I had a lovely surprise today. A while ago I sent my friend Chris Bunting some photos for a book he was working on. Well, the book is out – and what a fantastic book it is too.

My photos are the ones of the sake brewery (not the cover photo, the sake casks or the B&W photo – although funnily enough the brilliant drinking game photo is actually from an exhibition by Hans Brinckmann I organised a while back).

Chris is the author of  Nonjatta, the definitive Japanese whisky blog, a great writer and – going on the evidence of this book – a world class barfly. This comprehensive guide to everything alcoholic in Japan is going to be a classic I’m sure. Proud to be part of it. Kampai!

You can buy the book here and it has it’s own website too: drinkingjapan.com.

Cherry blossom.

It’s a challenge to find a new way to shoot sakura any year, but this year was particularly difficult.

(These were taken using a Takumar 55mm lens on a Nikon D700)

(Tokyo Photojournalist on Facebook)

Even at a time like this, people need music. Perhaps, at a time like this,  they need it more than ever.

On Tuesday I received this email from Robert Ryker, Music Director of the Tokyo Sinfonia. It was about a concert that some time ago we’d arranged I’d photograph – I was surprised to hear that the concert was still going ahead:

To a few musical friends,

Japan is facing serious upheavals in the lives of the people. Even in Tokyo, we are enduring disruptions to transportation, rolling blackouts in electric power, shortages of foodstuffs for daily consumption, and the eerie feeling that possible meltdowns in Japan’s nuclear powerplants may further exacerbate the national disaster.

Of course I have considered carefully what we should do. The Tokyo Sinfonia members and I are professional musicians — what we do is make music. So Monday, as best we could, that’s what we did, rehearsing for Friday’s concert, a Tchaikovsky Serenade.

Five of our players could not get there because their trains were not running. I rehearsed with those who came. We had to stop at three as the electric power was then about to be cut off. We skipped lunch and played straight through without a break. No one complained. We just did what we do.

We plan to perform this Friday, of course. Our concert is not a social event; it is an evening of solace. People need to keep balance in their lives. So, God willing, we’ll be there to perform for those who are there.

We’ll dedicate the concert to the victims of the disaster. We’ll put a donation box in the lobby. We’ll add the income from CD sales to the donations. And, most appropriately, the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana is the awesomely beautiful Preghiera (prayer).

It’s our way of helping. Please be with us, if you can, Friday evening at Oji Hall.

Robert Ryker

(Tokyo Photojournalist on Facebook)

The atmosphere is Tokyo right now is hard to describe: a mixture of horror, weariness and unease. Like everyone else here I’ve been glued to the TV and internet for days.

Yesterday morning was the low point so far for me. When the media started reporting on rising radiation at the Fukushima plant I agreed with my wife that she and our two children should travel to stay with the grandparents in west Japan. Tokyo is a stressful place right now.

I wasn’t the person with that idea and Tokyo station was crowded with families so I stayed there a while to take these photos.

The poor children in north Japan. I just read this heartrending story by my colleague Julian Ryall.

I took about two hundred portraits of runners at the Tokyo Marathon last Sunday, 100 at the start and 100 at the finish – all with my trusty nifty-fifty. I had a press pass courtesy of EURObiZ Japan. They’ll be a photo story in the magazine soon.

I wanted to show the excitement of the start line and the exhaustion of the finish line. Not sure I quite managed to do that. The start photos were fine, but as soon as I pointed a camera at anyone at the finish they broke into a huge smile. They were giving me the elation rather than the exhaustion.

Still, these are some of my favourites. (The first guy was dressed as a bunch of grapes)

START…

FINISH…

I’ve had a few stories in the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan magazine before now, but this is the first time on the cover.

A project close to my heart too. As I wrote in the text (see below) to go with these portraits, I have enormous respect for the people producing Japan’s fantastic food and drink. They live their work in a way that we Tokyo strap-hangers find hard to truly understand. And they face a very uncertain future.

I wonder what Sugiura-san will think about his family being on the cover of this magazine? I’m going to send him a copy.

Food for thought

The quickest way to a country’s heart, this journalist reckons, is through its stomach. The stories on Japanese food I’ve covered over the years have been a fabulous opportunity. I’ve visited parts of Japan I never knew existed and sampled some occasionally strange, often spellbinding, food.

I’ve met some remarkable people: a Shizuoka wasabi farmer (tough as a boot after years bent double in freezing mountain steams); a Tokyo fruit-vinegar ‘sommelier’ (dapper and fantastically camp); a Kobe-beef restaurateur (bull-necked and brash); a Tsukiji kamaboko fishcake factory owner (an extraordinary businessman; you’d have to be to think of selling the stuff); a Chiba sake brewer (who decided on a new sake range after seeing a UFO floating over the shrine behind his brewery) – to name just a few.

They all impressed me with their sincerity and dedication. The also granted me glimpses of the profound crisis facing the countryside and the awesome challenge Japan will have simply to sustain current food production, never mind modernize it.

The plight of the countryside is as desperate – and obdurately ignored – as any of the many facing Japan. As the head of the Keidanren told an FCCJ presser in January, well over half of Japan’s farmers are past retirement age. The average farm is tiny and hopelessly inefficient. Even if Japanese agriculture became profitable who would work the rice paddies? In a few years Japan may not have much agriculture at all.

My head tells me that Japan’s attempts to protect its rural economy are failing. I’ve seen the ghost towns and the fallow fields. I’ve spoken to the farmers who complain that almost every young person with any ability or ambition takes the first train to the city at the age of 20.

But my – by now almost Japanese – gut argues something different. Belatedly, I’ve come to understand the visceral importance of food here. Coming from England – a country with effectively no native high cuisine – it took me a while to comprehend how a people could actually define themselves by their food (and by extension the place where is made). I suspect that Japanese people will never swallow arguments of economic efficiency when food is involved.

The farmers themselves haven’t given up. I’ve met many second, third generation presidents of tiny food companies in far corners of Japan. They have told me about their involvement in “rural revitalization” projects (read, heroic struggles against the slow death of their hometowns). I’ve met few young ex-urbanites who swapped a life of convenience, if not always comfort, for exhausting farm-work for low pay in towns where the most significant social events are funerals.

But I still envy them for their lives and work. They don’t just make food, although they do that exceptionally well, many are the guardians of centuries old traditions. The fruit of their labours is appreciated all over Japan, and increasingly abroad. They are one of the few hopes for the Japanese countryside; they provide employment and encourage tourism; increasingly many spearhead local environmental efforts.

An aged Japan economy could well encounter an unpalatable future. But whatever happens, I’ve no doubt that Japanese people will keep eating the best food in the world. I’m privileged to have met and photographed some of the people producing it.

They say that the young should eat to live, the middle-aged eat and live, and the old live to eat. Perhaps that applies to nations too?

Tony McNicol is editor of EURObiZ Japan, the magazine of the European Chamber of Commerce in Japan.

 

Here’s an unlikely Tokyo tourist attraction, definitely in the category of places I would NEVER have gone if I wasn’t a journalist.

Apparently, this is the largest flood protection civil engineering project in the world. It is open to the public and the tours are free, but you need to speak some Japanese. I recommend booking well in advance – and checking the weather forecast!

Also, if you want to take photos, you’d better be quick. The pre-tour lecture takes a good 30 minutes (include compulsory stretching) – and then you get only 10 minutes in the cavern itself.

This is the text from the photo story I did recently for EURObiZ Japan:

The Parthenon of Saitama

Deep in the Tokyo suburbs, behind a grey door in an empty field, and down a long narrow staircase, is a 177m by 78m cavern. Its 18m-high ceiling is supported by fifty-nine 500 ton pillars. Designed to help channel rainwater safely into the Edo river and help protect the flood-prone Naka basin, the cavern has been dubbed Saitama Prefecture’s Parthenon.

The project’s official name – the Water Discharge Tunnel on The Outskirts of the Metropolitan Area – is less charismatic. But the facility is a breathtaking feat of Japanese civil engineering. As well as the cavern, it includes five underground water storage tanks joined by 6.3km of tunnel, each large enough to house the Statue of Liberty. The system’s four pumps are driven by modified aircraft turbine engines with enough power to drain a 25m swimming pool every second.

Since its completion in 2002 the system has been used more than 60 times, saving countless residents from injury and thousands of homes from destruction.

The biennial festival near our house has become something of a project for me. I helped carry the shrine for the third time this year and took a few portraits while resting my bruised shoulders.

These were all shot with a 50mm lens at f2.0 on D200 body. The sensor size on the D200 makes the lens close to a standard portrait, but still fairly unobtrusive. (The D200 is my backup camera – in case I trip and get trampled under the shrine.)

The other essential kit is sun and sake.

One thing the English (I’m from England) and the Japanese share in common – other than constantly talking about the weather – is a love of tea.

Last year I was asked to write about green tea and interview Masamitsu Takau, a registered “tea sommelier”. When I checked out his website I was surprised and pleased to find his green tea shop, Shigetsuen” within walking distance of my home. He is the third generation of his family to run the shop.

As well as selling tea, Takau runs tea classes in his shop, researches the brew and travels the world lecturing on tea. He told me he’s been to the US four times, Europe four times and Taiwan eight times. He’s also written several books.

As Takau explained to me, the tea he deals in isn’t the rarefied brew of the tea ceremony. He makes and sells the ordinary Japanese cuppa. “I’m involved in something that is part of everyday life: how to enjoy tea.”

This is bancha, a lower grade green tea.

This is some of the good stuff. Hand rolled.

The tea in his shop is shrink-wrapped on the premises.

We chatted a little about green tea around the world. One fascinating thing I learned was that at the time of World War One, Americans actually drank more green tea than black tea – albeit they drank it just like black tea, ie with milk and sugar.

Meanwhile, in Japan, what is now everyday green tea (sencha) was too precious for anything except export.

As you might expect, Takau was pretty scathing about the popularity of PET bottle tea (“It all tastes the same”). Sadly, people simply don’t have time or the patience to brew up any more.

Green tea, Dec 2009 – Images by Tony McNicol

A while ago I posted on shops for new camera kit in Tokyo. Here’s the companion to that, a short list of my favorite used camera shops in Tokyo. But before I get started, a caveat:

Please bear in mind that this is a very subjective list; these are just places I’ve been recommended or stumbled across. I have bought and sold at some, but not all, and apologies if I have missed somewhere important.

5 shops, in no particular order . . .

1) Fujiya Camera, Nakano

Nakano was Tokyo geek central before Akihabara, and it has some of the best hobby shops in Tokyo, including cameras. There are several Fujiya shops in a small area. The biggest one has used cameras on the second floor. Check out Mandarake while you are in Nakano. No cameras, but everything else you could imagine!

2) Sanpo Camera, Meguro

Sanpo is the most inconviently situated of this list, but I suspect that is the point. They are VERY cheap. I’m not so sure about their used cameras, but they kitted me out with a new DLSR kit not so long ago for much less than anywhere else I could find. A favourite of pros.

3) Map Camera, Shinjuku

Right round the corner from Yodobashi camera Shinjuku West exit. There are about 5 or 6 used camera shops within a stone’s through of this one but Map is the biggest and best. I just sold them a lens the other day and they were super-efficient. I’ve always had good advice from the staff too.

4) Sakuraya, Akihabara, Shinjuku etc

There are Sakura camera shops dotted all around Tokyo and Japan, actually a chain of used camera shops, and how that is economically feasible, I have no idea. In any case, they have lots of extremely cheap classic cameras. I bought a Yashica Samurai for 1000 yen in one the other day.  It came with a free battery worth 800 yen!

5) Lemonsha, Ginza

By no means the cheapest of the above, but my favourite. Lots of Leica, a fair selection of Nikon and Canon, medium format etc. They stock other collectables like fountain pens and watches too. (I’m writing a story on Seiko right now). They have a little coffee machine and seating area, so its perfect for a break during an afternoon of ginbura.

Lastly, my friend Alfie Goodrich has a great post on his local camera shop. There are hundreds of small and (mostly) friendly camera shops in Tokyo and around Japan. Good luck on finding your own favourite!