Danchi Dreams

A New Zealand photographer gently explores the decay of Tokyos public housing schemes that were constructed in the 60s on Utopian ideals.

- Claire McCall

When Japanese author and Nobel Prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata wrote, ‘The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand,’ he doubtless never imagined that, 80 years later, his words would inspire a body of work shot beneath a lunar glow.

It’s after dark and before dawn that photographer Cody Ellingham slips into this world in-between, to capture haunting images of Tokyo’s danchi, the social-housing schemes that grew from grand ideas in the 1960s.

Ellingham spent his childhood in Pakipaki, a settlement southwest of Hastings, where he went hunting and fishing in the mountains and rivers with his father and brother. He remembers the magic that Japan’s megalopolis wove in his soul at first sight. He was 22, a graduate of Japanese literature, and he was blown away. “I flew in at night. Seeing the way the skyscrapers extended beyond the horizon, the lights stretching into the distance, I felt overwhelming awe.”