“Even though it had not been all that long since I last went on a prowl in Shinjuku, when I grabbed my camera and took to the streets of Kabukicho that day the scenery evoked in me a certain sense of nostalgia. Nothing was supposed to change in the neighbourhood in less than half a year, but I could not deny that rather strange feeling.

It all started sixty years ago, when I arrived in the capital with my Canon 4Sb and made my first frame on the square in front of the east exit of Shinjuku station. Since that day I have been making an endless chain of pictures of that place, which became for me an irreplaceable home ground and an inescapable metropolis: very real and actual, wild and erotic, and at once quite charming.”