Photographing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 5

Con­clud­ing Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4 of a recent pho­to­graphic trip to Tokyo, Japan.

I vis­ited the 21_21 Design Sight museum this morn­ing, and was lucky to catch The Out­line, an exhibit about the work of prod­uct designer Naoto Fuka­sawa. I’m a fan of his work and really enjoyed look­ing at the flow­ing, organic shapes of his designs.

I love Tadao Ando’s archi­tec­ture as well, and look­ing at the 21_21 museum he designed, I thought it would be a lovely thing to shoot in the evening light, but alas I was there at noon and noth­ing worked. It wasn’t all wasted though, as I man­aged to catch these autumn leaves behind the museum, my first in Tokyo. Even though I vis­ited Tokyo in late Novem­ber and every­one was telling me how beau­ti­ful the autumn leaves were going to be, I hardly saw any (the Japan­ese were also telling me how unusual it was rain­ing so often – global warm­ing, I’m look­ing at you).

I then walked over to the National Art Cen­ter. I didn’t want to spend too much time shoot­ing it as I wanted to move away from shoot­ing archi­tec­ture this time round, but I enjoyed play­ing with how its shape inter­acted with the beau­ti­fully blue sky that day.

These birds flew by just as I lined up the cam­era to shoot the Art Cen­ter dome. There was no way to see it com­ing, there was only time to shoot one frame – it’s just one of those happy coin­ci­dences where I was in the right place at the right time.

Finally, autumn leaves! It was a beau­ti­ful scene, and I wanted to con­vey the slow, con­tem­pla­tive feel of a lazy after­noon in the warm sun, cool breeze blow­ing, light lunch and good book in hand. It felt like it would be really rude to dis­turb the peo­ple enjoy­ing them­selves, so I only took a few shots here. Ah, the Japan­ese are so lucky to have beau­ti­ful places like this.

I then took a slow, lazy walk through Aoyama, get­ting lost. I found myself wan­der­ing into Aoyama ceme­tery, which I admit, hardly sounds like the best tourist spot, but it was so quiet and peace­ful there.

I’m not sure, but it looked to me like the Japan­ese have a dif­fer­ent atti­tude towards ceme­ter­ies than Sin­ga­pore­ans do; I saw a fam­ily play­ing ball inside, some­body read­ing, and peo­ple jog­ging around the periph­ery. Instead of look­ing gloomy and aban­doned, it looked clean and even beau­ti­ful. I know I had an inter­est­ing time look­ing through at some of the very old tombs – it was almost like walk­ing through a his­tory museum.

As I looked at graves of peo­ple who have been dead for decades, some for cen­turies, I tried to pic­ture them as they once were; real, liv­ing peo­ple, who were broth­ers and sis­ters, sons and daugh­ters, hus­bands and wives. I felt a pro­found sense of grat­i­tude wash over me, for being alive to wit­ness this scene while they weren’t, know­ing that one day, I too will join them. Although it would have been inter­est­ing to pho­to­graph, I felt like it would have been deeply dis­re­spect­ful, so I left it at that. It’s going to sound strange of me, but this acci­den­tal visit to a Japan­ese grave­yard was one of the high­lights of this trip for me.

My feet were killing me after all that walk­ing (seri­ously, they would be hurt­ing days after I returned home), and as I came out of Aoyama ceme­tery I saw a lit­tle café called Choco­lat Chic tucked away near the exit. It was a great find, the cof­fee was rich and the dessert was deli­cious. This is what I love about let­ting your­self get lost while trav­el­ing, if you’re lucky you stum­ble upon great places you would have oth­er­wise never found. The com­po­si­tion in this photo isn’t any­thing to shout about and the light is all wrong, but unlike 90% of the other shots I took, I didn’t take this for any­one else, with inter­est­ing lead­ing lines and clear cen­ter of inter­ests. I took it for me, to help remind me some­day that one beau­ti­ful autumn after­noon, I enjoyed a deli­cious snack, lost in the sub­urbs of Tokyo.

I wanted to cap­ture what an autumn late after­noon felt like on the streets of Tokyo before I left. I’m not sure if I got it with this one, but I like how the light catches the man on the right just as he’s glanc­ing across at the two ladies on the left, and the long shad­ows that stretch across the pave­ment cast by the set­ting sun.

The shot that became a favorite amongst my friends almost never hap­pened. I touch-downed near evening, hands full of lug­gage, stepped off the plane and this view greeted me. I was exhausted by then, and just snapped a cus­tom­ary shot using my iPhone. I wanted to go off there and then – but some­thing made me dig out the Canon 7D from my lug­gage and snap another cou­ple of pho­tos. Lucky for me.

And that con­cludes it. I shot around 6000 pho­tos over 6 days of travel, and these few are amongst my favorites. I hope you enjoyed look­ing through them as much as I did shoot­ing them.

Related Posts

1. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 1
2. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 3
3. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 4