Food and Drink

Tokyo may well be blessed with an incredible train network that crisscrosses the metropolis, but the city is also surprisingly walkable, so on good days, meanders between specific locales have a lovely habit of conjuring up more surprises than the main destination. Such walks also provide the option of popping into a local neighbourhood eatery, and for the time being at least, that can very often mean an old school machi chuka. A type of Japanese-style Chinese restaurant that was ubiquitous in the post-war period, but the with the owners of such places invariably getting on in years to say the least, they are slowly disappearing.

While they last, however, they are places frequented by all kinds of people. Somewhere anyone can feel comfortable due to their relaxed, down to earth ambience. A sort of home from home feeling that is further added to by the fact that looks-wise, and despite many decades in business, many of them haven’t changed much at all. And with those elements in mind, this little glimpse of one such place ticks all the requisite boxes. For starters there’s the older couple with the man doing almost all the cooking. Then it’s also patched up with tape, the decor and menu haven’t been altered since inception, and perhaps most of all, there’s the pretty much standard, and now beautifully faded, red counter. A little sanctuary that, like the vast majority of such restaurants, is as full of soul as the food that’s served.

There are no shortage of Tokyo bars and homes on these pages that have sadly ceased to exist, and whether it be the emptiness of the building left behind, or its complete demolition, they never fail to have an impact, no matter how inevitable such changes always are. The lovely little bar below, on the other hand, is a slightly different story. Or at least I’m pretty sure it is, and so that’s the version I’m content to go along with.

A friend and I drank there in 2019, and the mama-san was happy to serve us drinks and cook whatever was in her fridge. Her house next door fridge that is, as after nearly 45 years in operation, there wasn’t much of a business left. Instead, it was more just a place where you were cheerfully served if you turned up, but if nobody did, it quite clearly didn’t matter in the slightest. A situation very much like this bar once run by a 93-year-old.

And so we had a few beers, a bit of food was rustled up, and it was a genuinely fun experience. But then, some time between our visit and the end of the following year, the bar was demolished, along with the house next door.

In their place, however, is now a shiny new home. One in which the mama-san lives, as I’m fairly sure I saw her through the window.

The vast majority of my photos tend to be taken in the older, eastern areas of Tokyo. Places that in many respects are a world away from the usual image of the city, and yet at the same time they are just as much (if indeed not more) a part of the capital as the bright lights and bustling streets it’s more famous for. The one exception, however, has been Shinjuku. An area that despite its changes and my shifting interests, has remained a firm favourite.

Being a popular entertainment hub, Shinjuku has no shortage of fancy shops and the like, but there’s also so much more. It’s intimate as well as crowded, rough and ready but also refined, plus more than anything, it’s simply interesting, with similarly interesting people. A location that has also been more on my mind of late, as the photobook my friend Giovanni and I recently released (now available to buy here), contains half a dozen photos I took there over the years. Hence this post with those six pictures included.

The book is a visual conversation, so the images were chosen as a response to the previous photo rather than simply picking out some favourites like I’ve done here. The former was often incredibly difficult, but somewhat surprisingly, so was whittling down a set from the many Shinjuku pictures I have. Below then are the ones I settled on. Some inclusions I’ll no doubt question the moment this is posted, along with likely failing to understand why I left one or two others out. But either way, as a whole I still feel they represent a part of Tokyo that has changed enormously, and yet at the same time has barely changed at all.

It was once a little hub of local shops, but these days this narrow arcade is more or less just a wooden shell with empty spaces where most of the businesses once stood. Only two of the original stores are still open, and even then, the green tea outlet looks more like a museum piece than a fully functioning operation. The tofu place next door, on the other hand, is very much a going concern, and considering the location, it still has a steady enough supply of customers.

A more modern appendage at one end seems to enjoy the majority of visitors, but presumably when either that or the tofu shop call it a day, then the bulldozers will finally move in. Until then, however, it remains a fascinating glimpse of Japan before supermarkets and convenience stores became common.

Some of these photos have appeared on Tokyo Times before, but with the addition of several taken very recently, and others from quite a few years ago, it seemed like the right time to put them all together as a document of sorts. My little photographic homage to a part of Tokyo’s subway system that is genuinely unlike the rest of it.

There have been changes in the time I’ve been visiting. The bars have new owners and now look quite different. Also, the unusually located vending machine is sadly no longer there. But on the whole it’s pretty much still the same. Presumably the same as it has been for many decades too. A rare glimpse of how things once looked, and in regards these photos, how it has looked over the last 10 years or so.