This old fella is probably just as fond of drinking in this bar, as I am of photographing it. And as far as decisions go, I’d say we both made pretty decent ones.
A cherry blossom wedding selfie
With the cherry blossom now visible, it would seem this year’s flower-based photo frenzy has well and truly begun.
A traditional Tokyo rice cracker shop
Seeing rice crackers made using time-honoured techniques, in suitably traditional settings, is nice to say the least. Better still, however, is the aroma, as despite their simplicity, the resultant snacks smell absolutely sensational.
A shadowy Tokyo smoker
Now no longer the smokers’ paradise it once was, Japan’s cigarette lovers are slowly but surely being ushered into the shadows.
The sadness of a small, abandoned Japanese house
Hemmed in by a new car park on one side and a ditch on the other, this abandoned house is small and basic to say the least. There’s no bathroom. Not even a toilet. A shared breeze-block outhouse being the only facility. Plus, as far as a kitchen goes, it was presumably a case of making do with a two ring gas table near the door. Yet despite the building’s size and rather primitive nature, until July 2005 its two rooms were clearly very much a home for the old lady who lived there.
A tiny, rectangular space as one entered acting as a living room, dining room and pretty much everything except a bedroom.
Up some terrifyingly steep and narrow stairs one finds the latter. A room that was so sad and silent that the opening verses of John Betjeman’s Death in Leamington seemed unsettlingly apt:
She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the ev’ning star
That shone through the plate glass window
From over Leamington Spa.
Beside her the lonely crochet
Lay patiently and unstirred,
But the fingers that would have work’d it
Were dead as the spoken word.
An old, very traditional Tokyo fish shop
Many traditional shops in Tokyo open out onto the street — a lovely communal element that further cements their ties to the local neighbourhood. In older areas of the city, a surprising number of them still survive too, although there can’t be many that boast a working, and still in use water pump like the fishmonger’s below. A feature that has presumably been in place since the shop opened for business back in 1935.
