Tokyo Times

The area in the photos below is Tokyo’s Yoshiwara red light district. Well, officially the name isn’t in use anymore, but the same 17th century street layout still exists, as does the adult nature of the services on offer.

Relocated to the current site in 1657, the area has endured earthquakes and fires, plus countless thousands of young women who worked there over the centuries suffered indenture, disease and very often an early death. Many in fact died before they reached their 30s, and the ashes and spirits of a staggering 25,000 former residents are housed in a nearby temple — the vast majority of whom were deemed nothing more than unwanted bodies and unceremoniously dumped outside the gates.

Nowadays, of course, things are different, but while the name and a shocking disregard for human life are in the past, the main line of business is essentially still the same. To sidestep the law, however, it’s nearly all soapland these days. Rather comically named soapland at that. All of which made the sight of an elderly lady walking by with her freshly bought vegetables more than a little incongruous to say the least.

The fella below and his family before him used this wonderfully cluttered little office to run their business selling nuts and bolts. A small, but seemingly busy operation that had already been trading for about 80 years when I took this photo back in 2017.

Four years on and it’s still going strong — the only difference being the man now works from a tiny desk squeezed into his storeroom down the street below. A space that does seem functional, but at the same time it’s a world away from the character-filled building he spent decades in. That’s now gone though, with nothing to mark those memories except some freshly laid tarmac.

Walking towards the shop below, it seemed like the owner was loading his van for a delivery, and just as I got within a few metres, he drove off down the street leaving everything as it is in the photos. A temporarily unattended business that looks every bit like it was abandoned years ago.

The photograph below was taken just shy of 7 years ago — a day when 130,000 spectators squeezed into Tokyo Racecourse for the Japan Derby. Not that long ago really, and yet in the current climate it almost looks like another world. All those people, hardly any masks, and, pandemic comparisons aside, an almost complete absence of smartphones.

2014, it turns out, wasn’t half bad, and perhaps appropriately, the winner that year was One and Only.