Tokyo photojournalist » news

The fight against “Paris Syndrome”

tony — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:48:43 +0000

Here’s a fun photo story from the Reuter’s blog. A group of Japanese expats in Paris are helping tidy the city in an attempt to ammeliorate the symptoms of “Paris Syndrome”.

According to Wikipedia, Paris Syndrome is:

“a constellation of symptoms primarily affecting mood which affects visitors working and vacationing in Paris, France.”

Basically, Japanese women who grew up reading Palace of Versailles set manga and watching films like Amelie arrive in Paris to have their illusions instantly shattered by cigarette-butt littered streets and narky waiters.

Some vistors are driven to nervous breakdown. In 2006 the BBC reported that the Japanese embassy in Paris had to repatriate four tourists with a medic on the plane to help them in their distressed state.

I’ve always suspected a corresponding Tokyo Syndrome actually, people who come expecting servile robots and nymphomaniac women (or perhaps the reverse).

And there’s no-one repatriate the victims of that malady! I guess they just take up residence in the corner of a Roppongi Irish bar.

local flower festival

tony — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:10:57 +0000

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 portable shrine is carried past the old flower growing houses, and through the park.

What a perfect setting and perfect day. A few sakura trees were in full bloom: a late flowering variety.

I’ve been using my D200 as a back-up/home snap-shot camera ever since I upgraded to the D700. This was with the Tokina F4 12-24. Not bad at all. The Tokina is pretty fuzzy in the corners at F4 but the reds and greens are really vibrant.

I shooting in RAW recently. Only a few simple adjustments here – mostly boosting shadow detail.

I was carrying my 2 year old son with my left arm as I took these shots. Luckily he was pretty well distracted by all the noise.

This is the mikoshi heading off to the far end of the park where there’s a little Japanese primose display.

I’ll ask if I can help carry the shrine next year!

Entomophagy in Japan

tony — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:40:11 +0000

My story on bug-eating was on the front page of the Japan Foreign Correspondent’s Club magazine this month. Hope it’s not on display in the restaurant.

The photos were picked up by the UK’s Telegraph newspaper too and run as a slideshow. (Many thanks to the Telegraph’s generous food critic Japan correspondent Julian Ryall for tipping me off to this story. It was one of the most fun, albeit stomach churning, stories I’ve done in a while.

If this has wet your appetite, I’ve pasted the text of the story below.

Shoichi Uchiyama first experienced the exquisite pleasures of entomophagy (insect-eating) in 1998. He and some friends had visited an exhibition on the subject. Inspired, on the way back they stopped near a river, caught some moth caterpillars, and barbecued them for dinner. It was love at first bite – Uchiyama had caught the entomophagy bug.

A decade later Uchiyama is Japan’s leading insect-eating evangelist. He has a Japanese-language blog on the topic: http://musikui.exblog.jp/ that gets 400 visitors a day and is the author of a recent cookbook on bug cuisine, Tanoshii Konchu Ryori (Fun Insect Cooking).

At his suburban Tokyo home, Uchiyama offers me some Taiwanese tagame (a kind of giant water bug). I politely decline and tell him I’ve just had lunch. Uchiyama turns the freshly boiled insect upside down, cuts through its underbelly with a pair of kitchen scissors, then nibbles on the tender yellowy meat inside. “The flesh is quite fruity; it smells like bananas, but the taste is more like pears,” he says. I’m happy to take his word for it.

On his living room table sits a feast of creepy crawly cuisine. There is a plate of sushi with toppings of Japanese cicada, pregnant joro spider, sakura moth caterpillar and Madagascar cockroach. Uchiyama’s wife, Chisato, helped him prepare the praying mantis tofu and locusts on sticks. “Deep frying is the best way to cook insects,” says Mrs. Uchiyama, “like fish and chips.”

The Uchiyamas both hail from mountainous Nagano, where there is a long tradition of insect-eating due to the lack of easy access to protein in the form of seafood. Locals are particularly partial to locusts, stonefly larvae and silkworm cocoons cooked in sugar and soy sauce. The Uchiyamas say it was a relatively short step to sampling more unusual bugs. Uchiyama says that there are at least 10 kinds of tasty bugs to catch near his home. During the summer he collects his own cicadas (“they freeze well”). There are hundreds more edible insects worldwide, he notes.

Uchiyama also heads an insecteating club that meets once a month and holds events to catch and cook bugs. Spring is larvae time, cicadas are in season insummer, and autumn offers fine locusts. Surprisingly, poisonous bugs are rare, Uchiyama claims. “Insects are much safer than, say, mushrooms,” he says. Insects can also be eaten raw “as long as they are fresh.” Are there any bad-tasting bugs? Apparently stag beetles eat a lot of rotten vegetation, so are best avoided.

Uchiyama is a passionate entomophagy advocate. “Insects are very nutritious and they are all around us,” he enthuses, suggesting they could be a solution to food shortages and even food-safety worries. Insects are high in protein and low in fat, Uchiyama continues. The shells boast lots of calcium and provide plenty of roughage. “It would be great if elementary schools could teach insect-eating,” he muses. “Teachers could take the kids down to the local river to catch bugs, then cook them together.”

These days everyone wants to know about where their food comes from, so what better than rearing your own protein source? It’s impossible to keep a pig or cow in a Tokyo apartment, but a small tank of cockroaches would be very practical, he notes. In the end, I don’t try any of Uchiyama’s cuisine, using the excuse of being too busy taking photos. Or perhaps as an Englishman I’ve had plenty of opportunities tosample unpalatable-looking food.

“Insects aren’t dirty,” he stresses, as I wrinkle my nose at a toasted locust. “Humans were made to eat them and they are good for our bodies. Try them once and you will be hooked.”

insect sushi

eating insects

Here’s a link to the full gallery on my archive: insect eating in Japan

Junichiro Koizumi, Alex Kerr, and why the global depression might be good for Japan

tony — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:06:25 +0000

If I had a nice shot of a Japanese funeral, I would have put it here with the caption “RIP Japan”. Ten years in Japan and I’ve never been so disgusted at the crooks, fools, now drunks that claim to be leading the country.

Everyone has seen the coverage our ex-Finance Minister, Shoichi “Lemsip” Nakagawa. Justin McCurry of the Guardian newspaper had a great story.

You’ve got to wonder how much more the Japanese public can take? The last Prime Minster to be actually chosen by the people was Junichiro Koizumi back in 2005. Two other unelected failures have come and gone since, and Aso now has an approval rating of less than 10%.

I saw Koizumi in the flesh for the first time last week at the gastronomy summit. He was looking pretty pensive most of the time – plotting Aso’s downfall one hopes.

There have been rumours of a Koizumi comeback for a while. But I hope he has got more sense. Saving the LDP once (back in 2005) was once more than Japan needed.

Thinking about the risible economic and politcal situation in Japan though I was reminded of something Alex Kerr wrote in the final chapter of Dogs and Demons in 2001:

“At the turn of the century, hopes for the future [of Japan] remain balanced between revolution and stagnation. Stagnation is most likely in the absence of a major shock to the system, such as a wholesale economic crash. But revolution could happen. . . .

Sadly for Japan, a crash is highly unlikely. The chances are that for the next decade or two there will never come a moment when the nation stare’s disaster right in the face.”

Maybe we are staring disaster in the face? We’ve certainly had stagnation, and now here’s the wholesale economic crash.

Where’s the revolution?

Super Handicapped Pro-Wrestling

tony — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:55:07 +0000

disabled wrestler

Earlier this year I did a story on a group of disabled wrestlers called Doglegs: Super Handicapped Pro-wrestling.

It sounds like the most incredibly crass bad taste idea ever. But after actually seeing one of their events I kind of understood why the wrestlers said it was empowering for them. These photos are from a tournament in the center of Tokyo. 350 people came to watch.

Wrestler “Orochi” chops “L’amant” in the neck. Both wrestlers suffer from cerebral palsy. Only attacks to afflicted areas are disallowed . . .

disabled wrestling

The wrestlers’ included men and women with sight and hearing impairments, mental disabilities, wheelchair users, diabetes and cerebral palsy.

Yasuhiro Kayahara, AKA “No Sympathy”, gets helped out of the arena after his bout. Everybody knows pro-wrestling was fake, but I can tell you that this kind isn’t. I was taking photos ringside and I saw the blood on the canvas.

handicapped wrestler

Doglegs are on YouTube as well . . .

My photos and story on doglegs are available from the Rex Features agency.

Here’s a link to all my disabled wrestling photos on my archive.

Tsukiji knife photos

tony — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:55:18 +0000

[UPDATE 23 Nov 2008: All the photos in my online archive here, Tsukiji knife photos ]

[UPDATE 10 Oct 2008: The full story is now on the wesbite of Rex Features: here]

I’ve been taking photos of a 240 year old knife shop in Tsukiji fish market. This is the owner of the shop sharpening a cooking knife. If you buy a knife at the shop you can bring it back to be sharpened for free.

Tsukiji knife sharpener

Here he is with a tuna knife (the knives tuna dealers in the market use to slice up the fish). He told me that the knives were a blend of Japanese sword-making techniques and Western knife technology.

sharpening a tuna knife

The tuna knife is taller than he is! For a long time the shop was the sole tuna knife supplier at Tsukiji.

Tsukij knife shop

otaku dominoes

tony — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:46:04 +0000

I was at the Big Site exhibition hall in Odaiba last weekend covering one of Tokyo’s many otaku events. (Deep deep into geek territory for a series of articles on Japanese pop culture exports right now)

This one was for model makers and figure collectors: everything from Tamiya tanks to latex Godzillas

I got there about 12 in the afternoon and found the whole place crawling with police and worried looking organizers. Apparently, about an hour earlier one of the huge elevators in the central hall had suddenly started moving backwards. Otaku dominoes! Scary.

Thanks Tokyomango

Interviewed

tony — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:29:36 +0000

Not so long ago I was interviewed for a magazine published by the Japan Foundation. The article is here - all in Japanese I am afraid.

As it was part of a series on students of Japanese and their jobs, they asked me to take along some of the texts I had used to learn Japanese. I chose two manga books and a collection of poetry by Aida Mitsuo.

Hopefully I come across better than my last online interview, where I ended up suggesting I did most of my research by reading manga.

Kabuki props

tony — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 13:08:37 +0000

Working on an article about Kabuki props at the moment. Mattias Westfalk took this photo at the props company we visited today.

View image

Horiemon

tony — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 08:57:08 +0000

very interesting analysis of the Livedoor scandal from the Japan Today website.

click here