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Leaving Home

 In the years after the 1923 Great Earthquake, Katsuo Tasaki’s father cooked tempura and sold it here on Okazu Yokocho, Side Dish Alley. At the street’s peak, the family nagaya, shop-house, was one of 70 food stores. In the US firebombing of March 9, 1945, neighbours formed a bucket brigade to try to save Torigoe’s…

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Elephant Talk

 Ayako Nakamura learned something at a Thai animal park that changed her life: how to make paper from elephant dung. She had worked at zoos for more than 10 years, so she knew how profitable elephants can be for their keepers. And she knew about the ivory trade. She says, I wanted to give something…

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Mood Indigo

 Tsubame Kobo, “Swallows Workshop”, is the lone busy shopfront this Sunday along Torigoe’s shuttered Okazu Yokocho, Side Dish Alley. There’s an impending typhoon. Mr Takahashi stands at the doorway and chats. His wife strips leaves from branches of tade, indigo plant, and sets them aside. She’ll pack them into a blender with water, filter the…

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Free as a Nighthawk

 The picture window at dusk has a magnetic pull, enough to make you double back on the bicycle. Is this a bar or an exhibition space? A shop? Stick your head in and ask. But there’s nothing on show. A solitary proprietor, typing on a laptop at the counter. It is a place to drink…

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Muscling In (Watch This Space)

 There are some upset locals at this neighbourhood “explanation” meeting hosted by the APA hotel group. Families have lived for generations around these narrow streets in Kaminarimon. But when APA has finished construction next year, they’ll live beside a 50-meter tall, 14-storey budget hotel. Some of their homes will be in shadow every hour of…

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Cocktail Garlic

 Yep, rakkyo. I have to peel each one. It’s such a nuisance! But these are clean, they are from Tottori, they’ve only got a bit of sand in them. And I only have to do this once a year, it’s the season. Where are you from? And you know rakkyo? Hmm. Me? Yes born and…

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Still Coffee

 You may think you’re in the wrong place, that it’s members-only, that the customers at the broad black counter under the tar-stained lampshades only stopped talking when you opened the door. The fact is, at Cafe de Naniwaya, most of the time, it is silent. People don’t break the spell. Coffee is almost the only…

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When Carps Fly

 A stiff breeze stirs the carp streamers for Children’s Day, May 5, at Higashi Shirahige park. They wallow and whip like the real things. Kouya Sakai rigs them across long ropes more or less singlehandedly, spanning the vast stretch of asphalt at the public housing estate. Sakai is 73 years old and this is his…

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Taro the Cat

 A west Asakusa park. He came in from the street. His eye was all gummy so I took him to the vet and he fixed him up. He took out the eye. He said he’s a good cat. His name is Taro. If I don’t keep him on the leash? He’ll run away and fight!

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Cultural Home

 A young woman stands watching a carpenter in a white headscarf maneuver his small truck outside a clay-coloured mortar and corrugated tin structure. The curious building here in Kyojima, east of the Sumida River, has Roman-style columns and looks like it may have been a bank, perhaps from the 1920s, the early-Showa period. Somehow it…

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