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"I was drawn to the world of photography with my first touch of a Leica."
My first encounter with photography was in 1945, when I was a first-grade elementary school student. One day an uncle, my mother's younger brother, came to our house with a camera. It was a Leica. It had an impressively solid feel, like nothing I had ever felt before. And I've never forgotten the unique sound of its focal-plane shutter.
In the upper grades of elementary school, I started taking photos with a Semi Pearl camera borrowed from another uncle. I also built my own darkroom and made three printers for contact printing around the same time. Later, in junior high school, I entered a local photography contest and won a prize. I thought photography was such fun!
But I felt I really wanted to be a painter, so after high school, I enrolled in Aichi Gakugei University's Art Department. Then, just before I was about to graduate, I fell ill with the measles and had to stay in bed for a week. Although I had already decided to take a job as a junior high school teacher after graduating, and even knew which school I would be teaching at, on my sickbed I kept remembering the Leica I had held as a child - the way it felt and sounded. And I began to realize that photography, rather than teaching, was my true calling. It was a truly decisive moment in my life. Urgently wanting to act on my decision, I persuaded my parents, the university, and the prefectural board of education, and left for Tokyo the day after the graduation ceremony, suitcase in hand, so I could take the entrance exam for a photographic college.
Unfortunately, though, the college turned me down, saying that admissions had already been closed. But after I spent two hours of persuading the person in charge, they decided to make a rare exception, and accepted me even though I hadn't taken an entrance exam. I don't believe anyone, before or since, has ever entered the college without taking the exam.
After graduating, I got a job at an advertising company dealing with commercial film production. I really loved the cinema, and over a period of three years, I spent almost every weekend at movie theaters, seeing as many as 103 films in a year. As a result, I came to understand the difference between still photos and movies, and the camerawork that each requires.
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