These are, in no particular order, three photos out of hundreds I took while in Osaka. I didn’t have a lot of personal time to explore until the very last day. So I wondered about in a random fashion close to the hotel I was staying at, grabbing images that had a certain appeal to me, such as this businessman coming down these red stairs. It was the composition and colors, and the one lone human in the frame.

This photo shows the bare sinews that bind a city together: power and communications. You need power in a modern city before anything happens, starting with communications, and continuing on to light, heat, the movement of water and other human activities. Even when it’s exposed like it is in every Japanese city I’ve visited so far, it’s totally ignored, just part of the background. Yet, if it didn’t exist, neither would this city, or any modern city for that matter. Even cities that go back centuries, to far earlier historical eras, now have these sinews.

And then there are this odd little corners with human-designed and crafted artifacts that catch the eye and the imagination. I thought about moving the cigarette receptacle out of the image, but left it in because smoking is such a part of Japanese culture. The other four are meant to hold cuttings or living plants. Four support life, one supports the human activity that leads to an early grave.