Like most cities that don’t get a lot of snow, a few centimetres of the white stuff caused all kinds of trouble in Tokyo this week. Trains were delayed. Schools closed. And the TV continually told us how terribly treacherous it was under foot.
But, in older, more traditional Tokyo, rather than chaos it instead created a comforting sense of serenity.
And an absolutely sublime silence.
Most abandoned buildings/haikyo offer something of interest, but the ones that I’m invariably drawn to contain hints of the past; poignant reminders of the lives of those who once lived or worked there. An element that the old enka singer’s house offered with suitably melancholy mystery.
Yet arguably better still are those rarities like the long since closed mountain school — a building so utterly untouched that despite decades of disuse, it still felt occupied.
Neither of those places, however, contained that other mainstay of haikyo: the taking back of the building by mother nature. A feature that, despite offering little else, the SPG House hotel in Yamanashi Prefecture had in abundance.
Possibly because of its location beside one of Mount Fuji’s famous lakes, the dampness throughout the structure — particularly on the ground floor — was staggering.
A problem that has gone way beyond rising, and is now simply all-encompassing. Even its iconic neighbour, bravely clinging to the wall, is now barely recognisable.
Fortunately, despite the decay, there were still a few of those previously mentioned reminders of the past, with the office revealing some of the activity that once went on there.
But all that came to a very abrupt end in 1996, when the business went bankrupt. The last people to check-in and enjoy what by then could have been the SPG’s quite dreary delights, being Shusaku Miyadera and four family members or friends.
Elsewhere, it was simply more signs of the hotel’s fight with the forces of nature.
An unfair contest that has even turned everyday objects into fascinating, initially unrecognisable, forms.
And in the guest rooms, moss in particular has begun to make a move.
Some of it so wonderfully resplendent that it easily manages to outdo many moss gardens.
The serene and yet somehow slightly unsettling sight of a man sleeping in the weak but very welcome winter sun.
Considering the amount of cake and sweets that many Japanese seem to consume, the country really should be adding obesity issues to its long list of concerns — but it’s not. Far from it in fact. Meaning that on the whole, people do indeed have their cake and eat it too.
And, if it’s all as wonderfully fresh as this, then why not?
For many men, myself included, shopping is such a hassle that some sort of military-like planning beforehand can ease the pain. A strategy that, providing there are no rogue shop assistants or unforeseen circumstances, should allow one to go in, make an exceedingly quick purchase, and then exit — immediately. Sanity intact and stress at a (hopefully) manageable level.
Others, however, appear to take the military element to a new and frightening level, modifying the misery into what would appear to be a full-on mission.
Coverage of Japan invariably touches on a variety of regularly trotted out cliches, but arguably one constant is that of a modern, affluent nation. A country that despite its lost decade(s), still benefits from a relatively low unemployment rate, along with an enviably first-class infrastructure.
It’s an approach that admittedly contains a fair bit of truth, but what it also does is brush over the increasing number of people who aren’t aided by any of the above — a large number of whom haven’t done so for quite some time too. And while it’s not difficult to find poverty in many parts of Tokyo (let alone the country as a whole), around Taito-ku, in an area once known as Sanya, it’s starkly and depressingly obvious.
Photographs from this area have appeared on Tokyo Times before — images that are troubling not only in the plight of those featured, but in the potentially voyeuristic element of photographing the dispossessed and homeless in the first place.
It’s an argument that I’ve wrestled with, and one that understandably is often debated on photography sites and forums. But as ethically dubious as such photos can be, with next to no coverage of these problems, both in Japan and elsewhere, it also seems equally questionable not to publish them — even if it is only on a website like this, rather than in a newspaper, or on a site of note.
So here, without further justification or explanation from me, are the rest. All of which were taken in a short space of time, in the space of a few streets.
