More photography whining
Over the past few months, I’ve become dissatisfied with the place photography occupies in my life. For some people, uploading their pictures to Flickr and getting a few “Nice capture!”-like comments has become a kind of daily fix. But the whole exercise feels increasingly Sisyphean these days; what is it all for? Galleries? Books? The latter brings to mind those lonely souls I met in Shinjuku, sitting in small rented rooms, surrounded by expensive prints, waiting for someone to come in and sign the little book by the door. As for books, it’s easy enough to print up something on blurb.com, but what then? What does it mean when there are tens of thousands of such bo

Return
It was raining hard outside my hotel room window when I got up yesterday, my view of Shinjuku’s roofline murky and gray. I didn’t want to spend hours on a plane with soggy feet, so I stuffed some extra socks and jeans in my backpack and figured out which subway route would give me the least time out in the weather. After marking “excellent” on every box on the hotel survey form, I checked out and set out in the rain with my tiny umbrella to the Shinjuku Higashi Station’s Oedo line, which took me to Ueno-Okakimachi Station. I suspected there might be a convenient underground passageway to the Kesei Line Station, and there was, though the signage wasn’t

Ueno and Roppongi
I took the JR to Nippori this morning, walking up the hill to the west side of the station to find the “Suzuki” guesthouse. Overlooking the rail station is convenient and all, but the constant trains and announcements must get really irritating. Beyond the Suzuki is a huge cemetery, with many famous dead people. But I wasn’t there to see dead people, famous or not. I’d read that the area around there had more or less remained as it was decades ago, and I wanted to get a glimpse of old Tokyo. So I walked past the orderly stones and into the surrounding neighborhoods. I wondered what kind of people generally live next to graveyards in Japan, are they hyper-re

Yokohama
I walked through the brilliant streets this morning to the big Shinjuku JR Station, which, with the smells of restaurants starting up and the rush of passengers on their way to work, reminded me somehow of the first day of elementary school. I was planning on taking the Shonan Line out to Yokohama, but it was down, so I took a train to Tokyo Station and switched there. Other trains ran parallel to ours, and I wondered if they ever race. At Yokohama Station, I got directions from a friendly garbage collector who spoke remarkably good English, before heading out towards what I hoped was the harbor. As I crossed a bridge over a canal I was surprised to see huge grey fish in the water

Shibuya and people who hate it.
I slept in this morning, puttering around my room and posting the previous day’s journal before finally heading out at noon. This time I walked around the other side of the park, through the alleys that skirt the edges, past old wooden houses along dead-end lanes. The weather was cloudy gray, and hardly anyone was around. I thought about Louis’ opinion that Taiwan is both Japan’s past and its future; the shiny veneer that I found so antiseptic when I first visited Tokyo in 1991 has worn off. It seems much more used and lived in now, closer to Taipei in feel than before. I’d told Louis that I’d meet him at Sendagaya Station again, as I couldn’t r