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Comment by grapeskin | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why people make fake pictures of Japan like this but absolutely no other country. It seems like Taiwan’s or Hong Kong’s night markets would be a better foundation with all their gaudy lighting, but nope. Take a normal grey pic of a random side street in Tokyo and blast it with fake neon.

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You can go on 500px and flickr and find plenty of examples of this style of photography for Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as all sorts of western cities.

I'd guess there being more Western exposure to it in Japan is due to fairly famous bits of Japanese media embracing the cyberpunk/neo-noir aesthetic, a la Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc., as well as Japanese photographers being fairly active on the previously mentioned photo sites.

I live in Tokyo and I promise you that none of the side streets near me look remotely like these, regardless of whatever filters or processing you applied.

Yeah. I imagine people who look at this sort of photography would probably recognize Golden Gai if they were dropped into the middle of it just because of how many shots like these are taken there, heh.

If you like the style the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/neoncities/ while you find lots of photos of Japan , there are lot of photos from other places of the world and not only Asian cities. Most of them not as good as Liam Wong ones though.

Not only that, most of the pictures in this style come from the same street in Shinjuku called Kabukichou.

To be pedantic, Kabukichou is quite a bit larger than a single street - it has something like 3000 bars in it. Golden Gai is part of Kabukichou, and is made up of a handful of small alleys that have the shantytown style bars and eateries that are cribbed from quite heavily in cyberpunk/neon noir media.

These are his early works from when he was starting out

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