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Published as a companion to 2023’s “Weekend,” Japanese photographer Shigeru Yamazaki’s photobook “View of Shitamachi Tokyo” takes the reader on a journey into the good old days of Showa-era Tokyo. Photographed between 1974 and 1977, “View of Shitamachi Tokyo” focuses on the downtown (“shitamachi”) areas in eastern Tokyo—traditionally the less developed part of the city and home to humbler, more rustic, characterful scenes of everyday life. Yamazaki’s black-and-white photographs capture completely ordinary scenes—cars parked between houses, posters on walls, clothes drying in front of doorways, cats lounging in back alleys—but reveal the everyday ingenuity and architectural idiosyncrasies of the vanishing world of Shitamachi Tokyo.

“Whenever I walked around the area, I had a strange feeling that I could not tell whether I was experiencing reality, unreality, or a world between dreams and reality. I enjoyed this feeling while taking the photographs.

During the Showa period, Tokyo was like a wonderland. It was a fascinating city to photograph, no matter how you framed it.”
― from Shigeru Yamazaki’s afterword (included in Japanese & English)