#213 The Tokyo I Wasn't Looking For

Some photographs are planned.

You go somewhere because there is something you want to see. You wait for the right light, find the right angle, and hope to come home with a good picture.

But I sometimes wonder about the photographs we don’t plan.

The ones we take almost without thinking, simply because something catches our eye for a few seconds.

At the time, they may not seem important at all.

But when we look at them again later, some of them begin to feel different.

Why is that?

A few days ago, I was going about my day in Tokyo and took several photographs along the way.

Looking at them later, I realized they had quietly recorded something about the day that I might otherwise have forgotten.

At Tamachi Station, I happened to look across the tracks.

A train arrived, stopped, and moved on.

For some reason, I took the picture.

Just an ordinary moment that happened to catch my eye.

This one was even less planned.

I was actually waiting for a Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line train.

The line is mostly underground, but around Ochanomizu it briefly comes above ground before going underground again.

I was hoping to catch that moment.

Instead, a Chuo Line train came through.

So I photographed that.

It wasn’t the picture I had been waiting for.

Perhaps that was the point.

Later, I had about thirty minutes before catching a bus near Tokyo Station, so I wandered around for a while.

At one point, I noticed one patch of ground looked unusually dark.

I wasn’t sure what it was, so I walked over to take a closer look.

When I got closer, the contrast suddenly caught my eye.

I hadn’t gone looking for it.

I found it in thirty spare minutes.

This was taken on another day, somewhere else in Tokyo.

Flowers like these seem to be everywhere in summer.

I hadn’t gone out of my way to find them.

They were simply a bright part of an ordinary summer day.

I stopped for a moment and took a picture.

I always have my phone with me, so taking a picture takes almost no thought.

Sometimes I simply notice something and decide to keep it.

It was the kind of sky I could easily have walked past without noticing.

But every now and then, I look up and notice something slightly different — the shape of a cloud, the softness of the light, or the way the evening begins to settle between the buildings.

Just a small change I might have missed if I had kept looking straight ahead.

By the time I reached the tennis courts, the day was almost over.

The train, the thirty-minute wander, and the bus ride were already behind me.

After tennis, I looked up.

The lights seemed almost geometric against the dark sky — something I had never really noticed before.

So I took one more picture.

But somehow, after a day of small things catching my eye, it felt like a quiet way for the day to end.

Looking at these photographs later, I began to understand why some unplanned pictures stay with us.

None of them is especially beautiful on its own. The places are not particularly important either.

What matters, perhaps, is what they bring back.

None of these moments seemed remarkable when they happened.

But together, they quietly return an ordinary day to me.

Perhaps some photographs need time before they tell us what they were for.