Photos of Tokyo Before the Tourists

Tokyo today is full of snap happy tourists eager to capture the bustling Japanese metropolis, however Greg Girard’s work is interesting, because he photographed the capital in the 1970s, when Tokyo was still infrequently visited by foreign travelers and remained a distant and mysterious city. Greg Girard, a Canadian photographer known for his explorations of Asian cities such as Hong Kong or Shanghai, lived in Tokyo in the 1970s working as an English teacher.

‘In the mid-1970s, apart from great work by Japanese photographers—work that was rarely seen in the west—there simply wasn’t much information (visual or otherwise) about what Tokyo was like’, Girard tells My Modern Met. ‘And the Tokyo I was seeing, when I first arrived and started living there in 1976, didn’t fit with anything I knew or had previously seen. So, I suppose I felt like I was “discovering” it for myself, and set about trying to make pictures of what it looked and felt like to me’. This dazzling discovery of Tokyo over the course of 20 years, is primarily the result of an encounter with an Australian traveler, ‘who described the city in ways I had never heard before…described the mannered behaviour of train conductors – how they acted when trains arrive and depart – and the stylised mannerisms of women working in the department stores’, says Greg Girard in his photographic work ‘Tokyo-Yokosuka 1967- 1983‘.

A new book has been published by the Magenta Foundation, bringing together the photographs of his Tokyo years, forgotten and then resurfacing more than 40 years later. They provide a rare glimpse of the changing Japanese capital. The 1970s were indeed a pivotal period for Japan, which Greg Girard describes in his book as ‘post-war decadence combined with modernity in transition’.

In the preface to the book, the photographer even describes his first impressions of the city as a trip into a science fiction universe. The photographs also have an aesthetic parallel with the cinematic world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The Shinjuku district, captured in a bluish and greenish light for example is strangely peaceful at 5 in the morning, far from the hustle and bustle of the neighbourhood today.

Always fascinated by the city he considers both quiet and isolating but also human and electric, Greg Girard continues to visit Tokyo two to three times a year.

For more information about Greg Girard’s books and other works in Japan, we recommend his website.