Tokyo Times

There’s no shortage of quiet and faded old towns and tourist spots on these pages. Slowly deteriorating locations that offer hints galore about the past, but little in regards the future — except that is the sad inevitability of further decay and population decline.

Here then is a series from another such town, and just like all the others, it was an endlessly fascinating place to explore and photograph. The shop-lined streets and shuttered businesses hark back to a more prosperous, and presumably bustling era. Scenery that makes you wonder what will ultimately happen to all these settlements, but whatever the coming years and decades may bring, for now at least they remain crumbling time capsules still semi-occupied in the present.

We are now more than halfway through September, but summer in Tokyo shows little sign of letting up, with the still intense temperatures making long walks more of an endurance test than something to look forward to.

These then are photos from a recent saunter starting in the late afternoon. A chance to avoid the worst of the heat as well as wander some of the capital’s nearer to me western suburbs.

Like the images in a recent post, they don’t really show anything particularly striking or unusual. They don’t tell any kind of story either. Instead, these are all just small moments of life in a city that contains the lives of many millions.

Of late I’ve been posting photos of old and dilapidated markets from other regions of Japan. Locations that in some respects are quite shocking in their semi-dereliction, and yet at the same time, the combination of a shrinking population and urbanisation makes such sights wholly understandable. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that away from the country’s main cities and tourist spots, such scenery is increasingly becoming the norm.

Far more unexpected, on the other hand, is to see similar scenes in Tokyo, and while certainly a lot rarer, they aren’t all that uncommon either. The mostly shuttered shopping centre below being one such example.

Recently I mentioned that a key aspect of my photography is returning to places I like to try and build up a series of photos. In that way I can try and tell some kind of story, or at the very least produce a more representative set of images. Something I’ve tried to do in this area, with the most recent visit being last week, and the first back in 2020.

Needless to say there have been some changes over the years. The shutters were painted a while ago to try and brighten things up a bit, and perhaps not surprisingly, one or two more businesses have closed down. Also, the government housing buildings that are a part of the shopping complex, and completely surround it, are, just like the stores, becoming increasingly unoccupied. A sort of vicious circle that will presumably see the whole area demolished at some point. For now though, it remains the kind of urban landscape almost never associated with the capital.