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"My interests as a junior high school student were instrumental in shaping my career."
I was about three or four years old when I took my first photo. Apparently, I used to photograph my aunt and children in the neighborhood with my father’s camera. I must admit I don’t really remember it, but my aunt still has some of the photos. Years later, when I was in junior high school, I joined the photography club and learned how to take real photos, develop film, and make prints. Looking back, I can see this was my first step on the road to becoming a photographer.
As an adolescent, I also used to build radios and do odd jobs to make money to buy transmitters to operate radio-controlled airplanes. In those days, the price of a transmitter was 12,000 yen, which is the equivalent of about 200,000 yen today. Imagine a junior high school student spending that much on anything! Either I had no sense of the value of money or I had a daring streak. Anyway, this daring side of my character showed itself again when as an adult, throwing caution to the wind, I invested 10 million yen in one of the first professional digital cameras.
People say the ideas we have in junior high and high school form the basis of the profession we eventually choose. I couldn’t agree more. When I was in the fourth grade of primary school, I remember being totally fascinated by an article in an electronics magazine about how to make a memory unit. That moment is somehow connected to everything I do now, from my involvement with digital cameras to the photos I take.
After high school, I entered a design school in Tokyo, but soon had to leave when the school failed financially. I returned to my hometown where I tried getting a job in the medical field while also helping my potter uncle with his pottery. Neither of these appealed to me, though, and I couldn’t really get into them. To be honest, I had always thought there was a huge psychological wall I had to overcome. That wall was my uncle. He’d become a famous ceramic artist, but his climb to success had been no easy thing. So, every time I failed at something my mother used to tell me how tough it had been for my uncle, and how I should work harder. The situation was something close to traumatic for me.
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