These photos capture the ambient beauty of Tokyo’s commute

Nearly seven million people pour into central Tokyo every day, wedged shoulder-to-shoulder in rattling train carriages. While the rest of the world has flirted with remote work since Covid, Japan has mostly stuck to long office hours and an obsession with “face time”. Not even talk of a government-backed four-day work week shifted the norm.

On her frequent visits to Japan, photographer Prissilya Junewin has found herself fascinated by the beauty in the mundanity of these commutes – the in-between hours when Tokyo’s workers drift in through the suburbs before racing beneath the city to their final destination. The subject also hit close to home: in Berlin, while her own hour-long trips to the darkroom had once been frustrating, they’d evolved into something more meaningful. “While stuck in the U-Bahn, I tend to observe the people around me – their habits and facial expressions, the small gestures between passengers. The time has become quite precious to me.” This made Junewin curious about other commuters. Are they happy? Have they, like her, learnt to enjoy this liminal time and space, this lifestyle, or are they simply enduring it?

Tokyo, she decided, was the perfect place to begin exploring this. “It’s well-known for being busy, hectic and packed with commuters,” she says. During a recent stay, Junewin worked with SMN Casting agency, who connected her with five of them – a barista, a model, a chef, an accountant and a waitress – and accompanied them on their daily journeys to and from work. “I was curious to tag along, given the many cultural and societal differences,” she says. “People generally refrain from talking or making noise that could disturb anyone seeking quiet after an exhausting day.” Instead, Junewin silently documented the routines of her subjects. “It was so important to me to actually capture them on their real, everyday routes,” she notes.

In a series of conversations with her subjects, a pattern emerged: a longing for nature. “The reality is that it’s pretty hard to survive here, not only financially, but mentally as everything moves on so incredibly fast,” Junewin says. “You’re forced to move with the city’s pace, with nowhere to go because of your strict work schedule.”

That tension rings true for Ryukun, a 27-year-old accountant who is seen reading in the series. “The biggest challenge is achieving a good work-life balance,” he says. “In an ideal world, I’d have good access to the city for work but also be surrounded by nature, since that’s what gives me a sense of fulfilment.” Mei, a 24-year-old waitress, described her commute as a time to clear her head, adding that recently she’s felt a stronger need to be in touch with “the kind of energy that comes from the earth”. 

To mirror her subjects’ yearning, Junewin interspersed their portraits with photographs of rivers, trees and mountains taken on her travels across Japan. The contrast highlights a universal theme: young people carving out lives in some of the world’s busiest cities while quietly longing for something slower, greener and freer. For her, the project became a way of holding those two realities in the same frame – the fluorescent rush of Tokyo against the quiet persistence of nature. “It made the pros and cons of life in a city vs the countryside clearer to me,” Junewin says of the project’s evolution. “I definitely started to appreciate the randomly scattered green spots in Berlin more.”

One journey, with Ryukun, stayed with the photographer most vividly. “It was around 8pm that we met him at his office and headed towards his home in Shibuya – one of the busiest stations in the whole city,” she says. “There were no empty seats on the train, so he was just standing there with his book – completely switched off from reality. The atmosphere was melancholic and there was so much to read into in the carriage.” For her, that moment underscored what the project was all about: finding private rituals of pause within the relentless rhythm of the city.

By weaving together these moments with her own images of nature, Junewin places that tension into focus – not just as a Tokyo story but as a wider generational one. What she hopes viewers take away is simple: “Be more conscious of your needs and your surroundings. And definitely daydream.”

Visit the gallery above for a closer look.