Show this image to any Tokyoite and few will be able to tell you where this place is. They’ll guess it is somewhere abroad. But this is Ginza, Tokyo’s celebrated high-class shopping avenue as it looked in the 1880s.

A horse-drawn streetcar casually runs along an almost empty sandy road flanked with magnificent willow trees and Western-style brick buildings. How immensely different from today’s noisy and crowded Ginza.

Pointing his camera toward Kyobashi, photographer Kimbei Kusakabe stood near what we now know as Ginza Wako, a shop famous for its expensive watches, jewelry and other luxuries.

The Open Road

As I sit at home in Hawaii, enjoying our short winter, or rainy season as many locals call it, I am reminded of a journey I took in the summer of 1994. At the time I was studying haiku poetry and the life of one of its most prominent icons, Matsuo Basho. It is difficult to turn a page of a book on haiku poetry without running into Matsuo Basho. He usually is the first author a foreigner meets when they begin haiku.

I decided to replicate Basho’s trip to Japan’s northern wilderness as detailed in his world-famous “Oku no Hosomichi.” A fifteen hundred mile journey from his home in Fukugawa, Tokyo to the north country of Hiraizumi, then left to Yamagata and south to Lake Bizen and ending his journey shortly after.

Tokyo Journal Street Editor Kjeld Duits hits the streets with his lens to see what's hot in Harajuku