Tokyo Times

The fella below and his family before him used this wonderfully cluttered little office to run their business selling nuts and bolts. A small, but seemingly busy operation that had already been trading for about 80 years when I took this photo back in 2017.

Four years on and it’s still going strong — the only difference being the man now works from a tiny desk squeezed into his storeroom down the street below. A space that does seem functional, but at the same time it’s a world away from the character-filled building he spent decades in. That’s now gone though, with nothing to mark those memories except some freshly laid tarmac.

Walking towards the shop below, it seemed like the owner was loading his van for a delivery, and just as I got within a few metres, he drove off down the street leaving everything as it is in the photos. A temporarily unattended business that looks every bit like it was abandoned years ago.

The photograph below was taken just shy of 7 years ago — a day when 130,000 spectators squeezed into Tokyo Racecourse for the Japan Derby. Not that long ago really, and yet in the current climate it almost looks like another world. All those people, hardly any masks, and, pandemic comparisons aside, an almost complete absence of smartphones.

2014, it turns out, wasn’t half bad, and perhaps appropriately, the winner that year was One and Only.

This time last year I did a short series on suburban bus stops and their sometimes comically eclectic seats. A set of photos that was deliberately devoid of people as the emptiness seemed to somehow suit the surroundings.

The old Tokyo bus stop below, on the other hand, has always felt like it needed the right person, or indeed the right people, to really do it justice — something that had never quite happened until I fortuitously happened upon these three fellas last week. A trio who for me at least compliment the scene almost perfectly.