Tokyo Times

The day before a recent typhoon, the weather forecast was for a mixture of sun and light showers. A combination that seemed like it might be conducive to some interesting moments, and to my eyes at least, it pretty much worked out that way. In fact the only downside to the day was discovering that a favourite old restaurant of mine had been demolished. Admittedly it hadn’t been a going concern for a good few years, but still, seeing its disappearance was no less disappointing. To honour its demise then I’ve included a ‘before’ shot to the series.

Quite a bit of my Tokyo work involves re-visiting certain areas and neighbourhoods. That’s partly due to me conducting Photowalk Tours in many of those locations, but it’s also because of my ongoing efforts at documentation, as the changes those parts of the city are going through makes recording them feel more important than ever. An element I touched upon on in my recent ‘before and after’ series.

The vastness of Tokyo, however, means there are always new places to seek out and explore, along with missed little sights and scenes that have inexplicably gone unnoticed. The first photo is one of the latter. It’s in a part of the capital I’ve walked through many times, and yet somehow I hadn’t encountered that abandoned and wonderfully overgrown old restaurant. All the other shots are from a recent outing with a friend. We simply picked a part of the city we had little knowledge of, and then had a gentle meander round its various neighbourhoods. A walk that turned out to be very productive as well as a lot of fun.

Beyond the colours, and the fact they were all taken on recent-ish Tokyo photowalks, there isn’t really anything specific that links these images. Instead, they are simply simple moments and scenes of daily Tokyo life. A city that’s going through massive changes, and yet in many ways it somehow manages to stay more or less the same.