7 Essential Japanese Photobooks

The photobook has become central to the development of Japanese photography, particularly in its postwar phase. Today, influential volumes by artists such as Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Rinko Kawauchi, and more continue to inspire generations of artists and book makers.

Coinciding with the release of new limited-edition prints by Daido Moriyama, we have gathered these seven essential volumes, both new and classic, by Japanese photographers.

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City, 2018

For the past thirty years, Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from limestone quarried by explosive blasts, to the evolution of a city from a bird’s-eye view, to the recovery and reconstruction of the artist’s tsunami-swept hometown in northeastern Japan—capturing the phases of creation, change, and destruction over time in Japan’s contemporary topographies. Mapping the growth and expansion of these sites, Hatakeyama’s photographs hauntingly embody the death and rebirth of cities, not just creating a record of their past and present, but also providing a possibility of imagining and projecting their future.

Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi, 2009

Eikoh Hosoe’s groundbreaking Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited-edition photobook of one thousand copies. A collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, the volume documents their visit to a farming village in northern Japan, in which they created an improvisational performance with local villagers inspired by the legend of Kamaitachi, a weasel-like demon who haunts rice fields and slashes people with a sickle. The resulting photographs document Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and people they encountered, combining performance and photography in a personal and symbolic investigation of Japanese society during a time of massive upheaval. In 2005, Aperture collaborated with Hosoe to release a limited-edition facsimile of the original book, before releasing a new edition reworked by original designer Ikko Tanaka in 2009, featuring never-before-published photographs alongside texts by Donald Keene and Suzo Takiguchi.

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo, 2017

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs of tender cadences of everyday living have begun to swing further afield. In Halo, Kawauchi expands her previous inquiry of spirituality, photographing three main themes: Lunar New Year celebrations in China (where a five-hundred-year-old tradition calls for molten iron hurled in lieu of fireworks), the southern coastal region of Izumo, and her ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. The resulting images knit together a mesmerizing exploration of the spirituality of the natural world, contemplating cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature and human ritual, and the larger spiritual forces at play.

Hiroji Kubota Photographer, 2015

From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s to his incomparable access to North Korea, Hiroji Kubota has prolifically captured the histories of diverse cultures for over fifty years. Rooted in his experience of a Japan ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Kubota’s photographs are characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. “The fine quality of Hiroji Kubota’s photographs is that they are single-minded and immediate, and need no interpretation,” Elliott Erwitt writes. “His skill is observation without artifice, documentation without judgement.” Hiroji Kubota Photographer is the first comprehensive survey for the veteran artist, featuring over four hundred photographs from his many extended trips throughout China, Burma, the US, North and South Korea, and his home country of Japan.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Black Box, 2016

Since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto has explored ideas of time, empiricism, and metaphysics through surreal and formalistic photographs. A self-described “habitual self-interlocutor,” Sugimoto uses the camera as a bridge between abstract questions and the quiet, comical nature of modern everyday life—with subjects ranging from Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, to wildlife scenes at the American Museum of Natural History, to two-hour-long exposures of film screens in movie theaters. “Despite being contemporary, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images seem archetypal and atemporal,” Iran do Espírito Santo reflects, “curious qualities to find in photographic images, since they normally record a fleeting instant.”

Shomei Tomatsu: Chewing Gum and Chocolate, 2014

Shomei Tomatsu’s Chewing Gum and Chocolate is a defining portrait of postwar Japan by one of the country’s foremost twentieth-century photographers. Beginning in the late 1950s, Tomatsu committed to photographing as many of the American military bases in Japan as possible, focusing on the seismic impact of the American victory and occupation: uninformed American soldiers in the red-light districts, foreign children at play in seedy landscapes, and the emerging protests and counterculture formed in response to the ongoing American military presence. Tomatsu originally named the series Occupation, later changing it to Chewing Gum and Chocolate to reflect the handouts given to Japanese kids by the soldiers—sugary and addictive, but ultimately lacking in nutritional value.

Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, 2009

During the 1960s and ’70s in Japan, the photobook overtook prints as a popular mode of artistic dissemination. This process has expanded to an extent where any discussion of Japanese photography now has to include the book. Today, the most famous of works—such as Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens (1986) and Eikoh Hosoe’s Man and Woman (1961)—continue to inspire generations of artists. Featuring forty definitive publications from the era (both iconic works and forgotten gems), this volume examines the distinct character and influence of the Japanese photobook, placing it within a larger sociological context.

As part of our special print sale with Daido Moriyama, expand your photobook library and save 30% off these Japanese photobooks through October 13 at midnight ET.