The world’s saddest post?
A Japanese bike that’s both a way to get around and a workshop
With its busy trains and traffic-congested roads, Tokyo is a great city to navigate by bike; the side streets, sights and a real sense of freedom making even a commute something to relish rather than recoil from.
And if said bike also doubles as a workshop and therefore one’s workplace, it must be even more wonderful.
Waiting, impatiently, in Tokyo
Despite what the foreign media may say, delays on Tokyo’s trains are not a rarity. Thankfully leaves on the track aren’t usually a problem, but inclement weather, technical issues and sadly suicides, sometimes are. On the whole though, yes, they are staggeringly punctual — pathologically so really.
A system that while admittedly great, at the same time allows for little leeway if one is late; invariably requiring a very imaginative excuse to appease those left wondering and waiting.
A traditional pagoda undergoing less traditional preservation
Traditional techniques are all well and good, but sometimes, a bit of modern machinery is much easier on the engineers, if not the eye.
The face of Tokyo’s grittier east side?
In lots of ways Tokyo is more than just a collection of bureaucratically bordered cities, and is instead a group of really quite different areas all melded into one; an amalgam of various districts that have very diverse characters, and so attract equally distinct crowds.
Yet despite covering a large and varied chunk of the metropolis, east Tokyo arguably has an overriding and very perceptible feel all of its own. A grittier, sometimes grimmer vibe, that in many ways makes it feel — for want of a better description — more real. And this man’s face, for me at least, is the embodiment of it.
