Photo and caption by Betsie Kasner

After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, there were very few tourists anywhere in Japan. The large hotel where we stayed in Tokyo would normally have been filled with tourists, especially westerners, in April. Instead, there were very few guests and even fewer westerners. For me, these two Japanese ladies sitting by themselves in an almost empty dining room captured the atmosphere and sense of time and place during our visit to Japan in late April 2011.

Location: Tokyo, Japan