Exit Shinjuku

Outside exit A9, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo

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Photos of the Week: Late-Night Faces

Found at a whiskey bar in Tokyo, reading “Lolita”

Restaurant chef seen through sake bottles, Tokyo

Both of this week’s photos were taken by Clinton Watkins.

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Tokyo, Two Weeks After the Earthquake

March 2011

I arrive in Tokyo on a clear, crisp afternoon. As my train makes brisk progress from Narita Airport to the city centre, I stare out the window at the country fields giving way to suburbia and then a densely crammed cityscape. The city seems calm. Kids run freely through an asphalt schoolyard. Uniformed boys play softball in a neighbourhood field. Men stand next to the muddy banks of a river, hitting golf balls into the water.

I’ve come here to see how Japan’s capital is bearing up under what has been described as the worst disaster to hit the country since World War II. Two weeks ago, on March 11th, an earthquake stirred up a tsunami that rushed towards the country’s northeast coast. Thirty minutes later, 30-metre waves crushed towns as far as ten kilometres inland. Fishing boats were dropped on top of three-storey buildings. Thousands of people were swept out to sea amidst churning rubble. When the sun set three hours later, tens of thousands were dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

As I write this, another disaster brews. Damaged by the earthquake and flooded by the tsunami, emergency generators at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant failed, causing the cooling system to malfunction. Reactors overheated; a meltdown seemed imminent. Spooked, foreign bankers, English teachers, and even journalists have fled Tokyo en masse. Radioactivity has since been found in vegetables, milk and tap water. Shipping companies are avoiding the port after Fukushima was revealed to be spewing contamination into the sea.

Skyscrapers loom, and, with them, the unknown. Friends are surprised I’m even here. If international headlines are to be believed, the world’s largest city, with 35 million people and an economy 40 percent larger than Canada’s, is on the verge of becoming the next Chernobyl.

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Photos of the Week: Flyover

Bangkok. Photo by Jonathan Newman

Chicago. Photo by GXM

Tokyo. Photo by Corentin Walravens

Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.

Tokyo Vending Machines

It’s a huge cliché, but how could I resist?

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Tokyo’s Urban Bungalows

One of the greatest surprises I encountered when I visited Tokyo last spring was how quiet the city became when you ventured away from the train stations. The above photos were taken less than 15 minutes by foot from Shinjuku, one of the world’s busiest transportation hubs and the centre of a huge business, entertainment and shopping district.

The bungalows I came across in central Tokyo reminded me a bit of the Japanese-era houses I found in Taipei neighbourhoods like Shida. But those parts of Taipei were intensively urbanized less than 50 years ago — Shinjuku has been a busy part of Tokyo since the Yamanote Line opened in 1885. Then again, multi-family dwellings didn’t become common in Japan until after World War II.

Tokyo Bicycles in Twelve Frames

Photos of Tokyo cyclists taken in March 2011.

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The Masked Metropolis

Why do so many Japanese people wear masks? The question became stuck in my mind almost as soon as I arrived in Tokyo late last month. Everywhere I went, on the streets and in trains, nearly half of the people around me were wearing surgical masks.

I already knew part of the answer: people wear masks when they are sick. That’s the case for many people in Hong Kong, and even in Vancouver and Toronto, especially after the SARS outbreak of 2003. But that didn’t seem to explain why such a huge percentage of people in Tokyo wore masks. Was half the population really suffering from colds? It seemed unlikely. Did people think that the masks could filter out radiation, which everyone worried would float down from Fukushima? That seemed unlikelier still.

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Saturday Night at Shin-Okubo Station

Saturday, March 26th at Shin-Okubo Station

Last Saturday, two weeks after the Japanese earthquake, I found myself in Tokyo. I was on assignment for a Canadian magazine — more about that on a later date — and I spent much of my time wandering the city and speaking to people, trying to get a feel on how the city was coping with the disaster and the disruption it had caused to daily life, not to mention the persistent threat of a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.

By the time I arrived, the mood in the city was not one of panic, or even overt tension, but rather a quiet, constant stress that seemed to pervade every aspect of life. Tokyo was barely damaged by the earthquake and for the average person, the question of radiation was still hypothetical, despite the news of contaminated vegetables and (slightly) radioactive tap water. Compared to the devastation up north, where tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands more left homeless, Tokyo got off easy.

But a conversation never lasted long before turning to everyday uncertainties — whether there would be fresh produce in the grocery store, whether the power would be on — and long-term anxieties: will the economy recover? Just how bad is the radiation, anyway? And it was hard to escape the reminders that this was not a normal time. The streets in Shinjuku’s normally-buzzing Kabuki-cho were quiet. Billboards and video screens were dark. TV screens on the JR rail lines flashed constant announcements of train services cancelled by blackouts.

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Tokyo Serenity: Naka-Meguro

Whether surfacing, globetrotting, or merely in transit, it’s best never fully to trust the travel section. Take Tokyo, where over the last few years a number of writers have labored to portray the southwestern neighborhood of Naka-Meguro as tragically hip.

Descending from Naka-Meguro’s elevated subway station into a quotidian landscape of utilitarian shops and services, though, “hipness” wasn’t the first thing I felt washing over me. If anything stuck out, it was the neighborhood’s anomalous politics: I’d arrived on the eve of Japan’s historic 2009 election, when the Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority for only the second time in history — but had clearly retained much of its popularity in Naka-Meguro.

Parked in front of the station was a minivan mounted with speakers, blaring the slogans of an LDP candidate busy shaking hands with voters on the sidewalk below. Further into the neighborhood, posters confirmed that Naka-Meguro’s constituency was either an LDP redoubt or at least one of its targets. It meant a substantial number of people here were clinging with uncommon sympathy to the party most associated with Japan’s elite establishment. “Hip” seemed increasingly far from the right word to describe the place.

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Backstreets of Ginza

In Ginza, it seems almost as if Japan tucks its true self out of view. Sure, the row of colorful, vertical signs advertising the largely upscale shops and services along the district’s main drags echo similar scenes all over the country, but the façades (and often stores) they’re attached to are too cold and modern — too standoffishly minimalist — to really reflect the soul of the country in which they’re located.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that the area would turn out this way. Once a city of half-timbered matchstick homes, Tokyo began, in the wake of several disastrous early Meiji-era fires, experimenting with brick as a building material. Ginza was an early adopter of the new medium, along with Victorian building styles favored in the West. British architect and engineer Thomas Waters designed a made-over Ginza, completed in 1877, that was known as Renga-gai (“brick street” or “bricktown”). Only the kanji and katakana on its signs would have distinguished it from major commercial districts in North America or Australia.

Renga-gai literally bit the dust in 1923, when it was leveled by the Great Kanto Earthquake, but American bombers probably would have reduced it to rubble anyway. In its current incarnation, Ginza bears more than a passing resemblance to plenty of other anonymous shopping zones across East Asia. Its backstreets, though, tell a slightly different story about the neighborhood.

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Tokyo Façade Frivolity

The curve of a closed eyelid, the outline of a nose, an unmistakable set of lips: enough to discern the outline of a singer, covering, along with the notes floating up from her mouth, almost all of a multistory building in Akasaka. Halfway across Tokyo, a family of turtles somehow scales the vertical wall of an apartment building in Shinjuku West. The two façades may have little in common otherwise, but both are exceptional in their respective environments — touches of whimsy in neighborhoods best known for their relative seriousness and severity, where staid office suites, the official aura of embassies, and sometimes too tastefully-restrained hotels combine to form a neutral cityscape deferential to the business conducted therein.

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A Day Around the Yamanote Line

Tokyo doesn’t really have a single discernible center. Most of the metropolis’ characteristic clusters of lighted advertisements and overloaded sidewalks — Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ueno, and (at Tokyo Station) Ginza — are strung together along the circular Yamanote Line, a Japan Railways loop that calls at the city’s busiest nodes. This necklace of light and activity effectively constitutes Tokyo’s peculiarly polycentric core.

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When the Streets Were Swept by Hand

In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.

Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.

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