Have you ever tried street photography in Manchester?
It’s a nightmare.
You’ll end up with hundreds of blurred shots of moody emo youths on skateboards, some scallies with a dog, one hastily clicked wobble of the bloke who told you to fuck off out of his kebab shop, along with three missing teeth and a black eye.
The violence you endured for your art will be beautifully lit though- the fist of your attacker appears smooth and evenly textured through the oh-so-fragile lens, Piccadilly’s watery blue sunlight having been diffused softly through a feathery blanket of reassuring Lancashire clouds.
That’s assuming you even manage to smuggle a memory card home though, as the chances are that your equipment will all get nicked and you’ll be left sobbing into a pint of former local brew Boddington’s (now concocted in South Wales.)
Street photography in Tokyo, on the other hand, is a piece of piss. This is due to the multitude of well-dressed, distinctive sub-cultures patrolling the thoroughfares. Black suited business people, leather bound rockabillies, and candy-costumed teenage girls are among the more well known groups who frequent the metropolis. Furthermore, the urban mass is segmented into clear tribal dominions, so you can head straight for the zone that tickles your fancy and have a good idea of what to expect- Yurakucho for salarymen, Koenji for punks, that kind of thing.
But what is exceptionally conducive to getting a few decent snapshots is that, of all those stories you’re hoping to curate a vacuum packed millisecond of; all the characters you’re sympathetically straining to preserve truthfully on a digital sensor, you’ll find that some are eccentric, many are happy, a few are unwell, some conformist, some confused, some are flashy and glamourous, while some are understated and in control, but… none of them are profoundly disturbed sociopaths with a predisposition for daylight violence!
I know, it’s seems insane, but you’re very unlikely to be punched, robbed, threatened, or even mildly intimidated.
Now, your more hard-bitten, New York subway prowling street photographers of yore might have argued that that removes the challenge of the enterprise, rendering it cheap, but frankly, that’s simply because they’re also profoundly disturbed sociopaths with a predisposition for daylight violence, who just happened, through the whimsical eddies of fate, to be on the deep thinking, light capturing end of the lens, rather than on the puddle jumping, black and white side.
I took a stroll around East Shinjuku to see what I could find. The main area I roamed was Golden Gai- a couple of blocks of narrow, interconnected streets and alleys in which are clustered almost two hundred tiny, fascinating bars. As you sip your whisky, sake, or over-carbonated cheap lager, you can listen to heavy metal, jazz, traditional Japanese folk music, or just drunken rants and smoky laughter, depending on which doorway you happen to have tentatively creaked open.
The area attracts misfits, nihilists, bohemians, tourists, and on Fridays and Saturdays nearby nine-to-five workers who are through with social fakery, for a few hours at least. It’s a friendly and welcoming place.
Golden Gai neighbours Kabukicho- a chaotic red-light district which has both a bad and a good reputation at the same time, depending on your perspective. While there can be a bit of an edge to the atmosphere there, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly when you’re taking photographs.
