Kanda Nobody

In Tokyo, emptiness shocks. There was something alien about the vacant road as I stepped out from Kanda station – it was the sudden destitution of an empty Tokyo street. I turned my jacket collar up against the biting wind as we walked along the blank stretch of shuttered shops, dark interiors and closed doors. This was a thousand miles from Tokyo station, where only minutes before we had been lost in its belly amidst the tight mass of people about to disperse across the country for New Year’s. It’s difficult to move in and Tokyo is difficult to understand. Just when you are ready to describe it, just when you think you’ve soaked it in, you only realise that the city’s been soaking you in. It has taken you in, gargled you about its mouth, bounced you off its inner walls, tired disoriented, run down and exhausted. To move through Tokyo is to be a rock in a never-ceasing wave crest, exhausted and eroded. But everyone in this wave is also rock. And by walking the street you become part of another person’s wave – a part of their exhaustion. And what does it give back? An empty Kanda street. Tokyo will demand a piece of you before it will ever reveal itself.

Masataka Nakano had his camera ready at 5.00 am, waiting for that moment when the street went silent, even if only for an instant. He could have been in Kanda on New Year’s Eve. We walked along guided by hunger, and took to a side street after spotting a flickering blue neon sign. It was dark inside with the brown wood panel walls seeming to soak up the light. Men were gathered around the cramped bar, hunched over their bowl of noodles, slurping up the warmth. New Year’s Eve and in a back street noodle bar. They’re from the North Country, working in Tokyo to send money back home, but not earning enough to make the trip themselves.

Drifters – that’s what we are. At a loss to ourselves and taking in the warmth of the big bowl. I wish there and then I could have said, “We’ll make it through. We’re gonna be alright, you and I.” But I didn’t, I just leaned back, resting against those wood panel walls before taking in another mouthful of ramen. Because, in Tokyo emptiness shocks.

Tokyo is nobody’s home, I thought. Like those men sitting silently across from us, like the Chinese workers running the restaurant, like all those people in Tokyo station heading off in all different directions across the island. Like us. Tokyo is nobody’s home, people just live here.