Tokyo Love Hello

When I started photographing in Japan I had no book in mind. I was just there, taking photographs for my interest or for magazine assignments. Back in those days my core subjects were elsewhere, in the developing world. Africa and Afghanistan. Places whose history was being written in blood and sand, and of course my homeland, England. Always England.

Things changed when I met my wife, Miyako Yamada, who was Japanese and who had a son, Daisuke. Things changed a lot. Life got better and far more complicated, as it does when you fall hopelessly in love. I now had a compelling reason for being in Japan and for photographing Japan, wanting to understand a place that had suddenly given me so much.

I started with a large project on Mount Fuji, the symbol for Japan, and documented the life and landscape around the mountain as a microcosm of Japanese life played out in the present of the great mountain. I documented it over the seasons and a period of four years. It was a project that started in a very different manner to this book. Fuji was a classically documentary project, conceived from the beginning to be a book, which is what it finally became.

During the time I was working on Fuji I also photographed Tokyo, but it was only later, when I brought my Tokyo material together as an archive, that some images emerged, insisting on my attention and interacting, in some indeterminate way, with other images from Tokyo, in a manner that felt like the beginning of a book.

Much of making this type of book is intuitive. It is as if there is a scent you follow, not knowing what the scent is, or even, in the beginning, that you are following it. You follow it into blank walls and towards blind horizons before you find a live trail again, until at some point you are close to Somewhere, and that Somewhere is the book you did not know you were making. Then, the fragments of memory, the silent echoes of experience, which are your photographs, start to be assembled in a process of construction shaped by the logic of dreams.

I cannot explain this book. I can say plausible things about it if required; things that would be true yet miss the point that for me Tokyo is a state of mind as much as it is a place. By this I mean that my Tokyo is not someone else’s, it is colored by all my prejudices and affections. Undoubtedly based on reality, in other ways it is a fiction.

Think of it as a novel, even a love story.

Arriving, you don’t know where you are, or whom. You are me, but you don’t know me. Everything is not quite as it seems. You linger on street corners, peer into lives, lost in a sequence of passing encounters, reflections, screens, illusions. Searching, looking, hoping. For what? Truth? Beauty? Love? You travel for a long day of many years, before drifting into night: a stranger in a city which somehow you feel you know. You don’t, but you might.

Chris Steele-Perkins from the introduction to the book “Tokyo Love Hello,” published in 2006.