Reading manga before coming to Japan was like imagining a fantastical world. One I never expected to step inside.

Tekkonkinkreet aired late one night and stayed with me for years. I never imagined I’d walk into its pages.

Taiyo Matsumoto wasn’t drawing fantasy. He was drawing a future I’d find still flickering in the past.

I couldn’t tell you if it was one place in particular, or if it was all of them.

I only know that my summer in Gifu was soundtracked with the grasshopper hum.

A summer that brought me to places not entirely from the past, nor entirely the future imagined.

I had a lot of cameras back then. But two in particular were conversation starters.

Before the influencer handbag camera trend, we all thought Leica was doing something revolutionary with the Q.

I thought so too, and so did this old man.

Just outside of Gifu was a place called Ōgaki. Its name lingers in my mind like the taste of a particularly good coffee.

I wasn’t using the Q that day, but I had it with me, slung around my neck on an overpriced silk strap.

I spent most of the day in the old arcade, wondering if Kuro or Shiro would jump from the rafters.

I met a robot.

A stark contrast to the hand painted signage and sun-faded kanji.

Perhaps if I was more academic, I would have learned Japanese. I could have told you what the robot was selling.

Or perhaps had I learned the language more competently, I would have lost the magic.

The mystery of Showa signage and mundane kanji. All phone numbers and fax machines...

From the maroon, navy and brown tile, velour upholstery. Designs a child may call expensive.

I wasn't quite sure if I had fallen into the past, or into someone's lost future.

A far cry from Shinjuku. A long way from Akihabara.

But there were cats here, down alleyways and on rooftops, rather than in quaint cafes on Takeshita Street.

Not cuddly companions for five hundred yen an hour. Ever evading the click of my Pentax S2.

An old domestic made SLR from the seventies.

It was always full of 100 yen Fujicolor, from the bins outside Yodobashi.

Carrying the Pentax was dangerous.

Anyone over the age of sixty would cry Pentax-o!

And perhaps they would tell me stories of their old Pentax…

At least that's what I inferred. Sometimes they would give me biscuits.

This one man in the arcade, he saw the Pentax, but then he spotted the Leica Q.

The way one might react after spotting a UFO over Area 51.

The way I looked at the robot hawking goods in fluent Japanese.

And I wonder to this day, if that man was closer to Showa than to Shibuya.