The pedestrian lights turned green. As the audio signal's distinctive chirp sounded, the assembled crowd began its march across Yasukuni-dōri towards Kabukichō, which teemed with life in the distance. It was late spring 2009, and on the second day of my first trip to Tokyo, I was being shown around Shinjuku. In the world's most populous city, amid one of its busiest districts, along a prominent thoroughfare at a point where footfall and vehicular traffic reach their peak, I was struck by the quiet in the air.

I had built a visual impression of Tokyo through images I'd encountered. Perhaps I even had a sense of the city's smells and tastes, shaped by time spent in Japanese restaurants and visiting other East Asian cities where the scent of humidity gathers similarly in the air at that time of year. But I'd given little thought to its sounds. Unthinkingly, I assumed the auditory landscape would reflect the heightened noise levels one might associate with a metropolitan region housing 37 million people.

The stretch of Yasukuni-dōri north of Shinjuku JR Station spans six lanes of traffic, divided by a central reservation. Its width rivals a typical UK motorway. And yet, I distinctly remember the sound of the breeze threading through the tapping of footsteps, accompanied by strains of J-Pop drifting from shopfronts on Kabukichō's inner streets. I felt comfortable within the crowd as we unhurriedly moved across the broad road. "This is a place I could be," I thought to myself, perhaps for the first time.