Day turns to night as one steps over the threshold of the Kowloon Walled City. And it's an uncomfortable, almost threatening kind of night, illuminated only by flickering neon bulbs beneath steel shades and the glow of a television set in a run-down apartment.

Hong Kong's Walled City may have fallen to the wrecking ball in the 1990s, but its spirit lives on in a curiously realistic recreation that serves as the facade of an amusement arcade in the unlikely surroundings of Kawasaki, the industrial suburb south of Tokyo.

These photographs by David Gilbert show how within the deliberately grimy and scarred exterior of the building, the designer's image of the Walled City has run a little wild - notably as visitors leave by crossing a pool of smoky-blue water on stepping stones. But the rest is eerily authentic.

Through the steel-plate double doors of the entrance, passing the conspicuous sign banning entry to under-18s, is a claustrophobically small and red-lit chamber, all rivets and rust.

Beyond, the visitor is in an alley with store shutters on one side, tattered corrugated iron and dim lights behind grimy windows. Advertising signs hang above the narrow passage.

Given the designer's desire to accurately reflect the lives of the inhabitants of Kowloon's infamous den of iniquity, it is perhaps appropriate that a glance in one of the first windows reveals a semi-clad young woman lying on a mattress. I'm fairly sure it was a mannequin.

By twists and turns in the narrow corridors, a visitor emerges into a courtyard with an open stall selling plucked ducks, chickens and chunks of meat. The plaster on the walls is peeling convincingly. Pipes, door frames and stairwells are coated in frayed posters. The postboxes that hang askew are just as real.