Photo 3: 1997, Nagoya, Japan

I took several of my favorite photos of Japan in 1997 and couldn't choose only one to post, so I thought I would tell the stories behind each of these. I was just starting to experiment with black and white photography in '96-'97 and these were some of those early efforts.

I had some good luck taking pictures of average people in average scenes with a 70-300 mm zoom lens, and these first two are a couple of those shots. I went to Nagoya Station on my day off (in those days I was teaching on a Tuesday-Saturday schedule, so this was a Monday evening), sat on the floor during rush hour, and snapped away. I caught this salaryman, headed who knows where, on a cell phone. This shot captured for me the pace of life of the average company worker in big city Japan.

The next shot is one of my absolute favorite people shots. Again, sitting on the floor at Nagoya Station, this group of high school students happened by, and I got this shot. In the late 1990's, high school girls were more and more on the leading edge of trends in fashion, technology, etc. and the coolest of the cool had begun to take on a sort of detached, disaffected attitude that I think comes across in this photo. Where the salaryman above seemed to have noticed me, and maybe wondered what I was doing and why I was taking his picture, these girls seem to be looking right through me to something far more interesting.

While the rest of Japan was dealing with the post-bubble economic malaise that has now lasted 15 years, high school students were taking advantage of a degree of economic and cultural power to cement themselves in a place of influence in Japanese society that remains today. One would like to think that this power had something to do with a sense of youthful optimism that young people in Japan maintained while their parents watched Japan's position as a world economic power erode. It would be interesting to see where these students are today and whether they have maintained their devil-may-care attitude, or whether they have softened somewhat.