Neighborhood

A typical Japanese neighbourhood in transition. The older houses are about fifty years old, two floors, a small garden out front or tucked round the back, enough space to breathe and enough light to remind you what season it is. These places feel lived in, not optimised. Sadly, they are being replaced, one plot at a time, by three-storey domino houses stacked tight together. Narrow, tall, identical, pressed shoulder to shoulder like books on a shelf nobody ever opens. Streets lose their sky first, then the light, then the green. Windows stare straight into other windows. Gardens vanish, replaced by a single parking space and a concrete step, and it is hard not to feel a quiet sadness walking through these streets.