Tokyo climbed to the top of Monocle magazine's list of most livable cities, while Vienna was named No. 2 and Berlin No. 3. The London-based journal of lifestyle and culture found Tokyo scored high overall on a wide range of metrics, such as housing, cost of living, access to the outdoors, crime rate and business climate. While the honor of being No. 1 should give Tokyoites a sense of pride, the ranking overlooks many of the problems that remain in the world's biggest city.

For one thing, Tokyo, of course, is much larger than either Vienna (with just 1.7 million people) or Berlin (3.4 million). The population is 13.3 million in Tokyo proper, and over 20 million if the nearby areas of Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama are included. Considering Tokyo's much greater size, any generalization or conclusion must remain even more qualified than for other cities.

Tokyo didn't even make the top 10 in the Economist Intelligence Unit's livability survey in 2014, Mercer's Quality of Living Ranking 2015, where Tokyo came in 44th. Perhaps Monocle's focus on hard-to-define metrics such as freedom, independence, joy of life and a combination of "heart-stopping size and concurrent feeling of peace and quiet" is what moved Tokyo to the top. Different metrics produce a very different picture of a city and its livability.