moom bookshop

Off the main street across from Yokosuka station on the Keihin Kyuko, there is an entertainment district known as “Wakamatsu Market,” that has retained much of the good old Showa flair. As I currently have some other business in the area, I’m walking the streets of Yokosuka quite frequently these days, and realized that visited Wakamatsu Market for the first time since walking around here several years ago to take photos for an earlier issue of Record. Once I slipped into the area’s back streets, there was a smell in the air that reminded me of Shinjuku’s “Golden-gai.” It’s a smell that I like, an environment that my body seems to feel comfortable in, so whenever I pass through it now, I can’t do so without repeatedly pressing my camera’s shutter. On the other hand, however, the Dobuita-dori shopping street that has been synonymous with Yokosuka more than any other place, and where I used to hang out to take pictures around the clock so to speak, has transformed into a place that I now find utterly boring. Not that the neighborhood has changed completely. Even the notorious “sukajan” jacket shops are still there. It is the atmosphere in the streets, the people that I meet here now, the way everything smells, that is so different now. I know that it’s useless to expect everything to be just as I remember it from roaming the streets that I identified with Yokosuka some 60 years ago. Nonetheless, I ask myself where in the world those unique nightly sceneries, those ladies swaggering through the dusky streets with the American soldiers, have all gone. As a matter of course, things change with the times, with age and through the generations, and this place makes no exception. But at the same time, there are those things that do remind me of the Yokosuka that I know so well: the area around the station on the Yokosuka Line, the sea you could see from Shiori station, the ships and cranes on the military base…

So I find myself scouring this neighborhood with a wry smile now. Could it be that Yokosuka is where my photographing career started, and where ends? No way! C’mon Daido, you’ve got work to do!

I like it though, Yokosuka.

– from afterwords by Daido Moriyama