It is possible to walk down a busy Tokyo street, with it's constant traffic and bustling people, the cyclists on the pavement and the barrage of signs and advertisements hanging from every surface, and see almost nothing. It's also possible to walk down that same street and see everything; it's a matter of personal choice. However, if you make the choice to really look at everything you possibly can, and note the ways in which they are different from what you may have, in the West, grown accustomed to, you might experience a gradual, numbing, sensory overload.

Everything is different here. Even the things that may not, superficially, seem different at all, can surprise you.
So, being human, busy and preoccupied with the demands of everyday life, we have an automatic, self-protecting tendency to filter out most of things we see and experience. We decide we already have enough trivia to last us a lifetime, so we refuse to notice. The 'processing overhead' for our brains is just too much. We discard everything we subconsciously evaluate as not relevant to our current task; whether that's finding the nearest of the thousand or so subway station entrances, going to a brightly lit, all-night convenience store, hailing one of the thousands of taxis or deciding which restaurant to queue outside for lunch by evaluating the plastic food in their window display.

We see what we choose to see. It requires extra effort to look and see the things that surround us and think about them with objectivity.

However, many years ago, while I was a young boy of maybe nine or ten, Gerald Durrell came to our school, made thirty or so of us stand in a line to hold up a huge, live python and told us all to stay curious even when we were grown up. It was good advice and I followed, it even if it does drive other people crazy sometimes.

Last week, around two in the morning, I left my fifth-floor apartment (a 'pencil' building; so called because it is tall and thin, with a single, small apartment per floor) to go to the all-night supermarket around the corner. It's like having a huge fridge, freshly stocked with everything you want just three minutes away. We had the great good fortune to stay in a friend's beautiful, huge old house in Normandy last summer where it took longer than that to get from the top floor to the kitchen (there was no elevator). So why have a big fridge in a small apartment? People don't do bulk food shopping here. They don't have the room to keep it, they don't have the cars to carry it in and they'd rather have fresh produce anyway.

The reason they don't have the cars is because you're not allowed to buy a vehicle in Tokyo unless you can prove you have an off-road parking space for it. That parking space, often stacked in a skeletal car vending machine, can cost you the equivalent of the rent on a studio apartment in Hampstead (with a view). So when you live in a city with the most punctual and well run subway system in the world, what do you want with a car?

On my way to the supermarket, I nip though a dark passageway between two rows of old-style houses. Sliding front doors, overhanging eves, wooden facings, hanging bamboo screens and prowling cats. The sky is filled with a crosshatch of wires and transformers because all the electricity is supplied from above, strung between concrete poles. Japan is an archipelago of volcanic islands and the most earthquake prone area in the world - you don't want to bury the power lines.

As I walk through the alleyway at two in the morning, I have no perception of threat, because even though this is the largest city in the world, the crime rate here is unbelievably low. Street crime barely exists. Serious assault in England and Wales is over 26 times more likely This isn't just manifest in my feelings of personal security or lightness of mood; outside these front doors are well tendered plants and even bonsai that would cost hundreds of pounds in trendy Fulham Road stores but nobody would even think of stealing them. I have a friend who lived in Stoke Newington and had her window boxes, containing a few straggly geraniums, nicked. She moved. Not quite as far as I did, but then she had already moved to London from Brisbane. I wonder if some of us just have to travel around until we find the place we have to be.

I have to be here, that's definite. I'm comfortable being an alien. I don't mind knowing that I'm not like everyone else because I never felt like everyone else anyway. But if you have to be an alien, I reckon you should choose the best example of civilisation you can find that's compatible with your expectations.

That doesn't mean I expect my bath to talk to me (which it does) or taxis to have automatically opening doors (which they do), but I do expect vending machines to actually work, give change (from notes even!) and not be empty or vandalised. I do expect trains to run on time and be clean and I do expect shopkeepers to be happy when I've walked through their door to give them money. And I love living in a place where a young girl can walk into a busy coffee shop, spot a free table and deposit her designer bag and mobile phone on it to reserve her place, then go stand in line for a green frappuccino with whipped cream and an individually wrapped straw. And if that table is outside, next to a low, narrow hedge that separates it from the crammed Saturday afternoon shoppers pushing by? What then? How much exactly is that worth? Maybe for everything else, there's a credit card, but you can't buy that type of civilisation. Not with money.

There's a wine shop around the corner - not far from the all night supermarket that I am still on my way to - that stacks a load of side-facing boxes on the pavement so you can almost trip over a playful Beaujolais or a coy, yet fruity Sancerre on your way past. The light-fingered would describe these 10-15 quid bottles as free samples. I lived in Liverpool for many years and my local off-license had a narrow corridor from the front door to the counter surrounded by bullet-proof glass and a wire mesh. The guy behind this barricade scowled at you when you came in and refused to take fifty pound notes because there were too many 'dodgy' ones around. Here, they will welcome me with a cheerful shout and let me read as many labels as I like before taking my money carefully in two hands. This note would very likely be a ten thousand yen denomination - at today's rates, a smidge under fifty pounds. Yet they don't stare at it suspiciously, hold it up to the light or try to tear a bit off the corner with their teeth. What they do do, is bow politely, give me my change, (again with both hands) and put some points on my local shopping co-operative 'Happy Card'.

I have about six or seven of these 'Happy Cards' now; all filled up. They're worth about 500 Yen each apparently, but I haven't got the heart to cash them in. After all, it's about loyalty really, not the discount. Funny, but I don't feel the same way about Virgin Airmiles somehow.

The all night supermarket isn't on the local Happy Card system. Surprisingly, they don't use any loyalty cards at all, which is very unusual. If you go shopping around here you usually take at least four or five different loyalty cards with you because when it comes to being a Japanese housewife, discounts and bargains rule. Competition is fierce and special offers generate instant queues. The supermarket opposite has recently installed a machine at the door that reads the barcode on your loyalty card and allows you to play a type of 'tic-tac-toe' game to 'win' more points. Discount and gambling in one go - pure genius.

Any trip to the supermarket is sure to provide a lot of entertainment. 'Guess the product' is a favourite game. I have been known to buy stuff just because I like the packaging without having a clue about what's inside it. The disinfectant soaked toilet wipes were a lovely surprise. Of course, because this is Japan, technology comes to the rescue. My mobile phone has two cameras in it - one facing me and one facing away - so I can make a video call to my wife, select the external camera and she can direct me to whatever weird and wonderful product she wants me to buy. There have been a few occasions when late night visitors to the upper floor of the supermarket have been less than phased to see a gaijin walking around following instructions from a small voice emanating from his outstretched hand. Nothing unusual about that is there?

A letter from Steve Baker - http://stevebakermanagement.com

Photography by Steve West - http://homepage.mac.com/mecan