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I went through the Kojimachi and Hirakawacho area of Tokyo today, on the western edge of the Imperial Palace, near the Hanzomon Gate and Hanzomon Station. The following are a few casual snaps I took.

Demae, KojimachiDemae (??) is what traditional food delivery is called in Japan, and this guy makes for a typical sight on the streets of Tokyo, carrying bowls of food, probably to workers on a nearby construction site. Traditional though this style of delivery may be, you can't fault it for its efficiency, what with about a dozen bowls making the smooth journey from restaurant to customer, no time-consuming loading or unloading involved, using nothing anymore sophisticated than a well-balanced tray and a pair of legs. Food deliveries in Japan are often by bicycle or motor scooter, but here legs are all that are needed.
Demae IISidewalks in Japan are touch and go - often they're there, often they're not, and there's a lot more of what an English speaker might call jaywalking than you'd expect, with space for pedestrians and space for vehicles being more or less shared in many cases. Here our demae guy walks smack down the middle of this Kojimachi backstreet, that, as you can probably tell, is a pretty quiet one. That street sign he's walking over says "Stop" (Tomare).

Gentleman reading a magazine in KojimachiIt's not just the roads that are fairly quiet in most of Kojimachi, the footpaths don't get too crowded, either. Here a businessman from one of the hun...