Tsukiji
Share Tsukiji fish market is quickly turning into the photo destination in Tokyo. It’s colourful, chaoatic and real. It’s open 24 hours a day and about 10,000 people work there. What could be better? (Just ignore the fact that officially the public, including tourists, aren’t allowed in the market). Tsukiji fish market I took my [...]
Sweet and sour
Share When I met Mitsuyasu Uchibori he gave me a business card that read “Summelier No 001″. He is Japan’s premier vinegar sommelier. (Su-memlier is a pun on the Japanese word of vinegar, su.) And quite the showman . . . Uchibori runs a 130 year old vinegar company in central Japan and a chain [...]
Tasting danger
Share As I’ve written on this blog before, Tsukiji is about my favourite place in Tokyo. For anyone who’s interested in food – indeed in Japan – there is a lifetime’s worth of stuff to see, eat, learn and photograph. These photos are from a long feature I did recently on fugu (blowfish). Someone I [...]
135 years of Japanese wine-making
Share I writing this from frigid December Bath in the UK. Brrrr. I think these photos are actually making me feel colder. At the end of summer I travelled up to Katsunuma in Yamanashi prefecture. The area is home to Japan’s largest winemaker, Mercian, and 80 odd little wineries open for visiting and tasting. Katsunuma’s [...]
Power to the People
Share Apologies for the long silence. It has been quite a busy few weeks at Tokyo Photojournalist, to say the least. I have just started editing a new magazine. More on that anon. In the meantime, here is a set of photos I took in the Autumn. When I saw this press trip advertised to [...]
Second class food?
Share Perhaps only Japan would have an event celebrating “2nd class food”? It’s probably something to do with the fact that even the fast food in Japan tends to be very good. This year the B1 Grand Prix was held in Yokote-city up in Akita prefecture. B1 stands for B-Class Gourmet, foods like yakisoba, okonomiyaki, [...]
Red Light District
Share A selection of photos from a personal project I’ve been working on recently. Street photography is pretty much how I started out, and I still love it. But not much time for wandering the backstreets of Tokyo these days. For want of imagination I’ve called the project Tokyo Red. Other name suggestions welcome!
The oldest city in Japan
Share For a notably low-key city, Fukuoka has a fair few superlatives to its name. It is Japan’s closest city to Korea which means it can lay claim to being Japan’s oldest city. In other words, it was the first beachhead of civilization from the Asian mainland. These days Fukuoka has some of the strongest [...]
A hot assignment
Share Nambu Tekki ironware is a specialty of Iwate Prefecture in Northern Japan. I took these photos for a travel story last summer. This is the oven where they heat the pots and give them a special anti-rust layer of oxidised metal. The technique dates back to the Edo period. Nambu Tekki pots This was [...]
Poland photos
Share Not Japan and not photojournalism per se, but I’ve been meaning to post these here for a while. The summer before last I visited Poland with my family and trusty GR1. We were visiting my Polish relatives, but it was my first time to Poland since school. I was quite shocked at how little [...]
All you ever wanted to know about Kamaboko (likely more)
Share There are some photographic subjects that are not exactly obviously photogenic. This was definitely one: Kamaboko AKA Japanese fish cake. I was shooting the white pasty food for an airline magazine. So what to do? I visited a kamaboko factory in the inner Tsujiki fish market and the same company’s kamaboko shop in the [...]
Karl Bengs, German-Japanese Architecture
Share This story was on the way back from Niigata early spring this year. Karl Bengs is a German architect who first visited Japan in 1966. He buys old Japanese farmhouses, dismantles them then rebuilds them in his own distinctive style and with all mod cons (like proper insulation and heating). This photo was taken [...]
Wrestling with disability
Share I shot this story almost a year ago and its been a long wait to see it in print. But well worth it. Doglegs Superhandicapped Pro-Wrestling are a group of Tokyo disabled and able-bodied wrestlers. I first learnt about them through a great article in the Japan Times and shot one of their tournaments [...]
Brown’s Field farm – an alternative lifestyle in Chiba
Share When home is a fifty-something square meter Tokyo shoe box and the daily commute is shared with thousands in the same predicament, it’s easy to forget there are other ways of living. But photojournalist Everett Brown and macrobiotic cookbook writer Deco Nakajima remembered and did something about it. Brown’s Field is their remarkable and [...]
Sado Island
Share Sado ferry Sado seems to be one of those places that everyone talks about going to but few actually get to. After 10 years in Japan this was my first trip to the island, on a story for an airline magazine. First photos were on the ferry – a pretty chilly voyage as it [...]
Dashi and umami
Share Another shoot to add to my expanding menu of stories on Japanese food. This time I covered arguably the core ingredient of Japanese cuisine, the ingredient without which Japanese food probably wouldn’t exist: dashi fish stock. The first place I went to was Tsukiji Tamura a famous ryotei not far from the fish market [...]
sake brewery
Share More sake photos – this time of a fantastic brewery in Chiba. The sake-kura is called Terada Honke. Many thanks to photographer and friend Everett Kennedy Brown for the introduction. The special thing about the brewery is their completely traditional methods. They use organic rice and natural sake yeast that lives in the walls [...]
Japan Sake Fair
Share The annual Japan Sake Fair at Ikebukuro Sunshine City must be the best kept secret of the alcohol world. 3000 yen for all the sake you can drink, from all over Japan, and the best sake in Japan to boot. sake fair On the plus side I had a free press pass. On the [...]
The Seiko-Epson Micro Artist Studio
Share The Micro Artist Studio in Nagano prefecture is where Seiko-Epson make their Sonnerie luxury watch. I was up there for a story earlier this year. Each Sonnnerie costs 15.7 million yen and is made from 630 parts over 12 months. There are 12 “micro-artists” in the workshop but all the watches are assembled by [...]
Miso photos
Share One of the best things about being a journalist are the tit-bits of knowledge pick up along the way and which can really enrich your life. This story I recently did on miso is a good example. I’m not sure I’d ever had proper miso before, but I doubt I’ll be able to go [...]
An explosive assignment
Share Question: How do you launch a 120cm diameter, 420kg “yonshakudama” fireworks shell – the largest in the world? Answer: Spend a year making it, bury a length of ex-oil pipeline in the ground, insert the shell, blast it 800 meters in the air, make sure spectators stay nearly a kilometer away, watch and enjoy. [...]
local flower festival
Share I was out in the park with my son this afternoon and came across this! It’s the local “sakurasaoh matsuri” – as written on the pink lantern. My landlord says that our local area used to belong to sakurasoh (Japanese primose) growers. During this festival – the primoses are in bloom now – a [...]
photo “licensing” and working for free
Share I had no idea that pictures of astronaut underpants were in such demand. This week, I’ve had three websites pick up on my blog post and story about Koichi Wakata’s experiments on the International Space Station. One was a large Finish website who linked to my blog and sent several thousand visitors. Welcome Finns, [...]
