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.
Linda says
This is a fabulous set. It’s amazing that with all the old neighborhoods you know so well, there’s still more to find. When people wonder why I visit Tokyo over and over instead of going to other parts of Japan, I say that you could spend a lifetime in Tokyo and never see everything worth seeing. This is the sort of thing I mean.
Lee says
Thank you very much. And yeah, exactly. Tokyo is so vast there’s always something new to see. Also, with it changing so much, that only adds to the seemingly infinite nature of the city.
Denise says
I’m so in love with the plant life in these. Beautiful series! 🙂
Lee says
Thank you very much. Yeah, such greenery never fails to delight.
cdilla says
As Linda has experienced, we are often asked, “Why always Tokyo?” After 150 days we know we will never have enough time to see just the places we know about, and we also endeavor to spend at least half our time either being shown, or randomly discovering, places we did not know existed.
I saw a program about an old guy who decided to spend half a day wandering around each of the stops on the Toden Arakawa Tram Line, something I would love to do, but that is 15 days right there. Even though we keep extending our trips (six weeks this time) it will never be enough to more than scratch the surface.
Which is why Lee’s posts like this are so wonderful for us, and his photowalks even more so.
Now to figure out whether I can get a plant to grow in the form of our house number like the 5 on that old post box 🙂
Lee says
Thank you very much. Be a pleasure once again to show you some more new places next month. But yeah, it would take many lifetimes, let alone stays, to even begin to do the city justice. Probably take just as long to grow that pant too!