Via Japan Exposures.

Shintaro Sato is a photographer known for his iridescent images of Tokyo’s twilight taken with a Toyo 4 x 5 camera from the various 10th floor fire escapes that serve as his observation deck. He walks around during the daytime scouting locations to find a good location. He carries a map and notebook and marks down the place, the name of the building, the address.

He is asked these questions in this interview: Why did you shoot the Tokyo Twilight Zone project with film? Why not even then use a digital camera? Sato says its:

Just a quality problem. Resolution, quality. I needed high resolution. If I could have used a digital camera equal to large format film, maybe I would have used that....I want to see much more details in my picture. If possible, I want to be able to see the expressions on the faces of people who are standing in the distance, after enlarging the photo. You can sometimes see people in my picture, after enlarging. I want to show what kind of face, what kind of person is there. So high resolution is important. And if I make a very large picture, for example 1 meter wide on one side, you can see a man who is lying on his side in his room. I can see that in this picture