My dream of Tokyo

is being forced to choose

between

glowing Dr Pepper cans…

Tokyo is thirsty work.

(Pictures taken in Nakano, Tokyo on April 3rd, 2012.)

It was creepy. There was nobody there. Nobody we could see or hear.

The village was right next to a walled-off utility area, where a man was washing the giant bags that Ueno Park personnel put out for everyone’s trash and recycling.

This is not something I expected to see in Tokyo. I don’t think my friend did either. He regularly visits the Ueno Park area, and he seemed taken aback when we, literally, stumbled upon this village of tents.

To give you an idea of how close the sublime and the ridiculous can be in Tokyo, 90 seconds before my friend and I found the tents we were near an amusement area where I saw this little girl:

It’s good that she was 100 yards and many socio-economic levels away from the tent village. I hope she never finds that world.

As for my friend and I, we found it and wandered around to have a look. (For the record, I think some of my photos have a rushed look, because I was quite worried some tent resident would emerge at any moment to yell at me and chase me off. I would have deserved it, I think, but I’m glad it didn’t happen.)

What amazed me, though I’m not sure why, were some of the homey touches of the place. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to think that whoever lived here was incapable of showing some pride in how they lived.

Of course, when you live in a visqueen tent hidden in plain sight in one of the busiest urban parks in the world, I suppose one’s pride has limits. The shoes were filthy and looked abandoned.

The questions I had about what folks do for money when living like this were quickly answered when I saw the bike and the bags of cans. Looking at this photo now, I wonder how many cheap bentos and glass jars of Ozeki One Cup these cans bought. Hell, maybe I’m being presumptuous again.

Because right after I saw the can collection, I saw another good, if indelicate, example of the care some fellow had for his undergarments. Do the Japanese have the same joke we do in America, about making sure you wear clean underwear in case you get taken to a hospital emergency room and have to be stripped?

In the end, after a 15-minute visit there was still no one among the tents but me and my friend. Just ghostly stillness, with the sound of thousands of happy, oblivious Ueno Park tourists drifting down from the distance over the tree tops and into our ears.

And as we started to leave, I saw a most touching thing. Someone’s art project, set aside for completion at a later time. I think the block in the middle of the three below ended up being a fine tiki, if it was ever finished.

So there they were, the tents and the trees and the incongruity that people could live like this in one of the greatest and most prosperous cities on Earth. I get teary-eyed thinking about this now. And I am glad I didn’t encounter any tent village residents. I played interloper here enough. The people who live here didn’t need to see me taking pictures of their stark and poor way of life.

And I have no idea what this sign says, but I took a picture of it anyway. It probably does not say that the tent village is abandoned because all the residents won the lottery and got rich.

On this night this particular pachinko joint was nearly empty, and the air was almost breathable. The man in my photo had a lit smoke, but he lowered it from his lips, I think, to have a look at me. I’m glad he did.

If you’ve never been in a pachinko hall, the sounds and the bright colors can be overwhelming. I remember feeling that way when I took the picture above. So I wanted to see if what I photographed was as interesting with the color removed. You can do that with computer software these days.

I like the result. It looks like my guy is sitting inside some kind of some gigantic chrome pleasure machine. And in the monochrome view of this colorful piece of the Japanese world, I like the expression on this man’s face even more.

Because in his face I see the possibility that he is thinking I see him in black and white terms anyway.

Dear Reader:

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to read the material I post on this blog. But I feel I owe you an explanation. Many of the pieces I have posted in the last month have been of dingy, drunken, desperate-looking men (and one woman) in Tokyo, Japan.

Some days, even from Sanya you can see the sky, light, hope, and progress…

(A view of Tokyo Skytree from the shōtengai in Sanya, Minami-senju, Tokyo, April 2012)

Through a strange twist of good fortune, I was able to spend five weeks in Tokyo (from April 1st through May 7th 2012) taking photographs of, well, dingy, drunken, desperate-looking men for a book of photography, poems, and prose I’m putting together about the low, desperate life on this great city’s lesser-known streets.

The working title of the book is Tokyo Panic Stories, though I doubt that will be the final title. I think it’s going to take me about 8 1/2 weeks from the date of this post to put a first draft together. And the point of this post is to make it easier for you to view the preliminary work from the book that I have already posted on this blog.

If you go to the menu above and click ‘Tokyo Panic Stories’, you will be presented with header summaries of all the work I have created thus far for my forthcoming book. I just wanted to organize things and make it easier for you, Dear Reader, to access this growing and evolving body of work.

So, please take the time to wander around these pages. I’m pleased that you stopped by, and I hope you enjoy my words and photos, even though they about a dark and, frankly, depressing subject.

–Dan Ryan, Brisbane, California, May 16th 2012

left over from when I was The King of Japan and rich beyond your

mortal imagining.

Jesus couldn’t bark the orders of all his father’s wrath at me.

The emperor of Japan was my public face and functionary.

Where did those days go?

What I did was disguise myself in desperation and dirt,

and I went among my people like Henry V.

The problem is, I never came back to victory.

I stayed on the streets of Tokyo,

hoarding anger and drinking gold from metal cans.

Metal cans are now my treasure and my legacy.

Would you like to stop awhile and have a drink with a king?

(Pictures taken near Keisei Ueno Station, Ueno, Tokyo, April 2012)

So when I encountered this statue one Thursday afternoon in Nakano Broadway, it didn’t shock me so much as it disgusted and surprised me. In the 24 years since I lived in Tokyo, I would have guessed that iconography like this had been thrown away or destroyed.

I realize this is a naive way of thinking. People collect this stuff in America, so why not in Japan? In my country, for archivists and scholars at least, collecting  “pickaninny” artwork and objects is a legitimate but painful way of taking measure of the history and treatment of black people in America over the last 400 years. (Cross-burning crackers probably collect this stuff too, for their own perverse reasons. I don’t know.)

In Japan, I have no idea who collects this stuff or what the hell the cultural significance of it might be to them. Who would want to display this in their home?

I found this displayed in front of the Mandarake (Man-da-ra-kay) high-end vintage toy boutique on the fourth floor of Nakano Broadway. I was able to read the red katakana, which says “Oriental Curry”. I had to research the black kanji, which reads “sokuseki”. This apparently means ‘instant’. So what you have here is the caricature of a black chef hawking Oriental Instant Curry. It looks like he’s holding the cross section of a hard-boiled egg to me.

I don’t know what the red-lipped depiction of a black man has to do with instant Japanese curry. To me, there is no connection. If you know of one, please clue me in. As for the actual use of saucer-eyed black caricature, my attitude now is the same as it was in the late ‘80s: I can’t completely blame the Japanese for this because I strongly suspect they copied the use of racist Negro images for advertising purposes from us Americans.

I mean, didn’t Commodore Perry bring black-face minstrels with him to entertain the shogunate in 1854?

I don’t know who ate, drank and smoked here.

I don’t know who left these things here.

But these items were there in the gutter, by a storm drain.

And if you want to know the truth,

these are three of the four food groups in Sanya.

I’m not certain, but if I had to guess I’d say

the fourth food group

is pain.

(Picture taken at the shōtengai in Sanya, Minami-senju, Tokyo, April 2012)

and slowly turn to metal.

I became robotic late in life,

here in the streets of Tokyo.

It seemed like an easier existence,

than seeking the perfect cherry blossom,

and the metal in my head gets me free satellite TV.

My eyeglasses are my screens.

They let me see all the broadcasts of the world.

And the broadcasts often prove to me

that I never want to leave Japan.

(Picture taken across from Keisei Ueno Station, Ueno, Tokyo, April 2012)

I asked her “Is this a punk-rock thing, a cosplay thing, an art thing, or just your thing?”

While very graciously allowing me to take her picture, she explained that this was a personal thing, a look she had carefully considered and crafted with a dear female friend from Sweden who has the identical appearance configuration, only in bright green. She said she’s not into cosplay, and gets tired trying to explain that to people.

“That,” I said to her, “Is the most remarkable look. You have kind of a Predator thing going on. And you are also a very pretty woman.”

She laughed at the Predator reference, and thanked me for the compliment. Then the train arrived and we parted ways to the cars in which we had reserved seats.

Later, at Narita Airport, I saw her and her husband boarding a United flight to Newark. The woman and I smiled at each other and waved. An hour later, I boarded a United flight to San Francisco.

Then I left Japan.

When I was getting over the illness, I honestly doubted whether I would be able to complete the book project for which I came to Japan, a longer sequel of sorts to Tokyo in the Underbrush. Originally I planned to only be in Tokyo for a month, but after losing two weeks I booked a fifth week in the apartment I have been renting near Nakano Broadway. Still, I was stressed-out and very doubtful that three weeks would be enough time to get the photos I needed for my project. I was unfocused, didn’t have a clear idea how to find subjects for my photos, and….well, I was freaking out, basically.

And then I met Lee Chapman, the guy on the right in the picture below.

(Picture taken at the Sanyukai NPO free clinic in Sanya, Minami-senju, Tokyo in April, 2012)

Lee is an Englishman who has been in Japan for 14 years. Professionally, he teaches English language in a Japanese high school. But for fun in his spare time, he shoots some of the most lovely pictures showing aspects of life in Japan that you’re likely to see.

After seeing Lee’s Tokyo Times site over a year ago, I started following him on Twitter. One thing led to another, and he ended up writing the introduction for the recently-published Kindle edition of Tokyo in the Underbrush. And when I made my overall plans for this trip to Tokyo, Lee and I made specific plans to meet so we could explore, shoot pictures, and have some drinks together. We ended up getting together three times to shoot pictures in various parts of central Tokyo.

And because of this, he helped me save my project.

From looking at my old Tokyo photos, Lee knew the skid-row areas where I had been in the ‘80s. He had, in fact, explored these areas himself. He cheerfully gave me his time, and willingly took me to some of the dirtiest and most desperate parts of central Tokyo. This allowed me to recapture a certain mindset I needed to do my project. And it made it possible for me to take the photos I needed of Tokyo’s downtrodden by myself. It helps to have someone show you where to go.

Lee did that for me. And he is a very funny, likable, unpretentious guy, with whom I enjoyed having beers at Kamiya Bar.

So before I actually leave Tokyo I just wanted to say:

Thank you, Lee.

Your friend, Dan Ryan of Brisbane, California