THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

There are recurring motifs: curving metal tubing or pipes, meshes or fabrics, the garish shopfronts and signage of night-time Shinjuku, where unreal faces stare down from hoardings and backlit billboards promising another tantalising out-of-reach lifestyle built on brands and labels, the impossible lure of fashion and fame.  The Shinjuku of today is a distant echo of the political, radical place that first fired the young Moriyama’s imagination in the late 1970s.  Nevertheless, it still exerts a grip on his imagination.  He shoots it, he says, because “it is still there in its primary colours, a living, writhing monster.”

O’Hagan/Guardian

The Asahi Shimbun proclaimed ‘Tokyo’s Shinjuku, the angura [underground] town’ in March 1968.  They hyped it up, spurred on by their love of incidents and scandals.  The media called it ‘Shinjuku, the giant amoeba’, ‘the Shinjuku jungle’, ‘Shinjuku, the town on the brink of exploding’.  Home to a black market after the war, commerce and danger thrived side by side in Shinjuku, as well as creativity.  ‘In Shinjuku it’s not appropriate to talk about the past,’ someone once wrote.  ’It’s a town where only the present is important.’

Andrews/Japan

I walked in the rain to Kabuki-cho, taking a hard right off a neon and billboard-lined street, ducking through a quiet Shinto shrine and into a bustling warren of pachinko parlors, hostess bars, pantyless coffee shops, yakitori joints, and whorehouses.  Turning onto the Golden Gai, things were even narrower and the streets were bordered by tiny one- and two-table bars.  Above, through a tangle of fire escapes, power lines, and hanging signage, skyscrapers winked red.  Welcome to Tokyo. 

Bourdain/Cook