Tokyo Times

Photographs from a small group of islands

Lee

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A Tokyo host and hostess getting intimately acquainted?

For anyone who has seen the fascinating, The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, the depressingly cyclical nature of Japan’s host and hostess business will be horribly familiar. Scores of young women who make good money flattering or otherwise servicing men, then go on to quickly recycle their gains at similarly cynical host clubs. A practice that arguably sums up the lonely, destructive nature of Japan’s vast adult entertainment industry.

But, after a very long night, these two at least found some company.

Tokyo host and hostess

Regardless of the possible financial cost.

Tokyo host and hostess

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Remnants of a man’s life in a rotting hotel room

Unlike long vacant homes and schools, abandoned hotels tend to contain very few reminders of the people who worked or stayed in them. And the Tower Hotel, which can be seen here, was no different, with room after room of faded hope and lost guests.

Except one that is, as tucked away in a dark corner of the building was a space once occupied by Kanbe Tadashi.

abandoned Japanese hotel

Whether he was actually living there it’s hard to say, but judging by all the stubbed out cigarettes, it’s a room where he certainly spent a good deal of time. However, with the hotel closing, finding a new job at the very least would have been a necessity. An undoubtedly stressful time that quite likely saw him spend a lot of time sat here. Smoking heavily. And silently staring out of the window. All the while wondering where he would end up next.

abandoned Japanese hotel

Perhaps sometimes looking at his reflection in the mirror too. Each and every time dealing with the horrible realisation that he wasn’t getting any younger, and work would be increasingly difficult to come by.

abandoned Japanese hotel

But, with interviews hopefully beckoning, and future work of some description in the service industry ahead, leaving several of his suits behind doesn’t seem to have made any sense. Clothes that appear to hint at an ending of sorts, but an end to what it’s impossible to say.

abandoned Japanese hotel

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The morning after the very long Tokyo night before

That drunken, falsely confident feeling of, ‘one more can’t do any harm, I’ll be fine’, generally results in a sore head, or more often than not, horrors far worse. Times when the comfort of a bed and the shaky embrace of feeling sorry for oneself slowly but surely win out the day. But how much those horrors must be magnified when waking up. In daylight. Outside a grotty convenience store. Really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Tokyo hangover

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Tokyo drinkers in a wonderfully grubby drinking den

Tokyo may lack some things, but not drinking establishments — not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet despite many being lavish and elaborately decorated affairs, it’s almost impossible to resist the dirty little places down dark alleyways that offer wonderful, character-filled glimpses of the past. Cramped escapes that happily exist in the modern world, but very rarely give the changing times more than a cursory glance.

Tokyo drinkers

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Goose stepping Japanese nationalists and a call to arms against China

The yen might well be falling, but due to an island dispute and hawkish new prime minister/long simmering resentment/economic stagnation/sheer idiocy (delete where applicable), nationalist sentiment is going very much in the opposite direction. Or at the very least, public expression of such views is, with shouted attacks and individual hatreds just a few of the scenes I’ve seen of late.

But a goose stepping flag waver heading an (albeit rather small) organised march seemed like a further shift in an already worrying trend.

Japanese nationalists

Particularly so as those behind him were suggesting a call to arms in the country’s aforementioned and ongoing territorial discord with China.

Japanese nationalists

The only blessing being that a brief fracas with a group of angry bystanders and some of the marchers about 5 minutes after these photographs were taken, does suggests that some people at least are having their eyes opened in regards where the country may be headed.