Take a Walk Through Tokyo From Anywhere on Earth

Today Japan Probe announced Google's launching of Street View for Japan -- an amazing upgrade to the already impressive Google Maps application. In short, almost every street in Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto, Sendai, Hakodate, Otaru, and Sapporo has been photographed and knitted together in a navigable matrix.

In the early noughties when it was just old Yahoo! Japan Maps, I wrote a short film about a guy who zooms closer and closer to his apartment's location, with the world outside his window transforming into solid colours and lines, until finally he's inside his own head. We're getting there...

Here's the entrance I used at the Nikkatsu Studios when I visited the set of Tokyo Sonata.


This road in West Ikebukuro runs parallel to the train tracks. You can just see the entrance to the CineRoman pink cinema on the left.


Visit a restaurant location in the first Jûon film.


Maybe you'd like to pay your respects at the grave of Akira Kurosawa and want to make sure you find the right entranceway. (See my old map here).


And if you were ever curious about where this blog radiated from, this is it. If you squint and concentrate really hard, you can see Borges...