Concrete Alleys & Cold Drinks

This photographic project explores the quiet architecture and overlooked details of Tokyo through its back streets, vending machines, and the dense geometry of everyday urban life.
Away from the spectacle of major crossings and skyline views, Tokyo reveals another identity intimate, improvised, and quietly luminous. In narrow alleyways and service lanes, buildings press close together. Exposed pipes trace exterior walls. Staircases climb sharply toward unseen apartments. Electrical wires sketch lines across the sky. The city feels layered, built upon itself in fragments rather than grand gestures.
Threaded through these spaces are vending machines glowing, self-contained constellations of light. Positioned at the edge of parking lots, tucked beside doorways, or standing alone in residential lanes, they operate as silent companions to the architecture around them. Always on. Always waiting. They offer both utility and atmosphere: a small pause in the rhythm of movement, a human-scale interaction within a vast metropolis.
This project approaches Tokyo not as spectacle, but as texture. It studies repetition tiled facades, stacked balconies, painted metal shutters and the subtle irregularities that give each block its personality. It observes how artificial light meets concrete at dusk, how condensation gathers on illuminated plastic, how narrow streets compress perspective and amplify stillness.
By focusing on these peripheral spaces, the series invites viewers to reconsider what defines the city. Not only landmarks or crowds, but the unnoticed systems and structures that sustain daily life. In the glow of a vending machine against weathered concrete, in the geometry of tightly packed homes, Tokyo becomes less overwhelming and more intimate a city of quiet design and constant presence.
This is a study of the spaces in between where architecture, light, and automation create a distinct urban poetry.