I have returned to the UK from a frantic 7-day trip to Tsukuba, some 70km Northeast of Tokyo. I arrived in Tokyo on Sunday afternoon following a 12-hour flight from London, and fell asleep almost as soon as I entered my hotel room in Shinjuku. I woke up at about 5am due to jetlag, and decided to make the most of the glorious light outside.
I wondered how it would be, to return to my “second home” after a year away. I wondered if I would remember Japanese [language], and if I could still remember the backstreets I once knew so well. In short; I could. It was like putting on a pair of old shoes. Your favourite shoes.
I had 30 minutes to kill before I needed to get back to the hotel for breakfast, and meet our Japanese agents, so I decided to hop on over to Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower and take a snap (which I’ve done many times before, but never at 28mm).
I was rarely on my feet at this hour of the morning when I lived in Japan, and on weekdays I’d be in too much of a hurry to photograph most of the time. And with no twilight period of which to speak, the photographic chances in the evenings were mostly shot after sun-down. At weekends I would usually be recovering from the previous week, and would take my camera with me in the afternoon. So, in some ways, I was seeing this morning in Tokyo through very different eyes.