Few rebuilt metropolises have stimulated so many drawn visions from architects, creating a kind of "Parallel Tokyo". More specifically, the aim here is to identify the narratives or imaginaries that some contemporary Japanese architects nowadays convene to design the capital's future. We will focus on two Japanese architects working on a large scale, in support of conceptually speculative projects for the future of Tokyo: - “Tokyo 2050 Fiber City” in 2004 by Ohno Hidetoshi 大野秀敏 (b. 1949), - “Chiiki shakai-ken地域社会圏 (Local Community Area)” in 2012 by Yamamoto Riken 山本理顕 (b. 1945). The representations of the capital city's future that they produce belong to one or other of these categories (Besse, 2020): the fiction, the scenario, and sometimes even to both categories at the same time. The aim is to examine the conceptual relationships these two architects have with both Tokyo's present and its past. Indeed, to project a future, on what present and what past can we rely? The recognition and manipulation of inherited architectural and urban motifs are design principles shared by both architects as they propose a narrative for the Tokyo of tomorrow. At the beginning of the 21st century, in parallel with the Urban Renaissance policy and in the wake of the triple disaster in Tōhoku (2011), the central issue of building (de)densification and risks led architects to draw on the discreet qualities of the metropolis to reveal an image that is rooted yet plural, even timeless. They draw on the intrinsic spatial and structural values of Edo and Tokyo to (re)animate another image of the capital. For these post-war architects, Tokyo's “urban ecology” (Banham, 1971) is one way of constructing a new narrative. Digging into its spatial resources, hidden or marginalized by modernity, determines the potential for writing the future of the Japanese capital, and offers the opportunity to (re)construct an image that is familiar locally, singular yet shareable across borders. A cohabitation of global (the vertical city) and local (the urban village) figures draws a new narrative in the form of scenarios. On the contrary, with the Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) project for Tokyo Bay, published in 2021, the Metropolitan Government reactivates architectural fiction to develop a laboratory for a 21st-century model city in Japan, supported by a globalized technophile ecological narrative. Together, these parallel representations play a narrative role in the construction of the Japanese capital's image, both locally and abroad.