What the Crows See Over Tokyo

Filmmaker Gino Montalvo strapped a GoPro to a DJI Phantom 2 drone and sent it up over Tokyo, Kyoto, and a handful of other Japanese cities—and the people on the ground waved. That detail keeps sticking with me. A drone buzzes overhead and the reaction is to wave hello. Whether or not it’s strictly legal to fly one over central Tokyo is a question nobody on the ground seemed particularly interested in answering.

From street level, Tokyo overwhelms in the best possible sense—noise, neon, signage stacked floor to sky, the particular physics of a city where millions of people move without ever quite colliding. From a few hundred feet up it becomes something else: rooftops in grey and rust, long corridors of streets vanishing toward the horizon, shrine rooflines interrupting the grid at irregular intervals. Kyoto reads differently—lower, greener, more deliberate, the kind of city that holds its history in its posture. I’ve been half-obsessed with Japan for years without ever managing to get there, and footage like this doesn’t help. It makes the distance worse, which is probably the only honest reaction to it.