Finding Edo

You step out of Shibuya into the chaos—neon, glass towers, advertisements blinking through colors that shouldn’t exist, the future arriving in real time. Two blocks in the right direction and you’re somewhere else. Forest. Temple. Something quiet that’s been there for centuries.

That’s the thing about Tokyo that most people miss. They see the half that photographs, the half that fits the narrative. The city used to be called Edo, a minor place until Tokugawa Ieyasu built a castle there in 1590 (he was the third of Japan’s great unifiers, after Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi), and it exploded into the country’s largest, most important city. The traditions that took root never left. They got buried under glass and concrete and neon, but they’re still everywhere if you know how to look—in the temples, in the restaurants, in the way buildings hold themselves, in details most people walk straight past.

I spent time trying to photograph that ghost-city underneath the modern one. The temples that survived. The houses that remember what they are. Restaurants that have been feeding the same neighborhood for a century. It’s less dramatic than the neon version. It doesn’t give you the story tourists want. But it’s truer to what the place actually is: a city that kept building on top of itself, adding layer after layer, never quite letting go of what was underneath.