One day＠Kabukicho #DAY189 - Kabukicho was completely packed on the first day of the long weekend.

Yep, I actually made it back to Kabukicho after two weeks this time. It was the first night of a three-day weekend, and when I got there a little after 9pm, the whole area was packed. Behind the TOHO building, taxis were backed up in a full-on jam... it was all just pure chaos.

The GRAN CUSTOMA you see in this photo is a manga cafe, but as you can probably imagine, it also ends up being a place where kids who don't want to spend the night on the streets go to stay. The people going in and out of there... a huge number of them have that definite "local resident" vibe, in the Kabukicho sense of the word.

Crowds were everywhere that night, around the TOHO building, along Ichiban-gai, down Godzilla Road, literally every spot was packed. I think this photo was taken in front of the TOHO building. And even though it was only a little after 9pm. when I shot it, I remember thinking, "There's no way I can take decent photos like this... I'll have to walk around again after the last train.". So after I parted ways with my friend, I went back out for another round of shooting.

I can't help taking shots like this whenever I come across them. This photo is probably the last one from the "first half". Oh, and the very first photo I'm using as the eye-catch image for this article, that one was taken in the second half. And man... it's suddenly gotten really cold lately.

So from here on, it's the "second half", the photos I took after the last trains had already stopped running. There were way fewer people than before the last train, of course, but since it was the first night of a long weekend, there were still plenty of people around. Lots of groups of tourists who don't care about holidays in Japan were out too, so the crowd felt a bit different from earlier.

This one's a really plain-looking photo, but I personally love shots like this and can't help taking them. The fact that Godzilla Road is this empty shows perfectly that it was after the last trains had stopped. Normally, there's no way you'd ever see so few people here.

There was a food truck here too. You see food trucks all over Kabukicho, takoyaki, kebabs, chocolate bananas, and some kind of bento I can never quite identify... they're everywhere. I'm always a little curious, but since I almost never carry cash, I've never actually bought anything from them.

I like photos like this too. I take it simply because I like it. The contrast between the trash overflowing in the street and a person. In my slightly twisted sense of aesthetics, even street trash like this ends up feeling beautiful to me.

I didn't think much of this last shot when I took it, but while I was editing it I suddenly thought, "Hey, this is actually pretty good", so I'm including it here. By the way, I wasn't really sure if this place was a sports bar or what, but the customers were overflowing out onto the street. And they were almost all foreigners. I still have no idea what was going on there.

See you then.