Five Years Ago, When He Shot Mirai-chan, Kotori Kawashima Never Imagined He'd Become the Photographer Everyone Wanted

Asked how he chooses his subjects, Kotori Kawashima doesn't stop to think: "I love photographing people just as they're about to change fast."

On November 28, a show called "The Small Happiness Photo Studio" opened at Hysan Place in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. It is the first exhibition the Japanese photographer Kotori Kawashima has held in the city, and its theme is "love your family, love your friends." Say his name today and most people picture one thing: his photo book Mirai-chan — the little girl with wind-burned red cheeks and a runny nose.

Words like "small happiness" and "hipster" do cling to Kawashima, and his pictures explain why. Readers call his work "healing." His lens stays on the joys and small griefs of ordinary lives, set against the countryside, in the same clean, fresh register every time. That is much of the reason the artsy young love him.

Like most photographers in demand, Kawashima still gets invitations from every direction.

Early this year the Japanese online magazine Ozmall came to him and asked him to run a serialized photo column on the web, on the theme of travel scenery. Kawashima does travel a great deal, but shooting landscapes held little interest for him — more precisely, he found it "a bit boring." So he pitched the magazine a project of his own, "Otona e no Tabi" ("A Journey Toward Adulthood"): follow the actor Taiga through his life and his trips and watch what time changes in him. Kawashima was sure that would make a far more interesting body of work.

The pitch wasn't arbitrary. Portraits are the subject he is surest of. And asked how he chooses his subjects, he doesn't stop to think: "I love photographing people just as they're about to change fast."

Born in 1980, Kawashima published his first photo book, baby baby, at 27 — a collection about young girls that took him four years to shoot. He printed the pictures at the photo shop where he was then working part-time, bound them into a book, and entered it for the Shinpusha–Itaru Hirama Photography Award, which it won that year. The prize was run by the publisher Shinpusha, and it existed to give any up-and-coming photographer a route into print: win, and you were published.

baby baby brought his eye for portraits its first notice. "I was caught at once by the delicate distance between Kotori-kun's gaze and the girl he was photographing," the Japanese entertainer Kazunobu Mineta wrote of the book in 2007.

An award for a first book still left him unknown to the public. What gave him a taste of sudden fame was Mirai-chan, published in 2011, whose pictures still circulate across the Asian internet. People may remember the red-cheeked girl in it better than they remember Kawashima himself.

In fact, the Japanese lifestyle magazine BRUTUS had already run a photo from Mirai-chan on its cover in late 2010, and that issue sold well across Japan. The book itself came out the following March, sold out in four days and went back to press. It sold more than 30,000 copies in two weeks, and more than 100,000 within a year.

A buying rush over a young photographer's book so soon after release naturally drew attention. Outlets ran story after story on Kawashima and Mirai-chan; readers passed the photos around online.

The wave reached Taiwan. Less than three months after publication, Mirai-chan caught the eye of a Taiwanese curatorial group called Good Scenery, which invited Kawashima to the Qingtian 16 arts space in Taipei for his first solo show outside Japan. He has gone back to exhibit in Taiwan on and off ever since.

On Douban, Mirai-chan now has more than a thousand ratings and an average of 9.5 — very high. Across several hundred short reviews the same two words keep coming back: "healing," "adorable." One user, LukeYan, was reminded by Kawashima's book of another photographer good at everyday life, Kayo Ume. "After Kayo Ume's, this is the second photo book that has made me laugh and cry." Threads like that started in 2011, and people are still adding to them.

"I never expected it to sell like that." Kawashima was delighted that Mirai-chan became the hit of the year almost overnight. It changed little for him, though, and he doesn't think it made him a celebrity. In an earlier interview with BIOS Monthly he described what fame had altered: "I hold to photography the same way as before. What's different is that I face my subjects with a more relaxed mind."

Looking back at the book after it took off, Kawashima offered a few reasons for the name "Mirai" — future. First, children are the future of any society. Beyond that, Mirai-chan grew up on Sado Island, a small island in the sea with a deeply rural feel, and to Kawashima, after years of living in Tokyo, it offered another way of living — one that, as he put it, "really did feel like the future." It was also a place where people were closely bound to one another.

This wasn't the first time he had said in public that places with close human ties spark him. Which makes it easy to see why, on his first trip to Taiwan in 2011 for the exhibition, the human landscape pulled him in and he decided on the spot to shoot his next book there — Star (《明星》).

Lay all of Kawashima's work out side by side and a few subjects repeat: portraits, smiles, food, the countryside. His attachment to portraits looks straightforward enough. "People grow and change with time. I find that especially appealing, which is why I like photographing them." He goes further and reaches for flowers to describe how exciting he finds that change.

Most people love a flower in full bloom; Kawashima is drawn more to the state just before it opens. "When a flower has opened only a little, we're waiting for it to open fully — that feeling is more appealing. Or put it this way: you don't know whether the bud will open, but you're waiting through the process." In the interview he stressed, in Chinese, that what draws him while shooting is really the sense of not knowing, and a feeling of "imperfection" — imperfection in a landscape, or in people in the middle of changing.

In 2015, at 35, Kawashima won Japan's Kimura Ihei Award for Star. The prize, run by the Asahi Shimbun, has gone each year since 1975 to a promising young photographer of the day. Many names now prominent in Japan or abroad have won it, among them Mika Ninagawa, Masashi Asada and Masato Seto.

Star is a book about ordinary people in Taiwan's streets and alleys. In the year he decided to go and shoot it, Japan had just been through the Great East Japan Earthquake (Editor's note: March 11, 2011). Kawashima noticed how low the national mood was, and it weighed on him too; he was even anxious about turning 30, the age that stands for a fuller adulthood.

Taiwan felt different. "At the time I thought everyone here (in Taiwan) was happy, so I really wanted to photograph that." Speaking to QDaily, he joked that he is a gloomy person by nature, so he is naturally pulled toward that sense of being "happy."

The project took three years in all. He carried his favorite camera, a Nikon F6, burned through countless rolls of Fuji 400, crossed between Taiwan and Japan more than 30 times and shot over 70,000 frames. The pictures were finally gathered and published as Star in 2014.

"My friends in Taiwan would take me around on their motorbikes — schools up in the mountains, city god temples, night markets; sometimes I took the train." In an earlier interview with the Taiwanese publisher TinTint, Kawashima said he tried to understand life in Taiwan by staying as close as he could to the way local people live.

Masato Seto, who won the Kimura Ihei Award in 1996, has judged it many times since. In one interview he gave his view of the prize itself: the times keep changing, and there is no single measure of good or bad, but "a good photograph has a strong presence that can move other people; if it is good enough it will simply 'jump' out at you."

Seto's account of the judging also answers, indirectly, why Kawashima's work spread the moment it appeared. Mirai-chan and Star both carry that force. After all, there is no shortage of portrait photography; not every set of pictures reaches that deep.

Take one picture from Star: a little girl eating pudding with total absorption. Kawashima says he is very fond of it. "It was the first time I'd seen someone eat pudding that happily, that contentedly. It really stayed with me." He does photograph people eating often; to him, eating and sleeping are the most natural, most relaxed moments in a life, so of course they catch his eye.

By his third photo book Kawashima already had wide attention and a major prize — enviable, no doubt, to a lot of people.

Before any of that, Kawashima was not much different from any other university student, until he met an older figure in photography. He graduated from Waseda University in 2003 and took a part-time job at a photo studio, and there, by chance, met the well-known Japanese photographer Genki Numata; he volunteered to go and help out and learn. It did not last long, but he still holds Numata in deep respect.

Speaking to QDaily, Kawashima passed on a line of Numata's: "In a photograph, the person or thing being photographed accounts for eighty percent of the appeal. The photographer's own power is small. So the most important thing is to stay humble."

When a man can still recall one sentence from more than a decade ago, its effect on him hardly needs proving.

That effect may date back to Mirai-chan, but it showed more plainly while he was shooting Star. Mirai-chan was one subject photographed over a long stretch; Star was one-to-many, people he had not known beforehand. "If you're photographing a lot of people, you can't shut yourself in. You have to keep showing an open, easy version of yourself." The method he describes arrives at the same place as Numata's advice.

In the two years after the Kimura Ihei Award, commercial offers came in from various companies: an ad for the famous Japanese confectionery shop Fujiya, a promotional short for the Hobonichi Techo planner, a music video for the Japanese band SHISHAMO.

For a photographer, a steady flow of commercial work is the best proof of being active in the market. And yet, after a few such jobs, Kawashima seemed thoroughly puzzled by the logic of moving images; today he says plainly that for now he wants to stay with still photography.

Asked which photographers he admires, Kawashima says he is a fan of Nobuyoshi Araki. He remembers being overwhelmed the first time he saw one of Araki's books, at 17. From that moment he knew photography had power, and could carry every kind of feeling.

He is good at portraits, but he does not take every portrait that comes his way. He holds to one principle: respect. Any photograph made without respect for its subject, he believes, is simply not acceptable. "When the subject is relaxed, and relaxed about the person photographing them, every kind of emotion comes out easily."

Kawashima even says, with real confidence, that he can tell from a single photograph whether the photographer felt "love" for the subject.

(Our thanks also to Mr. Wu Chunwei, who interpreted.)

Cover image from Kotori Kawashima (c)Kotori Kawashima