In the afterword to this remarkable collection of pictures, the photographer says that "in the unprecedented chaos in the economy" he found a "phantasmal Tokyo that had been assimilated whole by computers and transformed into a virtual city."
He began to feel that he had "stumbled into an alien sort of world where everything and everyone was transmitting a certain message I'd never picked up on before."
This was in the late 1980s when people were beginning to find parallels to George Orwell's 1948 novel "1984." To Ohkura it indeed seemed that Japan was "immersed in the process of becoming a highly regimented, electronically controlled society from which there was no escape." This was the message he set out to record and interpret -- chronicling a whole decade of close attention.
Since the collection has a theme, alien modernity, it is arranged like an essay. Long shots of the city, moving closer, then focus in on that most alien of neighborhoods: Shibuya. Here are the young UFOs in their pathetic and transient finery. Pierced boys and dyed girls take each others' pictures, work their portable phones, chat happily with the unseen, each clutched in the grip of fashion.
A schoolgirl squats down to do her makeup and her box says "hide with spread-beaver appeal," a message she cannot read. In another part of the city a beached young wind-sailer looks across the shallow water to the deserted Alphaville of Daiba.
Leaving the alien young, the photographer turns to the ordinary alienated citizen, head down in train and subway, trudging through limbo, small in the shadow of all the futuresque architecture. A man sleeps sitting up under the vaunting vanity of the International Forum.
Lots of people are asleep, arms and legs cut off by the public monuments, as the empty escalators turn and Tokyo becomes a kind of Sleeping Beauty castle with wire and cable instead of briar. There is lots of modern sculpture around, as still as the sleepers that surround it. And when a child wakes to peer through a hole in one of them, all we can see on the other side is a beaming Colonel Sanders.
From a metaphysical limbo we descend to a physical one. The homeless sit in Shinjuku Station like so much public sculpture themselves. Then, in a movie-like segue, we see their numbers after the local police arranged a diaspora -- the land of promise, cardboard houses lining the banks of the Sumida. And in the midst -- a touching shot -- a work of art made by one of the homeless: a tree decorated with found objects.
Tokyo (though some of the pictures are from elsewhere) is seen in literal black and white, posed at the cusp of the apocalypse. One remembers that this was the city Tarkovsky shot for the alien capital in "Solaris," the place that both inspired and offered locations for Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner." And in the concluding pages of this collection is a view of an enormous poster for the Iron Maiden hard rock group with "Brave New World" emblazoned, an evil monster gloating, and the passersby caught, as it were, in frozen flight.
One need not agree with the photographer when he maintains that "in the consecrated space at the very summit of the hierarchy of this world, there exists a godlike, demon-like ruler whose power is so vast that it envelops the entire planet and transcends all human understanding and religion." Such an idea is perhaps too "X-Files" for its own good -- unless, of course, he means computer science.
But one may certainly enjoy his forage into this brave new world, which we will recognize despite ourselves. There is vaunting Tokyo Tower, but he has shot it from its base, which we now know to be surrounded by barbed wire. Jesus offers his electronically enhanced bleeding heart but, this being Omote-sando, his message is compromised by the sign of an entirely separate business next door: Cash. Meanwhile, at Shinjuku City Hall, a pigeon flies past a surveillance camera.
The message is there for those who can read it.
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