Tokyo Game Show 2008

Plastic food factory

Second class food?
Perhaps only Japan would have an event celebrating “2nd class food”? It’s probably something to do with the fact that even the fast food in Japan tends to be very good. This year the B1 Grand Prix was held in Yokote-city up in Akita prefecture. B1 stands for B-Class Gourmet, foods like yakisoba, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, koroke and oden. As one person I interviewed put it, “The price may be b-class but the taste is a-class”. Over two days some 260,000 people attended. (I guess there isn’t that much to do in Akita?). Some of them queued for over two hours for their favorite foods. I had a lot of fun p

Red Light District
A selection of photos from a personal project I’ve been working on recently. Street photography is pretty much how I started out, and I still love it. But not much time for wandering the backstreets of Tokyo these days. For want of imagination I’ve called the project Tokyo Red. Other name suggestions welcome!

The oldest city in Japan
For a notably low-key city, Fukuoaka has a fair few superlatives to its name. It is Japan’s closest city to Korea which means it can lay claim to being Japan’s oldest city. In other words, it was the first beachhead of civilization from the Asian mainland. These days Fukuoaka has some of the strongest business links with Asia. I was down there a few months ago to do a story on a Chinese company, then stayed an extra day to work on a travel story. The main theme of my travel piece was Fukuoka “yatai” street stalls . . . Fukuoka street stall

A hot assignment
Nambu Tekki ironware is a specialty of a Iwate Prefecture in Northern Japan. I took these photos for a travel story last summer. This is the oven where they heat the pots and give them a special anti-rust layer of oxidised metal. The technique dates back to the Edo period. Nambu Tekki pots This was also inside the foundry. Hot hot hot. Wish I had gone in winter. I was told that all the restaurants nearby serve salty ramen – to replace salts in the buckets of sweat the workers must produce.

Poland photos
Not Japan and not photojournalism per se, but I’ve been meaning to post these here for a while. The summer before last I visited Poland with my family and trusty GR1. We were visiting my Polish relatives, but it was my first time to Poland since school. I was quite shocked at how little I really knew about the country. So please treat these as a first impression. The photos were taken mostly in Warsaw and Krakow. Anyway, my Poland via a GR1 and few rolls of B&W . . .