Locations: TOKYO
Image from September 2014 - Exact location unknown.
I’ve visited Tokyo twice over the years and certainly plan on visiting again, having being the largest urban conglomeration in the world for decades, and only recently been overtaken by Jakarta, it’s a truely fascinating city with endless visual delights. The overwhelming thing I took away from my time there is the quiet. This is always something which I enjoy and am regularly surprised by, given that it’s very hard to be alone, there is always a real sense of peace when wandering almost anywhere, even in the mad rush of 10,000 people crossing the street at the same intersection in Shibuya, or the peaceful crowds in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo carries itself in a very different way than New York for instance.
One of the main reasons I’ve visited Tokyo is to visited one of my oldest friends who has lived there since 2003. My second visit was in 2014, I’d recently gotten divorced and needed a change of scene for a little while, and the differences between Melbourne and Tokyo are endless. I spent a good portion of the time by myself, and would meet up with friends in the evenings. We took a great day trip out to Kamakura to see the Daibutsu, the second tallest statue of Buddha in Japan, standing at an impressive 11.4 metres tall. Most of the time was spent meandering numerous wards in metro Tokyo and enjoying the combination of hyper modernity and tastes of history. This second trip lasted about ten days and was actually slightly extended as I left my passport in a cab, and had to get an emergency travel document which certainly turned out to be an expensive way to travel - and when I landed back in Melbourne I had an email from the New Zealand consulate that my passport had been returned by the cab driver - something which I found to be rather surprising . I shot entirely with my D-90 with a 50mm lens which did the job very well.. I’ve long been a fan of working with one lens for long periods of time, the fifty millimetre is a classic option for the kind of photos I wanted to take on this trip - wide enough to get enough scope, but not so wide that things get lost and fast enough to be able to shoot at night with a quick enough shutter speed to be able to make sharp photos.
Shibuya
The peace and quiet is really surprising in Tokyo, the traffic is about what I expected but the way people behave in public is quite different than many places I’ve been, despite the volumes of people, specifically on the train it’s always quiet. I really like the unspoken rule that there is no talking on the train - I get tired of hearing people on the train in Melbourne having a conversation on speaker phone or being able to hear five conversations at once, Australians (and Americans are loud.)
There were moments when Tokyo felt somewhere between science fiction and documentary. I’d already encountered versions of the city through films such as Blade Runner and Lost in Translation, so arriving there produced a strange sense of recognition. Blade Runner isn’t set in Tokyo, of course, but its vision of Los Angeles borrows heavily from the visual language of Japanese cities — neon, signage, density, crowds and technology. Lost in Translation presents another Tokyo again: quieter, alienating at times, but also intimate and beautiful both these films have shaped the perception of the city for many Americans and Australians who might not have visited.
It made me think about how much films influence our perception of a place before we ever visit it. Perhaps part of the excitement of travel is comparing the place we imagined with the place that actually exists. In Tokyo those two versions seemed to overlap constantly. I would see something completely ordinary — a street corner, a train platform, a row of signs — and it would somehow already feel familiar. The first trip I took in 2003 I came back to Melbourne and saw Lost in Translation in the cinema the during the opening week so they film and the actual experience were very much intertwined in my mind and I’m sure it shaped the way I remember being there.
Having lived in Australia and the US for my whole life the contrast in Japan is the near monoculture, Having done a little research it’s the percentage of people who identify as ethnically Japanese in Japan is in the high nineties which is certainly a contrast to many places I’ve been. In Melbourne or Chicago you’ll be in public and often hear two or three languages simeltaneously, It’s much less likely in Tokyo, and certainly unlikely in smaller cities.
