My weird hobby lately is just wandering around Street View and zooming in on random stuff. Houses, wires, trees, whatever. lol.
Today I found a 350Z in Tokyo. It’s just sitting there on the side of this narrow street, and when I flipped to the oldest photos of that spot, there it was too. Same street. Same place. 2009.
Every capture since 2009 shows it parked in that same spot, like 17 years of never leaving. Though honestly, look how clean it is. Nobody abandons a car for 17 years and it stays that clean. Someone clearly drives it and just always parks it back home. But from Google’s point of view, it never left. Still parked. Still waiting.
Here’s the 2009 Street View capture. Same car, same spot.
I have no idea why that’s so satisfying to me. But it is.
So yeah, this is the hobby now: I open Google Maps, pick a place I’m curious about, and just wander.
I walk down streets I’ve never been to. I look at the houses, the wires, the trees, the sky between the buildings. Light falling in some random alley. People going about their day, frozen in time. And I pay attention to the small stuff: a tiny bike leaning against a gate, plants on a windowsill, a ladder that’s been sitting there for years. I pretend I’m there.
Then comes the best part: I go back in time.
Google keeps old Street View captures for a lot of places. You click once, and suddenly you’re on the same street seventeen years ago. The trees are smaller. The buildings are different. Half the neighborhood didn’t exist yet. Streets look wider, or emptier, or the whole skyline changed.
I love seeing how places changed through the years.
Sometimes the old photos make me think about the people in them. The guy leaning on his car. The kid on a bike. Someone carrying groceries in. I wonder if they still live there. If they’re still alive. If they’re happy now. It’s a little weird to admit, but it makes these streets feel real. Not like pixels. Like actual places where lives happened and kept going.
Tokyo is my favorite place to do this. Its streets are narrow and weird and full of small details, and you can lose an hour on one block without noticing.
There’s no goal here. No destination. I’m not looking for anything specific. I just like seeing how some places change, and how other places somehow stay exactly the same.
There’s something calming about a thing that just stays. So much of the internet is built to move fast. Street View is the opposite: it keeps fences, signs, and parked cars like little time capsules. It doesn’t care that nobody’s looking.
Anyway, if you haven’t tried this, do it. Pick any city, drop the little guy on a random street, and just walk. You’ll be surprised what you find.
Maybe I’ll find another 350Z somewhere.
lol.
Update: the 350Z is gone
I posted this on Reddit, and someone who lives in Tokyo actually went to the street to check. He found the exact spot, you can tell by the mailbox on the wall. But the car is gone. The whole house is gone too. Torn down and replaced with something new.
Here is what he wrote:
So, as is often the case in Japan, several of the houses around there have been torn down and replaced in the 4 years since that last street view. I found the exact spot, though, you can tell by the mailbox on the wall. The white 350Z is gone, as you can see, along with the whole house! It’s all new.
So the 350Z showed up in that same spot for 17 years, and now it only exists in old Street View captures. The time capsule outlived the street itself. I think that makes me like this hobby even more.