Cyclists are an ever-present sight in Tokyo, but old fellas on tricycles sporting bandaged legs and retro shades, most certainly aren’t.
Photography
Portrait of an old Tokyo bar owner
Many of Tokyo’s little old bars are a complete mystery from the outside. One can hope that inside it’s what you are looking for, but until the door is slid open, it’s simply impossible to say.
Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t, but when it’s got bags of character like this place, and has been run by same lovely old woman for the last 43 years, you know you are on to a winner.
A Tokyo ‘Japanese only’ establishment
Seeing signs like the one below is always jarring. How could it not be? A hugely incongruous sight in any era, but surely even more so in a modern city, in 2019. And yet that said, as the services on offer are adult orientated, a lack of communication could obviously be a problem. An element that arguably makes it a little more complicated, and perhaps, at a push, not quite as clear cut as it initially appears.
So is it a grey area, perfectly okay perhaps, or without a doubt completely unacceptable?
Timeless Tokyo drinks and expressions
The interiors of more than a few Tokyo bars are truly timeless, and in this particular case, the blurring of the decades was nicely aided by some wonderfully old school headwear.
Tokyo rainy season lights and reflections
Rainy season is rubbish. It rains a lot, obviously, and the humidity very noticeably starts to increase. Then even when it’s over things aren’t any better, as the scorching heat of summer kicks in and the stickiness gets truly uncomfortable.
But moaning aside, one definite benefit of all that rain is reflections. Particularly so considering Tokyo’s love of bright lights. An effect that can, at a push, make the mundane sight of an old man heading home after drinks appear almost poignant.
On a similar-ish theme, the other day I achieved a goal of sorts by getting a series of photographs in The Guardian — a newspaper I’ve been reading daily my entire adult life. The topic is Tokyo’s old, but still working bar and restaurant owners, craftsmen, shopkeepers etc, so if you’d like to see it, the gallery can be viewed here.