When my son was three months old, he would start crying every evening. We held and soothed him and tried feeding him, but nothing made him stop.

I later learned that unexplained crying like this is known as colic, and that evening episodes are sometimes called the witching hour. The cause is not well understood.

While reading about it, I came across the idea that anxiety about nightfall might be involved. For early humans, being alone at night was dangerous. According to this idea, even in a safe modern home, a baby instinctively senses darkness as danger.

I do not know whether that explanation is accurate. Still, I know what it is like to feel anxious as night approaches.

From my twenties into my mid-thirties, the setting sun meant it was time to leave for a night shift I dreaded. Even a beautiful sunset was not something I could enjoy. That may be why I am still drawn to city streets at dusk.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

To read this photograph, you need a few words.

The black mass in the background is a real submarine called Akishio. It entered service in 1986 and was decommissioned in 2004. It is now displayed on land at the JMSDF Kure Museum, and you can go inside. Kure is one of Japan’s major naval port cities, and it is where the battleship Yamato was built.

In front of it, two high school girls are dancing. They are probably filming a short video. Behind them is a vessel built for the possibility of war. In front of it, the two girls are spending a peaceful moment. That contrast is why I pressed the shutter.

The “you me” sign beyond the submarine belongs to a shopping mall chain in this region. The name plays on yume, the Japanese word for dream. But in English, it reads as “you and me.” It could refer to the two girls, or to the relationship between those who film videos and those who watch them. A sign that happened to be in the frame adds another way to read the photograph.

Read more

Some years ago, I lived without a permanent home. I was traveling constantly for photo shoots and rarely spent time at home. So I thought I might as well try living without one. It did not suit me, and it lasted only a few months.

During that short period, I did my laundry at laundromats. The roadside laundromats I found outside Tokyo were relatively clean, and some were part of small local chains.

Eventually, I rented an apartment in Tokyo and returned to my old routine. That was when I noticed old laundromats scattered around the city. Small places that appeared to be independently run.

Outside Tokyo, old, independently run laundromats seem to have disappeared, replaced by cleaner roadside ones. Perhaps laundromats like these survive in Tokyo because of the size of the city’s population.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

Income from self-employment is hard to see from the outside. No fixed amount lands in my account each month. There is no payslip. It is no wonder she worries.

Some self-employed people and business owners flaunt expensive purchases, or post the exact figures of their income. It is not very tasteful. But I understand the impulse a little.

Without the steady income of a nine-to-five job, making their income visible may reassure the people around them, and even earn their respect.

Perhaps their mothers ask them the same question. If it sets their mothers’ minds at rest, then putting their income on display starts to seem almost endearing.

I am often asked how I make a living from photography.

These days I make my living from client work, licensing fees, sales of my photobook and Lightroom presets, and writing.

Listed this way, my income may look diversified. In reality, most of my income depends on client work. Companies commission me to shoot, edit, and deliver photographs. Most of this work is for advertising and web content.

Income from client work comes in only while I continue working. I would rather not think about it, but if I became unable to work for some reason, I would lose most of my income.

In fact, from last year into the start of this one, for about half a year around the birth of my son, I held back on client work. It was my own choice, but my income dropped. First-time parenting brought expenses I had not expected. I could not keep my income and expenses in balance as planned.

At times like that, I honestly wish I had a steady nine-to-five job. In Japan, employees can receive partial income replacement while on parental leave. For someone self-employed like me, it sounds like a dream.

Read more

I did not become a photographer through any official route, if such a thing still exists, so I had never written a book about photography.

There seemed to be no need for one. Type “how to use light in photography” into your phone and you can find the basics. There is not much point in me repeating it.

But this year I started writing a newsletter, and it made me think that ideas and perspectives drawn from actual experience might be useful. I began to want to write a book about photography.

So I put what is in my head into the form of a table of contents. I may cut some of it, or add to it. General advice will be kept to a minimum. The center will be my own experiences, and what I have come to think through them.

Part 1: The distance between photography and me

1. Do you like photography?
   I hated photography. Photography meant being photographed. It was not hate. I just did not know how to live with it.

2. Becoming a photographer
   My first digital camera at thirty. A point of contact with society. Social media turned it into a job.

3. What makes a photographer
   I stopped caring about titles. Turning back for a photograph. Not a state but a stance.

Part 2: Learning photography

4. About cameras
   Fujifilm’s legendary lens. If I started over, still a prime lens. Shoot in RAW.

5. Practicing photography
   Shooting the same place again and again. Shooting with a friend. Shooting alone. Turning off the lights in the room. The flowers of 2020.

6. Light and shadow
   Light falling through a gap between buildings. Going back the next day, or the next year. Why am I drawn to shadow?

7. Composition
   In the end, the subject goes in the center. Cropping afterward. Choosing what to keep.

8. Learning from outside photography
   Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. Looking at the Rakuchu rakugai zu folding screens through a monocular. Hiroshige’s framing. Films and museums.

9. Photographs that stay with you
   Returning, rising early, waiting. Waiting for a place to empty. Waiting for someone to appear.

Part 3: Ways of seeing and thinking

10. What not to photograph
    I still cannot answer the question, “What do you photograph?” What I do not photograph becomes clear over time.

11. What to look at
    On the road. Train windows. Things seen but overlooked. The laundromat theory.

12. Give up on photographs no one else could take
    A photograph unlike anyone else’s is impossible. A signature in photographs. How you have lived.

13. Photography’s sense of time
    Looking at the present from a little way into the future. Ordinary photographs gain meaning. No need to rush a concept.

14. Skilled photographs and good photographs
    Skilled and good are different things. Photography is like conversation. The day I handed my wife a Leica.

15. Manners for the person holding the camera
    The asymmetry between photographing and being photographed. Sharaku, the artist who vanished after a year. New Year’s sunrise at an observation deck.

Part 4: After shooting

16. You select twice
    Once when you shoot, once when you look back. Enjoying the second time. Building a system for your library.

17. Color and processing
    Blue, green, orange. Editing without quirks. Before buying a preset, try editing on your own first.

18. Putting words next to photographs
    Photographs go with words. The sound of idling engines at dawn. A vending machine at 3 a.m. When you cannot shoot, words remain. Snow and cherry blossoms.

19. On sharing work online
    From wide and shallow to narrow and deep. Crowded places, and a place to come home to. “The guy who let social media go to his head and went independent.”

20. The practical side of keeping photographs
    Assume the data will disappear. Local and cloud. The ultimate backup is paper.

21. Selling a photobook
    Making a photobook. Selling it. Photographs making their way out into the world. The work of human hands.

Part 5: Photography as a job

22. When photography becomes your job
    You enter places you could not otherwise enter. You meet people you would not meet. “What is the most beautiful black?”

23. The people who get the work
    It is not about skill. Whether you are someone who can stand in that place. Muscles built by commissioned work. People not suited for it.

24. On keeping a day job
    Full time and part time. If you can keep a day job, keep it. Free time does not mean you will shoot.

Part 6: Living with photography

25. Family photographs
    Photographing what a child does, not the child. The tagasode folding screens. An old album at my wife’s family home.

26. Photography and happiness
    The hot pot theory. Too much to do to be bored. So the world does not change me.

27. Why photograph
    Photographs trigger memory. “Well, it was never something I disliked.” The motive does not have to be noble. Self-love will do. After you die, every photograph becomes a good one.

My ideas may be wrong. But I also think there is no right answer in photography. I said I might write it. The truth is, I have already started.

If you have thoughts, let me know in the comments.

Since my son was born, I have been photographing at home more often. Then I remembered another time like this.

It was 2020, when we could hardly leave the house. Looking back, it is hard to believe the world was like that.

I bought flowers at a nearby supermarket. I had never bought flowers before. Baby’s breath, dahlias, spray roses, roses. I also learned for the first time that cherry blossoms could be bought by the branch.

I bought vases that seemed right for them, and spent whole days in my room photographing the flowers. Whatever the situation, I end up taking photographs.

Six years have passed, and I am photographing at home again. This time, the subject is not flowers.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

I have made one printed book. In July 2023, I self-published my first photo book, PERSONAL WORK.

In this post, I will write about this book step by step, from choosing the photos through printing and binding to getting it into readers’ hands. I hope it offers something to anyone who wants to make a book of their own, or who simply loves books.

What got me started

I started taking photos in 2010. At first it was not work, just a personal hobby. Later, work started coming in, and I shifted toward commercial photography.

All that time I had a vague idea that I wanted to make a photo book, but I kept putting it off. When commercial work gets busy, my own projects tend to slip down the list.

What finally moved me to start was printing.

One day I turned on an Epson inkjet printer I had bought years earlier and left to gather dust, and printed a few of my favorite photos.

As I laid the prints side by side, I got into it: print that one too, put this one next to that one. I spread them across the floor at home.

For the next few days I rearranged them again and again and kept looking. As I did, I began to see what the book might be.

You cannot do this on a computer or a phone screen. Holding the prints, feeling the paper, I watched how the photos connected to one another.

“I want to make my own photo book and see it through to readers myself.” I wrote that and announced the project on social media in February 2023. I wanted to make it impossible to back out.

Choosing photos, cutting photos

I selected more than 500 photos as candidates. After more than ten years of shooting, I had many I was attached to.

I started laying out pages in Adobe InDesign. I am not a designer. This was the first time I used InDesign in earnest. Still, I decided to do the sequence and design myself, including the front and back covers.

As I worked, I noticed I lacked photos to connect one page to the next. If I lined up only the lead photos, the reader’s eye never had a place to rest.

A photo that stands on its own and a photo that moves the page forward are different. Photos that face each other across a spread, photos that come before and after, color, light, shadow, distance. I had to build the whole flow by watching those relationships.

This changed how I shoot afterward. Making a photo book was a way of gathering past photos, and at the same time it changed how I see the photos I have yet to take.

I narrowed those candidates down, and in the end included 148 photographs.

Contacting a printer

While I worked on the design, I contacted a printer I had been researching.

It was Fujiwara Printing, based in Matsumoto, Nagano. To be honest, I find sending email hard. A first contact, even more so. “Hello, my name is Takashi Yasui, a photographer based in Tokyo.” Even that opening line took me a while to write.

Fujiwara-san replied quickly. We set a meeting soon after and met for the first time at the company’s Tokyo branch. What was scheduled for about an hour ran close to two.

It was the first time in my life I had talked with someone seriously about photo books and printing. When I described what I had in mind, we moved straight to specifics. I had planned to get quotes from several companies, but by the end of that meeting I wanted to work with Fujiwara Printing.

When you self-publish a photo book, the work with the printer carries the whole book. With no publisher in between, there is no editor and no sales team. What kind of book it should be, how many copies to print, which paper to use, where to spend the budget. You have to decide all of it yourself.

That first meeting was already concrete. Trim size, paper, page count, number of photos, print run, schedule. Color proofing every photo. Attending the print run.

After a meeting that dense, I headed home in a daze. On the train I thought, I am really making a photo book, and it still felt unreal, like being inside a dream.

Deciding the specifications

PERSONAL WORK ended up 210 × 210 mm, square. 192 pages. 148 photographs. Hardcover. For the body I chose OK Ultra Aqua Satin, and for the cover, NT Rasha.

The size came from a photo book I had picked up many times: Saul Leiter’s Early Color.

I chose the paper together with Fujiwara-san. OK Ultra Aqua Satin, the body paper, holds deep blacks well. It is bright, with a slight blue cast. My photos carry a lot of shadow. How the blacks would read on paper was a key point for this book.

A photo book is not made of photos alone. Paper, size, weight, how it opens, the feel of the cover. All of it shapes how a reader holds the book.

Holding the tsukamihon

Before printing, a tsukamihon was made. A tsukamihon, or dummy, is a sample built with the same paper and binding as the real book, but unprinted. There are no photos in it. Still, holding it, you feel the weight and thickness of the book you are about to make.

When I held the tsukamihon, the book suddenly became real to me. It was, without question, a book. At that stage I checked the thickness of the paper, how it opened, the feel of the cover.

Thicker paper is not better. Too thick, and the book is hard to open. The binding and the glue also change how the pages turn.

Imagining my photos printed on those blank pages, I felt an excitement I could not hold back.

Making color references

Next I needed color references. I printed all 148 photos on my inkjet printer at home.

These give the printer a target to match.

On screen, a digital photo is RGB. In print it becomes CMYK. A photo seen in the light of a monitor and a photo printed in ink on paper are not the same. And an inkjet print, home or professional, is different again from offset printing.

Even so, without a reference you cannot settle the color. What kind of black I wanted. I had to show the temperature and balance for each photo on paper.

I pushed these prints further than my earlier ones. The work was hard. Of the whole process, it may have been the hardest part.

When a photo did not come out right, I printed it again and again. In the end I printed far more sheets than the book holds. I had never run the printer this hard. The ink dropped fast.

When the ink ran out, I went to the electronics store for more. I had worked for hours in a room with the curtains drawn, to read color accurately, so when I stepped outside, the sunlight and outside air hit me all at once.

At the ramen shop where I stopped for lunch, I wanted to tell the stranger next to me, “I’m making a photo book right now.” I was in a strange state of mind.

The printing director’s work

In mid-May 2023, I traveled to Matsumoto, Nagano, for color proofing. About three hours from Shinjuku on the Azusa express. I looked out the window the whole way.

Color proofing means comparing a test print against the color reference and checking whether the color is right. There are several ways to do it. I chose a proof made on the same press and paper as the final run. Put simply, the most expensive method.

For a photo book, proofing every page on the actual press is rare, I’m told. Usually you check only the key pages and leave the rest to the printer. But I wanted to take responsibility for that too.

At the Matsumoto plant, we laid the proofs and the color references side by side and went through them. At the center of this was Hanaoka-san, the printing director at Fujiwara Printing.

I had not really understood what a printing director does. In making a photo book, that role is a big one. They understand the materials and the press, and set the direction for data correction and platemaking.

First, Hanaoka-san would look at a photo and tell me what he felt. Then I would tell him what I cared about in it. For this book, we talked about black and shadow over and over.

How to handle shadow was a major theme for this book. You cannot just make the black denser. Too dark, and the detail collapses. Too light, and the humidity and weight in my photos drain away.

Hanaoka-san was thinking about how far to push the shadow in platemaking and how much to adjust with ink on press. The first proof was intentionally left with room to spare. From there, we decided together how far to sink the black.

Moving a photo I had seen on screen onto paper took not only feeling but skill.

Deciding the cover and the title

For the cover I used a photo of a red umbrella. Rather than print across the whole cover, I chose a method called daisen-bari. A square recess is cut into the cover, and a separately printed photo is set into it. It looks like a framed photograph.

By then the title was set: PERSONAL WORK.

It is not a special phrase. It is closer to a plain noun. But it fit me. Personal work, nothing more. The plain words were enough.

On the spine I put black foil. The cover paper was matte, so fingerprints showed easily. To deal with that, we added a varnish.

The cover is the first thing you see when the book is closed. But not only that. The feel in your hand, the spine on a shelf, the sense of the book before you open it. All of that becomes part of the photo book.

For the cover proof, I checked the combinations: foil glossy or not, varnish or not. In the end I chose varnish, with matte foil. I wanted a restrained finish.

The press check

Two weeks after the proofing, I went back to Matsumoto. The proofing was done, and now the press check.

It ran two days. With Hanaoka-san, the printing director, and Uchiyama-san, the press operator, I checked the printing for every page.

At a press check, you start with a test print. You check it and adjust if needed. Once you sign off, the final run begins. Then you move to the next form and test again. For PERSONAL WORK, we checked 12 sheets, 24 sides.

The press was bigger than anything I had seen. Paper is drawn in, ink is laid down in the order K, C, M, Y, and the sheet comes out the far side.

Beside the press was a monitor showing the ink flow. Watching it, Uchiyama-san made fine adjustments to the ink. Even during the run he pulled finished sheets at intervals and checked for any drift in color.

For PERSONAL WORK, what counted was how the black was handled.

According to Hanaoka-san, each of the CMYK inks tops out at 100 percent, so 400 percent total is the densest black in printing. But the more ink you lay down, the more the shadow detail tends to collapse.

At the proof stage, the platemaking set the deepest shadows at 340 percent. On the final run we raised it to 370. Pushing the density this far is rare in ordinary work, I’m told. We could go that far only because I had chosen OK Ultra Aqua Satin.

Hearing this, I understood that choosing the paper and building the color are connected. The paper decides what you can and cannot do. How far you can sink the shadows. How much ink it can hold. Whether you can keep detail inside the black.

The black I was after could not be made from data alone. It came onto the page through the paper and the press, and through a person’s judgment.

At the press check, each time I finished checking, I wrote an OK.

Of course I could not judge all of it on my own. Without the printers’ skill, I could not have come this far. But in the end, deciding which way to go was mine.

On the evening of the second day, I signed off on the last sheet. The press check was over. The printed sheets go next to the bindery. From here, a stack of paper becomes a book.

To the bindery

Two weeks after the press check, I headed to Nagano for the third time, now to the bindery.

The body is gathered, joined with the cover, glued, and shaped into a book. Binding is split across specialist shops. For this book, Shibuya Bunsenkaku handled the gluing, and Dankseki the foil stamping and the inset label.

At Shibuya Bunsenkaku, I watched the body and cover being glued. The body on its own still looks unsteady. Joined with the cover and carried along the conveyor, it finally becomes a book.

At Dankseki, I watched the foil stamping. The letters PERSONAL WORK rise on the spine the moment it passes through the machine. They showed me the die that gets reused for any reprint.

The last step was the inset label. Into the blind-stamped recess, the separately printed red-umbrella photo is applied one at a time. This was done by hand. After so many mechanized steps, at the end a person sets each photo in place. That stayed with me.

Watching the binding, you see that a photo book is also an industrial product.

For a photographer, a photo book is a body of work, a gathering of photographs. It is also an object made by cutting, folding, gathering, gluing, and wrapping paper. Many people’s labor is in it.

When I shoot, I think only about the photo. But with a photo book, there are steps that turn the photo into an object, and a specialist for each.

A photo book cannot be made by the photographer alone. Realizing that was a major experience for me.

Packing and shipping

To sell a photo book, you also need packing and shipping.

This too I had barely grasped before making the book. A photo book is heavy, so it can be damaged easily if it takes a hit. You also have to keep it from getting wet. Shipping one copy and shipping several call for different boxes.

In the end I used a frame-style box for single copies and a different one for multiples. I ordered samples, cushioning included, and checked them in hand.

Instead of shipping from home, I worked with a warehouse. When an order comes in, it connects to the fulfillment system and ships from the warehouse. Making a photo book does not end with making it. I had to think through where the books would be stored, and how orders would be taken and shipped.

Going on sale

In July 2023, after about half a year of work, I put the book on sale. What stays with me is the rhythm of how it sold. The first three months were intense. Because I had shared the process beforehand, about 1,000 copies sold.

I needed to sell 1,000 copies to recover the production cost. Reaching that point within three months was honestly a relief. What made me happiest was the purchase reports coming in from around the world on Instagram Stories.

Outside Japan, in order of volume, the book reached the United States, Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, China, France, Australia, and other places, 30 countries in all.

I still keep those purchase reports in my Instagram Stories highlights.

Since last year, there was a period when I could not ship to the United States because of tariffs, but shipping has now resumed.

Looking back

Making PERSONAL WORK was itself personal work, I think. It was also the experience of building the whole thing, from making a product to delivering it to readers.

What I like about self-publishing is that I decide everything myself, from selecting the photos to shipping.

The book still sells. Online only, with basically no promotions. I imagine buyers find the shop through my Instagram or my website, look at the production documents, and then buy.

With commercial publishing, a book that keeps selling slowly might be written off and pulped. And it is rarely reprinted. Anyone who loves photo books will know the sight of an “out of stock” notice.

With self-publishing, I can keep selling as long as I want. Three years on, orders still come in, and I like that rhythm: a sense that the book has reached someone without a conversation.

Even now, when so much information and so many exchanges have moved online, making a printed book and delivering it to someone still feels special.

That said, I have made only one book so far. To keep my work in physical form, I will keep making photo books.

PERSONAL WORK was built from photographs alone, so I also want to make a book of photographs and writing.

For the next one too, I will start by making prints.

PERSONAL WORK - TAKASHI YASUI

Photo credits: Takashi Yasui, Shuhei Inoue, and Nagisa Ichikawa

A while back, I posted this on Notes.

PERSONAL WORK is the first photo book I ever published, bringing together my work up to that point.

Three years later, orders still come in.

To handle those orders alongside my client work, I use a fulfillment warehouse for shipping. International mail from Japan to the US has resumed, but some new customs rules were added, and the warehouse couldn’t handle those shipments.

So this month, I worked with the warehouse and set up a business account with DHL. I spent the past few days on the paperwork, and now I can ship to the US again.

Read more

To photograph cherry blossoms means that during that time, I am not photographing anything else. This happens even on ordinary days. When I decide from the start to “photograph this,” I sometimes stop noticing everything else.

Some photographic series begin with a theme chosen before shooting. You go to specific places or follow particular subjects, gathering the photographs you need. Photographing cherry blossoms in their season is close to this. There are also series that emerge afterward, when you look back at photographs accumulated over many years.

For me, it’s usually the latter.

When I’m walking through the city or traveling, I photograph the moments that draw me in. When I take the photographs, I am not thinking about which series they belong to. But when I look back at my library, I find that the same things have been appearing in my photographs again and again. A series begins to emerge from those photographs. Once I recognize it, the next time I’m out in the city, I start noticing things I had walked past before.

My library holds several clusters of photographs. These are the beginnings of series, found among photographs I’ve taken over many years. Today, I’ll share twenty of them.

1. Laundromats

2. Bicycles

3. Traffic cones

4. Liminal spaces

5. Vending machines

6. Dogs in the city

7. Blue hour

8. From above

9. Traffic mirrors

10. Views from windows

Read more

Japan has a rainy season called tsuyu.

A long stretch of light rain that keeps falling. The beginning of this season is announced on the news: “Tsuyu has begun.”

But in recent years, the start of tsuyu has become less clear. Instead of steady rain, brief and intense downpours have become more common. The number of rainy days also seems to be decreasing.

The sense of season I had as a child has changed into something else now. Days when light rain kept falling. I may one day miss them.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

The phrase “Because I don’t dislike it” has stayed with me.

I posted the same story on Notes. Afterwards, I wondered how people who read it understood “Because I don’t dislike it.”

Some readers may have thought she had no choices, because she lived in a rural area, because she was a woman.

In 2017, when I took this photo, I was three years into my career as an independent photographer.

I had never worked as someone’s assistant. I had never worked at a studio. I had never received a photography award. Without roots in the industry, I felt constant pressure to be evaluated by someone I could not see. More credentials. More income. That kind of urgency drove me.

That was when I heard, "Because I don't dislike it." It made me feel that there was another way to keep going, another way to live. Something in me relaxed.

Read more

I had visited before on photo trips, but Kagawa came to feel close to me through those six months of staying there. What you see on a short trip and what you see over a long stay are different.

This isn’t a checklist or a travel guide. It’s a record from my own viewpoint.

About the Seto Inland Sea

To understand Kagawa, the place to start is the Seto Inland Sea, which spreads out to its north. The Seto Inland Sea is enclosed by three of Japan’s main islands: Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu.

Because it doesn’t open onto the ocean, the surface stays calm, more like a lake than a sea.

What I love most is the view of the Seto Inland Sea from the train as it crosses from Honshu to Shikoku. The water is always as flat as a meadow, and the rounded islands scattered across it look as if a child had set them there.

Along this stretch, the train called the Marine Liner slows down so passengers can take in the view. Watching the sea, I feel far from the noise of the capital.

Driving in Kagawa

Kagawa sits on the Seto Inland Sea, in the northeast of Shikoku. It is the smallest prefecture in Japan by area.

After the calm of the Seto Inland Sea, what interested me was the pace of people in Kagawa.

At a car rental shop in Kagawa, when I picked up the keys, the clerk said: “You’re from Tokyo, right? Kagawa drivers are rough, so be careful.”

When I actually drove, at first I didn’t notice much. I figured the clerk was just being self-deprecating about his own prefecture.

But when I looked it up, I found that Kagawa often ranks among the worst nationally on a number of traffic-accident indicators, and the prefecture itself has made this a policy priority.

Once I started paying attention, I saw it. Drivers changing lanes without signaling. Pulling out before the light turned green. Not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks. I came across these scenes more often than in other prefectures.

Talking with my wife, we came to one conclusion: people in Kagawa are impatient. And this impatience runs through the food culture here as well.

About udon

Kagawa is the home of Sanuki udon. When I was staying there, lunch always began with one question: udon, or not udon. Udon sits at the center of the local diet.

Sanuki udon is all about koshi (the firmness, the bite of the noodle). Boiled fresh, it’s at its best. Once it cools or sits too long in broth, the koshi is gone. So when udon arrives at your table, you eat fast.

At a self-service udon shop, where you carry your own tray, the sequence from ordering to finishing feels like a sport. You pick your noodles. You line up and choose your tempura.

An array of tempura in front of you. With people behind you, there is no time to hesitate. You pay, sit down, and start eating right away. Ten minutes is enough to be out the door.

Udon culture supports this impatience, and that impatience keeps udon culture going.

Why is udon the staple here?

On the evening news in Kagawa, you’ll see daily updates on local reservoir levels. That’s not something you usually see elsewhere in Japan.

Kagawa has many sunny days and no major rivers. Water issues sit close to daily life. Rice cultivation requires a lot of water. Wheat, the main ingredient of udon, doesn’t need as much.

Because the land has struggled with water, wheat took root here. From that wheat, Sanuki udon developed.

Getting off along the way

This isn’t only about Kagawa. My favorite way to spend time in a rural area is to ride a train without a clear destination or a fixed schedule.

The station buildings, the ticket machines, the interiors of the trains, the ads inside, the scenery flowing past the windows. All of it feels out of the ordinary to me.

My favorite line in Kagawa is the Kotoden Kotohira Line (Takamatsu-Chikko to Kotoden-Kotohira).

The end of the line is Kotohira, a town near the center of Kagawa. It’s the gateway town to the famous Kotohira-gu shrine, and one of the prefecture’s main tourist destinations.

After 5 p.m., though, the place changes. Shops close, and the streets empty out. Almost no one is heading to Kotohira at that hour.

The final stop is a tourist destination, but the closer you get to it, the fewer passengers are left. That reversed feeling is one reason I take the Kotohira Line in the evening.

The line from Takamatsu to Kotohira runs into the late afternoon sun. The faded blinds tell you how strong the light is.

When I feel like it, I get off at a station and take photos. Unlike in the city, once you get off, the next train in the same direction is at least 20 minutes away. Sometimes longer.

Most stations between the endpoints are unmanned, so I can take photos freely while I wait. But I am alone at the station, and the unease grows. Even so, the train arrives exactly on time.

On the train

Neither tourist nor resident. From that vantage, I observe the people around me. On public transport, especially trains, you can see people with a slightly different air from those in Tokyo.

One evening, after taking photos in Kotohira, I boarded a train on the Dosan Line. There weren’t many passengers, and I was looking out the window at a sky shifting from indigo into dark. At Zentsuji Station, a group of high school baseball players got on.

A dozen or so came on at once, but the train didn’t get loud. They were probably worn out from a hard practice. A few crossed their arms and closed their eyes right away. The others sat with earphones in, eyes on their phones.

“Kids these days. Same as Tokyo,” I thought. Just as I was about to close my own eyes, I heard the sound of slurping. One of them had casually started eating instant ramen.

Many stations in Kagawa have a Seven-Eleven near the ticket gates. He had probably filled his cup with hot water from the in-store kettle before boarding.

Eating something so soupy and strongly scented on a train is a clear breach of etiquette. It is not something you see in Tokyo, and I found myself staring. He noticed me staring and looked back, puzzled.

Another day, on a Yosan Line train from Takamatsu Station, I saw a father and child sitting in a box seat.

The child looked out the window calmly, occasionally turning to speak to the father. The father was reading a paperback. He would set it aside without hesitation each time, listening until the child was satisfied. When the child turned back to the window, the father returned to his book.

When the two got off at Sanuki-Fuchu Station, I caught a glimpse of the cover. It was Agota Kristof’s The Notebook.

Time on the ferry

The Seto Inland Sea has many islands, and from Kagawa there are ferries out to a number of them. One day, I decided to head to Honjima.

On the first ferry of the day, there were a few other passengers besides me. They were probably heading to work. One asleep. One typing on a laptop. One not sitting at all, leaning against the wall with eyes closed.

A while after the ferry departed, the morning sun came into the cabin. Soon the Seto Ohashi Bridge appeared. The person with the laptop, sitting by the window, squinted at the brightness and closed the curtain without hesitation.

What was a sight I could not look away from, for someone who lives and works here, was part of an ordinary day.

Honjima is small. I rented an electric bike and circled the island in about an hour. The shops for tourists were closed. The only ones I met were a few elderly residents and a few cats.

I crossed to the island, then came back. That was the whole day. But this kind of time, repeated over months, was what I needed to come to know Kagawa.

The people I saw in Kagawa did not seem to be adjusting themselves to trends or to an order imposed from outside. At the pace of their own lives, they seemed to carry a certain casualness and conscientiousness, along with an unexpected kind of culture.

Someone said you arrive at the Seto Inland Sea at the right moment in your life. Kagawa, facing that sea, has become close to me. I no longer think this is a coincidence.

It is where my wife grew up, and where my son was born. In this newsletter, I expect I will write about Kagawa, again and again.

Lately I see more people around me who keep using older digital cameras. In Japan, the weak yen is probably part of it.

I have been on the camera industry’s “upgrade cycle” for a long time, partly because of my work. Since I started photography in 2010, I have replaced my main camera roughly every two years (along with plenty of lenses).

Had I used a single camera for many years, I might have kept taking photos with the feeling that “the photos I took with this camera carry special memories.”

If photography were only for my own pleasure, without professional demands, there would be something romantic about staying with one camera year after year.

By contrast, the joy of owning the latest model fades in about two weeks. The latest model does shoot more comfortably, but looking back, the difference is within a margin of error.

More than anything, the photographs themselves don’t change dramatically.

A camera has two sides. On one side, it is a tool for making photographs. Light enters through the lens, you press the shutter, and an image is recorded. This is about function.

On the other side, it signals the owner’s cultural position. The camera you choose becomes a statement about who you are.

“I shoot film.” “I carry the latest model.” “A ten-year-old camera is enough.” Each of these goes beyond how you photograph and speaks to where you stand.

When digital cameras were still advancing rapidly, the first side received most of the attention.

As a commercial photographer, I sometimes take on assignments to shoot sample images or write reviews for new cameras and lenses. But there is no longer much that functionally changes the photograph itself.

Read more

Looking out the window, I noticed something after the train passed Okayama Station. Among the gray tile roofs of the old houses in the distance, some were red. The further west I went, the more red roofs I saw. It was a curious sight.

That sight stayed with me. In May 2024, I made time to travel through Okayama Prefecture.

Houses with red tile roofs were everywhere. The red roofs I had seen from a distance through the Shinkansen window turned out, up close, to come in many shades. Muted red, glossy red, vermilion.

I looked into it. The tiles are called Sekishu-gawara. They come from the Iwami region of Shimane Prefecture, and the red comes from kimachi-ishi, a local stone used as a glaze material.

Fired at high temperatures, they are also resistant to cold and snow. What I had thought of as a color turned out to be tied to the local geology and climate.

Against the green of new leaves and rice fields, the red tile roofs remain in the eye. That contrast is part of what makes the landscape of the Chugoku region distinctive.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

I don’t watch much anime.

That said, “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk” were part of my boyhood.

Mondays were the release day of the weekly manga magazine. When I got to school, someone always had it open on their desk, and a group would form around them. That was my boyhood.

As I grew older, I drifted away from both manga and anime.

Some years ago, I went out to take photographs in Japan with a friend from abroad I had met on Instagram. She loved anime, and her eyes lit up as she talked about “Naruto.” When I said I’d never seen it,

“What about One Piece? Demon Slayer?”

She pressed on. I hadn’t seen either. The moment turned a little awkward, though we laugh about it now.

That experience led me to a thought.

Japanese cultural content draws a lot of interest from abroad. But the center of that interest, as far as I can tell, is mostly anime and manga.

Meanwhile, everyday life in Japan, the way people work here, and the values behind them have not yet crossed the language barrier.

There are many people who write about Japan from the position of being Japanese. By comparison, there are fewer voices writing as ordinary people living ordinary lives here.

The biggest issue is the language barrier. But automatic translation is improving, and we are in a transitional period where that barrier is beginning to disappear.

For that reason, I started Beyond The Frame. I wanted to write not only as a Japanese person, but as a photographer and as someone living an ordinary life, to readers abroad.

Here I’ve written about traffic mirrors, vending machines, and chairs. Not mainstream culture, not subculture either. The kind of Japan that doesn’t fit neatly into either.

Writing about these things, I notice something. When you live in Japan, you rarely think about what feels Japanese.

But when you start writing for readers abroad, familiar scenes begin to appear in front of you as something specific to Japan.

An old woman whose daily routine is a morning visit to a shrine. The volunteers in vests who stand at corners to keep schoolchildren safe on their way to school. When writing for a Japanese audience, these pass by as “obvious.”

Writing in English, for me, is a way to gain a new perspective.

In some sense, this is what I’ve been practicing for years through photography. I’m doing it now with words.

And writing in English also changes where I stand.

Read more

The TV was always on, usually tuned to NHK. What flowed from it, in the late afternoon, was sumo.

Grand sumo. A sport, and a Japanese ritual. A tradition that grew out of ceremonies praying for a good harvest. The ceremonial ring entrance, the shiko foot-stomping, the throwing of salt. A rare competition where sport and Shinto rite live side by side.

Even as a child, I felt this was different from other sports.

As the broadcast neared its end, the smell of dinner would drift in from the kitchen. Many Japanese people who grew up in the era of television probably share this memory.

Those were the years when Chiyonofuji, a small yokozuna with a legendary career, dominated the ring. Foreign-born rikishi were beginning to make their mark. The Waka-Taka boom was on the horizon.

Somewhere along the way I stopped watching, and for a long time sumo felt far from me.

My wife and I started watching sumo again in 2025. It began with a YouTube channel we happened to find: the Futagoyama stable.

These days, many stables post on YouTube: practice sessions, daily life, meals.

Once we could see inside the stable, the rikishi stopped feeling like beings from another world. They became people who lived, struggled, and kept pushing themselves.

It was my wife who fell for sumo first. During her pregnancy, in a stretch when morning sickness left her unable to eat much, she watched rikishi eat and felt that they were eating for her. It seemed like outsourcing appetite.

We started watching the actual matches, learning each rikishi’s story, and now we are both fans.

Let me introduce one rikishi. Aonishiki (安青錦), from Ukraine. He came to Japan in 2022, trained with the Kansai University sumo club, then joined the Ajigawa stable. He made his professional debut in 2023 and climbed into the top makuuchi division in a remarkably short time.

He’s slightly below the division average in height and weight. His background is in wrestling. He slips low into bigger opponents and breaks their stance from underneath. There’s a clarity to his sumo that I find refreshing. Young, with a dramatic path behind him.

The more you learn each rikishi’s story, the more you are drawn in.

In September 2025, I went to Ryogoku Kokugikan for the first time, to watch the September tournament. My wife was in her late pregnancy and couldn’t come. I went alone.

The Kokugikan seats only about ten thousand. The tickets are sold by lottery, and they’re hard to come by. My seat was up on the second-floor chair section.

Looking down at the dohyo from a far seat, it felt like a stage. I couldn’t see the faces of the rikishi. But I could see things television cuts away: the shape of the ring, the gyoji’s movements, the rikishi entering and leaving the dohyo. I could see the movement of the whole space.

When I was a child, sumo in my mind was something like a black-and-white TV. Watching it now, the kesho-mawashi aprons, the gyoji’s robes, and the traditional Japanese colors all over the dohyo are beautiful.

The Aonishiki match I mentioned earlier. He was up against Kirishima (霧島). Pushed to the edge but never breaking, he reset his stance and reversed it. That was the day I felt sure he would be a yokozuna one day.

On the dohyo, physical impact and decorum sit side by side.

The final bout. Hoshoryu (豊昇龍), the yokozuna, folds the towel he used to wipe his sweat. The hush before the tachiai. A single impact, a string of techniques.

── The match is over.

A wave of cheers. The contrast between motion and stillness, which I had only watched on TV, came through in the air of the Kokugikan.

When rikishi win, they show no joy. When they lose, they keep their faces composed. In the winner’s interview, their words are few.

A former yokozuna once said on a broadcast, “Rikishi are samurai.” In modern Japan, I think the most samurai-like figures are these rikishi.

January 2026. The living room of an old house in Kagawa. My wife’s parents’ home. We were watching the sumo broadcast. Our newborn son was there with us, and so were my parents-in-law.

Each of us was doing something else. My laptop was on my knees. My wife held her phone. My mother-in-law was preparing dinner in the kitchen. My father-in-law was getting ready to walk the family Shiba.

Sumo is the perfect sport to watch while doing something else. The gap between bouts is long. When a match starts, everyone turns to the TV. It’s settled in an instant. Then we go back to what we were doing.

That distance between watching and not really watching. And yet, when the top-division bouts come on around five in the afternoon, everyone naturally puts their hands down and looks at the screen. Conversations start. When a cheer goes up, our sleeping son wakes up and stares at the TV.

When I was a child, I sat in my grandparents’ house and watched the late-afternoon sumo broadcast. Now, I watch sumo with my son.

Thinking aloud

About ten years ago, I photographed a craftsman who makes sumi ink. I asked him, “What is the most beautiful black?” He paused for a moment, then answered, “The feathers of a crow wet with rain.” I still remember those words.

The shoot was part of a corporate interview project. I was there to take photographs, while another interviewer spoke with him.

During the shoot, I had to focus on the photographs. That meant I could not listen to everything he said. The words of someone who had spent decades on his work.

But later, a professionally edited interview was published on the website. It was a fine piece. Something that could last, I thought. I was also satisfied with the photographs I took.

I could read it back anytime, I thought. The other day I remembered it and went looking. The domain was no longer the project site I knew. When I opened it, what came up was an overseas streaming site with no connection to the original project. On the web, this can happen.

In that same project, we interviewed many other craftspeople as well. Swordsmiths, dyers, armor makers, and others. Their words are no longer on the web.

When I learned this, as someone who had been part of the project, I was disappointed.

Sometimes the media project itself shuts down. When it was a one-off project, the original team may no longer be there, and no one chooses to keep the domain alive. Even when the interview was commissioned by a major company, there’s no guarantee it will survive.

We used to think of magazines as short-lived and the web as lasting. Now the opposite seems true. Magazines and other print media last longer. Some of the renewed interest in physical media comes from realizing this.

But if that’s the case, what survives for future generations is only the version of history told by newspapers, books, and the publishing world. The honest voices of ordinary people scatter and disappear from the web. The web, I think, is where more raw voices tend to appear. When those voices disappear, that is a cultural loss.

How should we think about this problem?

Read more

Traveling with a six-month-old was new ground. My wife and I had been restless for weeks. For our son, it would be his first trip.

It was also our first trip as parents.

The Shinkansen seats had to be booked a month in advance. Only certain rows have space for large luggage, and they go quickly.

Stroller, baby carrier, changes of clothes, baby bottles, extra formula, diapers. Unlike adults, we can’t just pick things up on the way. Enough to handle anything over three days. The bags naturally got bigger.

On YouTube, influencers travel abroad with babies the same age as ours. How do they manage? By comparison, Tokyo to Kyoto is a school field trip.

To cut weight, I packed no change of clothes for myself, only underwear. I wore the same outfit for three days. “Our son is better dressed than his father!” I said this more than once on the trip.

My son is looking out the Shinkansen window. Scenery still unfamiliar to him streams past.

It wasn’t his first time on the Shinkansen. We had already taken him from Kagawa, my wife’s hometown, back to Tokyo. This time, I had a little of the ease I lacked then.

I look around. The Shinkansen carries all sorts. Parents like us with small children, couples, people in business attire, an elderly couple, visitors from abroad. The train car begins to feel like a small slice of society.

Among them, I am one of the fathers with an infant. A feeling, somewhat shy, somewhat proud.

From my seat, I caught the eye of an elderly woman in the aisle, lined up to get off. “How many months?” she asked. A few seconds, the smallest exchange. My son looked up at her, puzzled.

From Kyoto Station, instead of waiting at the taxi stand, we took the subway. On the subway, a man saw us and immediately offered his seat.

“We’re getting off shortly,” I said politely, declining. He smiled and went back to his conversation with the woman beside him.

Maybe it’s because of Japan’s low birth rate. Or maybe it’s just me. But the way people look at you when you’re with a child has felt kinder these past few years.

Subscribe now

Before, when I traveled, I could spend all my time taking photographs.

Reaching the destination is less important than the time spent moving. I look out the window. I pass through unknown towns. While driving, I stop the car when something catches my eye and take a photo.

I decide on a destination, but enjoy the room in between. The photos I take that way are not the ones you find in guidebooks.

Traveling with my son feels different from that. There is very little room left in the trip. It’s closer to filling in a puzzle.

There’s feeding time. There’s the chance he’ll fill a diaper. There’s bath time. There’s the fussy hour when sleep is coming. Things adults would barely notice become the trip’s center.

We head straight to the hotel. We check in, enter the room, and hear the door close behind us. Hearing it, I felt relief in my whole body. My wife must have felt the same.

We chose Ace Hotel Kyoto.

Once inside, our son rolled around the bed, happy. He seemed to know clearly that this wasn’t home.

All three days were rainy.

The first day was the only one when we could properly walk outside. We did some quick unpacking and went out. We moved through Kyoto with our son in his stroller.

Pushing the stroller, the road’s slight tilt and the seams in the pavement come up through my hands. The step between Kyoto’s sidewalks and the road feels lower than in Tokyo.

I wondered if Kyoto’s drainage standards were different. I don’t know for sure, but with a stroller, I noticed these things.

We walked close to Shijō-Kawaramachi, near the Takase River. This was the only stretch of the trip where we approached anything that looked like a tourist spot.

We rested at a café. Glancing at the Takase River, I saw a grey heron. Nearby, an older man was watching it.

The Takase River was once part of the city’s waterways and transport routes. That was part of why the heron by the water felt strangely like Kyoto.

Nothing in particular happened. Still, I really felt I had come to Kyoto.

The next day, I found a little time to take photographs. “I’ll just go out and take some photos,” I told my wife, and stepped out for one hour.

The streets near the hotel. Walking and shooting, I observed the neighborhood. Tourists don’t gather here, but there’s a steady kind of life to it.

Kyoto’s street rhythm is unhurried. Building heights are restricted by ordinance, in part, and most houses here are one or two stories.

From the flowers and plants set at the entrances facing the street, I can sense the people who care for them. The work of watering, the time spent picking off dead leaves. Those things seep into the street, even though they aren’t visible. That may be why time here feels unhurried.

I came back exactly one hour later. My wife and son had been exploring the hotel. Ace Hotel Kyoto has shops and restaurants on-site, so there’s plenty to see inside.

Now it was my turn to watch our son. My wife went out for ramen. It was just our son and me in the room.

I looked back through the photos I had just taken.

This trip wasn’t for taking photographs. And yet I had taken plenty.

Flowers at the entrances. Plants. Things I had never paid much attention to. My eye seems to be drawn to them now. Is it because I am raising a child? Without realizing it, I had started to notice the act of caring.

I glanced over at our son. Through the slats of the crib the hotel had set up, he was staring out the window. He is always trying to take in everything in front of him.

I looked out the window. I am learning to see the world through his eyes.

On the last day, we had breakfast at Inoda Coffee, and spent the time before checkout in the room listening to records. It was my wife’s first time learning how to play one. Placing the record carefully on the platter, lowering the needle into position. The motion seemed to stay with her.

“Maybe we should get a record player,” she said.

Our trip wouldn’t make a YouTube video. The footage would probably be awkward. But now, looking back through the photos, I think that was enough.

After years of walking around Tokyo, I have come to remember the places where light falls.

From the gaps between Tokyo’s buildings of different heights, light sometimes falls on a single spot.

For example, when I’m walking with my wife on a sunny day. Even while we talk, I keep looking around. “Light is hitting that spot,” I think, and I check my watch and remember the time.

And then I return to that spot. It might be the next day. It might be the next year.

This light only appears in this season, at this hour. The height and angle of the buildings match the path of the sun for only a few days each year.

People’s lives appear in the light.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

As I wrote recently in “From followers to subscribers,” I want to keep Beyond The Frame as a place where photographs and thoughts build up over time. I think of it as a body of work. Starting today, there is a way to support that.

The following will remain free to read, as before:

• Essays that share photographs and life from my own point of view

• The Visual Notes series

Subscribe now

What do paid subscribers receive?

1. Paid subscribers will have access to subscriber-only posts, which I plan to publish about once a week. These posts will be closer to the process behind Beyond The Frame: photography, freelance work, Japan, and the questions that come with making this newsletter part of my work.

2. Paid subscribers can send questions. If you want advice, another point of view, or want to ask about my experience, please feel free to send a question. I will choose some of them and answer them in subscriber-only posts. They may not be direct answers so much as a way of thinking together. If I use your question in an article, I will follow your credit preference. As a small thank you, I will extend the paid subscription of anyone whose question is used by 90 days.

3. When I release new books in the future, I will share early information and discount offers with paid subscribers.

4. My sincere gratitude for supporting this work.

About Founding Members

Founding Members ($150) receive my photobook, including shipping, and my Lightroom presets. After you subscribe, I will send an email with instructions on how to receive them.

One note. Because of tariff-related issues, shipping to the United States is currently paused. If you live in the United States, I will send the photobook once shipping resumes. International shipping to countries other than the United States is still available.

What is in today’s paid section

I am accepting questions and comments through the Reader Survey.

In the paid section, I write about why Beyond The Frame reached 9,300 subscribers in a short time, and what readers have taught me through comments.

Read more