Photographically, Tokyo is a city open to many interpretations. It is sex, it's shopping, elevated highways and kids playing at the end of quiet streets. It's futuristic, hyper-real and postmodern. It's a series of villages and an isolating, soulless landscape in demise.
Gray or green, working class or rich, inside or outside the Yamanote Line — pick your lens and take your pick. Photographers past and present, native and not, have played with all these ideas to varying degrees.
Edgar Honetschlager, an Austrian artist and filmmaker who has lived 17 years in Japan, nine in the capital, adds to Tokyo's photographic dialogue in his wonderfully titled book "Tokyo Plain." In it, he draws our attention away from the usual cliched images of the city and focuses on what he argues is the "real" Tokyo — the back roads, shotengai (traditional shopping streets) and lanes of Tokyo's 23 wards. For him the city is not a distant crowded landscape of never-ending urbanity, but rather a human and intimate space. As he puts it, it's "plastic, one-family houses with 2-foot garden strips"; it's "wild and untamed"; a "marvelous, vivid jungle, organized by means of numbers rather than names."