Tokyo Times

Compared to many cities, Tokyo’s down at heel Sanya district isn’t especially rough or deprived. By Japanese standards, however, it most certainly is. There’s a sizeable and very visible homeless population for starters, along with many more residents living precariously in hostels. The area is also home to numerous charities providing much needed help, food and medical assistance. Not something one sees all that often in the capital, and certainly not in such numbers.

A couple of years ago I covered some of the history in a post which also includes a set of photos from nearly a decade’s worth of visits, but basically it’s a section of the city once populated by day labourers. Men who in many ways helped build modern Tokyo. Nowadays, however, there’s little demand for such work, and even if there was, the vast majority of those still a part of the neighbourhood would be too old to take it on anyway.

Sanya is also a place where the past is never far away. Death and tragedy are remembered in street names, and discrimination is a centuries-long disease. Yet despite all that, and some gentrification due to lower land prices, a very real sense of resilience persists. It also feels like there are untold stories down each side street and behind every window. Something that hopefully comes through in these photos taken during a brief walk in the area a few weeks ago.

Back at the beginning of this year, I photographed an old and wonderfully dated concrete robot. A playground addition that’s as colourful as it is retro, and if it were somehow capable of owning a phone, then the one below would be absolutely perfect.

Donated to the park in 1981 by the then Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, the slide was a gesture to mark 1.5 million subscribers in the area, along with an impressive 30,000 public phone installations. Figures that now seem as dated as the push-button replica built to commemorate them, but just like the aforementioned robot, it’s that old school aspect that makes it so appealing.

This photograph was taken in early 2012 which was a time of experimentation of sorts, as after switching to a Leica, I was thoroughly enjoying the relatively unobtrusive nature of a compact camera system. It was also a time when elevator girls were a regular sight in Tokyo, and elevator girl was the actual job title. It still is in fact, as while considerably less common these days, the role persists — a sign in some respects of Japan’s slow progress when it comes to gender equality. Of course there are exceptions, such as the current governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko, but the higher floors remain unattainable for most women, and the roof a rarified realm deemed fit only for old men.