The 7th of ‘Utagawa Hiroshige: 100 Famous Edo Views’ is Odemmmacho cotton store. The original picture is here.
The area around 1-chome, Nihonbashi-Odemmacho, Chuo-ward, Tokyo, was once a clothing wholesale district. In Hiroshige’s print, there is a gorgeous scene of beautiful women walking among the neatly lined stores. However, today, this area is a rather bleak building district, and there do not seem to be many textile-related companies. In addition, I visited this area on a weekend in a deserted central business zone, so I was at a loss as to what to take pictures of.
I decided to take a picture of the scene as bleak as I could.
The fact that large apartment complexes are being built in such central locations with a bang is also very much a part of the 2024 Tokyo landscape. To emphasize the bleakness of the scene, I added a Pentax “Silver-left” style finish (a fake profile of my own creation), but is this too much? In the original picture, a wooden trafic gate restricting access to the town is represented on the left edge, and in this photo, a traffic sign is slightly reflected on the left instead.
In the Edo period (1603-1867), there was a government office in Odemmacho to arrange horses to carry goods from one town to another, but it is hard to imagine this from the current scenery.
It was early March, and there was an early-blooming cherry tree called “Kanhizakura” (as usual, I don’t know the name of it) on neighbor street. I was able to take a few strolling photos, and decided to take advantage of the flowery scenery to create my own “Honoka” style profile, which is the exact opposite of “Silver-left”.
We continued on for a short walk, near JR Kanda station, with the elevated restaurant district on the side.
It was a weekend morning, when the bars were at their quietest and dullest, so here we are again, in our own “Silver-left” style.
So, while playing with picture profiles, we were approaching the next #009 location.
![広重名所江戸百景 望月義也コレクション [ 望月義也 ]](https://thumbnail.image.rakuten.co.jp/@0_mall/book/cabinet/0032/9784772610032.jpg?_ex=128x128)
