After years of doom and gloom with discontinuation announcements, Fujifilm have issued a statement about the re-release of the famed Neopan Acros in 35mm and 120 Format scheduled for fall this year.

This is an exciting development and of course it will be available in our web store.

To purchase in 120 format please click here and for 135 format here.

While we are eagerly awaiting the release and shipment of the new MS Optics (former MS Optical) MS Apoqualia-G/Apolia-G 35/f1.4 lens, Tokyo premium camera boutique Map Camera has announced a lens named MS Optics Reiroal 35/f1.4, which is now available for pre-order exclusively on the Map Camera web site at the price of ￥143,800.

The Map Original lens is limited to 100 pieces and is produced in a very attractive “platinum chrome plated” finish, including a vented MS Smart Hood. Map have also put together a nice special feature page around Mr Miyazaki’s lens craft, which offers some behind the scene photos on how the lenses are made in his basement workshop. The site also explains the origin of the lens name. It is based on a poem called “Aomori Elegy” composed in the 1920s as part of “Spring and Shura” poetry, where the term “Reiro lens” appeared in one episode, which Map Camera have then based the lens name on.

We hope you find these MS Optics lens news of interest and welcome questions or comments.

For those wishing to be placed on a notification list for the Apoqualia 35/f1.4 lens which is set for release in October, please register on the product listing page.

Royal Road is the Way of Bronica from Japan Exposures on Vimeo.

In 2010 I met up with Tony Hilton, the author of the book Bronica: The Early History and Definitive Collector’s Guide. Tony and I went to a place in north-west Tokyo called Kami-Itabashi, trying to find remaining traces of Zenzaburo Yoshino’s camera company.

Be sure to also read the previous article Mr. Zenza’s Rolls-Royce.

Since then, many hundreds of these tiny wonders have been sold and reached the camera bodies of people all over the world. This is not limited to the original 35mm focal length, as later a 28mm, 24mm and most recently a 21mm super-wide Perar followed suit.

At Japan Exposures, we would like to celebrate this and are calling all photographers who have taken pictures using this Super Tpirlet Triplet lens. Our aim is to collect images from everyone and everwhere, then to pick the 100 best images and put them in a printed book to be handed to Mr Miyazaki (alert: this is a surprise and he does not know about this yet!). That way he can see how far his creations have travelled and what people have captured with them.

Japan Exposures was founded in 2004 and was the first site offering photo equipment, lens conversions, films and camera & parts sourcing from Japan. Since the beginning, we have been very happy to be able to work with Mr Miyazaki. This little project is meant to be a token of appreciation to him and his work.

We hope that you share this sentiment and would like to invite you to participate by submitting your photograph(s) to us. We will keep you informed on the developments of this endevour and at a later stage you will have the opportunity to purchase the book yourself.

You will find practical guidance below on how to submit your material.

Thank you and please spread the word to all “Perargraphers”!

Current Status

Editing— We are no longer accepting submissions and are editing entries for including in the book. Thanks!

 Submission Guidelines and Procedure

We will use Flickr to manage submissions. If you donâ€t use or like Flickr, please email us.

1. Please join the Flickr group The Perar Book and add your image to group pool.
2. Please include the following info with your image in the description field or tags:
   • Lens used (and if possible serial number); it’s sufficient if you just state the focal length i.e. 21, 24, 28, 35. Example: Perar 28 #065 (MS Super Triplet Perar 28/4 serial number 065)
   • Your location country or the location country where the image was taken (supposed to indicate where the lens went)
3. Should your image get selected, we will later approach you privately to give you the option to provide your real name for credits and a high-resolution file for printing
4. If we cannot ascertain the above information, we may reject the image on these grounds

Please also see this gallery with more images from Nakafuji’s STREET RAMBLER.

STREET RAMBLER is available in the Japan Exposures Book Shop.

I also have spent many hours, if not days, taking long walks in various Japanese cities taking photographs. The photo walk is a common activity and popular in Japan. The goal was to take photos of people in the streets going on about their daily business. Taking photos this way is surely pleasurable and even more so it is to find that you have taken interesting photographs that are worth showing to others. You go into the darkroom or work on the computer and do your processing, crank up contrast and the intensity of your pictures. You think of the next place that you could go or travel to, to take more photos. But the thought that keeps lingering in my mind is the second meaning of the ramble. The lack of goal, purpose or direction. Not that these are necessary all of the time. Still, it somewhat leaves a void and the thought that perhaps the rambler is not privileged, but condemned to ramble, and the photographs may bear witness to this.

Takehiko Nakafuji has been traveling the world and documenting it for nearly 20 years. The following photographs come from his latest work, STREET RAMBLER, which sees Nakafuji in such diverse places as Cuba, New York, Paris, Russia, Shanghai, Berlin, and his native Tokyo.

STREET RAMBLER is available in the Japan Exposures Book Shop.

Terry Bennettâ€s fascinating book “Photography in Japan 1853-1912”

The book, which is digestibly structured in portions of decades, starts out with a fireworks of “firsts”. The first photograph taken in Japan, the first photograph taken of a Japanese, the first photograph taken by a Japanese, the first photo studio by Japanese and foreigners alike and even the first Paparazzo-type shot of a ruling Japanese Emperor. These events, however , are simply the correlation with developments of Japan as a whole. Photography is a side-effect of political and geo-political developments in Asia at a greater scale. We soon realise that this book is not only fascinating for the reader interested in photography alone, but provides ample historic and cultural context on Japan as a place as well. This is much appreciated and holds some surprises, even for those of us who think of ourselves as being familiar with it. For example, I was surprised that in those days it was prohibited for any Japanese to leave the country. Violations would be punished by execution. You can perhaps imagine (and this is covered in the book) the treatment of foreigners by the armed population.

Above: Japanese Wrestlers by T. Enami

Photography is always as much a technological phenomenon as it is a sociological one, perhaps even more so and even today. It should therefore not surprise anyone that the advance of photography in Japan is primarily driven by the rise of the medium in English-speaking countries, which is to say the United States and the British Empire. In these cultures, photography always seemed to have a special position. With a few exceptions, British and American residents are also the key persons bringing photography, sometimes on the sidelines of other engineering activity, into Japan. In an age where only the privileged were able to travel themselves, but the masses knew that the wider world existed, there was an enormous appetite for pictures taken in far-flung places. While our view focuses on Japan in this case, this is probably by no means exclusive to Japan.

The developments in trade, and especially maritime trade, make the arrival of photography on the sidelines of the forced opening of the country seem completely inevitable. The treaty forced into effect by Perryâ€s Black Ships triggered, what seemed like a primitive isolated jungle tribe to be propelled into modern civilisation as if a fast-forward button was pressed. It is fascinating to think about how much intellectual potential laid untapped during the feudal era Japan that ended in the 1850s.

Edward Meyer Kern, American Cemetery, Gyokusen-Ji Temple, Shimoda, Japan ca 1855

As one would expect, the early photographic activities are dominated by Western technology and personalities. In the course of a relatively short time — how appropriate for photographic history — a transition is made that put the medium into Japanese hands under Japanese cultural terms. It is a perfect adoption process at which end photography is comfortably embedded and placed into the Japanese cultural fabric, of course as one would expect it to occur in other cultures too. There is no further need for the rest of the world to steer the course of developments. This seems like an obvious truth that can also applied to other disciplines, but here photography serves as a suitable case study. There is one aspect, that Bennett occasionally highlights, which is to separate technical ability from artistic ability. These are, unsurprisingly, up to this day two different things in photography, in any culture.

The book is a fascinating treasure trove of information and artifacts, which I found surprisingly engaging and entertaining for the reader. The lifestyles and work ethics of the personalities involved make it a very vivid read. True to the somewhat ephemeral nature of photography itself, there are constant reminders on the perilous Japanese environs and the vulnerability of the photographic medium. Earthquakes and, above all, fires and more fires cause an entire artistic legacy to be lost forever. Add to that the curious practice of studios buying other photographers†works and marketing them as their own and you are set up for a never-ending mystery filled with conundrums around who did what and under what name! And more often than not, a sparkling career is ended by, what nowadays seem like trivial illnesses or conditions that were capable of ending someoneâ€s life. I was relieved to observe that life expectations increased over time and by the end of the book, there is the odd personality getting over 90 years old, whereas around 50 years seemed to be more common in the 1850s.

Once more regarding the repetition of history: the improvement of image quality afforded by 19th century photography, you can easily find yourself looking into the eyes of people, and to some extent scenery, that belie the fact that they existed over 100 years ago. Personalities, their desires and goals, their practices and methods do not seem to have changed enough to make it appear that it happened a long time ago. Perhaps not even the now dominating digital photography and the distribution means of the internet are really changing this — we might well be in the 1850s of the digital age right now. The photographic activities we see are just the manifestation of what has always been there and what we want photography to be for us.

Japan Exposures would like to thank Tuttle Publishing for their support during this review.

Top photo: Kusakabe Kimbei (1841-1934) circa 1880 location Yokohama, Japan hand painted albumen print

I had to go down to the Nadiff A/P/A/R/T bookstore last week — don’t ask me why they call themselves that — and they have a tiny gallery tucked into what must have once been a storage room in the basement. Tending to claustrophobia myself, and having bumped my head a few times on the narrow spiral staircase that descends down there, it may take the prize for my least favorite place to see a photography exhibit. (Perversely, it also happens to be where I saw one of the best exhibits of recent years — tiny 4×5 color landscapes of Toshio Shibata.)

Currently they’re showing Taiji Matsue, a photographer I quite like. However, not having paid any attention to the listing, I thought I had wandered into the wrong broom closet when I entered a completely dark room closed off with a black curtain, only to realize it wasn’t an exhibition of his photography at all but rather a single television auto-playing a video. (“Video installation” might be a tad generous). I was immediately turned off and was going to turn around, but just as I never leave a film or the dying cause of a lost sporting contest early, I forced myself to tough it out.

The video, or at least the seven or eight minute stretch that I saw, featured a single, fixed-camera shot of a busy Tokyo cityscape, one familiar to me from his new book TYO-WTC. Once I got past the initial urge to bolt from the room, the video grew on me and was actually quite interesting, my eye delighting in the various patterns that presented themselves in such a pedestrian view, and brought me back to my younger days when I used to eat up work of an ostensibly similar nature by such folks as Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, and to reflect with some regret on how much less patient I become with each passing year.

I don’t really see Matsue as a landscape artist but more like an earth artist or a geologist — which in fact is what he was before he turned to photography — but as we’re speaking loosely of landscapes, recently someone asked me to recommend to them some books of Japanese landscape work that were specifically “black and white and moody”. Aside from Kaiiki, which I had recently reviewed, I was hard-pressed to come up with any good examples, but the other day I finally got around to picking up Koji Onaka’s Twin Boat, which among other (frankly more important) things, would seem to meet the bill of “black and white, moody landscapes”.

I had actually passed over Onaka’s latest book for a couple of reasons. One, I simply adore his color work like Grasshopper and Dragonfly, and indeed both of those were my relatively late introduction to his work (along with Tokyo Candy Box), to the point where it was hard to accept that Onaka once worked in black and white. Secondly, I had assumed Twin Boat was, like Slow Boat which Schaden put out a few years ago, an American publication, owing to the publisher being Session Press in New York. While they are in fact the publisher, the book is really a joint publication between them and Onaka himself, and was edited by Miwa Susuda, a Japanese curator living in New York, and the book itself was printed here in Japan. So my biased bases covered, I promptly picked it up and I’m very glad I did.

Onaka’s book is certainly dark and moody in tonal palette (it seems as if a large handful of the images have been shot on days of bad weather), but it doesn’t strike me as psychologically moody. The photo from the book that I’ve included here has darkness, a looming sky, an expansive view (if not exactly a “landscape”), and in the eyes of this beholder, which is what matters most, an uplifting beauty. This is all to say that generic labels like “landscape” or loaded and heavily subjective terms like “dark” and “moody” are never the best way to talk about photography, but mea culpa we almost always over-rely on them. Speaking about talking about photography…

As Onaka’s popularity in Europe especially attests, the cachet of Japanese photography — and specifically Japanese photo books — shows no signs of abating. But as someone recently asked me, what about Japanese photo criticism? There’s plenty of tumblr-ing of Japanese photography, and certainly tons of blogs about it (this one included), but is there anyone writing about it at a more complex and nuanced level? Is there any criticism being written about Japanese photography that would be akin to say Max Kosloff, Alan Trachtenberg, Susan Sontag, or even someone in the slightly more popular vein of Janet Malcom?

My stock answer, gathered from inference and second-hand recommendations rather than primary knowledge, is Kotaro Iizawa, who has written innumerable books and was the founder and driving editorial force behind the 1990s journal Deja Vu. However, aside from some short essays, hardly any of his work is in English.

Recently though, I re-stumbled onto Minoru Shimizu’s semi-regular Critical Fieldwork essays over at the website for Art-It, the bilingual Japanese/English magazine about Asian Art. I confess I have not read all of the 38 essays posted there — Shimizu writes about other disciplines in addition to photography — but from what I have read I can tell that Shimizu certainly is someone worth reading. Particularly exciting for me is the prospect that Shimizu is not afraid of ruffling some well-preened feathers.

The Japanese photography “scene” as it were is a fairly chummy and mutual back-slapping place, by my observation, so when I read Shimizu refer to the work from a photographer that people seem to not be able to get enough of at the moment as “B-grade horror”, I had to take heart — not because they echo my own thoughts so much as they at least constitute a push-back against the fashionable tide. (The first footnote on that page consolidates this impression.) Superficial and reductive on my part, yes, but with only so many hours of the day and so much cheerleading to slog through, negativity is often a better tool for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Suda has been on my mind recently, spurred on by this altogether rare and insightful piece on Suda and then later by my conversation with the author, Ross Tunney, who was in town recently specifcally to see the Suda retrospective. (If he could make a 12-hour round trip just to see the Suda exhibition, well then really I have no excuse.)

When I do make it down to Syabi I always try to avail myself of their excellent reference library, and this time was no different. I particularly wanted to look again at two Suda books I don’t own, 人間の記憶 (Human Memory, 1996) and 犬の鼻 (A Dog’s Nose, 1991) — particularly the latter as Suda’s color work is still by and large ignored even amongst all the Suda exhibits and books we’ve been treated to recently. Both of these are excellent but unfortunately not really affordable on the used market. It would be great if both of these could be re-issued so I could affordably buy them, or perhaps not….

At the risk of biting the hand that sometimes feeds me, I’ve been thinking about the recent spate of re-issues such as the new Flash-up (Seiji Kurata), Suda’s Waga Tokyo 100 (both of those from Zen Foto), the reprint (or re-reprint) of Katsumi Watanabe’s Shinjuku Guntoden: 1965-1973, or the new facsimile editions of Daido Moriyama’s Another Country in New York, both of which are the latest in a string of re-issues from Akio Nagasawa Publishing they’ve done over the last couple of years. These are all worthy of once more seeing the light of the everyday, rather than languishing unseen and out of reach in the usually overpriced listings of AbeBooks, and most of them are very fine renditions indeed.

However — and I’ll admit right up front that I have no idea of the economics of putting these books out — do they all have to be so damn expensive? Speaking as a photo book lover, rather than a photo book store proprietor, I would much rather see more Errata Editions type of facsimile editions, which admirally accomplish several goals (of mine, not necessarily their’s or that of the publishers’ I mentioned above): allow people who have no access to the original to see the work; present the work as it was presented originally, but with better printing; provide context and perspective through contemporary essays; and make the books available to consumers at a very affordable price point. Japanese publishers are hardly the only guilty ones here it must be said. The German-based Only Photography has put out very nice — so people say, as I have never personally seen them — editions of work by Yutaka Takanashi, Suda, and Shomei Tomatsu. Nice and deserved, but not really priced at what sane people would call “affordable”.

For better or worse, Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is ubiquitous enough that hundred-dollar reprints are not yet in abundance. I caught Araki’s “Someone’s Wife” exhibit the other day at Rat Hole Gallery. I went down there to pick up a book and probably would have given the show a miss otherwise, but I’m glad I got to see it. The subject of the series is hitozuma, which the gallery translates into the vaguely innocent-sounding “someone’s wife”, while the translation I’m more familiar with is the altogether more titillating “another man’s wife”. (If you’re after a more culturally accurate English equivalent, “MILF” is what you want — for those not familiar with that term, I recommend you search Google for it when you are not at work).

Araki has over the last 15 years produced quite a number of “Hitozuma” books (in the main series of this type of work, 人妻エロスor hitozuma eros, published by Futabasha, Araki released #17 this past March). They’re a bit slick but I quite like them. However, I only own one since to the casual eye of say, my wife, having more than one of them would be the equivalent of a teenager with mound of Penthouse magazines stuffed under his mattress.

The exhibit at Rat Hole features about 15 large black and white portraits of middle-aged women exposing their unclothed bodies in various degrees of nudity that we assume is the limit of what they’re comfortable with, each one daubed in brightly colored paint that Araki has often employed in recent years and here uses as a way to censor the images in the same way that his books of old featured black strips over women’s private parts.

Thus superficially the tone of the show, and that of the accompanying book, is different from the hitozuma eros books I mentioned before, and one may be forgiven for thinking that here Araki is trying on his “I want to make serious movies” Woody Allen hat. But ignoring the trappings of the large prints, black and white film, and a large, airy gallery space, the series produced the same feeling I get from much of Araki’s oeuvre, and what I suspect drives Araki much more than his legendary dirty old man-ness — a deep empathy for the people he photographs, and a loving embrace of the notion that the flawed and fragile represent the true pinnacle of beauty.

If you’re in Tokyo, the exhibition is on until January 19, 2014.

This isn’t a historical or documentarian look at Imperial Japan’s suicide mission program or the soldiers tasked with carrying out their tragic missions, but rather a book of landscapes, or more precisely seascapes. Nor is the sea Uemoto photographs — specifically the Seto Inland Sea, where the Imperial Navy maintained three training sites for their manned torpedo program — a rough, violent one that could help illustrate such an emotionally fraught act as sacrificing your life for a stipulated greater good. The sea we’re presented with is a disturbingly calm one, where the trail of a speeding fishing boat is the most violent thing that can be seen.

The photographs contained in the book are all in the square format, and masterfully composed. The square aids in enforcing a defined stillness, although within the square the distances and scope of the seascape and shoreline are not inconsequential. There is an expansiveness — and a surprising amount of variety — to Uemoto’s framing. The approach is much like the Seto Inland Sea itself, which is semi-enclosed (see a map here) and in many ways more like a large lake than a sea. (The Japanese title 海域 kaiiki translates to “sea area” or “waters”, as in the expression “territorial waters”.)

Although as mentioned there is a lot of variety in how Uemoto presents the Sea, there is also in the editing of the book a deliberate repeating of certain vistas, scenes shot perhaps at slightly different angles, or with slightly different foreground or background elements, where we can’t be certain whether they are of the same place or not. This has the effect — like that of the square — of keeping us mentally boxed in. Not in a negative or aggressive way, but to say, let’s stay here for a while, perhaps there’s more here than meets the eye, perhaps these views have stories to tell us if only we can have the patience to look, and listen.

The photos are almost all dark and moody, some almost impenetrably so, and many feature heavy cloud cover or foggy haze. Many may have been shot at night, although this isn’t obvious. In lesser hands this darkness could easily push the viewer to frustration rather than wonder. (The publisher Sokyusha deserves kudos for the masterful printing of what couldn’t have been easy material to work with.) But here this darkness also draws us inward, compelling us to look further, make sure we haven’t missed anything, playing upon our natural inclination to suspect there must be things lurking in the shadows.

It’s not in the shadows, of course, but that which lurks under the sea’s surface, that contains the mystery, and the suspicion that all may not be well here. A more tangible guide to what underlies all these seascapes is the handful of non-seascapes that Uemoto includes in the book, say of tunnels that must have served some military use or the one shot of a torpedo, most likely one displayed in connection with the Kaiten Memorial Museum that is located on Otsushima island, the main training site for the kaiten program. These work well to hint that this is not simply a book of landscapes, that there is a larger purpose at work, while for the most part remaining subtle enough so as to not derail the overall mood of the book. (My one bone to pick with the book is the slight tonal misstep of including two photos of a group of figures walking through the tunnels. They are probably high school boys on a school excursion, but their school uniforms give them a slightly military air and the connection is a bit too obvious for my tastes.)

Uemoto provides an afterword (available, along with a map of the area, in English in addition to Japanese) that gives a brief background of the kaiten program. In this day and age of agenda-inflected buzzwords, “suicide bomber” is a hard concept to come to grips with without the corresponding invective, but if we separate the men who carried out their training and eventual suicidal missions from the authorities who dictated them, it is difficult to fathom the psychological turmoil these young men must have been going through as they looked out from the island out onto the sea. As Uemoto writes, “I could not possibly convey here just how taut their state of mind must have been at the time. Yet the color of the sea and the aspect of the island remain unchanged today.”

There is such an obviousness to the latter statement, and yet reading this I was taken aback a bit. Of course, but for minor details here and there, the sea we gaze upon through Uemoto’s lens is the same one these young men looked upon. It is the constant and steadfastly innocent party to that which man has chosen to do with what it wants to.

Uemoto also uses the afterword to tell us a bit of he came to photograph on Otsushima. He writes that it was one of the first places he went to when he took up photography in the mid-1970s as he looked for something to shoot, but that he was unprepared to reconcile his relatively comfortable upbringing with that of the young men who prepared to die there some 30 years earlier. Comparing himself at that time to them, he writes:

[…]I recall feeling pathetic for having come of age during Japan’s economic growth spurt (that is, an era of materialism and greed) and I departed the island as if to flee from it. Now, approaching my sixtieth year, I am finally visiting this island again, feeling that I may now be able to direct my camera at it.

One can only wish more young photographers would flee from their chosen subjects in such a manner, for the intervening years and maturity have helped Uemoto produce a measured and reflective work of subtlety and craft that, much like the usually placid water surface Uemoto has captured, invites us deeper, but doesn’t submerge us.

Kaiiki is available in the Japan Exposures book shop.