Kiyoshi has been my private English student for almost 3 years now. He has been playing the accordion for about 14 years, having settled on the instrument after unsatisfying tries at the guitar, piano, and violin. Twice a week he teaches beginning and intermediate students at the community center. Because of the volume of the sound the accordion makes, he usually practices outside in the park as shown here. The accordion he’s playing here cost him around $8,000 USD, and was made in Italy. It isn’t the only one he has (though I think the others were not nearly as expensive). Kiyoshi is the father of two elementary school-age daughters, and works in the marketing department of a large printer manufacturing company.

Also (on color negative) here and here.

Erik Kessels, flanked by two Dutch celebrities, showing off his Christmas stamp designs in Amsterdam

Also makes me wonder if the Dutch have discovered email yet. 750,000 sheets at 20 stamps per sheet comes to 15 million stamps. That’s almost one stamp per every man, woman and child in the Netherlands, and this was not the only Christmas stamp produced. Not that I’m complaining, mind you! But perhaps it’s appropriate there is a Japan element (albeit unstated) to these stamps, given that Japan has its own posting frenzy during the year-end holidays, when up to 4 billion (!) New Year’s cards will be sent at the end of this week.

To everyone reading, Season’s Greetings for 2007, wherever you may be.

(Above posted with a debt to Antipixel, whose composite from 4 years ago gave me the idea).

We make it an annual occurrence to go to the Toda – Itabashi Fireworks Festival which is held on the Arakawa River that forms the border between Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture, where we live. (We’ve only missed one, the year Kaika was born.) The last two years, thanks to our friends on the Tokyo side of the river who do the hard work of staking out a good viewing spot a week in advance, we’ve viewed it from Itabashi. (As ostensibly this fireworks festival is a “tournament” I suppose that means we’ve actually been turning our backs on our home side (Toda) these last couple of years.)

Anyway, this year I decided I would actually take photos of the fireworks, with the digital SLR and a battery of lenses in tow, along with the indispensible tripod. I even googled a few websites to figure out how it’s done, having never seriously attempted to shoot fireworks before. Not sure this time can really qualify as “serious” though, given the cans of beer and snacks that were being consumed, not to mention kids who just wouldn’t sit still (go figure!). In fact, I was so serious about the enterprise that I didn’t even noticed I had knocked the lens out of focus at one point and took about a hundred worthless photos that way.

Nevertheless, there was something nice and unhurried about the process of pressing the shutter (via a cable release) and then letting go a couple of seconds later (or one second later, or perhaps three — I wasn’t counting really), trying to capture the bursts of the various fireworks. I gave up fiddling with lenses after a while, settling on the 24mm (40mm on the digital), and barely paid attention to the LCD display except to check positioning. The fireworks in Japan go on so long (this particular festival lasted just over 90 minutes) that one is bound to capture something nice to look at over the course of a given night.

Should you find yourself at a fireworks festival this summer and would like to take some photos, here’s a recap of the advice I gleaned from various sites and my actual experience on the night:

*Bring a tripod. There’s no way around this one, really. Keep the lens focused at infinity. (Put the lens in M-manual mode, but periodically check it to make sure you didn’t accidently knock it off its infinity setting, like ahem yours truly.)

*Shoot at 100 ASA, on “bulb” setting, with your aperture somewhere between f/8 and f/16. (Looking at my exif data, it seems I was on f/13 most of the night.)

*Using your cable release (another necessary item), begin your shot at the moment the given firework starts to burst, and keep it open anywhere between 1 and 3 seconds. Don’t sweat it too much. (Surprisingly the Canon Digital Rebel XT exif data notes the shutter speed on “bulb”-setting shots, but only rounded off to the second, eg. “1 sec”. At any rate, it seems most of mine were taken around the 2 second mark. On the other hand, a few that were shot at 5 seconds look great too.)

*Use your “levels” adjustment in your photo-editing software to darken the shadows (making the dark night background even darker and making the digital noise — like grain in film — less noticeable), and lighten the highlights (making the actual burst pop out a bit more). Use “trial and error” here, and don’t overdo it.

Click the above composite to see the photos. Also, I turned the composite horizontally and made a desktop wallpaper out of it should you be so inclined:

Hanabi Wallpaper 1024 x 768 (.jpg, 272K)
Hanabi Wallpaper 1280 x 1024 (.jpg, 415K)

At the new Omotesando Hills building there will be an exhibition entitled Journey to Onomichi, featuring photos by Wenders and his wife Donata, which will run from April 29 – May 7. The series came about in part because of Wenders’ long-term desire to visit Onomichi, which figures prominently in one of Wenders’ favorite films, Ozu’s Tokyo Story. (Interesting to note that just a month or two after the Wenders visited Onomichi, I did too for much the same reasons).

On May 1st, Wenders will be lecturing and presenting some short films of his at the Ikebukuro campus of Rikkyo University (poster here). The event is free. I believe he’ll be speaking in English with a Japanese interpreter but I’m not sure.

There was a time when I was a huge Wenders fan, starting from when I first saw Paris, Texas (in Texas, appropriately enough, in 1985). Later that year I would see his documentaries Chambre 666, Reverse Angle, and Tokyo-ga, the latter of which still to this day I can see reverberating around in my head (as I wrote briefly about here). The “back catalogue” so to speak — particularly his first “road” film, Alice in the Cities, was also very influential to me at the time. But then for some reason, the wheels fell off; blame it on Wings of Desire, which I could never “get”. They all seemed to get progressively more pretentious after that.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I’m keen to get re-in-touch with Wenders again.

UPDATE: Another Wenders’ event I’ve come across is a May 2nd “all-night” screening of three of Wenders’ films (Paris, Texas; Buena Vista Social Club; and Land of Plenty) at the Shin-bungeiza movie theater in Ikebukuro. According to the listing, Wenders will be there to introduce the film screening.

If you’re in Tokyo then you really should try to catch the Hiroo Kikai photo exhibition of some of his “Persona” series, portraits taken over the last 10 years in Asakusa, showing at the Nikon Salon in Ginza (free, until March 11). I’m not usually a big fan of portraiture but this work has something. The photos are also accompanied by lovely, somewhat wry captions.

If you’re going to be in the area this week then you should also see the medecins sans frontieres photo exhibit Democratic Republic of Congo: The Forgotten War,featuring photos of Congo taken by 5 members of Project VII, including James Natchwey, Antonin Kratochvil, and Ron Haviv. This is at the Shinwa Art Museum (also free, until the 5th). Particularly striking were the color photos of an MSF run clinic for sex workers by Joachim Ladefoged, which somehow managed to straddle a dangerous line between the sensuousness of the color and tragicness of these womens’ situations.

UPDATE: Peter Evans tried to post the following comment but my comments were broken (my apologies):

I second your recommendation of Kikai’s show.

The longer I look, the more fascinating these photos become. This lady who started photography when close to 80 — and on whom an Olympus OM looks as big as a Pentax 67 would on me — appears in a different photo in the book _Ya-Chimata_. And she’s not alone: Kikai doesn’t simply recycle the photos he has already displayed, but digs up variants. That aside, these are photos that really benefit from size.

Kikai’s books have short print runs. (Just 5000 even for the new and very reasonably priced _Perusona_, I hear.) I guess people prefer to pay for and thumb through the prettily vapid (in color).

Peter also sent along this well-annotated Wikipedia entry on Kikai.

It felt good, and the results are pleasing. I dug out the Mamiya 645 camera earlier this week, half expecting to find fungus or something, not having used it in over a year. No fungus apparent, just a dead battery, which didn’t affect metering as there is none with the prism finder I have, but did necessitate being limited to a 1/60 shutter speed (with a dead battery, the shutter will only fire at 1/60). With my trusty analog Sekonic meter in hand, Kaika and I went for a walk around the neighborhood.

All of a sudden felt the tug of a big(ger) negative, and while I certainly have a much more solid 35mm camera than the Mamiya, probably due to size and the loud clang of the shutter, it somehow felt substantial, felt like an old friend (indeed, of all my current cameras, I’ve had it the longest). Getting the negs back tonight, more of the same. Tactile is a word that comes to mind.

Someone suggested family as a way to work through “photographer’s block.” Sally Mann or Friedlander I am not, but we’ll try not to get too hung up on the whys and wherefores for now. Didn’t realize until we were already outside that the wiping off of Kaika’s milk moustache from breakfast had been neglected. In lieu of a makeup artist, I left it as-is. It’s only really apparent in one photo.

Click here for the series.

Yanaka, Tokyo, January 8, 2005. Mamiya 645, Fuji NS160.

No I haven’t given up the blog, as mentioned here I’m busy with other things at the moment. I’ve never been a good multi-tasker when it comes to hobbies and interests, unfortunately. Truth is, I sort of miss the blog, definitely miss the photography, got some stuff to say and there are probably photos out there waiting to be taken, but I’m doing my darndest to stay away from them or else I’ll just return whole-hog and I’ve got to stick it out with my current project a bit more….

I apologize for the “chicken with its head cut off” conceit of the title, it sort of diminishes the photo which I’m rather fond of for some reason. At any ate, I’m pressed for time so it’ll have to do.

So yesterday as I was emerging from the depths of Shinjuku station, I came up not to fresh air but the formulaic strains of some Japanese pop group and a bunch of craned-neck fans ooh-ing and ah-ing. Based on the audience being 99% female, perhaps it was one of Johnny’s boy bands performing (Johnny Kitagawa is basically the Japanese version of Lou Pearlman), as part of some Nescafe promotion (women were handing out canned coffee drinks). Anyway, a good photo op…or so I thought.

No more than 15 seconds after putting the camera around my neck, I was descended upon by a uniformed man who was clearly not a police officer, but some rent-a-cop for some security company I’ve already forgotten the name of. Putting up the universal (or is it only in Japan?) “X” sign formed by crossing his arms, he was telling me “No Photos”. I was about to point to a couple of women with their cell phone cum cameras in the air when I saw that another security guard was telling them to put away their phones. WTF?!

In ham-fisted Japanese I told the security guard that I wasn’t standing on private property (though it did occur to me that perhaps the land was owned by Japan Railway and that my argument was on shaky ground, pardon the pun) and after a minute or so of me asking him if he owned the land I was standing on, he relented with the arm gesture than means “I give up, you win.” Whether this was because he couldn’t be bothered with a pesky foreigner or because he realized it was he who was on shaky ground, sure enough after that I was left alone by the security force, though they continued to tell other folks to put away their cell phones or digicams (presumably the fact that I was shooting the audience and not the band was noted by the “authorities”).

Tired of the scene I noticed that a crowd was forming across the street in front of one of the department stores and went over there to check it out. The crowd of about 50 had divided themselves leaving an imaginary catwalk between them, leading from the department store door to the street. I presumed that someone famous must be inside and that the crowd was waiting for him or her to exit, and this was confirmed to me by one of the ladies in waiting (apparently a famous comedian was inside, though in the end he never materialized). She also didn’t hesistate to tell me “no photos,” which was said in a way that made it clear she was parroting what someone — no doubt with an authoritative air but lacking any actual authority — had told the crowd before I had arrived.

This was getting ridiculous, like I had just woke up in my very own Twilight Zone episode where talent handlers and their minions ruled the roost, where cameras had been banned unless they were attached to an arm adorned with a “Press” armband, and where I was the last person on this planet to get the message. So I got my cojones in a bunch and positioned myself right at the end of the damn walkway staking my ground — and given that it was the street I sure as hell hope it was public property — and waited for said talent to emerge (sadly as I pointed out, the talent must have been flown by helicopter to safety because he never did produce himself).

In reality I didn’t want another scene of some non-cop telling me I couldn’t take photos, but as I thought about it later it occurred to me that I was probably making a show of it more for the folks in the audience who had been told to put their camera-phones away, and who had obediently relented. I couldn’t get over the fact that they — like the young women cooing over the pop group across the street — had acquiesced so easily in the face of apparent authority.

The scenes taken together were in fact rather pathetic: legions of adoring fans, hoping to capture probably nothing more than a fuzzy, low-resolution, figment of reality snapshot to email to their friends (“Guess who I saw today….?”), getting their enthusiasm dampened by young men with ill-fitting blue shirts and police caps following orders that probably didn’t fit them either.

It may well have been Johnny’s that was behind this production, for his talent agency — the most sucessful talent agency in Japan — is notorious for guarding the public image of his various talents. Indeed, if you visit the company’s site you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single image of any of their talent (I didn’t), and they’ve been known to go after various sites using unauthorized images.

Whomever was behind the concert event yesterday, it’s been clear for a while that talent agencies and related entities have become more agressive in protecting their supposed (though not explicitly codified in Japanese law) rights to their own image. Hence this campaign sponsored by the Japan Association of Music Enterprises which was launched in 2002 and recently updated. I don’t have a translation of the text for the current ad, but the old ad — showing a woman covering her face — featured a tag line along the lines of “Freely using this face is forbidden by law.” with the remainder of the ad going something like:

Of course entertainers and famous people, but also everyone, has a right to their own likeness. Other people can’t use these likenesses without permission. The publication of these photos, or “idol collages” [putting a face from one person onto a body from another] and things like that, is forbidden by law.

No “law” was ever specifically referred to, and it still isn’t. While I’m sure that I’m missing the nuances on this explanatory page the gist goes something like: “Wouldn’t you feel violated if someone took your photo while you were having dinner or out for a walk with your lover? These photos which can cause emotional distress are a violation of your human right to privacy. Not only artists or entertainers are protected, but everyone has these rights. And you can imagine that if common folks feel violated, then artists or entertainers are doubly violated since their portraits have economic value.” All of it is couched in “violation of rights” language, rather than specific laws which are being broken. And all of it cleverly exploits the “human rights” of common folk to garner sympathy for the rights of entertainers to make money.

Now, I can sympathize with artists wanting to control how they’re represented, and how representations of themselves are sold and marketed, but this whole “my face is part of my economic property” seems to go just a bit too far. And to say that a public personality has such a “right to one’s own likeness” (shouzouken in Japanese) beyond the confines of the concert hall or soundstage, in other words, in public is just a bit overboard. Granted, what JAME is concerned about most are probably things like aicora (“idol collage,” eg. ai from the Japanese for “idol” and cora from “collage” — stick that into your J-E dictionaries!), which most right-thinking people would agree is not kosher, but to tell me that I can’t take a photo of a public celebrity coming out of a department store, or even publishing said photo, is well, Twilight Zone stuff.