TOKYO · ASAGAYA TANABATA
THE CITY
PUTS ON A COSTUME.
Once a year, this very ordinary little shopping street in western Tokyo opens itself to the sky. Above the shops hang enormous handmade creatures, surrounded by color, wishes and a whole assortment of things. See how the entire neighbourhood becomes a work of art.
There's an enormous monster hanging out above the pharmacy and honestly, I couldn't tell you what it's meant to represent. After five minutes you stop caring entirely, and that's cool.
Keep walking through Asagaya's Pearl Center and the ceiling stops being a ceiling. A gigantic Pokémon floats above a restaurant. A giraffe big as a dinosaur pops out of the shop window. A penguin wearing Ray-Bans appears where, at least in my mind, no animals should be. Further along, another surprise is waiting. Then another. Until you realise that walking maturely ahead, like a responsible adult, is the best way to miss out on all the fun entirely.
Everyone is looking up.
This is Asagaya Tanabata, a summer tradition born way back in 1954 and developed over the years through the neighbourhood's shopping streets, particularly the Pearl Center. Tanabata itself goes back centuries. The star festival tells the story of Orihime and Hikoboshi, two star-crossed lovers represented by the stars Vega and Altair, separated by the Milky Way and allowed to meet just once a year. People write their wishes on small strips of colored paper, the tanzaku, and hang them up from bamboo branches.
Oh, this goes way back, and Asagaya apparently looked at all of that before deciding it was still missing one essential thing: an army of giant paper monsters.
And I don’t think they’re wrong for that.
Today the arcade fills with streamers and colossal papier-mâché characters made by residents and shopkeepers. They brought out Hello Kitty, Cinnamoroll, Yuru-chara, rice-ball samurai Musubimaru, and a whole menagerie no serious anime fan would dare to miss. For a few days each summer, the party is on in Asagaya and all the celebs are hanging out. You discover that Japan knows how to get down way more than you thought when you saw them riding in silence on the train.
THE BUILDINGS COMPLAIN.
THEY JOIN THE PARTY TOO.
01
THE STREET LOOKS UP
The first thing you notice is the sky balling out of control.
Which is a big change, when you think about it, because Tokyo normally spends an enormous amount of energy telling us exactly where to put our eyes and if you’ve been anywhere in Japan, you know how the rules rule everything here. The instructions are extremely clear. Look ahead, be polite and keep it moving. You don't even notice how well you obey all the rules until the day Asagaya flips the script.
The decorations hang high above our heads, so to see them properly you have to accept a small physical surrender: lift your chin and tilt your head all the way back. And then the arcade fills with adults wandering around with their necks stretched toward enormous paper creatures, wearing the exact expression of a party animal let loose on Bourbon Street. I love that. Adults need something completely crazy to do from time to time too, and in all fairness, they're not given enough of it.
Almost everything around us has to justify its existence. Buildings shelter us and signs inform us. Roads have to take us somewhere and shops always sell us something. Everything has its job to do. And then one day, someone hangs a giant handmade cat getting beamed up into a UFO above a shopping street. What's that about? Nothing at all. Maybe that's exactly what's so fun about it. Someone just decided that Tokyo would be a lot better with a rooster playing an electric guitar, then went through all the trouble of making it happen.
And nobody, not even the grumpy old man who always complains about noise, asked them to keep it down. No committee voted on one small, discreet paper animal, sitting politely near the entrance. Here the restraint runs the other way: make it enormous and keep going until the whole street has joined the party.
This kind of behavior can surprise anyone who doesn’t expect Japan to know how to party. Foreign eyes have insisted for years on locking Japanese people inside two clichés that don't have much to do with each other. On one side, the grey machine of Japanese corporate life: concrete offices and salarymen. On the other, a thoroughly polite vision of Japanese restraint, library silence and a perfect bowl of ramen sitting alone in the middle of an empty tatami mat in a disciplined room with sliding shoji doors. Asagaya offers a third option, way more fun: sometimes, there’s a lot more to a culture than you think.
And the best part is that none of this requires the everyday consideration around it to disappear. The festival gets loud, ridiculous and gloriously excessive without the whole social contract collapsing. People raise their glasses, shout kanpai and get on with having a very good time.
02
A JAPANESE FESTIVAL
Perfection would ruin the party.
The closer you get, the more you feel the hands behind it all. These aren't anonymous decorations ordered off Amazon, delivered by truck at three in the morning and assembled from an eighty-page manual. The handmade figures, the haribote, have been one of the signatures of Asagaya Tanabata for many decades. Built right here, in the shopping district by local people, then hung one by one way above everyone’s heads.
Every creature, in other words, started out as an idea in someone's mind, immediately followed by the far less glamorous part of any good idea: right, and now how do we actually make this thing? You negotiate with that one piece which, as everybody knows, categorically refuses to stay where you want it. And then one day something awesome, which before existed only inside someone's creative aspirations, is standing there in front of you with a whole paper body.
That's probably what I like most here. The neighbourhood doesn't just watch someone else's finished show. The people make all of it together. One shop contributes scissors and paper, someone further down the street makes it all stick together, and eventually the children do their part of the work. In 2026, the Asagaya Library ran a workshop where children helped decorate a small original haribote, meant to hang in the shopping street.
No single piece could ever carry the whole festival on its shoulders. But add up hundreds of contributions and the question of authorship starts to blur. At some point you stop seeing a collection of separately made cartoon characters. It feels, instead, like Asagaya made all of it as a unit. Not everyone agrees on what's beautiful, which would make it a seriously dull festival, but enough people agreed on one thing: this strange, temporary world was worth building together.
And after all that work, they take it down. That looks like a monumental waste, until you consider what permanence does to a tradition. A monument can outlive everyone who built it, and the next generation inherits it without ever having had to make it themselves. A festival that disappears doesn't offer that luxury. If you want this world again next year, you have to make it again. New hands have to get involved. Different characters make it to the party and new vibes slip in. Mistakes become part of the story too, and the little kids who used to look up at the creatures from the ground will eventually be old enough to make something that floats above the next generation’s head.
Some traditions survive because we protect them from change. Others because we love them enough to keep playing with them.
03
TOKYO SWITCHES TO PARTY MODE
For a few days, nobody’s in a big hurry to get anywhere.
The decorations change the instant the crowd arrives, because a giant cartoon character alone above an empty street is, at the bottom of it all, still just a big paper object. Put five hundred people underneath it and you start to understand why it's up there. Someone stops and points it out to a friend. A kid stands amazed beneath it, mouth open. A guy nearly walks into the person next to him, busy photographing the ceiling instead of watching where he’s going. A woman passes through all of it carrying her groceries as though it were an ordinary grocery run, as though giant paper animals had always been part of the walk home from the supermarket.
Every few seconds the party rearranges itself. That's when the street starts behaving like a living work of art. The architecture provides the structure and chance does whatever it likes with the rest. Nobody had planned for this particular woman, in this particular shirt, to pass beneath this colorful creature at this moment. She simply passed by. A second later the party transformed again.
That's what interests me about photographing this festival. I'm not even trying to preserve what it felt like to be there. A photograph isn't capable of showing you that, and pretending otherwise gives it way too much credit. What interests me is what the moment makes out of everything already happening. Someone built the decoration by hand. The neighbourhood hung it in the street. Then hundreds of strangers passed beneath it without knowing they'd wandered into someone's frame. For half a second, chance arranged them together, and I had just enough time to draw a rectangle around it before everyone moved on with their life.
In the middle of this huge public spectacle, there's something almost absurdly small: a strip of paper. The tanzaku carry individual wishes, each written by one person, then hung among hundreds, sometimes thousands, of others. I like that change of scale. Above us, enormous colorful creatures and a noisy crowd filling the arcade. And somewhere in the middle of all that, nearly hidden, someone's entirely personal hope, written on a scrap of paper.
There are things you can make with your own hands, and things you can only wish for. Tanabata makes room for both without making either seem ridiculous.
NO ONE DESIGNED THE ENTIRE IMAGE.
EVERYONE HELPED CREATE IT.
FOR A FEW DAYS, SOMEONE'S IMAGINATION TAKES OVER.
04
WHAT THE STREET REMEMBERS
And then everyone eventually takes off their costume.
Asagaya goes back to being normal, and it's not as sad as it sounds. The shops are still there and people go back to buying their dinner and everything they needed before someone decided to hang a giant creature above their heads. Physically, almost nothing has changed.
But for a few days, everyone saw proof that this place could become something else, and seeing a block party take shape isn't the same as knowing it can. People really built this other version of the neighbourhood, with paper and glue. An idea left someone's head and entered the world, until it grew large enough for thousands of strangers to walk beneath it.
And everyone went home with a slightly different Asagaya. One kid will remember the monster that scared the hell out of him. Someone else will remember the one that made them laugh hysterically. One person will remember exactly what they'd written on their tanzaku. A shopkeeper will remember the evenings spent trying to convince paper and glue to become the crazy creature they'd sworn they'd figure out how to make. I'll remember certain combinations of strangers, light and colors that found themselves in front of my camera just before disappearing in time.
There was only one festival. Thousands of different versions went home.
We ask so many things to last forever. Buildings, careers, our own names. Permanence has become one of the ways we convince ourselves something is special. Asagaya spends weeks making objects whose disappearance was planned from the start, and yet none of that work feels wasted. If anything, it makes the effort more visible. All the value was in the making of the thing, because, for reasons nobody really needed to explain, a giant handmade cat was floating above their head.
And if the neighbourhood wants this world again next year, it will have to rebuild it.
Maybe that's what stays with me most. Cities have a gift for presenting themselves as finished things, and concrete is particularly good at sounding definitive. Here is the street. This is what this building is for. Go this way down the stairs, buy something before the sale ends, catch your train on time. After a while these instructions start to look like facts, when so many of them are only unspoken agreements everyone has gotten so used to that nobody notices them any more.
For a few days every summer, Asagaya makes a different agreement. A beam that normally holds up a roof can carry a Godzilla. The coffee shop window can join the event. Any store can become an art gallery without ever ceasing to be the place where someone comes to buy chapstick. Adults can wander around with their noses in the air for no reason whatsoever. Something completely ridiculous can be special precisely because it serves no purpose.
An ordinary street doesn't need magic to become extraordinary. All it takes is someone imagining what else it could be. Then comes the hard part: actually making whatever you've just imagined.
THE EXTRAORDINARY IS NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE.
SOMETIMES, SOMEONE JUST HAS TO MAKE IT.