Photography #3
Neon nights: Light and Shadow
Hello readers and thank you to everyone who has continued to follow along with these posts.
This week, I had a lot of fun exploring Tokyo. It’s an extraordinary city because so many seemingly disparate themes mingle together - sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension. Tradition and modernity. Loud, New York energy, and quiet neighborhood streets. Big capitalism and community values. Excess and restraint.
Tokyo’s modern visual landscape and city planning simultaneously obscure and reveal layers of Japanese history and traditional architecture. In a single twenty-minute walk, Emily and I passed Tokyo Dome, home of the Tokyo Giants (and Lady Gaga’s concert this past week), where a roller coaster arcs across the skyline. Our destination, however, was Koishikawa Kōrakuen, a garden first built in the 1620s near the start of the Tokugawa shogunate, which still preserves design elements from centuries ago. On my morning runs, I pass overhead highways, large apartment buildings, and retro storefronts, but I also glimpse decades-old Shinto shrines tucked between houses, maintained and restored across generations.
This week, my photography focuses on the modern elements of the city, while next week will turn toward the traditional details that persist beneath the surface. That order is intentional. Whenever I arrive in Japan, I’m first struck by Tokyo’s modernity and sheer scale. But once I settle in and slow down enough to really observe my surroundings, the older layers begin to emerge. They were always there—I just needed to look more carefully. Intentional exploration with mindfulness.
TeamLabs: Borderless
One of the clearest expressions of Tokyo’s contemporary audio/visual imagination is TeamLab Borderless, a modern art exhibit that uses sound and light to immerse the viewer in constantly shifting spaces that astounded me. Rooms transform as digital landscapes flow in and out, leaving luminous trails that mark their brief existence. Flowers bloom and fade through spring, summer, autumn, and winter in an endless cycle. Time in the outside world slips away as I’m ensconced into this constructed, ever-changing environment.
~ Haiku Break ~
Shimmers from darkness
Cosmic dewdrops encompass me
An atom, adrift
Yokochō Alleyways in Metropolis Shadows
Shinjuku and Shibuya are the neighborhoods of Tokyo that come closest to feeling like midtown Manhattan. Shinjuku, in particular, has the bright billboards, dense crowds, and sensory overload of Times Square.
Threaded through both neighborhoods are Yokochō alleyways, tight clusters of tiny bars and eateries packed into narrow lanes. Many of these districts trace their origins to the post-WW2 period, when informal black markets and temporary stalls sprang up during reconstruction. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, those makeshift spaces were gradually formalized into permanent buildings that preserved the same cramped, stall-like scale. They intentionally allowed these black markets stall owners to continue but in a legally approved setting with more formal rules and requirements.
I’ve grown too used to early bedtimes in my 30s, so photographing these areas meant making a deliberate effort to go out at night. On one of these excursions, Emily and I arrived at Shinjuku Station and walked a few blocks past one of the most luxury-saturated malls I’ve ever seen (Hermès, Gucci, Valentino, Balenciaga - to name a few stores) while an endless stream of high-end cars poured out of the parking garage. One block later, we were in Golden Gai, a very different world: narrow alleys, tiny bars, raunchy stickers, and public restrooms plastered with layers of graffiti and flyers.
Theme for next week | Urban Palimpsest