Photojournalist Tsuzuki Kyoichi Documents Ordinary Lives — and Keeps Getting Called "Fringe" | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who works in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is what Japanese office workers call the optional follow-up gathering after the first round of after-work drinks — the party where the talk loosens up.

Many of my foreign friends love Kyoto. They walk into serene, exquisite temples to admire the moss gardens, sample refined kaiseki cuisine, cycle along the Kamo River[1], and spend the night in a machiya[2]. Some come back and tell me, quite seriously, that before long they intend to live in Japan. I can only nod, not knowing what to say, because however "classic" those sights and that way of life may be, they have little to do with my everyday reality. Sometimes I wonder: is the Japan my friends picture the same Japan I know?

Twenty-five years ago, to show the landscape as he himself knew it, Tsuzuki Kyoichi picked up a 4×5 large-format camera and rode a Honda motorbike through every ward of Tokyo, photographing the tiny rooms young people lived in.

Nobody Actually Lives Like That

Tsuzuki Kyoichi entered Japan's publishing world in the 1970s. In his second year studying English literature at Sophia University, the men's fashion magazine POPEYE was born, and it soon became a force shaping Japanese culture. Tsuzuki — who had grown up in Tokyo, absorbed culture voraciously, and loved skateboarding — became a fan at once, then landed a part-time job in the magazine's editorial office, sometimes helping editors translate American fashion magazines. "When it came time to hand in my graduation thesis, I happened to be off reporting in the United States, so I never got around to submitting it." Whether he had actually graduated stayed unclear to him for a long time afterward, but it never affected his career. "I've never once had a regular job in my life — I've always worked freelance, and nobody asks to see your diploma. Still, I do sometimes envy salaried workers their year-end bonuses."

Through the 1980s, Tsuzuki kept writing for POPEYE and BRUTUS. He had a desk in the editorial office, but his status was closer to a temp worker's: paid by the piece for whatever he produced. In 2016, when POPEYE marked its 40th anniversary, WOWOW[3] ran a video series on its website called City Boy of 2016 — 40 Years of POPEYE[4], in which Tsuzuki described what the POPEYE office had been like:

"You'd tell the editor-in-chief that New York sounded interesting, and he'd ask whether it really was interesting, and all you could say was, 'Well… I think so.' He'd let you go take a look, and once in New York you'd throw yourself into the culture there as hard as you could, gut instinct guiding you, hunting for material, then come back and write dozens of pages. Content made that way usually went over well with readers, because nobody had heard of it before. It wasn't until after I left POPEYE that I realized how unusual the approach was. Other magazines hold a pitch meeting once or twice a week, where you have to explain carefully to the editor-in-chief and the other editors why your idea is interesting. To convince everyone, you need something to show them. But if you already have something to show, doesn't that mean someone else has covered it — so why write about it at all? At the POPEYE office, if what you wrote turned out interesting, you got another chance; if it wasn't good enough, there was no next time. For someone with no knack for finding material, that system would be brutal, but if you had an instinct for sniffing things out, it was tremendous fun."

Over ten years at the magazines, Tsuzuki learned the craft of writing and editing. At 30 he decided to strike out on his own, planning and writing his own material. He soon found rent was cheaper in Kyoto than in Tokyo, and moved into a place near Doshisha University, in Kyoto Prefecture. He enrolled as an auditing student at Kyoto University and cycled to class once a week — Japanese architectural history in the first year, Japanese art history in the second — and after each class he'd tour Kyoto, hunting down every building the lecture had mentioned. In the geisha districts of Gion and Pontocho, and in local izakayas, he got to know local publishers and people visiting from abroad. Those connections later became part of the foundation for ArT RANDOM[5], the 102-volume contemporary-art series he wrote and edited.

"While writing for the magazines I noticed that the Japanese media didn't understand contemporary art in any depth, and that young artists overseas found it hard to get their portfolios published. With ArT RANDOM I wanted, on one hand, to show young Japanese readers the latest art trends, and on the other, to give overseas artists a platform to present themselves properly. So I held the price of each volume to 1,980 yen (about 120 yuan) — cheap for an art publication — and each time a book came out I sent 100 copies to the artist, so they could sell them to visitors and promote themselves at their own shows."

Before he knew it, the young Tsuzuki had become a bridge between the Japanese and international art worlds. One day photographers and writers from abroad came asking him to scout locations in Japan; they wanted to put together a photo book on "Japanese Style" architecture and living. Clean, fresh, understated. A minimalist tea table set on spotless tatami, tea sipped while gazing out at a Japanese garden. That was the scene the foreign photographers wanted, and Tsuzuki found houses like it nearly impossible to find — nowhere matched what they were after. He soon worked out why: "Because most Japanese people, myself included, simply don't live like that at all."

What "Style" Actually Means

Japan was still riding the tail end of its bubble economy, a level of affluence the whole world acknowledged; "Japan as Number One," a phrase coined by an American scholar, was everywhere. College students threw parties in five-star hotels; late at night in Roppongi you couldn't flag a taxi unless you waved a few 10,000-yen notes[6] at the driver. That manic era left behind a whole mythology. But Tsuzuki knew that many of the young friends around him had tasted none of that sweetness — they still lived in tiny tatami rooms, working part-time jobs while chasing their own dreams. "Their rooms didn't match the so-called Japanese Style circulating abroad at all, and that's exactly why they stood for real, ordinary people and the most common way of living. That is what Style is. The Japanese Style you could see only in fashion magazines was the exception."

TOKYO STYLE, published in 1993, holds the rooms of more than 100 young people living in Tokyo, and not one of them shows any deliberate, polished interior design. "The rooms and the people you see in home-decor magazines are actually the minority. Why do we have to have a big house, why buy an expensive sofa? Why does eating at home call for fine tableware and wine glasses? We belong to the majority — why should we imitate the minority? Look at it another way and I think the way of life of the young people in this book is healthier. While others put up with sky-high housing prices and brutally packed commuter trains, these people picked a cheap little room, so rent never weighed on them much; they'd bike to a part-time job a few days a week and spend the rest of their time on what was theirs."

The response after publication surprised even Tsuzuki. The book came with a reader-feedback postcard, and normally few readers bother to send those back — but a good number of TOKYO STYLE readers did. Most of them, Tsuzuki says, lived out in the Japanese countryside. They wrote things like: "I never imagined a place like this existed in Tokyo," and "If this is really what Tokyo people's rooms look like, mine is way nicer than theirs!"

Fashionable TV dramas like Tokyo Love Story were hugely popular in Japan then, and many young people believed the media's glamorized Tokyo, believed that was the life they were supposed to have. "That kind of media only gives young people in small and mid-sized cities a sense of inferiority. And the inferiority comes from something invented and prettified. Shooting and publishing TOKYO STYLE made me see that the mass media can't avoid carrying this kind of deception. The moment you see through the fiction the media puts out, you find an enormous reality underneath. That was the most important thing I learned at the time."

Whether You're Willing to Turn the Car Around

"Why does every small town in Japan seem to have some giant art installation sitting out front?" In 1997 Tsuzuki won the Kimura Ihei Photography Award for ROADSIDE JAPAN: A Chronicle of Curious Japan — the first time in the award's history that it went to a non-professional photographer. The book began at a dinner with the editor-in-chief of the magazine Weekly SPA!, and a few offhand remarks over the meal. What was Japan actually like beyond Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto? The editor thought the idea sounded fun and agreed to let Tsuzuki run a column, A Chronicle of Curious Japan, to try it out.

The internet wasn't yet widespread, and there was essentially no reference material for travel in rural Japan. He spent 100,000 yen (about 6,000 yuan) on a used Mazda, loaded it with his 4×5 large-format camera, a single-lens reflex, and a huge stock of film, and drove around looking for material himself. "You often see travel shows on TV where the host sticks a microphone in front of a local and asks about some interesting spot, and it looks easy enough to get an answer. But go and ask people yourself and they genuinely have no idea what to tell you. Even if there's a hihōkan (an erotic museum) nearby, they won't mention it — either they think it's shameful, or it never occurs to them that it's worth showing an outsider; to them, a place like that doesn't exist. You can't blame them. Think about it: the people who find their own hometown boring are the ones who left for Tokyo in the first place. So the interesting places, you still have to find yourself."

If TOKYO STYLE was a counterattack on the "Japanese Style" image, A Chronicle of Curious Japan was the Japan beyond metropolitan Tokyo that he found driving the national highways. The column was meant to run two or three months, but the material kept multiplying and it ran for about five years, before being collected at the end of 1996 into the large-format photo book ROADSIDE JAPAN. "I grew up in Tokyo, and it wasn't until I started this column that I realized how different so many places are from Tokyo — and that places like that make up most of Japan. Yet a lot of young people in Japan's smaller cities think their clothes are ugly and their lives not stylish enough. Clothing, music, literature, art — a tiny minority of media people sending information out from the big cities controls the majority of Japanese who actually live in the suburbs or the countryside."

ROADSIDE JAPAN runs 435 pages, and every one of them makes readers marvel. A whimsical, storybook "Canadian World" (Hokkaido); Aomori Prefecture's "Grave of Christ"; a shrine locals worship as the "Breast-Milk God"; Yamaguchi Prefecture's "Hometown of Yang Guifei"[7]; a giant golden Buddha rising out of the mountains; a homemade tableau of hell built by local residents. The book showed the world a Japan beyond imagining, and showed readers that behind the calm, orderly fantasy of "Japanese Style" lies a life that is messy and bursting with invention. "How on earth did you find all these places?" — that is the question Tsuzuki gets at every public event without fail. His answer is a helpless shrug: "If there really were a trick to it, I'd like to know it myself."

"A lot of the time the deadline is closing in and I still haven't found anyone to interview. All I can do is keep driving, feeling hopeless. Then, just as it's getting dark, you spot a handwritten sign by the road: a local 'genius' painter is holding a free exhibition. Another half hour of driving would get you to a hot-spring town, you're exhausted, your head's foggy, and the exhibition is probably not worth seeing — 99% of the time your hopes will be dashed. But there's still that 1% chance it leads to an encounter that leaves you thrilled. Whether you can seize that 1% comes down entirely to whether you're willing to turn the car around, go back to that sign, and get out to look."

His interviews with a hundred young people in Tokyo, and his road trips across Japan, all happened at the end of the last century; the biggest difference between then and now is probably the sheer volume of information the internet brings. Tsuzuki remains wary about whether writers and editors should treat the internet as a source.

"For grasping the overall shape of something quickly, the internet is of course the handiest tool. But lean on it too much while writing and you get pulled into the online world, and you start to think what's written online is the whole of society. Remember: the online world is built by people who are good at using the internet, and plenty of people in this society barely express themselves online at all. Take Japan's snacks[8] — wherever in Japan you live, there are surely one or two near your home, but search Tabelog[9] all you like and you won't find anything about them, and nobody reviews them on social media either. That's because these places don't need the internet or the media to promote them — looking after the regulars who live nearby, night after night, is enough. If you gather your information only from Tabelog, you'll never know what's really going on at the most common kind of snack in Japan, the one country uncles go and drink at every night. The internet is far more developed than it used to be, but if it's all you use, your view of the world only narrows. For the same reason, I've stopped caring what people say about me online, how many followers I have, how many likes I get. At first I cared a little, but think it over: the snack mama-sans, the elderly people living alone, the owners of love hotels and hihōkan I interview — none of them care in the least what others think of them; they're absorbed in doing what they want to do. I only have material to write about thanks to them. If they don't care, why on earth should I?"

If You Like the Unconventional, I'm Fully Behind You

Wildly decorated trucks, love hotels, hihōkan, the embroidered tokkōfuku jackets of biker gangs, poems death-row inmates write in prison. Because Tsuzuki's writing and photographs always carry a jolt, it's easy to mistake him for a hunter forever chasing curiosities. In fact his subjects have always been within arm's reach: everyone knows they exist, but because they're too close, or too "ordinary," nobody bothers to weigh their significance. After TOKYO STYLE he did similar shoots in Japan's Kansai region[10] (Kansai Style), documented the rooms and lives of people obsessed with clothing brands (HAPPY VICTIMS[11]), and for a stretch photographed young people's rooms in Shanghai. Across this whole run of shoots and interviews you can see the one position Tsuzuki has never shifted from: respect for nameless people — which is to say, for most of us — paired with an eye that is both minutely observant and sharp.

Sometimes the "Japanese Style" frame puts a kind of pressure on Japanese people themselves. Tsuzuki has held exhibitions in Paris, London, and Mexico, using themes like IMAGE CLUB[12] and HAPPY VICTIMS to show local audiences what Japanese life is really like. Japanese officials who came to view them would pull pained faces and urge him not to present anything "so embarrassing." "What I really wanted to say to them was, fine, then you show me Japan yourselves," Tsuzuki says flatly.

"Is the invention on display at a hihōkan, a watercolor painted by an elderly person living alone, or a line embroidered on a biker's tokkōfuku jacket, really worse than an oil painting in a Tokyo art museum or a line by a famous poet? I don't think so. If someone loves books so much they buy 10,000 of them, people usually praise it. But throw caution to the wind buying designer clothes and you might get mocked instead. Don't you find that strange? I wrote books like Legends of Ancient Curious Japan and HAPPY VICTIMS because I wanted to give people more choices. It doesn't matter if you're different from everyone else, if you don't fit the mainstream media's mold — your own style has equal worth. I'm not saying one is better than the other; it's a matter of taste. If you still like fashion, that's up to you. But if you like the unconventional, I want to back you all the way."

"A critic couldn't say something like that. A critic has to fix a point of view before critiquing anything. But I'm a journalist. A journalist's job is to widen people's horizons as far as possible, to offer more choices. Unfortunately most journalists these days have turned into critics, forever pronouncing this good and that bad, placing themselves above everyone else to direct the crowd. But let me tell you, most journalists and writers live lives not much different from anyone else's. Do the writers introducing a hundred different watches in a fashion magazine actually wear those luxury brands every day? Do you, writing up a hot-spring inn that costs 100,000 yen a night, stay in places like that every time you travel? I don't believe it. Why write about things you can't afford yourself? If you're going to write, write what you know best — at the very least, write about something you could afford to buy."

"Maybe because I won an award later (the Kimura Ihei Photography Award), people assume I'm a photographer. But I've never thought of myself as one, and I've never had professional training in it. I take photos because even now I can't afford to hire a photographer — if someone else could handle the photography, I'd hand over the camera in a heartbeat and concentrate on interviewing and writing. Since reporting is my main goal, I don't care whether the pictures I take are beautiful. Journalists sometimes forget that and get too caught up in making things look good, so I have to keep reminding myself not to shoot too prettily. Say you visit a bar to photograph the owner or the customers: treating that shot as your own artwork, a portrait, is one thing; shooting it to catch the bar's atmosphere so people want to go and drink there is another. The former is easier, honestly — the latter takes practice."

"Back to the media question — we've all grown too used to getting our information and understanding through it. Which means, conversely, it's easy to assume that other people live extraordinary lives because they are extraordinary. A lot of people think you have to be genuinely impressive to end up on TV or be interviewed by journalists. But go have a drink at a snack and talk to the mama-san and you find that she, and the ordinary people around her, have lived lives full of upheaval, every bit as dramatic as any TV celebrity's. The people I interview are ordinary too, and yet they keep getting filed under 'fringe.' It genuinely baffles me."

What Freelance Life Brings

From the 1990s to now, he has run serialized columns in print and online outlets, and turned each one into a book as soon as the serialization ended. He publishes at least one book a year, and two or three is normal. Pitching, gathering information, interviewing, photographing, writing — he does all of it alone, apart from occasional involvement by a publisher's editor.

"When I first came up with the idea for TOKYO STYLE, I pitched it to a lot of publishers and nobody wanted anything to do with it. That was 25 years ago, when Japan's economy was still doing fine, but every single publisher said no. I couldn't afford a photographer either, so I bought my own camera and film and started shooting with no support from anyone. I have no idea how much I spent on film and developing back then."

"It was the same with A Chronicle of Curious Japan afterward — I drove everywhere myself, wrote and shot on my own, because that's the only way to keep costs down. And through it I slowly realized that a lot of things can still get done alone, even if nobody else understands them. Looking back, every one of my books exists precisely because I made it alone. Put a team together and the load on each person might be lighter, but there'd be disagreements over what to cover, and the cost of a reporting trip would balloon. Working alone gives you far more freedom — you control the subject and the direction of the writing yourself, without having to listen to anyone else's suggestions."

He has never held a salaried job or drawn a wage; his income comes mainly from writing fees and royalties. Forty years into working as a freelance editor and writer, he once wrote candidly in one of his books: "Being freelance your whole life means that every editor besides yourself is not a comrade but a competitor."

So what has kept him running this long? "I'm past sixty now, and my stamina gets worse every year, but what I actually do — phoning to arrange interviews, counting every yen of travel expenses for a reporting trip — hasn't changed much from forty years ago. Still, I think it's pure luck that I get to do this work at all. As long as you keep your curiosity and your judgment, something will always come of it."

The Email Magazine ROADSIDERS' Weekly

Since January 2012, Tsuzuki has run the digital magazine ROADSIDERS' Weekly, now more than 300 issues in. It lands in readers' inboxes in the small hours of every Wednesday, packed with text and high-resolution images that are erotic, brutal, funny, and passionate all at once — making readers blush, snicker, or tear up on the morning commuter train or at their desks.

"My original idea was a print magazine, but the cost was too high — a magazine like that needs at least a few hundred million yen. Print has other problems too, like publication rhythm and page space. Say you find an interesting exhibition: in print you'd have to write a short introduction from press materials issued before the show opens, just to get readers timely information. Or you go and report on-site, and by the time you've laid it out, printed it, shipped it — by the time readers see it, the exhibition may well have closed. With digital media that worry mostly disappears. You can report on-site today, write a detailed piece, and readers can go see the show tomorrow."

"How much a page can hold is another advantage of digital. My pieces usually come with a huge number of images, more than print pages can possibly take. Digital has no such limit — you can put in as many pictures as you like, and readers can even zoom in, which is much more convenient. I want as many people as possible to see what I put out; that matters a great deal to me. It's easy to disable copy-paste on digital content, but I've deliberately chosen not to, because blocking copying runs against the direction of the digital era. I never watermark my photos either. Anyone who wants to copy them can do so easily. The photos I use in my reporting aren't personal artworks; they're photos made for reporting, and their whole purpose is to spread as widely as possible. Some people care a great deal about copyright and add watermarks to block copying, but however you try to protect yourself, technology will eventually find a way to copy your work anyway — I don't want to join that endless loop. What matters more to me is that the people who read my writing go out and do something: listen to some young hip-hop artist, come to an exhibition, buy a book. Music adapted to the digital era long ago — you can download plenty of songs free, and if you really like them you go to a show or buy a T-shirt to support the artist. If readers genuinely like my writing, I believe they'll be willing to pay to subscribe to my magazine, buy my books, or come to the events I hold."

Tsuzuki's body of writing and photography is wide and prolific, and he is now working on digitizing it. Kindle editions of several of his books are already on Amazon Japan, but he has doubts about the sales model inside a big-corporation framework, and finds the current pricing and format less than ideal. The print (Japanese) edition of The Outsider Editor, for instance, is priced[13] at about 111 yuan, while the Kindle edition is 90 yuan — less than a 20% discount. Judging by production costs, he believes digital editions should be cheaper than print; the gap being this small, in his view, comes down to big companies protecting themselves too jealously.

"Whether it's relations between countries or culture and content, I don't think an overly self-protective attitude produces good results. A few years ago I started converting my past work into digital editions and copying the content onto USB drives to sell. This format is much better than a print book — the digital edition of Tokyo Style, for instance, holds far more images than the print edition, more than 800 pages of them, and every image is razor sharp. I have no idea how expensive a print edition with the same content and the same image quality would be to produce, but it certainly wouldn't be cheap. What I most want to avoid is the readers who want this book being unable to afford it; that would defeat the whole purpose. The digital edition is priced at 3,800 yen; skip the USB drive and it's cheaper still — just 2,000 yen for a direct download to your computer. The advantage of the digital edition is that readers can zoom in on the photos themselves: what magazines are on the table in someone's room, what cigarettes they smoke, exactly which books are on the shelf, what the kitchen utensils look like — you can see all of it clearly. That's information print editions couldn't provide, especially the small paperback formats from a few years back; the pages were too small. When people think of digital editions they probably think of Kindle or iBooks, but the trouble there is you're locked into their designated app or reader. That's another scheme dreamed up by big corporations to make money, and it only obstructs the spread of information. Those e-book platforms have other problems too — they censor. My book on hihōkan was rejected by iBooks, probably for being too explicit. I have no plans to publish digital editions through those platforms; I'll keep selling my work on USB drives instead. The files inside are PDFs, copying the photos isn't blocked, and they're easy to view on a computer or a phone. I've made four digital titles so far[14]; the USB drives are made with a Taiwanese manufacturer, packaged with an instruction sheet in a small plastic sleeve."

In Search of a "China Style"

This June (2018), Tsuzuki was invited to give a talk in Wuhan, Hubei. The area around Wuhan is dense with Three Kingdoms sites, and quite a few Japanese "Three Kingdoms fans" fly there directly to trace a pilgrimage through the story of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But Tsuzuki cared more about how ordinary people live, and spent the rest of his trip wandering ordinary streets, checking out wet markets and supermarkets, and roaming residential neighborhoods.

"In Japan, reporting on China is still quite skewed. The media either say Chinese people are so rich now — I've even heard of someone collecting Ferraris in 12 different colors — or they report on China's poor rural areas, as if people there have nothing to eat. But between the very rich and the very poor, how the vast majority of Chinese people actually live, what kind of rooms they live in, what the ratio of rent to income is, what they eat for breakfast: we Japanese have no idea about those details. I believe most Chinese people don't care that much about money either; an ordinary, steady life satisfies them. Those ordinary Chinese people are exactly what interests me. Bizarre architecture or sensational incidents don't interest me at all, because they don't represent ordinary people. Just as when I toured Japan for ROADSIDE JAPAN, what I really want is to go and see the places locals themselves think have 'nothing there' — no famous sights, no famous local food, no particularly good scenery. More than 90% of Japan is like that; the media picks out the remaining 10% or less and promotes it for all it's worth as if that were Japan. Most Japanese have never stayed at a 100,000-yen-a-night hot-spring inn, but most middle-aged men, and office workers who missed the last train home, have enjoyed a 2,000-yen visit to a health land[15]. It's the same with love hotels — any Japanese person past a certain age has probably been to one at least once. These are the sights that make up our everyday lives. Real life is found in exactly these unremarkable places."

A few lines he wrote more than a decade ago in The Tokyo Squid Club: How to Get Lost on Earth have stayed with me ever since: "In places that aren't especially famous, that don't look like much fun, work hard to find something interesting and enjoy life there as much as you can. In an unremarkable, ordinary life, work hard to find happiness and go on living. I believe there is almost no difference between these two attitudes."

What moves me most is that in the decade-plus since, he hasn't gone back on a word of it — still running around Japan and the rest of the world doing interviews, writing on his laptop in budget hotels, getting his articles to readers on time.

About the Author

Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer working in Chinese, currently living in Beijing. She graduated in international relations from International Christian University in Japan. She has studied in Chengdu, worked on farms in southern France, and worked as an economic-news editor in Taipei, Manila, Shanghai, and elsewhere. She now writes full time; her books include Four Seasons of Bento and Tokyo Bookstores, and she has served as editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Light Cooking" book series, among others.

Notes

[1] The Kamo River (Kamogawa): a 31-kilometer Class-A river running through the city of Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture.

[2] Machiya: also known as "Kyo-machiya," a wooden house built by the traditional post-and-beam method. Long and narrow in shape, usually with a garden at the very back of the property.

[3] WOWOW: Japan's first pay-TV private satellite broadcaster, founded in December 1984.

[4] The video is titled The Men Who Created POPEYE; the interview was conducted in December 2009.

[5] ArT RANDOM was published by Kyoto Shoin in 1989, in 102 volumes. Each volume is a 48-page hardcover (1,980 yen), bilingual in Japanese and English, profiling a single artist — among them Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, and Vincent Gallo. Tsuzuki Kyoichi was chiefly responsible for editing the series; the art editor was Miyagawa Ichiro.

[6] Man-satsu refers to Japan's highest-denomination banknote, the 10,000-yen bill.

[7] According to a legend in Nagato City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Yang Guifei did not take her own life (someone died in her place), and later sailed to Yamaguchi Prefecture in southwestern Japan. A temple in the city, Nison-in, holds a grave said to be hers, and nearby stand a marble statue of Yang Guifei and a Chinese-style pavilion, which is why the area is called the "Hometown of Yang Guifei."

[8] A snack (スナック) is a small, family-style bar, usually open from 8 p.m. until the early morning, where women staff the counter and entertain customers with drinks, conversation, or singing.

[9] Tabelog (食べログ) is a restaurant-review website, comparable to China's Dianping.

[10] Western Japan, centered on Osaka and Kyoto.

[11] HAPPY VICTIMS was originally serialized in the magazine Ryuko Tsushin (April 1999–August 2006).

[12] Image Club (イメージクラブ): a piece of Japanese-coined "Wasei-eigo," commonly shortened to imekura, which could be translated as "fantasy club." At this type of establishment, customers choose a woman in a particular costume — a student, an office worker, a flight attendant — along with a matching themed room, such as a train car, an office, or an airplane cabin.

[13] Japan maintains a "resale price maintenance" system for four categories of media — books, magazines, newspapers, and recorded music — that lets publishers and similar bodies set the price of a publication; for a set period, bookstores and other channels must sell at that fixed price and may not discount it on their own.

[14] This refers to the "ROADSIDE LIBRARY": four PDF titles so far — Hihōkan, LOVE HOTEL, the cabaret club (a nightclub with song-and-dance shows) Belleamie, and TOKYO STYLE.

[15] Health Land (kenkō rando): a recreational facility combining leisure amenities with a public bathhouse, providing towels, soap, shampoo, razors, and other bathing supplies. A health land typically includes a restaurant, karaoke rooms, massage services, a game center, and a manga corner; some also offer overnight lodging.

About the Subject

Tsuzuki Kyoichi, a renowned Japanese editor, journalist, and photographer. Born in Tokyo in 1956, he wrote for POPEYE and BRUTUS in the 1970s and '80s, and has gone on editing and writing in art and design ever since, including the contemporary-art series ArT RANDOM. In 1993 he published TOKYO STYLE (in Chinese, 《日常东京》), a photo book on Tokyo living spaces, and won the 23rd Kimura Ihei Photography Award for his 1996 photo book ROADSIDE JAPAN: A Chronicle of Curious Japan. Since 2012 he has published the independent email magazine ROADSIDERS' Weekly, and he continues to travel across Japan and the world reporting, photographing, and holding exhibitions.

Tsuzuki Kyoichi: List of Works

[1]: (Titles translated by Yoshii Shinobu; publisher names in parentheses)

1989–1992 The art series ArT RANDOM, 102 volumes (Kyoto Shoin[2])

1992 Kyoto Cruel Stories[3] (Architecture & City Workshop)

1993 TOKYO STYLE (Kyoto Shoin → Chikuma Bunko, 2003)

1996 ROADSIDE JAPAN — A Chronicle of Curious Japan (ASPECT → revised and expanded in 2000 into separate Eastern Japan / Western Japan editions, Chikuma Bunko)

1996–1999 The art series ArT RANDOM CLASSICS, 8 volumes (Lampoon House)

1997–2001 The STREET DESIGN FILE series[4], 20 volumes (ASPECT)

— Hell on Wheels (customized biker-gang motorcycles)

— Rosso ITALIANO (advertising design for the Italian aperitif Campari)

— Portable ECSTACY (adult novelty products)

— Cruising KINGDOM (decorated trucks)

— Souvenirs from HELL (Hong Kong funerary offerings)

— City of GIANTS (hand-painted movie billboards in Madurai, India)

— FROZEN BEAUTIES (Japanese movie advertising photography)

— LUCHA MASCARADA (Mexican lucha libre wrestling masks)

— Nightmare in Bangkok (cover art from Thai weekly magazines)

— Planet MAO (the power of graphic design during China's Cultural Revolution)

— Buried SPIRIT (decorative coffins from Ghana)

— The German SOUL (German ceramic garden gnomes)

— Instant FUTURE (the 1970 Osaka Expo)

— Generation SEX (pornographic film posters)

— Voice of AFRICA (disguised radios from South Africa)

— Spaghetti EROTICO (racy, gory Italian comics)

— Satellite of LOVE (love-hotel interior design)

— Dancing SKELTON (Mexico's Day of the Dead)

— Rock'n'Roll CATS (the "runaway cats" craze that swept Showa-era Japan)

— Techno SCULPTURE (homemade arcade games)

2001 Uterus of Sperm: Toba International Hihōkan / SF Future Pavilion (ASPECT)

2001 UNIVERSE for RENT (Chikuma Shobo → Chikuma Bunko, 2005)

2001 Regional Cities: Roadside Japan (co-authored with Otake Shinro and Kitagawa Issei) (ASPECT)

2003 IMAGE CLUB (amus arts Press)

2004 A Chronicle of Curious World Travels: Europe (Chikuma Shobo)

2004 The Tokyo Squid Club: How to Get Lost on Earth (co-authored with Haruki Murakami and Yoshimoto Yumi) (Bungeishunju)

2005 Looking Up at French Gothic Architecture (co-authored with Kimata Motokazu) (Shinchosha)

2006 Sexual Titan: The Memoirs of Old Man Yasuda (ASPECT)

2006 Yoroshiku Modern Poetry (Shinchosha → Chikuma Bunko, 2010)

2006 Portrait of the Bubble Economy (ASPECT)

2007 Pilgrimage — Legends of Ancient Curious Japan (Futabasha)

2007 HENRY DARGER'S ROOM (IMPERIAL PRESS)

2007 Hitting the Road to Lose Weight (Chikuma Shobo)

2008 Somebody's Got to Buy the Books Nobody Buys (Shobunsha)

2008 Love Hotels — Satellite of LOVE (ASPECT)

2008 HAPPY VICTIMS (Seigensha → fukkan.com, 2018)

2008 Osaka Expo: Instant FUTURE (ASPECT)

2009 Hihōkan (ASPECT)

2009 BORO: The Culture of Ragged Cloth in Aomori (ASPECT)

2009 Contemporary Art: The Brawl Outside the Ring (Yosensha)

2009 Design Pig, Go Climb a Tree (Yosensha)

2010 Showa Style — Re-edited Architectural Photography Library (Commercial Buildings) (Shokokusha)

2010 ROADSIDE USA: A Chronicle of Curious World Travels — America (ASPECT)

2010 HELL — A Tour Through Hell: Thailand (Yosensha)

2010 The Watered-Down Taste of Heaven — A Michelin Guide to Tokyo's Family Bars (Kosaido Publishing)

2010 HEAVEN — Japan on Pilgrimage with Tsuzuki Kyoichi (Seigensha)

2011 A Pilgrimage Through Tokyo's Family Bars — Mama-san, I'm Starting a Bottle-Keep! (Million Publishing)

2011 The World of Independent Enka (Heibonsha)

2011 Legends of Ancient Curious Japan (Chikuma Shobo)

2012 Launched the email magazine ROADSIDERS' Weekly (still updated every Wednesday)

2012 The Right Half of Tokyo (Chikuma Shobo)

2013 Hip-Hop Poets (Shinchosha)

2013 Elders Living Alone: Style (Chikuma Shobo)

2014 Prison Goods — Made in PRISON (ASPECT)

2014 ROADSIDE BOOKS — Book Reviews 2006–2014 (Hon no Zasshisha)

2015 The Outsider Editor (Asahi Press)

2017 T-Shirts I Can't Throw Away (Chikuma Shobo)

[1] This list covers books Tsuzuki Kyoichi has written, photographed, and edited. He has been involved in a great many works; the author has tried to list them as completely as possible, and asks forgiveness for any omissions.

[2] The series is out of print because the publisher later went out of business.

[3] Under the influence of the bubble economy, all kinds of buildings by famous architects sprang up in Kyoto at the time. Tsuzuki lived in Kyoto for two years in the 1980s and documented these strange buildings, which he says look, however you look at them, like toys. Bilingual in Japanese and English.

[4] Tsuzuki was chiefly responsible for editing this series.

Images courtesy of the author and the subject.