Shibuya Crossing From Above Countdown Timer

From this high up the famous crossing stops being a place and becomes a mechanism, a crowd that gathers on four corners and then releases all at once, hundreds of people walking in every direction and somehow not colliding. I was on a rooftop terrace with a coffee going cold in my hand, watching it happen over and over, the same performance on a loop. What you notice from above is not the people but the pattern: the diagonal stripes of the crossing, the train tracks cutting across, the rooftop football pitch on the right, which is the strangest thing up here and has absolutely no business being there. The signs are all vertical and packed with characters, and you can read the shape of the city in the way they cluster. Buildings keep going out to the haze in every direction, low and grey and endless. The clouds were heavy that afternoon and pressed the whole thing down. A train pulled through below and the crowd on the corner surged forward and then stopped, obedient, waiting for the next light. Then the light went green and the mechanism reset itself without a sound I could hear from here.