JAPAN 2025

Japan in late winter occupies a specific frequency. The cold keeps the streets emptier than summer, the light flatter and more documentary. Everything is still operational but operating at a lower register — shotengai half-occupied, tourist infrastructure not yet fully awake.

I went specifically to photograph the transitional aesthetic: the last analogue signage before full LED replacement, the 1980s department store interiors that survived into 2025, the deeply layered information density of Tokyo station that no Western transit system has ever approached.

The Route

Tokyo for the first nine days, base in Shinjuku — deliberately chosen for its gradient from the clean JR hub to the memory of Golden Gai and the surviving neon corridors around Kabukicho. Then the shinkansen to Kyoto for six days, and finally a brief loop up to Hokkaido to see snow architecture and the extraordinary grid logic of Sapporo.

What I Was Looking For

I am not a travel photographer in the tourist sense. Every trip has a research agenda: what does the built environment say about the information design values of the culture that produced it? Japan's answer is consistently the most sophisticated I have encountered anywhere.

The ticket vending machine interface at any Tokyo station contains more considered hierarchy than most enterprise dashboards. The layered wayfinding of Shinjuku station — 50 exits, colour-coded, kanji and romanised in fixed positions — functions as a working argument about typographic priority that I find more instructive than any design textbook.