Did you know the postcards in Mysteries of Old Tokyo are 100% real? They exist. On paper. I have them. I scanned them all myself, and they are safely stored away in my cupboard. So where did they come from? And how did they get to be in a hit (hopefully) new detective adventure game?
I found them on a scorching day in September 2024. It was my first trip back to Japan in many, many years. I had arrived in Tokyo the day before, and I was still buzzing with the sights, sounds and smells of a city that has fascinated me for most of my life.
That morning, I visited a flea market in Shibuya.
At the back were some stalls selling antiques and Showa-era memorabilia. Books, toys, militaria, maps, and posters... and then I found it.
50 Views of Greater Tokyo.
It was a postcard set, wrapped in a slightly tattered, but still shiny, silver cover. As I flicked through the postcards, something told me this was special. The stall owner asked for some price that was probably too high. I bought it immediately.
There were scores of postcard collections printed in the early 20th century. The Tokyo Metropolitan Library has a great collection online, including many of "my" postcards. They were printed and reprinted; shuffled around, with photos reused, or colorised, and the text copied or tweaked as the years passed. They are an invaluable resource to show several things: not just what Tokyo looked like back then, but also what people thought was interesting, and important, and worthy of capturing on paper.
My set of postcards is called "50 Views of Greater Tokyo" or "Greater Tokyo: 50 Scenes", with the subtitle: "New Special Edition: Splendid 3-Color Prints". My best guess is that they were printed about 1935, since there are a few buildings from 1934, but the Diet Building (opened 1936) is talked about in the future tense. That may also be the reason the Diet Building is embossed on the packaging.
The publisher is unknown, though I suspect they might have some link with the Mitsukoshi Department Store, which always seems to get a mention.
They are a snapshot of a version of Tokyo, peaceful and prosperous on the surface, that was barrelling down the express route to total world war. Within ten years, many of these buildings would be ashes and rubble.
These postcards are not particularly rare, except perhaps to find them nearly complete - 44 out of the original 50 survived in my set. That's what makes my set unique - whoever bought them, 90 years ago, picked out six and posted them to their friends and family. What we receive as antiques are the postcards they either didn't care to share, or the ones they liked so much they kept them for themselves.
I can't help but wonder about the person who bought these postcards. What did they think of them? Were they in Tokyo for business or leisure? Two of the cards have addresses to Tajima, Fukushima, written in black ink. Were they from Fukushima, or did they have friends there? Ten years later, in 1945, were they alive or dead?
It staggers my mind to think that the postcards I now hold have passed down to me through 90 years of history. When the nation listened to the news transmitted back from Pearl Harbor, they lay on a table. As bombs rained on Tokyo, they sat on a shelf. When the Olympics came in 1964, they waited in a drawer. Through the glitz and glam of the 80s bubble, they lingered in a box of old junk. Maybe. Who knows? One day the little package was picked out, and put on a market stall, and then - like Taylor Swift's mansion - it was bought by me.
And that about wraps up the story. Half a year after I bought the postcards, as I was experimenting with game development, it occurred to me - wouldn't it be interesting to look at those postcards and dig into them? Locate them on the map, and find out what happened to them? Perhaps, even visit them?
And so, in April 2025, I created the first iteration of Memories of Old Tokyo - later to become Mysteries of Old Tokyo. The very next month I was back in Tokyo, slogging through pouring rain and blazing heat to capture as many of these postcards in modern photographs as I could manage. In a few months, the game based on all this will be released.
And to think it was just a chance find at an antiques market.
