A while back, I posted this on Notes.

PERSONAL WORK is the first photo book I ever published, bringing together my work up to that point.

Three years later, orders still come in.

To handle those orders alongside my client work, I use a fulfillment warehouse for shipping. International mail from Japan to the US has resumed, but some new customs rules were added, and the warehouse couldn’t handle those shipments.

So this month, I worked with the warehouse and set up a business account with DHL. I spent the past few days on the paperwork, and now I can ship to the US again.

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To photograph cherry blossoms means that during that time, I am not photographing anything else. This happens even on ordinary days. When I decide from the start to “photograph this,” I sometimes stop noticing everything else.

Some photographic series begin with a theme chosen before shooting. You go to specific places or follow particular subjects, gathering the photographs you need. Photographing cherry blossoms in their season is close to this. There are also series that emerge afterward, when you look back at photographs accumulated over many years.

For me, it’s usually the latter.

When I’m walking through the city or traveling, I photograph the moments that draw me in. When I take the photographs, I am not thinking about which series they belong to. But when I look back at my library, I find that the same things have been appearing in my photographs again and again. A series begins to emerge from those photographs. Once I recognize it, the next time I’m out in the city, I start noticing things I had walked past before.

My library holds several clusters of photographs. These are the beginnings of series, found among photographs I’ve taken over many years. Today, I’ll share twenty of them.

1. Laundromats

2. Bicycles

3. Traffic cones

4. Liminal spaces

5. Vending machines

6. Dogs in the city

7. Blue hour

8. From above

9. Traffic mirrors

10. Views from windows

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Japan has a rainy season called tsuyu.

A long stretch of light rain that keeps falling. The beginning of this season is announced on the news: “Tsuyu has begun.”

But in recent years, the start of tsuyu has become less clear. Instead of steady rain, brief and intense downpours have become more common. The number of rainy days also seems to be decreasing.

The sense of season I had as a child has changed into something else now. Days when light rain kept falling. I may one day miss them.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

The phrase “Because I don’t dislike it” has stayed with me.

I posted the same story on Notes. Afterwards, I wondered how people who read it understood “Because I don’t dislike it.”

Some readers may have thought she had no choices, because she lived in a rural area, because she was a woman.

In 2017, when I took this photo, I was three years into my career as an independent photographer.

I had never worked as someone’s assistant. I had never worked at a studio. I had never received a photography award. Without roots in the industry, I felt constant pressure to be evaluated by someone I could not see. More credentials. More income. That kind of urgency drove me.

That was when I heard, "Because I don't dislike it." It made me feel that there was another way to keep going, another way to live. Something in me relaxed.

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I had visited before on photo trips, but Kagawa came to feel close to me through those six months of staying there. What you see on a short trip and what you see over a long stay are different.

This isn’t a checklist or a travel guide. It’s a record from my own viewpoint.

About the Seto Inland Sea

To understand Kagawa, the place to start is the Seto Inland Sea, which spreads out to its north. The Seto Inland Sea is enclosed by three of Japan’s main islands: Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu.

Because it doesn’t open onto the ocean, the surface stays calm, more like a lake than a sea.

What I love most is the view of the Seto Inland Sea from the train as it crosses from Honshu to Shikoku. The water is always as flat as a meadow, and the rounded islands scattered across it look as if a child had set them there.

Along this stretch, the train called the Marine Liner slows down so passengers can take in the view. Watching the sea, I feel far from the noise of the capital.

Driving in Kagawa

Kagawa sits on the Seto Inland Sea, in the northeast of Shikoku. It is the smallest prefecture in Japan by area.

After the calm of the Seto Inland Sea, what interested me was the pace of people in Kagawa.

At a car rental shop in Kagawa, when I picked up the keys, the clerk said: “You’re from Tokyo, right? Kagawa drivers are rough, so be careful.”

When I actually drove, at first I didn’t notice much. I figured the clerk was just being self-deprecating about his own prefecture.

But when I looked it up, I found that Kagawa often ranks among the worst nationally on a number of traffic-accident indicators, and the prefecture itself has made this a policy priority.

Once I started paying attention, I saw it. Drivers changing lanes without signaling. Pulling out before the light turned green. Not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks. I came across these scenes more often than in other prefectures.

Talking with my wife, we came to one conclusion: people in Kagawa are impatient. And this impatience runs through the food culture here as well.

About udon

Kagawa is the home of Sanuki udon. When I was staying there, lunch always began with one question: udon, or not udon. Udon sits at the center of the local diet.

Sanuki udon is all about koshi (the firmness, the bite of the noodle). Boiled fresh, it’s at its best. Once it cools or sits too long in broth, the koshi is gone. So when udon arrives at your table, you eat fast.

At a self-service udon shop, where you carry your own tray, the sequence from ordering to finishing feels like a sport. You pick your noodles. You line up and choose your tempura.

An array of tempura in front of you. With people behind you, there is no time to hesitate. You pay, sit down, and start eating right away. Ten minutes is enough to be out the door.

Udon culture supports this impatience, and that impatience keeps udon culture going.

Why is udon the staple here?

On the evening news in Kagawa, you’ll see daily updates on local reservoir levels. That’s not something you usually see elsewhere in Japan.

Kagawa has many sunny days and no major rivers. Water issues sit close to daily life. Rice cultivation requires a lot of water. Wheat, the main ingredient of udon, doesn’t need as much.

Because the land has struggled with water, wheat took root here. From that wheat, Sanuki udon developed.

Getting off along the way

This isn’t only about Kagawa. My favorite way to spend time in a rural area is to ride a train without a clear destination or a fixed schedule.

The station buildings, the ticket machines, the interiors of the trains, the ads inside, the scenery flowing past the windows. All of it feels out of the ordinary to me.

My favorite line in Kagawa is the Kotoden Kotohira Line (Takamatsu-Chikko to Kotoden-Kotohira).

The end of the line is Kotohira, a town near the center of Kagawa. It’s the gateway town to the famous Kotohira-gu shrine, and one of the prefecture’s main tourist destinations.

After 5 p.m., though, the place changes. Shops close, and the streets empty out. Almost no one is heading to Kotohira at that hour.

The final stop is a tourist destination, but the closer you get to it, the fewer passengers are left. That reversed feeling is one reason I take the Kotohira Line in the evening.

The line from Takamatsu to Kotohira runs into the late afternoon sun. The faded blinds tell you how strong the light is.

When I feel like it, I get off at a station and take photos. Unlike in the city, once you get off, the next train in the same direction is at least 20 minutes away. Sometimes longer.

Most stations between the endpoints are unmanned, so I can take photos freely while I wait. But I am alone at the station, and the unease grows. Even so, the train arrives exactly on time.

On the train

Neither tourist nor resident. From that vantage, I observe the people around me. On public transport, especially trains, you can see people with a slightly different air from those in Tokyo.

One evening, after taking photos in Kotohira, I boarded a train on the Dosan Line. There weren’t many passengers, and I was looking out the window at a sky shifting from indigo into dark. At Zentsuji Station, a group of high school baseball players got on.

A dozen or so came on at once, but the train didn’t get loud. They were probably worn out from a hard practice. A few crossed their arms and closed their eyes right away. The others sat with earphones in, eyes on their phones.

“Kids these days. Same as Tokyo,” I thought. Just as I was about to close my own eyes, I heard the sound of slurping. One of them had casually started eating instant ramen.

Many stations in Kagawa have a Seven-Eleven near the ticket gates. He had probably filled his cup with hot water from the in-store kettle before boarding.

Eating something so soupy and strongly scented on a train is a clear breach of etiquette. It is not something you see in Tokyo, and I found myself staring. He noticed me staring and looked back, puzzled.

Another day, on a Yosan Line train from Takamatsu Station, I saw a father and child sitting in a box seat.

The child looked out the window calmly, occasionally turning to speak to the father. The father was reading a paperback. He would set it aside without hesitation each time, listening until the child was satisfied. When the child turned back to the window, the father returned to his book.

When the two got off at Sanuki-Fuchu Station, I caught a glimpse of the cover. It was Agota Kristof’s The Notebook.

Time on the ferry

The Seto Inland Sea has many islands, and from Kagawa there are ferries out to a number of them. One day, I decided to head to Honjima.

On the first ferry of the day, there were a few other passengers besides me. They were probably heading to work. One asleep. One typing on a laptop. One not sitting at all, leaning against the wall with eyes closed.

A while after the ferry departed, the morning sun came into the cabin. Soon the Seto Ohashi Bridge appeared. The person with the laptop, sitting by the window, squinted at the brightness and closed the curtain without hesitation.

What was a sight I could not look away from, for someone who lives and works here, was part of an ordinary day.

Honjima is small. I rented an electric bike and circled the island in about an hour. The shops for tourists were closed. The only ones I met were a few elderly residents and a few cats.

I crossed to the island, then came back. That was the whole day. But this kind of time, repeated over months, was what I needed to come to know Kagawa.

The people I saw in Kagawa did not seem to be adjusting themselves to trends or to an order imposed from outside. At the pace of their own lives, they seemed to carry a certain casualness and conscientiousness, along with an unexpected kind of culture.

Someone said you arrive at the Seto Inland Sea at the right moment in your life. Kagawa, facing that sea, has become close to me. I no longer think this is a coincidence.

It is where my wife grew up, and where my son was born. In this newsletter, I expect I will write about Kagawa, again and again.

Lately I see more people around me who keep using older digital cameras. In Japan, the weak yen is probably part of it.

I have been on the camera industry’s “upgrade cycle” for a long time, partly because of my work. Since I started photography in 2010, I have replaced my main camera roughly every two years (along with plenty of lenses).

Had I used a single camera for many years, I might have kept taking photos with the feeling that “the photos I took with this camera carry special memories.”

If photography were only for my own pleasure, without professional demands, there would be something romantic about staying with one camera year after year.

By contrast, the joy of owning the latest model fades in about two weeks. The latest model does shoot more comfortably, but looking back, the difference is within a margin of error.

More than anything, the photographs themselves don’t change dramatically.

A camera has two sides. On one side, it is a tool for making photographs. Light enters through the lens, you press the shutter, and an image is recorded. This is about function.

On the other side, it signals the owner’s cultural position. The camera you choose becomes a statement about who you are.

“I shoot film.” “I carry the latest model.” “A ten-year-old camera is enough.” Each of these goes beyond how you photograph and speaks to where you stand.

When digital cameras were still advancing rapidly, the first side received most of the attention.

As a commercial photographer, I sometimes take on assignments to shoot sample images or write reviews for new cameras and lenses. But there is no longer much that functionally changes the photograph itself.

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Looking out the window, I noticed something after the train passed Okayama Station. Among the gray tile roofs of the old houses in the distance, some were red. The further west I went, the more red roofs I saw. It was a curious sight.

That sight stayed with me. In May 2024, I made time to travel through Okayama Prefecture.

Houses with red tile roofs were everywhere. The red roofs I had seen from a distance through the Shinkansen window turned out, up close, to come in many shades. Muted red, glossy red, vermilion.

I looked into it. The tiles are called Sekishu-gawara. They come from the Iwami region of Shimane Prefecture, and the red comes from kimachi-ishi, a local stone used as a glaze material.

Fired at high temperatures, they are also resistant to cold and snow. What I had thought of as a color turned out to be tied to the local geology and climate.

Against the green of new leaves and rice fields, the red tile roofs remain in the eye. That contrast is part of what makes the landscape of the Chugoku region distinctive.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

I don’t watch much anime.

That said, “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk” were part of my boyhood.

Mondays were the release day of the weekly manga magazine. When I got to school, someone always had it open on their desk, and a group would form around them. That was my boyhood.

As I grew older, I drifted away from both manga and anime.

Some years ago, I went out to take photographs in Japan with a friend from abroad I had met on Instagram. She loved anime, and her eyes lit up as she talked about “Naruto.” When I said I’d never seen it,

“What about One Piece? Demon Slayer?”

She pressed on. I hadn’t seen either. The moment turned a little awkward, though we laugh about it now.

That experience led me to a thought.

Japanese cultural content draws a lot of interest from abroad. But the center of that interest, as far as I can tell, is mostly anime and manga.

Meanwhile, everyday life in Japan, the way people work here, and the values behind them have not yet crossed the language barrier.

There are many people who write about Japan from the position of being Japanese. By comparison, there are fewer voices writing as ordinary people living ordinary lives here.

The biggest issue is the language barrier. But automatic translation is improving, and we are in a transitional period where that barrier is beginning to disappear.

For that reason, I started Beyond The Frame. I wanted to write not only as a Japanese person, but as a photographer and as someone living an ordinary life, to readers abroad.

Here I’ve written about traffic mirrors, vending machines, and chairs. Not mainstream culture, not subculture either. The kind of Japan that doesn’t fit neatly into either.

Writing about these things, I notice something. When you live in Japan, you rarely think about what feels Japanese.

But when you start writing for readers abroad, familiar scenes begin to appear in front of you as something specific to Japan.

An old woman whose daily routine is a morning visit to a shrine. The volunteers in vests who stand at corners to keep schoolchildren safe on their way to school. When writing for a Japanese audience, these pass by as “obvious.”

Writing in English, for me, is a way to gain a new perspective.

In some sense, this is what I’ve been practicing for years through photography. I’m doing it now with words.

And writing in English also changes where I stand.

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The TV was always on, usually tuned to NHK. What flowed from it, in the late afternoon, was sumo.

Grand sumo. A sport, and a Japanese ritual. A tradition that grew out of ceremonies praying for a good harvest. The ceremonial ring entrance, the shiko foot-stomping, the throwing of salt. A rare competition where sport and Shinto rite live side by side.

Even as a child, I felt this was different from other sports.

As the broadcast neared its end, the smell of dinner would drift in from the kitchen. Many Japanese people who grew up in the era of television probably share this memory.

Those were the years when Chiyonofuji, a small yokozuna with a legendary career, dominated the ring. Foreign-born rikishi were beginning to make their mark. The Waka-Taka boom was on the horizon.

Somewhere along the way I stopped watching, and for a long time sumo felt far from me.

My wife and I started watching sumo again in 2025. It began with a YouTube channel we happened to find: the Futagoyama stable.

These days, many stables post on YouTube: practice sessions, daily life, meals.

Once we could see inside the stable, the rikishi stopped feeling like beings from another world. They became people who lived, struggled, and kept pushing themselves.

It was my wife who fell for sumo first. During her pregnancy, in a stretch when morning sickness left her unable to eat much, she watched rikishi eat and felt that they were eating for her. It seemed like outsourcing appetite.

We started watching the actual matches, learning each rikishi’s story, and now we are both fans.

Let me introduce one rikishi. Aonishiki (安青錦), from Ukraine. He came to Japan in 2022, trained with the Kansai University sumo club, then joined the Ajigawa stable. He made his professional debut in 2023 and climbed into the top makuuchi division in a remarkably short time.

He’s slightly below the division average in height and weight. His background is in wrestling. He slips low into bigger opponents and breaks their stance from underneath. There’s a clarity to his sumo that I find refreshing. Young, with a dramatic path behind him.

The more you learn each rikishi’s story, the more you are drawn in.

In September 2025, I went to Ryogoku Kokugikan for the first time, to watch the September tournament. My wife was in her late pregnancy and couldn’t come. I went alone.

The Kokugikan seats only about ten thousand. The tickets are sold by lottery, and they’re hard to come by. My seat was up on the second-floor chair section.

Looking down at the dohyo from a far seat, it felt like a stage. I couldn’t see the faces of the rikishi. But I could see things television cuts away: the shape of the ring, the gyoji’s movements, the rikishi entering and leaving the dohyo. I could see the movement of the whole space.

When I was a child, sumo in my mind was something like a black-and-white TV. Watching it now, the kesho-mawashi aprons, the gyoji’s robes, and the traditional Japanese colors all over the dohyo are beautiful.

The Aonishiki match I mentioned earlier. He was up against Kirishima (霧島). Pushed to the edge but never breaking, he reset his stance and reversed it. That was the day I felt sure he would be a yokozuna one day.

On the dohyo, physical impact and decorum sit side by side.

The final bout. Hoshoryu (豊昇龍), the yokozuna, folds the towel he used to wipe his sweat. The hush before the tachiai. A single impact, a string of techniques.

── The match is over.

A wave of cheers. The contrast between motion and stillness, which I had only watched on TV, came through in the air of the Kokugikan.

When rikishi win, they show no joy. When they lose, they keep their faces composed. In the winner’s interview, their words are few.

A former yokozuna once said on a broadcast, “Rikishi are samurai.” In modern Japan, I think the most samurai-like figures are these rikishi.

January 2026. The living room of an old house in Kagawa. My wife’s parents’ home. We were watching the sumo broadcast. Our newborn son was there with us, and so were my parents-in-law.

Each of us was doing something else. My laptop was on my knees. My wife held her phone. My mother-in-law was preparing dinner in the kitchen. My father-in-law was getting ready to walk the family Shiba.

Sumo is the perfect sport to watch while doing something else. The gap between bouts is long. When a match starts, everyone turns to the TV. It’s settled in an instant. Then we go back to what we were doing.

That distance between watching and not really watching. And yet, when the top-division bouts come on around five in the afternoon, everyone naturally puts their hands down and looks at the screen. Conversations start. When a cheer goes up, our sleeping son wakes up and stares at the TV.

When I was a child, I sat in my grandparents’ house and watched the late-afternoon sumo broadcast. Now, I watch sumo with my son.

Thinking aloud

About ten years ago, I photographed a craftsman who makes sumi ink. I asked him, “What is the most beautiful black?” He paused for a moment, then answered, “The feathers of a crow wet with rain.” I still remember those words.

The shoot was part of a corporate interview project. I was there to take photographs, while another interviewer spoke with him.

During the shoot, I had to focus on the photographs. That meant I could not listen to everything he said. The words of someone who had spent decades on his work.

But later, a professionally edited interview was published on the website. It was a fine piece. Something that could last, I thought. I was also satisfied with the photographs I took.

I could read it back anytime, I thought. The other day I remembered it and went looking. The domain was no longer the project site I knew. When I opened it, what came up was an overseas streaming site with no connection to the original project. On the web, this can happen.

In that same project, we interviewed many other craftspeople as well. Swordsmiths, dyers, armor makers, and others. Their words are no longer on the web.

When I learned this, as someone who had been part of the project, I was disappointed.

Sometimes the media project itself shuts down. When it was a one-off project, the original team may no longer be there, and no one chooses to keep the domain alive. Even when the interview was commissioned by a major company, there’s no guarantee it will survive.

We used to think of magazines as short-lived and the web as lasting. Now the opposite seems true. Magazines and other print media last longer. Some of the renewed interest in physical media comes from realizing this.

But if that’s the case, what survives for future generations is only the version of history told by newspapers, books, and the publishing world. The honest voices of ordinary people scatter and disappear from the web. The web, I think, is where more raw voices tend to appear. When those voices disappear, that is a cultural loss.

How should we think about this problem?

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Traveling with a six-month-old was new ground. My wife and I had been restless for weeks. For our son, it would be his first trip.

It was also our first trip as parents.

The Shinkansen seats had to be booked a month in advance. Only certain rows have space for large luggage, and they go quickly.

Stroller, baby carrier, changes of clothes, baby bottles, extra formula, diapers. Unlike adults, we can’t just pick things up on the way. Enough to handle anything over three days. The bags naturally got bigger.

On YouTube, influencers travel abroad with babies the same age as ours. How do they manage? By comparison, Tokyo to Kyoto is a school field trip.

To cut weight, I packed no change of clothes for myself, only underwear. I wore the same outfit for three days. “Our son is better dressed than his father!” I said this more than once on the trip.

My son is looking out the Shinkansen window. Scenery still unfamiliar to him streams past.

It wasn’t his first time on the Shinkansen. We had already taken him from Kagawa, my wife’s hometown, back to Tokyo. This time, I had a little of the ease I lacked then.

I look around. The Shinkansen carries all sorts. Parents like us with small children, couples, people in business attire, an elderly couple, visitors from abroad. The train car begins to feel like a small slice of society.

Among them, I am one of the fathers with an infant. A feeling, somewhat shy, somewhat proud.

From my seat, I caught the eye of an elderly woman in the aisle, lined up to get off. “How many months?” she asked. A few seconds, the smallest exchange. My son looked up at her, puzzled.

From Kyoto Station, instead of waiting at the taxi stand, we took the subway. On the subway, a man saw us and immediately offered his seat.

“We’re getting off shortly,” I said politely, declining. He smiled and went back to his conversation with the woman beside him.

Maybe it’s because of Japan’s low birth rate. Or maybe it’s just me. But the way people look at you when you’re with a child has felt kinder these past few years.

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Before, when I traveled, I could spend all my time taking photographs.

Reaching the destination is less important than the time spent moving. I look out the window. I pass through unknown towns. While driving, I stop the car when something catches my eye and take a photo.

I decide on a destination, but enjoy the room in between. The photos I take that way are not the ones you find in guidebooks.

Traveling with my son feels different from that. There is very little room left in the trip. It’s closer to filling in a puzzle.

There’s feeding time. There’s the chance he’ll fill a diaper. There’s bath time. There’s the fussy hour when sleep is coming. Things adults would barely notice become the trip’s center.

We head straight to the hotel. We check in, enter the room, and hear the door close behind us. Hearing it, I felt relief in my whole body. My wife must have felt the same.

We chose Ace Hotel Kyoto.

Once inside, our son rolled around the bed, happy. He seemed to know clearly that this wasn’t home.

All three days were rainy.

The first day was the only one when we could properly walk outside. We did some quick unpacking and went out. We moved through Kyoto with our son in his stroller.

Pushing the stroller, the road’s slight tilt and the seams in the pavement come up through my hands. The step between Kyoto’s sidewalks and the road feels lower than in Tokyo.

I wondered if Kyoto’s drainage standards were different. I don’t know for sure, but with a stroller, I noticed these things.

We walked close to Shijō-Kawaramachi, near the Takase River. This was the only stretch of the trip where we approached anything that looked like a tourist spot.

We rested at a café. Glancing at the Takase River, I saw a grey heron. Nearby, an older man was watching it.

The Takase River was once part of the city’s waterways and transport routes. That was part of why the heron by the water felt strangely like Kyoto.

Nothing in particular happened. Still, I really felt I had come to Kyoto.

The next day, I found a little time to take photographs. “I’ll just go out and take some photos,” I told my wife, and stepped out for one hour.

The streets near the hotel. Walking and shooting, I observed the neighborhood. Tourists don’t gather here, but there’s a steady kind of life to it.

Kyoto’s street rhythm is unhurried. Building heights are restricted by ordinance, in part, and most houses here are one or two stories.

From the flowers and plants set at the entrances facing the street, I can sense the people who care for them. The work of watering, the time spent picking off dead leaves. Those things seep into the street, even though they aren’t visible. That may be why time here feels unhurried.

I came back exactly one hour later. My wife and son had been exploring the hotel. Ace Hotel Kyoto has shops and restaurants on-site, so there’s plenty to see inside.

Now it was my turn to watch our son. My wife went out for ramen. It was just our son and me in the room.

I looked back through the photos I had just taken.

This trip wasn’t for taking photographs. And yet I had taken plenty.

Flowers at the entrances. Plants. Things I had never paid much attention to. My eye seems to be drawn to them now. Is it because I am raising a child? Without realizing it, I had started to notice the act of caring.

I glanced over at our son. Through the slats of the crib the hotel had set up, he was staring out the window. He is always trying to take in everything in front of him.

I looked out the window. I am learning to see the world through his eyes.

On the last day, we had breakfast at Inoda Coffee, and spent the time before checkout in the room listening to records. It was my wife’s first time learning how to play one. Placing the record carefully on the platter, lowering the needle into position. The motion seemed to stay with her.

“Maybe we should get a record player,” she said.

Our trip wouldn’t make a YouTube video. The footage would probably be awkward. But now, looking back through the photos, I think that was enough.

After years of walking around Tokyo, I have come to remember the places where light falls.

From the gaps between Tokyo’s buildings of different heights, light sometimes falls on a single spot.

For example, when I’m walking with my wife on a sunny day. Even while we talk, I keep looking around. “Light is hitting that spot,” I think, and I check my watch and remember the time.

And then I return to that spot. It might be the next day. It might be the next year.

This light only appears in this season, at this hour. The height and angle of the buildings match the path of the sun for only a few days each year.

People’s lives appear in the light.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

As I wrote recently in “From followers to subscribers,” I want to keep Beyond The Frame as a place where photographs and thoughts build up over time. I think of it as a body of work. Starting today, there is a way to support that.

The following will remain free to read, as before:

• Essays that share photographs and life from my own point of view

• The Visual Notes series

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What do paid subscribers receive?

1. Paid subscribers will have access to subscriber-only posts, which I plan to publish about once a week. These posts will be closer to the process behind Beyond The Frame: photography, freelance work, Japan, and the questions that come with making this newsletter part of my work.

2. Paid subscribers can send questions. If you want advice, another point of view, or want to ask about my experience, please feel free to send a question. I will choose some of them and answer them in subscriber-only posts. They may not be direct answers so much as a way of thinking together. If I use your question in an article, I will follow your credit preference. As a small thank you, I will extend the paid subscription of anyone whose question is used by 90 days.

3. When I release new books in the future, I will share early information and discount offers with paid subscribers.

4. My sincere gratitude for supporting this work.

About Founding Members

Founding Members ($150) receive my photobook, including shipping, and my Lightroom presets. After you subscribe, I will send an email with instructions on how to receive them.

One note. Because of tariff-related issues, shipping to the United States is currently paused. If you live in the United States, I will send the photobook once shipping resumes. International shipping to countries other than the United States is still available.

What is in today’s paid section

I am accepting questions and comments through the Reader Survey.

In the paid section, I write about why Beyond The Frame reached 9,300 subscribers in a short time, and what readers have taught me through comments.

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For me, as a Japanese person, self-disclosure in a language other than my native one was an interesting experience. I write in Japanese, then translate it into English. That distance may make me a little more honest.

In the four months since I started Substack, I have not only been writing Beyond The Frame. I have also read many pieces on Substack. One phrase I kept seeing stayed with me: body of work.

I was struck by that phrase for a reason. For years, I have mainly posted my photographs on Instagram.

I kept taking photographs with passion, and my follower count on Instagram grew. But at some point, I began to feel that I was no longer posting photographs to followers. I was posting to Instagram itself.

When likes or followers decrease on Instagram, I sometimes take it as a response to me. I wonder if I should have done something differently. Is that improvement for followers, or for Instagram’s algorithm?

At the end of that path, more such decisions accumulate: making the sky bluer, the sunset redder, or Somei Yoshino cherry blossoms look pink. A single decision in one photograph can affect the whole.

On Instagram, I try to show photographs as if someone were turning the pages of a photobook. But even when I post photographs that way, after a few days they are rarely looked at again.

For the platform, the newest post always has the most value. If a post does not get likes, the fact remains that its engagement was lower than past posts. I constantly feel pressure to make the next post.

Even with the same photograph, the way it is treated changes depending on where it is placed. At some point, Instagram had become a place where I posted to fit the algorithm.

I want my work and my thoughts to reach people widely. Making a continuous effort for that is not difficult for me at all. But if that effort is directed toward the platform, it strays from the original purpose.

To keep posting my thoughts and new photographs, I needed somewhere other than Instagram.

Photographs, and the thoughts and perspectives behind them, build up over time. That is how I understood a body of work.

Since starting Substack in January, I have remembered the feeling I once had on Instagram: the feeling of sending photographs directly to followers.

Substack has algorithms too. This is especially visible on Notes. But Notes is not the destination. It is an entry point for people to discover Beyond The Frame as a body of work.

This is not an effort to increase followers. It is an effort to increase subscribers.

When I am writing an article, I do not think about Substack. I can write while thinking only about the person reading, not the platform. That is what I like most.

Recently, I added Beyond The Frame to my profile. It is a sign of my intention to focus more on this newsletter.

Can a photographer continue working in this space, shifting the center from client work to their own projects? I have started to take this question seriously.

My name is Takashi Yasui. I am a photographer based in Japan.

I was born and raised in Senri New Town, Osaka. My life was uncertain from early on. I dropped out of high school, never took a regular job, and worked for many years as a non-regular worker. I belong to the generation Japan calls the Employment Ice Age. For a long time, I did not feel that I was really part of society.

A turning point came in 2010. When I was 30, my niece was born, and I bought a Ricoh compact camera to take pictures of her. As I photographed my family, I was drawn deeper into photography. Soon after, I joined Instagram, which had just launched.

I wanted to share photographs taken in Japan with people around the world. At the time, photography was both a hobby and a way to reconnect with society.

Before I knew it, photography work began coming in through Instagram. In 2015, I became a freelance photographer. At first, it was just a declaration. I had never studied photography systematically. I did not even know how to write an invoice when I started.

From 2015 to today, I have been fortunate that client work has not stopped. I may be the most surprised that I have continued as a photographer for eleven years. I have worked with companies across many industries: camera makers, automotive, aviation, architecture, real estate, and others.

Among these, work tied to traditional crafts and Japanese culture became an opportunity to take a long view of my career.

In 2023, I self-published a photo book. Through that, I learned the importance of personal projects, and more than anything, the joy they bring. There is too much to say about the photo book here, so I will write about it in another article.

There have been a few turning points in my life, but the events of 2025 were the biggest. My first child, a son, was born. Around the time of the birth, my wife and I lived at her family home in Kagawa. With various circumstances coming together, we ended up spending six months there.

During that time, I reduced client work and gave myself the time to think carefully about the second half of my career. The days after my son was born were intense, but personal projects were always somewhere in my mind.

I had grown less drawn to social media and wanted to write from a different place.

So in January 2026, I started this newsletter, Beyond The Frame. I see what I write here as part of my body of work. I want to write about photography, a career in midlife, becoming a parent, Japan, and other things. That is what I’m doing now.

I am not aiming for grand narratives. I write from what is close to me, from memory, from a personal perspective. I hope what I write can be an inspiration for someone, somewhere in the world.

These four months on Substack have surprised me. An article I wrote in January, about traffic mirrors in Japan, was featured in Substack’s the Weekender.

Many people have also seen my photographs on Substack Notes. The post with the most response gathered over 25,000 likes.

This photograph was taken in my everyday surroundings. That fact has meant a lot to me. I take it as a sign that everyday life around me is worth photographing.

I think Notes offers something different from ad-driven social media. Traffic from Instagram is limited. Because of that, finding new readers here means a lot to me.

What I value most here are the comments. I reply to nearly every comment on my articles. I also try to reply to as many replies on Notes as I can.

A comment tells me that a photograph or piece of writing has connected to something inside someone. Through them, I often find a reason to write the next piece. Of course, even without a comment, I am glad if something has reached you.

These experiences have made me want to put my full energy into Beyond The Frame. But selecting photographs, thinking, putting them into words, and delivering them takes time.

So, starting May 4, I am beginning a paid plan for Beyond The Frame.

Free articles will continue. Paid articles will be more substantial: the making of photo books and zines, behind the scenes of Substack, answers to reader questions, and other topics.

More details will be on the About page soon.

Upcoming content

In addition to regular posts and Visual Notes, I am planning longer articles and collaborations like these:

• A zine about the months around my son’s birth

• The story of self-publishing a photo book for 8 million yen (roughly $50,000)

• Behind the scenes of Beyond The Frame

• Answering reader questions

• Interviews

I am grateful for the welcome I have received here, in a place where Japanese readers and writers are few. I would be glad if you continue reading Beyond The Frame in the time ahead.

There are moments when something catches the light.

The side of a building, a bench, a vending machine, a road sign. Walking or standing still, I find myself drawn to that kind of light. Sometimes it appears in a street scene. Sometimes in a corner of a room.

Whatever catches the light looks as if it is generating it.

It lasts a few minutes or a few seconds. Then it is gone.

After the light disappears, everything settles into stillness, as if a small story has just ended.

Visual Notes is a series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.

I walk without a theme or even a fieldwork mindset. Still, chairs keep appearing in my frames.

Train platforms, storefronts, lobbies of public facilities, and parks. There are chairs. Sometimes they are brightly colored. Sometimes they simply stand out in the space. I react to their presence, and before I know it, I am pressing the shutter.

If you keep taking photographs long enough, this happens. Certain motifs begin to accumulate without intention. Eventually, they form a series. That too is part of what keeps me photographing.

Chairs are part of how a place feels.

They feel like permission. You can be here. Anyone can sit, regardless of age or status. If a city often asks people to keep moving and keep consuming, chairs also allow stillness.

You sit next to a stranger. Even without conversation, there is a loose recognition of others sharing the same space.

Places with many chairs feel as if they have more breathing room. They seem to make space for people simply living their lives.

However, this permission always comes with conditions.

Chairs let people sit together, while also carrying an unspoken expectation not to stay too long or take up too much space.

Looking back to the late 1990s, when I often skipped high school, I used to sleep on flat park benches to pass the time. I remember elderly people and office workers spending time there in similar ways. For me, those chairs were a place to be between things.

Now, scenes like that have become rarer. Many benches have dividers. That makes it impossible to lie down. There are understandable reasons for this.

The form itself tells you how to sit, and how long you are welcome to stay.

When I look at chairs in the city, I begin to see two things at once: an invitation, and a limit.

Even so, I find myself taking a photo whenever I come across them.

Someone may have been sitting there. Someone may sit there next. A brief blank space between the past and the future.

Sometimes light falls unexpectedly onto a row of neatly arranged chairs. In that moment they still look like part of the city, and yet they also seem like a place where one person’s time briefly meets another’s.

That trace is what keeps me pressing the shutter.

Falling cherry blossoms,
Even the blossoms that remain
Are falling cherry blossoms.
— Ryōkan

It accepts the falling of cherry blossoms as it is. Even the blossoms that remain will soon fall. Blooming and falling sit side by side as one continuous movement. I’ve always loved this verse.

The Somei Yoshino I had waited for all year also scattered quickly after the rain of the past few days. In recent years, spring rain and wind have felt stronger, and the blossoms seem to fall sooner.

The other day, on a brief stretch of clear weather, my wife, our son, and I went to see the blossoms. A row of cherry trees along a nearby river. As our son lay in his stroller, looking up at the branches, a single petal landed on his face.

It happened in an instant, and I couldn’t take a photograph. Still, the scene stayed vivid, etched into my memory. Since I began photographing my son, not only the moments I capture, but even the moments I miss seem to stay with me, taking on more meaning than before.

Somei Yoshino falls quickly. But we accept the season, including its falling. In fact, sometimes it’s the moment the petals start to scatter that makes it feel most like sakura season.

Petals drifting down. A line of petals floating on the river’s surface. Pale color pressed onto wet ground. Scenes that move toward an ending enter my view one after another. In Japan, many people experience farewells around this time of year, and the scattering blossoms often connect easily with bittersweet memories.

But it is never only sad. Petals cling to umbrellas on the street. To raincoats. To jackets. Maybe someone is on their way home from hanami. Sometimes a petal is even caught in someone’s hair. There is something charming about these small scenes.

You may have seen a petal resting in the hair of someone close to you, a friend, a partner, a family member. They haven’t noticed. You smile, and brush it away for them. I think many people in Japan have experienced something like this at least once.

Blooming and falling stand side by side, equally present. And we can’t help but place our own lives into that feeling.

What surprises me is how widely this perception is shared. We admire the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and we also love them as they fall. We find beauty in the ending itself. This exists as the very atmosphere of the season, beyond personal preference.

Where does this sensibility come from?

Perhaps it is the waka and haiku we learn in school, or the casual conversations of adults. Someone might say, “It’s over already,” and yet their voice carries a hint of satisfaction.

Experiencing goodbyes in life. Learning to cherish endings, and then moving toward new encounters.

I think the accumulation of those experiences trains our eyes to look at blooming and falling with the same attention.

This year’s Somei Yoshino scattered quickly in the rain, and still, I enjoyed it fully, together with the memory of that single petal resting on my son’s face.

Until next spring.

Reading a response like that, I found myself wondering if there was an underlying assumption at work: that photography has one correct answer. In-focus is correct, out-of-focus is incorrect, so you should teach someone in order to reach the correct result.

It became a useful opportunity for me to organize what I’ve been thinking about photography. From there, my thoughts moved to the act of teaching, and then to the question of what makes a good photograph.1

On teaching photography

To be clear, I don’t teach my wife photography unless she asks.

That comes from my own experience. When I first began taking photographs, there were people who tried to instruct beginners even when no one had asked. That kind of teaching often pushes a specific “correct” way of shooting. Focus, exposure, composition. By guiding each element toward a single answer, it can force what should be a free act into a fixed mold.

But photography doesn’t have only one right answer. Unasked-for advice can narrow someone’s range of choices. That’s how I see it. I want to respect her choices, including whether she wants to be taught at all.

For context, my wife’s main camera is her iPhone. We already take plenty of sharp, reliable record photos with it. And yet, the image I chose to publish in Visual Notes was an out-of-focus one.2

When we go out with our son, the purpose is not photography. She gets close, sharp photos on her iPhone when she wants them, and the Leica is just for a few quick frames. It gives us a different kind of photo.

Rather than turning it into a camera lesson, what matters more is walking together, looking at the scenery, and talking. Photography is secondary. That mindset is part of what makes the outing enjoyable.

If she ever asks to learn the camera more deeply, I’m happy to teach her.

Choosing a Leica M

I also think there is a misunderstanding around the Leica M. Because it is an expensive tool, there is an assumption that it should produce perfect photos. But for me, the value of a Leica does not lie there.

Rather, I am drawn to its slight inconveniences and the room it leaves for chance. It makes the act of shooting feel tactile and enjoyable, on a scale beyond mere efficiency or convenience.3

The settings I used this time (f/8 with the focus distance fixed at 5m) were inspired by the anecdote that Henri Cartier-Bresson used to shoot with a fixed focus distance. I’m not saying it’s the right way to do it. It’s simply a practical setup that keeps the camera ready to shoot.

What does “correctness” mean in photography?

So what does correctness mean in photography?

When a photograph is used as evidence, being in focus is essential. Proof that you were there, that you saw something, that you met someone. Our time is filled with images like that.

But photography is not only for proof.

This is especially true when you photograph family or people close to you. The air of the moment, the psychological distance between you and the subject, the time that flowed between two people. Sometimes those things enter the photograph as information that cannot be reduced to numbers.

Chance, accidents, results that didn’t go as planned. In those outcomes, the photographer’s feelings and the relationship to the subject can appear. Some people keep photographing precisely because they are drawn to that uncertainty.

Family photos don’t need to be proof. A photograph can start a conversation, and it can bring back moments that aren’t visible inside the frame.

And when you share it with others, it can become more than a specific family record. It can connect with the viewer’s own memory as well.4

What makes a good photograph?

There’s a scene I remember from one of my favorite films, Perfect Days.

The main character has a routine. Every day during his lunch break, he photographs sunlight filtering through leaves with a film camera. One day, his niece joins him. He points the camera at her and presses the shutter. But the photo that comes out is out of focus. The choice to include an out-of-focus image in that scene feels meaningful.

It seemed to express a moment when his carefully repeated daily rhythm was slightly disturbed by the presence of another person.

The distance between him and his niece remains in the photograph as a kind of missed focus. To me, that single image feels deeply human. I thought it was a very good photograph.

—

Even if the photos are out of focus, the day is still the day. I don’t want every family photo to feel like proof.

From here on, we are moving into an era where AI can generate the correct answer in both photographs and writing, and where failure becomes harder to produce. Tools that “fix” out-of-focus photos after the fact already seem to be appearing.

But a world filled only with correct answers is boring. Perhaps it is in failure, and in what is labeled incorrect, that something human becomes visible.

When we go out with our son and I’m wearing the baby carrier, I hand her my Leica M11 and she shoots with it.

The lens is a Summilux 35mm. It’s a manual-focus camera.

To keep it simple, I set it up like this:

• Shutter speed & ISO: Auto

• Aperture: f/8

• Focus distance: fixed at 5m

That way, she can shoot with it almost like a disposable camera, just by pressing the shutter.

But for my wife, who wants to photograph our son up close, this setup doesn’t focus where she wants it.

She looks a little dissatisfied. But I like it better when it’s slightly out of focus.

Visual Notes is a new series that will run alongside my regular posts—more photographs, fewer words.