They were surprised to see me, but nowhere near as surprised as I was to see them.
Tokyo alleyway bikes and bike riders
There wasn’t really enough room for the bikes, let alone the bike rider, but that didn’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference at all.
An optimistic looking old Japanese lady
Maybe, just maybe, this old lady knows something that many of us sadly don’t.
A fallen, modern-day Tokyo samurai?
A modern-day hero, felled on the 24-hour battlefield that is Shinjuku’s myriad of little bars.
A Tokyo mask to match the autumn sky
For some of us, simply trying to match the colours of our own clothes is a daily challenge, but for this fella, colour and design co-ordination even incorporates autumn cloud formations.
Unsettling scenes outside an abandoned Japanese house
Finding old and long-forgotten personal possessions in abandoned homes isn’t all that unusual in Japan. The houses in this previously photographed village, for example, can’t have been all that different when people still lived there, and in the same mountainous region as the buildings below was a slowly deteriorating little hamlet — its dwellings filled with the belongings of former inhabitants. And yet that said, the sight of mouldy clothes hanging out as if to dry was a first.
Surrounded by vegetation, the dark interior of the solitary house was in a terrible state, making walking in seem very unwise, but perhaps the best, albeit rather odd explanation for the scene that greeted us is that someone braver once ventured in to retrieve the clothes. And if that wasn’t strange enough, they then went a step further by hanging them all up
The only other possibility that makes any kind of sense is that they’ve been there since the property was abandoned, but that doesn’t really account for why the clothes were left outside. Yet regardless of how they got there, and whoever was responsible, stumbling upon them made for a strangely unsettling experience to say the least.
Similarly, and at the end of the same day, we found one last house on the way home. No longer lived in, it was completely locked up, but clothes were once again significant. This time hanging in the windows — their presence giving the property a strange, very real sense of still being occupied.
