Someone at the Door

Doorbells used to be simple things. Push the button; the spring behind the plastic compresses; two wires touch—ding-dong!

My Tokyo apartment has a doorbell lifted from sci-fi manga of the 90s. White plastic. Clacky buttons. Tacky blue LED. Surprisingly large screen for something that has ice-cube-sized pixels. Gadgets like this at home are ubiquitous in Japan, so I mostly ignored it. “Oh, I can see who’s ringing on the ground floor, neat,” I thought and forgot about it.

A few weeks ago, that garish blue LED refused to stop blinking. Nobody was ringing the bell. Being midnight, half-asleep, I accidentally fat-fingered the wrong button and discovered that my doorbell records and stores low-framerate videos of everyone who has ever pushed the button. The corner of the display had text familiar to any digital photographer: ‘1/53.’

During all those times, my doorbell has captured dozens of “portraits” of people. Mailmen, friends, stubborn television salesmen—all doing the same thing—ringing my bell.

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