Photos: Tokyo - Setagaya - Shimokitazawa 2006-2008

2006 ~ 2008. Last months in Tokyo.

I moved to Shimokitazawa, in the Setagaya Ward of Tokyo, in July 2006. I'd discovered the neighbourhood a year or so before and had grown to love its mix of pedestrian streets roamed by students, bohemians and bourgeois alike, thrift stores and a vibrant theater and music scene.

Shimokita became, and remains, one of my favorite place on earth. Life, however, called me to happiness in other longitudes, and I would spend the following year and a half waiting for bureaucracy to do its deed.

My perception of Tokyo, of home, changed. I had grown my first real roots here through most of my twenties. Looking ahead to a future on another continent made me at once detached and clinging; rooted and uprooted; already nostalgic towards what would not be my city forever.

Today, as I assemble and construct some of my last photographic memories of that place, it's been exactly a year since I flew away.

(22 Feb. 2009)