Kiosks and memory come and go.

My past is here, sweating in a wool suit, thanking the gods of physics and money for Japan.

Sweating in a wool suit, no CoolBiz in the ‘80s, and wondering, as young men will:

“If after Tokyo, what?”

After Tokyo was many years finding me.

After Tokyo I couldn’t find the parts I left in Japan.

So I came back here and found them, most of them.

They dangled from phone straps.

And it’s still Yushima Station, a wretched coffin with throughput rails.

I’m glad for it.

Bits of my mind still live there, and that makes it always my empty, wide-open home.

(Pictures taken at Yushima Station, Tokyo, in April 2012)

but I thought about it

many times.

Not to die, but to float,

float down to the sea.

Where the birds go

to have lunch on spring days

when the trash we leave them

isn’t quite enough to take home to the family.

The floating idea,

it’s all about the dream time,

the closing of eyes,

of being borne by Earth’s amniotic fluid

to the place where we all come home.

It’s a place we don’t want to go

but can’t help desiring.

It’s instinct, like picking our teeth with a knife.

It’s stupid

but we do it

because we’ve been dreaming of

floating down rivers

for so many thousands of years.

(Picture taken at Minami-senju Station, Tokyo, in April 2012)

It was a little like the scenario in that Kinks song “Lola”, but only in passing. I met her in a little place called Seoul Bar, which is in a rundown section of northeast Tokyo called Sanya. At first I thought her was a him, and she sounded like a man but…

The lipstick should have given me a clue, but it was confusing initially, even more so because his, sorry, her English was pretty rusty, and my Japanese was horrible. She took an interest in me because I was American. When she was still fully he, he used to work for Americans in the ‘60s. Or the ‘70s, but doing what I never completely figured out. But we managed fitfully to communicate, and after a few minutes I thought he was a pretty interesting woman.

She’d had the money at some unspecified point in the past to start the process of becoming her true self, to transition from male to female. Her family, which might have included a wife and kids, never understood nor approved of what she needed to be. They disowned her many years ago.

However, it was obvious she was accepted in Seoul Bar, but also treated a bit like an oddity. When another bar patron took a schoolboy jab at her breasts, it bothered me. It was playful, but far from respectful. But it was nearly 13:00, in a bar in a crummy part of town, and everyone was drinking. So maybe my standards were unrealistically high. Hell, she even wanted me to take a feel of her tits. She was proud of them. I declined.

She was also proud of her hands, justifiably I thought, but seemed frustrated by lingering facial hair. My guess is whatever hormones she used to take had worn off some time ago. She also said she still had the male parts she’d been born with.

I left the Seoul Bar when the karaoke was about to start and went out to the shōtengai to take more pictures. After about five minutes,  I noticed my ladyfriend walking in the same direction I was. She had bar-snack crumbs on her face, and in the outdoor light I could really see how worn- and shabby-looking she was. Yet as she waved her hands around at my camera, her manicured nails were still noticeable, as were her few female bumps and curves. She looked more like a woman standing up outside than she had hunched next to me in a chair in the dark little bar we’d been in.

She and I walked together for a few minutes. She didn’t mind me taking pictures of her. In fact, she carried herself with a little bit of the vanity some women seem to naturally have, whether their looks entitle them to such vanity or not. But the fact that this woman, this shabby, incomplete woman, carried herself in this a way instantly earned a small measure of my respect. It took, for lack of a better term, balls.

We came to a stop when she spotted a man she knew, a friend I suppose, a guy I had photographed previously. He was pretty goddamned drunk. But she wanted to go talk to him.

Like I said, she was proud of her breasts and not shy about playing with them in public. I didn’t ask her to do this. I don’t know enough Japanese to get that far. But she posed for me a few times out there in the street, and this is where her hands always ended up. You’ve got to roll with these things in some parts of Tokyo street life.

Then she walked over to talk to her friend. It was a short conversation. The guy in the gutter made a slow lunge for my ladyfriend’s crotch. Her response, as I barely understood it, was to offer to show the man that he would have gotten a handful of male goodies if she had let his fingers reach their target. This was a little bit too much for me, the idea that this incomplete woman was prepared to whip out her male equipment in the street.

So I walked away. But you know, I never even got her name.

(Pictures taken on the shōtengai in Sanya, Tokyo in April, 2012)

I discovered the Seoul Bar in Sanya, a rundown section in northeastern Tokyo, after watching a surly drunk get thrown out of it. A few days later I went back to this little joint because it had captured my attention and curiosity. And I wanted to see if the drunken ejected patron had been let back into the place.

At first I thought the old smooth-headed gentleman in the chair was the ejected boozer from my previous visit. A closer, more scrupulous look at the man proved me wrong. But then my eyes were immediately drawn to Mama-san, a beautiful older woman who calmly surveyed the street in front of Seoul Bar and whose smiling face beamed with what I took for pride.

When Mama-san saw me, she recognized me from several days before. And when she understood that I meant to enter the bar, she retreated back to a table inside and started clearing and cleaning a place for me to sit.

I sat at the table Mama-san cleaned for me with this gent. He ignored me at first, but as a foreigner visiting Japan I am used to this. Yet he stared so long out the front of the bar and into the street that after awhile I decided he really was more interested in the people coming and going outside than he was in ignoring me.

The Seoul Bar is small, the prices are cheap. But the pictures on the wall told me that this isn’t just some anonymous, impersonal dive in a run-down neighborhood. After Mama-san insisted on sitting in my lap and having our picture taken together, I immediately understood that this is her bar and this is her way of making customers feel welcome. Through some bad English spoken by a couple of other customers, and my horrible Japanese, I learned Mama-san is South Korean, and she has owned and run this place in Sanya for 23 years. That’s a hell of a long time to run a drinking business in this poor part of Tokyo.

So then Mama-san got up to get me a beer, and I finally took a look around the place. It didn’t have more than three four-seat tables in it. The smooth-headed older gent from before was still sitting at the front of the place. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t seem hostile either.

Then there this guy, who sat at the small counter in the back near the whiskey and tea. He smiled quite a bit, and made me feel as welcome as Mama-san did. I think he was her business partner, or her husband, since he was wearing what looked like a wedding band. I liked him.

The I looked around at my table mate, who had finished surveying the world outside the bar and turned his attention toward me. He was a bit jittery and didn’t sit still much, so this is the best image he allowed me to take of himself. The items sitting on the table before him seemed to me like a variation of the four basic Japanese neighborhood bar food groups.

Then Mama-san brought my beer and some more snacks, and my table mate and I had a bigger bounty to share. Cheese twists, watermelon wedges, a peanut/soy nut mixture, and beer were the day’s menu items. I could have had kimchee or bibimbap if I’d wanted. They’re listed in katakana on the front of the bar. I later regretted not having a proper lunch.

The beer was cold and delicious, and the snacks were pretty good. But when Mama-san handed my table mate the wireless mic and the karaoke started, I decided to take my leave. I can’t stand karaoke, and this nice man’s warm-up singing sounded like the best attempts of an off-key inebriate. Which they were. So I said my best Japanese goodbyes and left.

(Pictures taken on the shōtengai in Sanya, Tokyo in April, 2012)

Coming up: The Incomplete Transsexual…

Seoul Bar is a little place on the shōtengai in Sanya, a run-down section of northeast Tokyo. It’s on a corner and from the outside looks tidy enough. But it is also quite unassuming and easy to miss. In fact, I don’t think I would have noticed the place at all…

…if I hadn’t been walking by one day when this surly drunk was getting tossed from the bar. Actually, I didn’t see him get tossed. He was just there, in the tiled street on his back like a pissed-off turtle, laying on his flattened hat and yelling loudly and angrily.

He laid on his back for several minutes, shaking with anger more than anything resembling the chills or symptoms of a seizure. I’ve been an angry inebriate myself on occasion, and I know the signs.

Mama-san, who at the time I did not know was the Korean owner of the bar, came out to try to help the surly drunk. By then it had become apparent that the other customers had thrown the man out.

While everyone else went about their drinking business, Mama-san brought out the man’s small bag of possessions.

And while she decided how to handle the man, he threw a string of angry words at the other men inside the bar. I didn’t know enough Japanese to know what he actually said, but I know invective when I hear it.

Eventually, two men from Seoul Bar came out and helped the surly drunk back up to his feet. I wasn’t sure if he knew I had been taking pictures of him. He seemed too drunk to care.

Well, until I took this picture. Then the surly drunk directed all his anger towards me, away from his former drinking mates. This made him calm down a little. But he still wasn’t let back in the bar. I saw him walking dejectedly down the shōtengai towards Minimi-senju shortly after I snapped this picture. That was the last I saw of him…

(Pictures taken on the shōtengai in Sanya, Tokyo in April, 2012)

Coming up: Inside Seoul Bar, and The Incomplete Transsexual…

But I didn’t walk away easy. In Sanya I never do. My friend and I were starving, but we didn’t buy hot dogs from the food truck. We found a nice mom-and-pop joint nearby, and had the best ginger pork I’ve ever had. But still, it was Sanya, and I felt guilty about passing the food truck by for a good part of the rest of the day.

(Picture taken in Sanya, Minami-senju, Tokyo in April, 2012. You can read another short bit about food in Sanya here.)

A Different Side of Tokyo—Vincent Dabosville

Tokyo is a very diverse city. If you think it is just a colder version of Singapore, think twice and read “Ningenkusai”. This excellent journalistic work combines street photography and well written stories about the down and out who made Sanya their last stop. It also shows the people at the heart of Sanyūkai, the Non-Profit Organization looking after these modern-days burakumin. I can’t wait to see the second part of Tokyo Panic Stories and share a beer or two with Dan Ryan, a talented Mensch.

Lifting the Veil—Dove

A look behind the gloss of Tokyo’s streets at the forgotten ones, and those who have dedicated their lives to caring for them. It can often take an outsider to highlight what others take for granted. Here Dan Ryan has (literally) taken an empathic snapshot of a small area of Tokyo life and brought us into lives that other people would rather ignore, giving a human face to those who have fallen on hard times and who, so often, are barely given a second glance.

Story of Sadness and Hope—Robert A. Weisstuch

Dan uses his photos and words to open up a side of Tokyo that few know about or even imagine can exist. His ability to make connections with the people in his stories is evident in the un-posed and unglamorous photos of the troubled men of Sanya. I enjoyed Dan’s first book (“Tokyo in the Underbrush”) and look forward to additional releases in this series.

Hope—Bill Jokela

Dan Ryan offers us a glimpse of a part of Tokyo most of us overlook. The images and words he presents tell the story of a mostly ignored lot and a couple of people who have crossed an ocean to help them. These are portraits of compassion and dignity. His work doesn’t demand much of your time or your wallet and is highly rewarding. I strongly recommend this.

To be honest, I know three of these reviewers. But they’re all top-notch, no-bullshit people who wouldn’t do anything shady or dishonest just to help me sell a 99-cent book. Their words are their own and so are their opinions, and I am honored by them. I hope these reviews interest you in buying my books and the other excellent volumes published by Abiko Free Press.

And finally, I hope you are inspired to donate to my next Tokyo project. I’m headed back to Tokyo in September of this year, to spend about a month in the gutters and streets with some of the most amazing people you’ve ever seen. Well, at least you’ll see them after I bring them and parts of their world back to you.

And I regret that quite a bit. I hope to make it up to him when I’m back in Japan in September. Anyway, after we parted I walked around Akihabara for 45 minutes and took pictures of things that interested me and also had minimal human presence. These photos follow.

And for the record, I don’t know who the guy is on the storefront billboard in the ninth photo below, but I don’t think I like him.

(Pictures taken in Akihabara, Tokyo on April 20th, 2012. I have another Akiba post here.)

And this isn’t merely out of vanity, which is certainly a factor I would be foolish to deny. I truly love what I do and I think it has real value. What I do is the product of my natural, insatiable need to create, and a genuine, altruistic desire to make the world a better, more interesting place. I want to increase understanding, and contribute to the richness and diversity of the world through my words and pictures and the way my mind intermingles the two. See? There’s that vanity, thinking I can actually do those things.

But the truth is whether I was trying to make this my life’s work after a couple of crappy careers (which is the literal truth), or doing this on the side while working a dead-end job managing an Arby’s, I would still be doing this work. If nobody responded to it ever, and an excerpt from one of my teeny books hadn’t recently been published for the whole internet to see, I would still be doing this work.

Fortunately, the beautiful reality is people do respond to my work. I recently got this note on LinkedIn from a man I’ve never met nor spoken to, a foreigner currently living in Japan. He gave me permission to print it here…

Dan,

Your work always resonates with me.

Please keep this information between us, but I developed mental illness some years ago, which led to (enhanced?) substance abuse (mainly alcohol) and I spend a lot of time with the people you often write about (I shouldn’t be so detached: I’m one of them). I’m in recovery, and making my way a day at a time, but not everyone makes it. I’m sure the people you meet in Sanya are grateful for you turning your attention to them ever so briefly.

Anyway, just wanted to know you’ve touched at least one person.

Take care and thanks,

(Name withheld at author’s request)

It took a yard of guts for this man to send a note like this to a complete stranger, and I almost cried when I read it. I was so honored by his honesty about himself. We started a correspondence after he sent me this note, and some of the things I wrote in response to him were “Whether my work does more than give me a sense of accomplishment and vain pride, I have no idea. Until now, when I read your amazing note to me. My deepest thanks for telling me my work touched you. I can’t tell you how important that is.”

It is very important, not only for my ego and my creative motivations, but for the basic needs we all have to connect to others and to matter to them in positive ways. I hope to further connect by meeting the man who wrote me the note, hopefully when I am back in Tokyo this September. I want to hug this man and buy him a quiet lunch and talk and know that he is doing well and winning the battles against his afflictions and his demons.

Because my work helps me win the battles against my afflictions and demons. But knowing I’ve made an actual difference in a person’s life almost outweighs the value of the work itself.

is reputed to have said when he died at 101.

Loosely translated from late Edo-period Japanese,

he said: “I’m a coward when it matters,

and a hero when it don’t.”

This may be apocryphal family history.

Most family history is.

It’s blended from different sources like bad scotch,

being as it is neither comfort nor condemnation.

But on days like this in the chump streets,

I know how the old man felt.

Yes, in this place where I live,

I know how the old man felt.

(Pictures taken in Sanya, Minami-senju, Tokyo, in April 2012)

When I went to Tokyo in April and May of 2012, I benefitted from the unexpected generosity of a benefactor (who requested anonymity in perpetuity) who was very taken with a piece of work I did called “Tokyo in the Underbrush” and wanted to give me a chance to do more work like it. This person fronted the money for my plane tickets, lodging costs, and most of my living expenses for the 37 days I was in Japan.

And those 37 days were amazing, productive, joyous, life-changing. I just have to go back. So through careful household budgeting and judicious use of frequent-flyer miles, my wife and I have been able to secure my plane tickets to Tokyo and my modest lodgings in the Nakano-ku section of town. And that’s about the limit of our communal resources. The cash for cheap Yoshinoya and combini sandwiches and Tweetups and vending machine Dr Pepper and recharging the Suica card is all up to me.

So I’ll be having some garage sales and applying for a grant, and giving this PayPal thing a shot. I’m trying to be as creative with the means as I think I have been with the ends, the ends being the work I do. And I am very proud of my work, which is why I even considered growing the balls to ask for donations to continue it. It’s my life’s work now, that which I should have been doing 20 years ago.

You can see the bulk of my Tokyo work from 2012 here. This material, along with some photo essays I am still writing and editing, will be collected and published early this summer as “Tokyo Panic Stories”, the major work of photojournalism, poetry and fiction which I’ve been working on for the past ten months. The first part of this work, “Ningenkusai”, was published this past March, and you can read an excerpt and even buy a copy by going here.

So that’s my pitch. The PayPal button is on the upper right side of this page, and there is no minimum donation stipulated. I hope you consider using it. If you do you will have my lasting gratitude and a free copy of the photo-story book I produce after returning from Japan in October. And probably some other freebie copies of my existing Tokyo work, but I haven’t worked those details out with myself yet.

Thanks for your support. The money will come in handy, but the moral support is where the true and lasting value lies.

—Brisbane, California, April 2013

P.S. Like I said, there is no minimum donation stipulated. AND there is no maximum donation suggested. So if you feel like playing sugar daddy, you know, I just can’t deny you that.

¥———¥———¥

You’ve probably never heard of Sanya. The Tokyo City Government doesn’t acknowledge its existence, and you won’t find it on any official maps. Sanya is more or less Tokyo’s skid row, where people, mostly men, end up when the other parts of this immense, gleaming city have stopped offering comfort and opportunity.

Sanya is where  the Japanese outcasts, food animal butchers, leather tanners, and other professions considered “unclean” by Japan’s traditionally Buddhist ruling class, a.k.a. the burakumin, or dowa, plied their trades for centuries. These tradesmen may mostly be gone, and the smell of the blood they spilled long-since drifted away, but the stigma of what Sanya once was remains, and it clings to the many of the people who live and work here.

Sanya is a blue-collar place, where an aging population of day laborers lingers on the fringe of Tokyo society. Many laborers have drinking problems, and they’ve ended up in Sanya to hide their abuses from their families. Sights like this fellow are pretty common, except in rainy weather.

And even then Sanya has a shōtengai dotted with little bars and liquor stores.

For many men in Sanya, government welfare assistance is available but is a problematic thing. Applying for it requires identity verification by contacting an applicant’s family. Most Sanya men who have fallen on hard times and taken to excessive drinking don’t want this. They would rather their families not know where they are or how they live. Revealing this would mean bringing unbearable shame upon their loved ones.

So when you’re down in Sanya and public assistance isn’t an option for some reason, what do you do? You go private, to a small outfit like Sanyūkai NPO, a non-religious non-profit organization. The Sanyūkai NPO and the free medical clinic within it is run by a couple of foreign missionaries who have been doing charity work in Sanya since the early ‘80s.

Deacon Jean LeBeau, the director of Sanyūkai NPO, is a French-Canadian Catholic with the Quebec Foreign Mission Society. Deacon Jean has been in Japan for 41 years, including 28 years in Sanya. He’s a humble, affable man, who would rather speak Japanese than either English or his native French.

Sister Rita Burdzy, head nurse of Sanyūkai clinic, is an American from St. Louis, Missouri who came to Japan in 1981. She is a nun with the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic of Ossining, New York, a Roman Catholic order whose members devote their lives to service overseas in specialties such as medicine and agriculture. Sister Rita holds a Japanese nursing license and is the nurse in charge of most of the activities at the clinic.

It’s a small facility, with only two beds in the examination room. Hundreds of ailing men have passed through this place since it opened in 1984. And somehow it manages to keep doing the job.

In addition to Sister Rita, medical services are supplied by a volunteer roster of over 30 medical doctors and registered nurses. Doctor Kanade Hagiwara, an urologist at a general hospital in Tokyo, is one of those volunteers. She treats patients at the clinic on the fourth Saturday of each month. The NPO is not a religious organization, and therefore does not insist that either volunteers or clients adhere to any one faith, or have any religious faith at all.

Within the clinic, the one concession to spiritual matters is this hand-made banner and the shrine beside it, which is dedicated to recently-departed clients and patients of the clinic.

Since Sanya does not officially exist, Sanyūkai clinic has an address in Kiyokawa, in Taito-ku ward, on a small street that could easily pass for an alleyway. Outside the clinic, unless it is raining or bitterly cold, men in need of clinic services sit on benches and wait, often with Sister Rita and Deacon Jean (whose back is shown) somewhere nearby.

But the men who gather outside Sanyūkai clinic tend to make it more of a social venue than the dreary medical waiting-room scene you might expect. They’re a diverse group, even though most are older day laborers who get less and less work as they age. The men in the middle and the right fall into that category. The guy on the left is a transplant from nearby Asakusa, whose reasons for ending up in Sanya are not entirely clear.

But this man, who died of a brain hemorrhage in June 2012, used to own a bar next to the clinic.

While this fellow is a professional cook who does not always get daily work.

If the men who frequent the Sanyūkai clinic share one thing, it is a quality Sister Rita calls “ningenkusai” (人間くさい), which she says “is a quality of being very human, of smelling comfortably human. Of being full of human traits.” She adds that this is the best English translation she could offer for a concept that she says is uniquely Japanese.

With obvious fondness, Sister Rita goes on to say that despite their backgrounds and personal secrets “these men have a purity of heart and are very charming. There is no guile in these men.” She sums things up by saying when men come to the clinic off of Sanya’s streets and ask for help “no questions are asked. We’re a family.”

And you can feel the truth of it when she says it.

So, there’s no crime story here, and no breaking scandal. It is surprising, and shameful, that a city like Tokyo has had a problem like this for so long. But at least the phenomenon of homeless and chronically drunk and unemployed street men isn’t being ignored. Good people are on the case. People like Sister Rita and Deacon Jean.

Reporting and photography for this story was done in Sanya, Tokyo in April, 2012.

But when historians investigate the beginning of our relationship,

Or the state of things closer to this present day,

They will always find a picture of us holding each other close and smiling…

(To my wife Michele, on our 13th wedding anniversary. Every number is a lucky one.)

of nothing you don’t know.

I am a busted-down door for you,

collapsed under the weight of cosmic law.

You are the wind in which I twist and think.

We have shoveled enough dirt together

to have moved the entire mass of the Earth

into a new orbit around the sun.

I am proud of what we’ve done.

There’s no mistaking it for

something ordinary people could have achieved.

So there it is, the end of us

and the beginning of something new.

As I said, there’s nothing I could tell you,

nothing you can’t already teach the new gods on your own.

I look forward to when they replace us

and we can drift down to the streets of a human city,

maybe Tokyo,

and live in the bottoms of paper cups,

maybe sleep on Styrofoam plates,

and love the fact that we aren’t responsible anymore

for whether we dream of mankind,

or mankind dreams of us.

(Pictures taken at the Iroha shōtengai in Sanya, Tokyo in April, 2012)

It’s a simple thing and a piece of genius, watching people at Kamiya Bar. And I’ve had the most wonderful conversations in English there, with people who only spoke Japanese.

I didn’t speak to these gents, sad to say; I was mostly too busy swimming in a hootenanny nocturne with my American friends. But if these guys were watching me watching them, they didn’t mention it nor act as if they minded.

Kamiya Bar is good like that, as good as the people, who will love you like a lost family member for an hour, and then forget you after one of you leaves. I didn’t know if these men were brothers, or co-workers, or on a first date of some kind. I’ll never know.

But it didn’t matter. The beer was cold and the  “denki bran” (electric brandy) was dangerous. Everyone at the table we shared was having a good time, not a hint of regret showing on anyone’s face. Well, maybe a little bit of regret. Denki bran has a bite. Beer helps with that.

The important thing is to enjoy the moment, enjoy the place. And if you’re at Kamiya Bar with professionals, they’ll know how to help you get far enough into the night to hate yourself a little the next morning.

(Pictures taken in Kamiya Bar, Tokyo, on May 3rd, 2012. A good time was had by all.)

and cry into our udon soup in

the zone of happy gone memory.

Sometimes we doze in the soup,

wrapping ourselves in noodles

warmer than ever was our mother’s embrace.

We can’t dash your hopes, but we can help.

We are useful men.

We are champions you never thought to ask

to take up swords and lasers at the Battle of Ueno.

That is actually a battle we fight every day.

Here in this park of children and wives,

of discarded food, we fight the birds for this,

and of half-gone cans of chuhai.

These taste better, actually,

because they contain the backwash saliva

of a thousand indifferent suburb-bound salarymen.

We are cannibals of time and men of great leisure.

Step into our offices and we will help establish for you

a plan to become invisible

and never bother the emperor or his government

ever again.

(Pictures taken in and near Ueno Park, Tokyo in April, 2012)

He thought there was no piece of god to love him, and I think I may have changed that perception. Tokyo bars are so strange.

He gave me this gift, and told me I could take pictures of myself with it. We rode the subway like champions of love.

The pictures seemed like a good idea, and he seemed like a nice man, until I thought about it. There was no treasure he wanted more than a picture of himself with me.

At least it helps to think that. But I will probably leave him after I figure out how to use this. Tokyo bars are so strange.

(Pictures taken on the Tōzai Line, Tokyo, in March, 2008)

You can’t pass a day

of insane madness,

in this world encrusted on water,

without wondering

how much fertilizer it takes

to grow the huge watermelons which,

anthropologists have observed,

are the only food eaten by

The Giant Pink Bikini Women of Shibuya.

(Picture taken in Shibuya, Tokyo during Golden Week, May 2012)

When I go there, it feels like home. And thinking about it makes me, well, homesick.

So for your investigation and pleasure, I have compiled this small gallery of some of my favorite images from my 2012 wanderings through Nakano’s streets. I could, of course, present to you a hell of a lot more. But the internet can only hold so much, and it may take me the rest of my life to capture the full complexity and vibrancy of this part of a part of Tokyo.

Cartoon head on a Nakano side street…

Prohibited habit warning…

Graffiti-poster-sticker thingy on Nakano-dōri…

Junk-art retail storefront in Nakano Broadway…

Restaurant on a street near Nakano Sun Mall…

Empty street on an overcast Thursday morning…

A shopper, with Nakano Sun Plaza looming…

Handsome bastard beer advertising display in the Life Store…

Bunny head graffiti (a very minor landmark), and a confident workman…

A mattress for a new house near the Bunny head…

Salaryman in an alley near Nakano Broadway. What do the characters say?

(All photos taken in Nakano-ku on April 18th, 19th, and 20th, 2012. You can look through more of my material about this wonderful part of Tokyo here.)

Bee…

Harrison…

Bulbs…

Light…

Indy…

Morning…

(Pictures taken at the Brisbane Bureau, California in February, 2013)