A concrete and fantastically old school push-button phone slide
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.
Fonts, dereliction and a defunct Tokyo vending machine
This old and faded shop front with its nowhere near as old but still defunct vending machine has fascinated me for ages. It’s a scene I find hard not to photograph, but harder still has been trying to get someone suitable in the frame. The street is awkwardly narrow, and there aren’t many people passing by, so my efforts have always ended in failure. Until last week that is, when persistence finally paid off and at long last a half-decent chance presented itself.
Tokyo cable cars abandoned for over half a century
When exploring in the far west of Tokyo last week, I was reminded of a bar out there and the absolutely lovely 93-year-old who owned it. A memory that in turn made me think about the area’s long-abandoned ropeway, as it was an attraction the old lady had actually ridden on when she was younger.
Open and ready for passengers at the start of 1962, the 622 metre cable car ride was, in part, built to capitalise on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Just like the 2020 Games, however, things didn’t quite work out as planned, and visitor numbers simply weren’t substantial enough. An outcome that perhaps shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering the out of the way location, the short, one-stop hop over a lake, and the meagre 0.6 metre height difference between stations. So a mere 4 years after it opened, operations were halted on December 1st 1966. Ostensibly just for the winter, it was an end of year break that lasted until 1975, when an official suspension was announced. A state the site has stayed in ever since — clearly never opening again, and yet at the same time never actually closing.
Left to slowly decay and staying pretty much untouched for decades, there’s now graffiti on the platform, plus more recently on at least one of the cable cars, so that aspect, and the slightly tenuous Olympic connection, seemed like as good a time as any to re-edit these photos from 8 years ago. A time when everything was almost as it was after that last journey over the lake more than 50 years ago.
A Tokyo elevator girl from the past
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.
