Japan and Hong Kong: What the Photographs Don’t Show

The Tsukiji fish market at half past five in the morning, men in rubber boots moving through the aisles with the purposeful indifference of people who have been there since two a.m. and regard tourists as a minor inconvenience of geography. The pod hotel in Nagasaki where no one spoke English and the spa turned out to contain a primary school’s worth of small stools for sitting showers. The schoolchildren on the train near Kyoto who said “see you later” and fled the carriage in a controlled explosion of excitement. The old man at the peace park by the melted factory bells, standing there every day with the fresh flowers and the water bowls, telling anyone who would listen what happened to him on the ninth of August 1945.

Japan is not a country you can summarise. I spent two weeks there and came away with the strong conviction that I’d seen approximately three percent of it and understood somewhat less. The Shinkansen network alone, which connects the four main islands with trains running at three hundred kilometres per hour and arriving, according to the official records, an average of eighteen seconds late, suggests a country with ideas about how things should work that are not the ideas of anywhere else I’ve been.

Hong Kong is different in kind, not just in character. Where Japan has a quality of settled self-sufficiency, as if it arrived at its particular version of society some time ago and refined it continuously since, Hong Kong has the feeling of a place that is always slightly mid-negotiation with itself. The density is extraordinary, the wealth visible but unevenly distributed, the mix of Cantonese and British colonial and mainland Chinese influence producing something that is not quite any of those things but contains all of them. I arrived expecting the Tokyo of the south, orderly and efficient, and found something louder and more contested and considerably more interesting than that description allows for.

On Sundays the Filipino domestic workers of Hong Kong gather on the streets and underpasses of the central district, thousands of women on their one day off, constructing a temporary version of community on the pavements because there is nowhere else to put it. It is both perfectly ordinary and quietly heartbreaking. These are the women who make the domestic life of the city’s professional class function, and on Sundays they remind the city of their existence by the simple act of being visible.

The photographs from Japan and Hong Kong are up now for anyone who wants to look through them. There are quite a few. Some are very good and some are the kind of thing that seemed like a good idea at the time and less so in daylight. The picture of me on a street sign in Hong Kong falls into the second category. I’m not entirely sure how it happened.

Now in Manila, already. More on that shortly.