Daylight recedes as the setting sun moves west into China. On the Asian mainland beyond, it is still late afternoon, and twilight awaits. Before disappearing entirely, the sun descends to between four and eight degrees below Tokyo’s western horizon. Though no longer visible and its direct rays gone, a diffuse glow persists in the atmosphere. Shorter blue wavelengths come to the fore as they scatter through the air, giving rise to the cool, liminal interval between day and night we call the blue hour.
Blue hour came to structure my days last June, when I spent a week walking west to east along the Chūō Line. The walk followed Tokyo’s longest unbroken stretch of railway track, a distance of 142 kilometres, amounting to 222,524 steps at around 31,500 per day. Keeping to schedule meant being on the streets from first light until dark, and over the week, I grew attuned to the city’s patterns.
The morning rush hour seemed to peak between 7.30 and 8.30, giving way to more placid hours between 9.00 and 11.00. Activity would surge again from around 12.00 as restaurants opened for lunch. Another quieter spell tended to follow before the afternoon school run, which varied by neighbourhood but generally fell between 14.30 and 16.00. Then, each evening without fail, I watched the commuter tide build from 17.00, cresting near 18.00 before tapering into the night.
These patterns, in turn, corresponded with the region's mid-June light-dark cycle. The month sits within tsuyu—that early-summer rainy stretch: humid, moisture-heavy and often overcast. Moist air and urban particulates thicken the light, as aerosols and droplets take on water and scatter it more widely. Even on clearer days, dawn carries a lilac haze. Morning settles into a pale blue before yielding to afternoon shadow, its edges softened by the weight of summer air.
As afternoon advances, photographers can often sense when a vivid golden hour is likely to emerge. As the sun lowers towards the horizon, its light crosses a longer atmospheric path, thinning into longer wavelengths and taking on an amber cast. One waits in anticipation at a particular location, at a particular hour, poised for a certain kind of image. Yet it comes without warranty. A shift in cloud cover, together with the earth’s incremental turn, can alter the scene entirely, leaving you chasing the light or waiting in vain.
Somewhere in the photographer’s intensity there is a kind of time anxiety: an unease about its passage, the fear of running out of it, or the pressure to utilise it productively. It is a universal feeling, but attentive to light and tracking the sun’s arc, photographers watch time show itself in the sky, dissolving as colour. It renders tangible the thought that while a single day’s hours may seem expansive, a decade can pass by without warning.
I began my walk with no expectations of the light. On the first evening, however, the sky began to shift. I reached a suburban intersection in Hinohonmachi, by a roadside 7-Eleven. The light cooled and the flat grey sky began to take on dimension. After a day so persistently dull, it seemed improbable. Blue hour was forming. The same moisture that had washed out the afternoon was now catching the sun’s last indirect light across the low clouds. What I had taken for a barrier was the condition that allowed it to appear.
Milkier and less crystalline than during other seasons, I felt an urgency to record the blue hour in as many photographs as possible. Mid-June, though, is close to the summer solstice, and at this latitude twilight tends to linger. The sun drops below the horizon more slowly, and the transition from day to night is drawn out. The sky, in turn, holds its detail longer, especially towards the west. Blue hour was in no hurry.
In the side streets, restaurants and bars began to switch on their lanterns for the evening. Vending machines, convenience stores and station signage too illuminated. The pavements, muted to blue-grey, formed a complementary canvas for the warm sodium and LED light spilling from shops and infrastructure. Reflections gathered and bloomed on the wet asphalt.
The light converged with my physical and emotional state. I had landed at Haneda from London Heathrow that morning and travelled directly to the western terminus at Takao to begin walking. Giving myself a couple of days to adjust to the time difference before such an undertaking would have been sensible, but I was in the midst of a career transition. The walking had become the work, and I felt compelled to start at once. I had the sense of an open road ahead, an inflection point that comes only a few times in life.
Adulthood as lived in the modern metropolis is a layering of commitments: work, rent, routines, and expectations. Even artistically led lives accrue structure. The sensation of an open road requires a temporary absence of that structure—a moment when the future is not yet booked. It feels most acute in that in-between, when you are no longer who you were, but not yet fully who you will become.
Such freedom carries a melancholy; it is not ours for long. With each decision, the road narrows again. I wanted to hold tightly to that feeling, to press forward before it began to contract. Yet after thirty sleepless hours in transit and thirty thousand steps, I found myself at the Hinohonmachi intersection in a sleep-deprived haze, capable only of loosening my grip.
For the next seven days, the unhurried blue hour arrived around the same time, wherever I happened to be along the line. Its slow June fade eased that feeling of narrowing for a while. But no blue hour can be kept, however many photographs we take or how far we walk to meet it. Like the city’s patterns, each moment is already giving way to the next.
※ AJ
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