Many, many years ago I used to backpack around various places. As an example, in the mid-90s I managed to get over to Japan for a few weeks, crashing at a friend’s apartment now and then in the Kanagawa town of Ebina, about an hour outside Tokyo, closer to Yokohama.
As I didn’t think I was ever going to be back so I took quite a few snaps (calling them ‘photos’ is a little much as you’ll see) which I took with a film camera – possibly an Olympus iS-100 – on that trip. I thought slice-of-life images would be a nice counterpoint to the more tourist shots and over the years I got around to scanning the negatives, and since I coincidentally happened to be near Ebina recently, I decided to see if I could recreate some of them.
The town has grown a lot, from a sleepy dormitory town for Yokohama, to a decent sized city in its own right.
That’s not surprising and some places I could find, but some were long gone from the intervening three decades! Anyway, as a change of scene, here’s a few comparison photos.
The station is all new – it’s now part of a massive shopping and restaurant complex like many stations. Very nice, though many of the old buildings which were probably amazing the first time I was there, are now cheap, simple shops.
This one is actually a lot more like it used to be – same cool strawberry, same clock, although now we have some vending machines, and that tree has grown a lot more!
When I first visited, Ayumi Bridge was under construction. This time I could actually ride over it! It still seems that it’s fed from quite a minor road, which is a little surprising.
From one span being complete, to being all done is cool to see. Also, you can see the raised Ken-O expressway above it, running north to south.
This one might be a bit odd. There used to be a quite stylish KFC in Ebina. It’s not there now, having been replaced by a huge shopping centre called Vina Walk. The pagoda in the background is still there now, though less impressive, surrounded by all that concrete.
So there’s a few examples, and I’ve added some others to the gallery below.
For the record, I went down there on my Hunter Cub, which was a great base of operations, and took the new photos with my old FujiFilm X-T200. I really don’t remember what happened to that Olympus.
