warchildPost: [Adrian Storey] Let the Poet Cry Themselves to Sleep

Thursday, October 04, 2012

[Adrian Storey] Let the Poet Cry Themselves to Sleep - 東京の眠い

C'mon. Is she dead?

The british dude, Adrian Storey, rooted in Tokyo, starts a project in 2006 called "Let the Poets Cry Themselves to Sleep". It is kind of a problematic scenery chronicle about Japanese society. He states for BBC (translated quote):

"I think there is two sides about "people sleeping in the streets phenomenon". First, is quite incredible that a 13 million inhabitants city can be safe enough to sleep without worrying about being robbed or something even worst. But, there is situations of alcohol abuse, stressful works, family departed and behaviours assigned by other cultures only to youth."

I really don't get the last line at all. Keep in mind that I'm translating a post write in portuguese. Yeah, that means probably someone translated it from BBC. And I couldn't find the original article to get a clue. But, anyway... I could research a lot of images to illustrates what we could not understand by reading. So please, have a look.

japanese fellow sleeping hard at metro station

japanese young dude sleeping with his adidas with no fear in his dream

In Brazil this pic would be of a barefoot dude.

modern young japanese sleeping and being observed by a masked cop

Eat a lot? Damn sushis rolls. No problem, take a nap at soft Tokyo streets.

However Storey was quite stunned about his second point being totally neglected in Japan. He said that the shadowy aspect of his project was obscured by "how wonderful is to be safe enough to sleep at streets". The photographer does not have individual stories of each photo, mostly cause he does not awaits the models to awake and babble it out - and probably the majority was drunk enough to do not remember which country they were - or just missed the last train.

Storey pretends to transform this project into a book. Quite interesting.

まさか、日本。それは路上で人のねむるにバンプするのは非常に正常ですか？