Observations forged by half a century on the tectonic fault lines between East and West.
The memory of my first night in Japan in 1972, recreated by AI.
My first night in Tokyo ended in a love hotel—alone. I had assumed it was a hotel called Love. The room was exotic, a mixture between traditional Japanese elements, large mirrors, and garish decor. There were condoms and tissues on the night table, and the weirdest surprise, German porno movies with pixelated genitals on the hotel channel—a trace of home in a kinky room. I had arrived in “the city at the end of the world.”
Japan was never my destination, but it became my destiny. Just graduated from the College of Photography Munich, I landed with a one-way airline ticket on a cold December day in 1972. A life of turmoil incited my getaway to the other side of the planet. Japan was to be the first stop on a mainly overland journey to Australia, but I didn’t know then that Tokyo would be much more distant than imagined.
On my arrival in Haneda Airport, the first clue that Japan was out of this world appeared on the signs at Immigration separating “Aliens” from “Japanese.”
The choice to stop in Japan was not for visiting shrines, temples, or gardens, or for Zen meditation or seeking enlightenment in the “Far East.” A year before, I had seen Shuji Terayama’s film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, an unhinged, provocative, wild, and rebellious exemplar of Japan’s avant-garde. Terayama’s intoxicating creative outburst, plus the impressions of films by Kurosawa and Teshigahara, had triggered my interest. Japan seemed to be a compelling place for the start of my getaway.
Metropolitan Tokyo immediately clashed with the images of elegant wooden houses and smiling kimono-clad ladies evoked by fantasies of Japan. I staggered into a dense, chaotic urban jungle, an endless sprawl of concrete and steel, seemingly held together by a tangled net of overhead wires. The cacophony around huge frenetic railway stations was eerily silenced when train doors closed and I was squeezed between stoical, taciturn Japanese in dark suits. There was no chatter, a voiceless quiet punctuated only by the click-clack of the rails and the moans of squashed people when the train swayed.
Shinjuku, Kabuki-cho, 1970s; gyro/iStock
Tokyo seemed a restless, dispiriting place, an industrial city, much like the bleak workers’ underworld in Fritz Lang’s visionary 1927 film Metropolis. I wandered about in the urban maze of Tokyo; I lost track of time and space, and the impulse to continue my journey faltered. Finally, I ran out of money. Carpentry work paid for my first home in Tokyo, a three-tatami-mat room (180 × 270 cm).
For provisions, I pawned my camera (and never got it back). Dire straits led me to begin training as a German language teacher at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo. And I fell in love. The allure of passion in an exotic land I knew nothing about cemented my fate. I stayed for almost three years.
In September 1975, I finally continued my journey to Australia, as originally planned. I arrived in Darwin in August 1976, after a year’s odyssey via Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Two years later, I found myself working at a high steel construction site for an iron ore processing plant in the remote outback of Western Australia. After eight months of walking on lofty steel beams, I contemplated my next move. I sent job applications to the Goethe-Institut of Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Kyoto. Indonesia was my top choice, but the Goethe-Institut in Kyoto offered a government contract.
Within weeks, I was transported to a desk, back to Japan on a diplomatic visa, a tailored suit in my luggage. My container-room home in the rough environment of an 800-man desert camp transmogrified into life in a refined teahouse surrounded by a moss garden in a lush grove. A large pond with prized Japanese carp completed my Kyoto picture-book home. This was the “real” Japan I had seen in brochures and coffee-table books.
Despite being stuck for three years in Tokyo, I was ignorant about what is perceived as Japanese culture; I had never experienced a tea ceremony or heard about the enigmatic aesthetic of wabi-sabi or seen a noh or kabuki play. But I had learned to speak adequate Japanese and absorbed Japanese manners. My own home was so enchanting that it left me with no desire to join the crowds in Kyoto’s tourist attractions.
When I finally decided to return to photography, ten years after pawning my camera in Tokyo, my first subject was consequently not Kyoto’s sights but chindon-ya. These outlandishly dressed groups of street performers advertised for local shops and were often perceived as social outcasts. The leader carried a strap-on frame with a bell on top and a drum below, the chin and don of their musical procession. While still working for the Goethe-Institut, I traveled with the chindon-ya for almost three years whenever I had the chance.
Chindon-ya were my first major project, exhibition and publication in Japan
Obsessed with photography again, I left my cushy job, moved back to Tokyo and started a career as freelance photographer. I also found the perfect Tokyo home: less than an hour from the city center, in the heart of a rural valley, with rice fields, bamboo groves, plum and cherry trees—all surrounded by a jungle-like forest. This green sanctuary of isolated serenity within the raw and cluttered cityscape of a seemingly limitless megalopolis remains my base in Japan to this day.
Japan is a tribal society, fiercely territorial and protective of the group. This may have to do with rice cultivation in a mountainous country with limited land for paddies. Rice is central to Japan’s culture and customs, and growing it demands cooperation and coordinated irrigation. Dependence on others fosters a less individualistic and more collectivist mindset that emphasizes consensus. It may therefore take decades to be adopted into the collective fabric of a group, neighborhood, or village.
The break into my rural community came by way of funerals. I had photographed the seasonal life of the valley—rice growing, harvesting, and the local shrine festival. For ten years I was largely ignored, but one day a neighbor knocked at my door, asking if I had a photo of her recently deceased relative. Portrait photos of older people in rural areas are rare but necessary for Japanese funerals. This happened again, and again. By contributing portraits for funerals, I finally was part of the community.
My first years as a freelance photographer in Tokyo were primarily focused on offbeat projects: long-distance truck drivers and the Takarazuka Revue. But it was pachinko, most of all, that would occupy me for ten years, with requests from magazines worldwide.
To play pachinko in a bright and deafening hall, with ball-bearings falling vertically through pins and gates, is a solitary activity drowning the senses of the player into oblivion. It is gambling in a country where gambling is illegal. But pachinko was then Japan’s premier industry with more revenue than all Japanese automakers combined.
Pachinko. Probably the most widely published project I have ever done.
From the mind-numbing amusement of pachinko, I went on the lonesome road with long-distance truckers and spent many nights cruising through endless semi-industrial landscapes. “Lonesome Road: Trucker Life in Japan” was published as a photo essay in a Japanese magazine and nearly ended my fledgling freelance career. The head of a yakuza group called my publisher and demanded almost €50,000 for allegedly unauthorized use of his truck on the magazine’s cover. A friend’s intercession resolved the “misunderstanding.” Instead of compensation, I was to supply large-format photo prints. Not only did I have the honor of decorating a yakuza office, but my dubious reputation caused employees at the publishing company to bow deeply to me, out of respect, whenever I entered the office.
Japanese long-distance truckers. I spent four tough months with them.
After the macho trucker milieu, I plunged into the all-female fantasy world of Takarazuka, Japan’s most popular theater company. The Takarazuka Revue lavishly produces gaudy musical extravaganzas where young women embody female and male roles, “selling dreams” to an all-woman audience. Women taking on not only female but also all the male roles makes Takarazuka an example of gender-bending, like classic kabuki in which men play female as well as male characters.
Takarazuka Revue. The commissioned project and the stay in Takarazuka city were a breeze. Good food and fluffy beds.
Moving into corporate photography in the mid-’90s, I came face to face with Japan’s leaders: CEOs and executives of flourishing auto, airline, banking, and securities industries, as well as academic thought leaders, researchers, and two future prime ministers.
Unlike the often-flamboyant postwar company founders and entrepreneurial mavericks like Soichiro Honda (Honda Motor), Konosuke Matsushita (Panasonic), and Akio Morita and engineering genius Masaru Ibuka (both of Sony), who defied the rules in a nation of conformists, later generations appeared more risk-averse, careful not to rock the boat, which led to less vitality and, ultimately, stagnation.
Yukio Hatoyama, Prime Minister from September 2009 to June 2010, visits a ThyssenKrupp technology exhibit in Tokyo
For about ten years I alternated between all-male and all-female worlds — truckers and corporate boardrooms on one side; Takarazuka and Kyoto’s geisha district, on the other. Both worlds offered education and insights but my preference was for female environments: better bedding, much better food, and more care for body and soul.
Both worlds, however, were ultimately about power and hierarchies. In fiercely closed Gion I lived for several months in the house of a former geisha at the back entrance of the Kaburenjo, the exclusive theater and rehearsal hall of the Gion geisha community. By day I documented the grueling training of maiko; in the evenings my host and sponsor welcomed me into her intimate gatherings of regulars and trusted friends, maiko and geisha. As so often in Japan, it was my personal reputation that had been the entrance key. Gion Geisha was a book project that unfortunately never reached completion.
Although based for over forty years in Japan, my feelings about home are shifting and elusive. My sentiments are most eloquently described by Japan’s celebrated seventeenth-century poet, Basho: Moon and sun are travelers of eternity, and the years coming and going are wanderers, too. Drifting life away in a boat or growing old leading a horse by the bit, each day is a journey and the journey itself home.
Coda: There is a lack of visual documentation of my early years in Japan because I didn’t own a camera. It was a period in my life when I had no wish to photograph. Shortly after arriving in Tokyo on a one-way ticket I had to pawn my Canon for food, ironically in its land of origin. It was also a time marked by the grief for the death of my muse, model, and creative soul mate Cvetka Florjančič, daughter of the legendary Slovenian inventor Peter Florjančič. Losing Cvetka caused a breakdown that pushed me to get away to the other side of the world. It choked any desire to express myself visually or otherwise for several years.
Originally published as a foreword for my book JAPAN published in 2022 by Schiffer in the US and in 2020 by Frederking & Thaler in Germany. This is an extended version.
