Japan in 2009

A couple vibey photos

I lived in Saitama, Japan from December 5, 2008 to December 5, 2009. I was one of those English teachers, and it was not a fun year of my life. I made a video where I talked a bit about this.

In any case, it was a long time ago, and as the years pass it’s hard to not get a bit nostalgic about it, as I tend to get nostalgic about most things. I took a lot of photos when I was there, using a digital camera (there were no smartphones), and the other day I was showing some of them to a young friend who was thinking of moving there himself. Here’s a couple ones I thought stood out for their powerful vibes, as the kids say. “Japan is truly a vibe,” was how my friend put it.

I was also thinking about an interesting essay I read in The New Yorker a while ago, about how the sheer amount of photographs modern technology allows us to carelessly take has unintentionally made many of us into great photographers, even if we don’t know it:

If you take enough photographs, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually get an extraordinary one, for reasons you might not understand. Cartier-Bresson was a hunter in his youth, and photographers have often described his brand of street photography as a kind of “hunting,” but it might be more accurate to say that it was like fishing—a sport in which you can do a lot to optimize your chances but still can’t know for sure what you’re going to get. Chance is pretty much always in play. Sometimes everything comes together before the lens, and the visual world sorts itself within the frame, and you get a little gift. None of us really knows for sure if or when the magic’s going to happen.