Target practice?
A crumbling Tokyo alleyway from a different time
Preparations for the Olympics that weren’t put Tokyo’s construction industry into overdrive, but even in normal years, the city is in a constant state of flux — its need to modernise seemingly insatiable. Yet due to the capital’s size, and its wonderfully sprawling nature, there are still little enclaves that are forever stuck in what feels like a completely different time.
Scenes from a half-abandoned old Japanese hot spring resort
This year has seen the tourism industry hit incredibly hard, but for many of Japan’s traditional hot spring resorts, it has been a long slow decline rather than a sudden, completely unexpected collapse. A decades-long battle against closures and falling numbers that many towns will presumably never recover from.
The country’s mass tourism boom of the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the financial free-for-all of the bubble era, saw the construction of more, and generally bigger hotels. An expansion that, perhaps not surprisingly, proved unsustainable due to the double whammy of changing travel trends and economic stagnation.
Of course big, sprawling hotels with their own hot springs, restaurants and entertainment facilities are ideal when they are busy, but when increasingly under capacity, the financial burden must be staggering. And stuck with so many rooms to maintain, and over time slowly modernise, a lot of hotels seem to have simply limped on without any real attempts at renovation, making their eventual demise all the more inevitable. Closures that then affect the likes of local eateries and souvenir shops, causing further decline and increasingly visible neglect. A vicious, and incredibly cruel circle that has hit numerous tourist areas in Japan, just like this now terribly quiet old resort town.
And these are some of the rooms in one of the resort’s abandoned hotels. A structure that seems to be the biggest of those that have succumbed to insolvency, and one that’s surprisingly still quite modern. Rooms that take the quietness of the streets below to a whole new level, as they seem to silently preserve the long lost conversations of those who once stayed in them.
Tokyo Monday morning umbrella blues
Disappearing Tokyo drinks and smiles
Back in the spring of 2018, I took these 3 frames of the old lady below. She initially pretended she didn’t want to be photographed, then happily slid the door open to be in full view of the camera. A brief but enjoyable moment, and one I am very happy to have captured.
Sadly, however, I never saw her again. The old, former shop is still there, as is the bicycle in exactly the same position, but the drinks machine, and much more importantly the smiles that accompanied it, have now disappeared.
It wasn’t planned at all, but these little ‘before and after’ photo sets have become a growing series of sorts, so if you want to see more of what I have taken up to now, here are the links: Bar-wise, there’s a place owned by a woman who was in her 90s, a once lively little drinking spot that’s now empty and quiet, plus a tiny karaoke joint that one day simply ceased to exist. There’s also an old tofu shop that has been knocked down to make a car park, and finally, for now at least anyway, a once full of life traditional house that’s now abandoned and falling apart.
Tokyo summer kimono stares
Late summer looks.
