Tokyo Ramen

If you watch virtually any foreign TV documentary about Tokyo, you inevitably get the impression it's an ultra-modern high-tech metropolis full of futuristic buildings and automated robotic machines about two decades ahead of everywhere else. Usually there'll be a dash of the "true Japan", typically featuring somewhere like Asakusa or one of the city's few true Geisha.

However: the real Tokyo is much more complex: hyper-modernity and exoticism are but two aspects of this huge city, and often you come across tangible connections to its simpler, more down-to-earth past such as this mobile ramen stand in a side alley next to Tokyo Station.

It's nothing special: just a simple wooden construction mounted on a small trailer that could have been built at any point in the past 50 or 60 years. Presumably it provides a modest source of income for someone, maybe a retired salaryman or a long-time resident of the shitamachi (Tokyo's traditional mercantile-working class district). Or maybe even some homeless person living in a shack along the banks of the Sumida River.

It's a tribute to Tokyo's relative safety that something like this can be left unattended. I came across this in 2004; no idea whether it's still there: more likely than not some new building has gone up in this area and the owner has been forced to move his business somewhere else.