Cover image: photo by Fabio Caipirinha
A city can disappear without ever being destroyed.
In Tokyo, it happens one shopfront, one building, one street corner at a time.
The city remains, but the version of it we knew is already gone.
In Ulysses, James Joyce gave an ordinary day in Dublin the scale of an epic. He believed he had described the city so fully that, if it vanished, it could be reconstructed from his book.
I have often returned to that thought. Not because I expect to do for Tokyo what Joyce did for Dublin, but because it asks a question I cannot shake: what will remain of the city we take for granted today?
The Tokyo Ulysses Project is my attempt at an answer. I walk the streets, take photographs, and collect the places and stories I come across: a shirt shop in Nihonbashi, an eccentric building in Nakano, an afternoon of sumo in Ryogoku. These are not grand monuments. They are fragments of a living city.
I am interested in what we pass without noticing, especially when we have no reason to think it might disappear. Some places endure. Others change beyond recognition. We seldom know which is which until later.
Perhaps, decades from now, someone will find these pages and glimpse what Tokyo felt like in the early twenty-first century—not only its skyline, but the ordinary life beneath it.
For now, I invite you to wander with me.
And look at the photograph above once more. Can you find Mount Fuji on the far left?
Begin the journey
- A shirt shop in Nihonbashi — An old building and the history held in a neighbourhood.
- World Kaikan, Nakano — A curious building among the backstreets.
- Sumo in Ryogoku — A day among the rituals of the city.
You can also follow the project on Instagram.
Photograph: Fabio Caipirinha.