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" It all started with words of praise from my parents. That was what started me on the road to become a photographer."
I first became involved with photography when I was an eight-year-old primary school student. My grandfather had purchased a 110-format camera that came with a second, plastic 110 camera for free, which I ended up using. It was basically just a toy camera, but my parents were full of praise for a photo I happened to take of the sunset. This opened my eyes to the possibilities of photography, or at least made me more curious about it.
At the time, I was a big fan of the Chunichi Dragons professional baseball team. As I moved up through the grades in primary school, I used to follow the team around to take photos of the players, some of which I sent to the fan magazine "Monthly Dragons." Amazingly, about 90% of the shots I sent in were selected to be in the magazine, and I even won a prize. So even then, I had pretty much decided to become a photographer.
After high school, I went to a photography college and developed an interest in candids, night scenes, pure form, and other aspects of photography. In my second year there, I started taking photographs based on the theme of "Kachidokibashi," the name of a bridge over the Sumida River. When people ask me what my artistic genre is, I tell them my work is actually genre-free. I change my shooting style to match the subject, and take everything from scenic shots to documentary and wildlife photographs - anything I like, really. My subjects have even included crows and rats.
After graduating from college I worked for three years as an assistant at Toshinobu Takeuchi's studio. In fact, it was during my time there that I found myself chasing the abovementioned crows and rats. I used to go to Shibuya early in the morning to capture images of flocks of crows pecking away at garbage bags in search of food. After the crows had gone, the rats used to move in for the leftovers. This is probably why the two are often found together. I certainly didn't dislike them - the photos I took of them won a prize at a Japan Photographic Society (JPS) exhibition, and I was presented with a black Olympus OM-4Ti as part of the award. That's really how I got started with Olympus.
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