DAY 01 — ARRIVAL & SHINJUKU

The Narita Express deposits you at Shinjuku station via a route that does not try to ease you in. You are in the deep circulatory system of the city immediately — the signage system clicking over your head, the platform announcements cycling through four languages in strict temporal order.

After three years it still reads as dense but legible. The kanji I can parse now that I couldn't in 2022 changes the experience considerably. Reading a shotengai shop sign in full — even a basic one — produces a different relationship with the space than reading only its roman transliteration.

The Hotel and the Neighbourhood

Base in a small hotel off Yasukuni-dori, north of Shinjuku-sanchome. The room is 12 square metres and uses every centimetre with the ruthless efficiency that Japanese hospitality design has turned into an architectural dialect. Nothing is redundant. The storage is in the walls, the desk folds, the lighting has four temperatures controlled by a wall panel that took me twenty minutes to parse correctly.

This is interesting as a design document. The constraints are not apologised for — they are designed through. The result is more comfortable than a larger generic hotel room that treats its space carelessly.

The First Walk

Did not plan the first evening. Walked west from the hotel into the Omoide Yokocho corridor — narrow, the yakitori smoke thickening the air — then north and east through the surviving neon block around Kabukicho. Shot maybe 200 frames. Kept most of nothing. The eye is still calibrating.

The key thing I noticed: the pace of LED replacement has been uneven. Certain blocks that were fully neon in 2022 are now fully LED. Others have preserved. The decision seems economic rather than aesthetic — which means the surviving neon has no protection and no particular guarantee of continuation.