Tokyo Squares

Dérive : An unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, on which the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travelers, with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience.¹

After finishing 4B in the summer of 2013, I didn’t have any concrete plans other than to travel. And the destination had to be extra spicy in order to consider it as a sort of a celebration for an overdue graduation. Japan for me always rang with an excitement of a faraway and exotic place where sushi and hot springs—two of my primary reasons for living—were abundant in their originality. My brother and I traveled to Japan for three weeks with one whole week dedicated to Tokyo alone.

It was early December, yet Tokyo was still warm and tender in the full blossom of autumn. The air held a little chill, cool enough to walk without trembling or sweating. The sky stayed bright cobalt-blue with occasional clouds. Crisp yellow leaves were falling and had fallen on the streets. Christmas decorations occupied the commercial streets. Everywhere it was bustling with people excited for the coming of Christmas.

In every travel, I was never particularly interested in hunting down famous arch-holy buildings by famous architects. I am a bad architecture student. I was primarily interested in seeing and experiencing the city as it naturally presented itself. I preferred simply walking around the streets without any specific destination. I picked up a cheesy-tourist map at a train station with colorful images and basic geographic information; which I only used as a compass so as to not get completely lost. My brother and I roamed from big, commercial roads to narrow, quiet alleyways, as we unconsciously followed after whatever appeared interesting in the instant. This lack of designation allowed me to be openly perceptive to any detail, action, scene, and/or moment without binding my perspective to a specific frame. I didn’t even catch any names of places. Each day’s journey was totally arbitrary.

My brother, grown a bit sarcastic from walking too much, often joked, “Where the hell are we?”

Borrowing the Situationist term, dérive, it means to drift aimlessly in pursuit of experiencing different ambiances throughout the urban composition. A city—especially one as complex and dense as Tokyo—is an ensemble of multiple fragments that produce various experiential moments at every corner. A street offers a completely different experience even by day and night. Walking through a realm of tall and heavy modern shopping malls to a series of two to three storey-high, independent galleries to a silent, concentric, residential zone; I drifted and absorbed the urban fabric of Tokyo in the passing of momentary scenes.

And I captured these momentary scenes of my dérives with my phone. There was no specific theme nor reason for the subjectivity. The infinity of digital photography allowed me to be careless but equally free for choosing my subject. While I preserved my DSLR for reasonable images, I abused my phone camera for random captures. I present a collection of these photographs, which I named, Tokyo Squares.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rive