Last Day in Tokyo
While navigating the streets and subways of Tokyo, I started feeling limited by still photography. I decided to switch to video for our last day, just like I did on our last day in 2017 when I took video of the Kanda Matsuri (I’ll put that together eventually). I picked up two pieces of missing gear at Yodobashi Camera, got their jingle stuck in my head for the nth time, and put everything together for our last day in Tokyo.
Overview
The video starts in Asakusa with views from our hotel, the Asakusa Kokono Club. We booked it for its great reviews and balcony, which is uncommon in Tokyo for the price. The downside was a longer walk to and from the subway, but that’s not in video, which continues right in the station. Since it was our last day and our second trip to Tokyo, we didn’t have a set plan and decided to check out the new Tsukiji outer market — the part open to tourists had changed since our last trip.
The market was opposite of the rest of our trip, with big crowds, little space to move, and a lot of Tourism™. We tried to find somewhere to eat, but every place had huge lines and restaurants that we didn’t trust to deliver quality worthy of their price in a place so full of tourists — even in Japan. We gave up, left, and crossed a highway to Ginza to eat at a place I found on my phone called Futaba Sushi.
Futaba Sushi is a nice quiet spot, and we were lucky to get seats at the bar where the sushi chef served us directly. The building is a small rustic house built in the 1950s, now dwarfed on all sides by ultramodern Ginza skyscrapers. They don’t allow cameras, but it was so small, quiet, and intimate that it wouldn’t have been appropriate to take video even if they did. I did take two shots from the outside of the wooden cart storefront with the cloth waving in the breeze.
We continued onward to line up in the sun for Glitch Coffee to try some of the most interesting coffees we’ve ever had, like one with cheesecake notes. Moving on to Ginza, we found a large group gathering to look at a Mickey Mouse Seiko clock. We then walked northeast past Ginza, passing more large buildings. The video ends with the same shot of the street from our balcony. It closes on a shot of Elaine looking out at Tokyo one last time.
I wanted to capture the feeling of moving through the city, some of the interesting buildings along the way, and the feeling of spending one day aimlessly walking around when you’ve already done everything you wanted to do on the trip. I originally played with adding a soundtrack, but dropped it because I felt it overshadowed the sounds of the city.
Process
Neither my Fujifilm X-E4 nor the 16mm f/2.8 lens I use have image stabilisation, so they aren’t great for video. I picked up a Fuji 18-55 f/2.8 at Yodobashi Camera for a heavy discount thanks to the value of the Yen, and also went for a Sennheiser MKE 400. The mic wasn’t any less than at home, but I didn’t trust the onboard mic to do the job adequately. I ended up with a fun little run-and-gun kit to which I’ve since added a Smallrig cage and handle, although I haven’t ended up doing as much video as I thought I would. Considering the camera doesn’t have IBIS, I think I’m ok with the amount of shakiness in this video, although it would be nice to have image stabilisation in the camera body as well.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and would have liked to do more small videos like this. I didn’t have the right feeling to do so on our recent trip to Hong Kong, despite bringing everything with me — maybe somewhere else!