Another enormous gigapixel panorama appeared this week, this one being a view from the Tokyo Tower by Jeffrey Martin. Some cities suit this detailed bird’s-eye view more than others. A similar panorama of Prague wasn’t as interesting for me as the view over London which appeared at the beginning of this year. Tokyo from this vantage may be an endless clutter of concrete and tarmac but it still yields some interesting details.
Tokyo’s Ginza district, and Chuo-dori Avenue, are locatable by these signs.
Further away there’s this cat-and-kitten sign.
While elsewhere Colonel Sanders proves inescapable. The Colonel’s Wikipedia entry contains this, er…nugget:
The Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league has developed an urban legend of the “Curse of the Colonel”. A statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost during a 1985 fan celebration, and (according to the legend) the “curse” has caused Japan’s Hanshin Tigers to perform poorly since the incident.
In Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void (2009) we see some shots of a tiny graveyard in a Toyko backstreet. There are a couple of other cemeteries visible from the Tokyo Tower but this is the only one I could see like the one in the film, crammed into a tiny plot of land between buildings.
These are on a rooftop. PA system? Air-raid sirens?
Many of the buildings in central Toyko are very recent structures built in a modern style with no decorative or historical features. In most European cities, and many American ones, the sight of a mansard roof would be overlooked in favour of something more notable. Here the mansard roof is the notable exception.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive