Tokyo Times

Despite still being part of the capital, the far west of Tokyo can sometimes feel like another world, let alone merely a different city. For starters the area is incredibly green, but it’s also mountainous, and comparatively at least, very sparsely populated. Elements that together make even the briefest of visits feel like a welcome break.

Just like other parts of the metropolis, it also has the same wonderful knack of providing unexpected surprises. The sight of a slowly rotting Mercedes isn’t necessarily what you’d expect. Nor was the the pleasure of seeing a sheltered seat looking out from naturally sheltered surroundings. And yet that said, neither of those were anything like as unforeseen as the dolls we found in an abandoned house. A traditional old home full of far from traditional items.

There’s no shortage of quiet and faded old towns and tourist spots on these pages. Slowly deteriorating locations that offer hints galore about the past, but little in regards the future — except that is the sad inevitability of further decay and population decline.

Here then is a series from another such town, and just like all the others, it was an endlessly fascinating place to explore and photograph. The shop-lined streets and shuttered businesses hark back to a more prosperous, and presumably bustling era. Scenery that makes you wonder what will ultimately happen to all these settlements, but whatever the coming years and decades may bring, for now at least they remain crumbling time capsules still semi-occupied in the present.

We are now more than halfway through September, but summer in Tokyo shows little sign of letting up, with the still intense temperatures making long walks more of an endurance test than something to look forward to.

These then are photos from a recent saunter starting in the late afternoon. A chance to avoid the worst of the heat as well as wander some of the capital’s nearer to me western suburbs.

Like the images in a recent post, they don’t really show anything particularly striking or unusual. They don’t tell any kind of story either. Instead, these are all just small moments of life in a city that contains the lives of many millions.