Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“On a macro level, Tokyo isn’t a beautiful city. It encompasses a riot of architectural styles in full embrace of kitsch. A postwar wooden yakitori joint might be shoehorned between a newly poured mansion of exposed concrete and a megawatt pachinko parlor of mirror chrome. Add to this lexicon vast forests of neon, fluorescent and LED signs, overlay a spaghetti canopy of power lines, crisscross it all with railways, ring roads and cramped lanes, and you get an idea of the city’s built environment. And don’t forget the people: 13.7 million of them, living in the heart of a greater metropolitan area of 38 million.”