The final image of Nobuyoshi Araki’s Hitomachi (Junposha, 1999), his year-long love letter to the Yanesen area of Tokyo, is a two page spread of a couple and a child at at table in a small tea house in Ueno park.
This image gets its own page (528) in the Phaidon’s Nobuyoshi Araki Self, Life, Death (2005) and the venue of this particular photograph is familiar to most anyone who’s shot in Tokyo- the place sat near Bentendō temple in the middle of Shinobazu pond.
I had been past it countless times but only actually went inside once for a rest during a shoot in 2012. Sure enough, Araki’s table was there- as it had been since at least the late 1990’s or even earlier. His is a real photo- my digital re-take is just that, an illustration of recognition. Regardless, I inevitably continued to take photos of and around this place as it only became more photogenic over time.
It was then an unpleasant surprise on a morning walk last August that I saw this tea house barricaded up- a sure sign of imminent demolition. Sure enough, on a recent visit only the foundation remains. No doubt another casualty of pre-Olympic “cleanup” for 2020. Other parts of the pond are under renovation. Indeed, the new Starbucks in Ueno park up on the hill usually has a line out the front.
The overwhelming photographic documentation of Tokyo over the years means that one can’t help tread the same paths of previous photographers- I’ve said it before, it’s fascinating how photography is in conversation with itself. And when talking about Tokyo, Araki has one of the loudest voices fueled with one of the richest of vocabularies.