The curtain is about to close on 2012. Every year, time seems to pass especially quickly in this month. The Japanese call year-end the “year's rapids,” an apt phrase, since water accelerates [...] Read more

My seventy-first new year has arrived. Because New Year's Day is my birthday, congratulations are particularly appropriate. Yet I have heard there were no maternal-and-child health handbooks then, [...] Read more

Since I bought the Leica X1 several years ago, it had seen little use. Thrust carelessly into the car-door pocket, it was designated an emergency camera and sat beneath a thin layer of dust. The [...] Read more

My two-week photography exhibition in Tokyo has ended. The last time one of my pictures hung on a wall was in elementary school, when a colored-pencil drawing was placed in the corridor. I remember [...] Read more

Keichitsu, “the awakening of insects,” refers to the time in early March when creatures that had huddled underground against the cold feel spring's warmth and begin crawling outside. Seattle has [...] Read more

Returning to the countryside after a long interval, I heard billowing summer clouds resonate in baritone. Wrapped in rococo light filled with the fragrance of earth, the harvested landscape formed a [...] Read more

It is exhilarating beneath a blue sky. Fortunately, even when the temperature is high, humidity is low. With a little wind and a hat or parasol, one can stay all day without heatstroke; sunburn is [...] Read more

In Japan I once drank a cup of Mount Rainier café latte. Coffee chains originating in Seattle are popular there, but I did not know a Japanese coffee drink used the name of our local mountain as its [...] Read more

For the milestone of Volume 30, I wanted photographs with special meaning. I tried many things and sought a personal leap, but nothing worked. After earnest effort, I ended by recognizing the [...] Read more

Autumn has classical beauty and evokes the charm of the countryside. An impressive prelude becomes a set of variations racing over fields and mountains, filling them with changing radiance as though [...] Read more