Photographing places from Gyoda in Saitama to Imabari in Ehime Prefecture, Katsuhiko Hashimoto looks as much at the future of small towns outside Tokyo as back at their past. The images evoke the nostalgia that fascinates city dwellers confronted with a space outside the city limits: Showa-era houses with white-washed storehouses among them, shuttered storefronts in shopping arcades of towns that once boomed with a local industry and have declined, few pedestrians even in broad daylight, and yet, from the stillness of the scenery, a feel for the days when they thrived. In the afterword Hashimoto writes of the urge to travel, whenever there is time, not to tourist destinations but to towns that impart a nostalgic lived-in sensation, and of a gaze overlooking past and present that overlaps with reminiscences of that distant day.