{"title":"Homepage","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"shibuya-2025-ashen-reincarnation","title":"SHIBUYA 2025 - Ashen Reincarnation","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat: A5, 48 pages, saddle-stitched, monochrome offset print on uncoated paper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWorldwide shipping available\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\"Old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart).\"\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e— Charles Baudelaire, \"The Swan,\" trans. Roy Campbell\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor over thirty years, I have lived and worked in Shibuya — not at its center, but at a considered distance, close enough to feel it, far enough to see it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuring that same time, I turned my lens toward cities around the world. Cities that preserved their old beauty intact. Cities where new buildings appeared with every visit. How has the consciousness behind city-making transformed, and under that consciousness, what is created, what is irreversibly lost? That question drove my work — until one day, the lens turned toward the city beneath my own feet. The turning point was the demolition of Tokyu Honten. On the wall of Bunkamura, standing beside the rubble, an \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eartwork had been carved — rising like an apostle announcing the collapse of a city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe signs of change had been visible long before the apostle's arrival. The character of the crowds along Center-gai had shifted. The bookshops that once held the cultural edge had vanished. Seibu had withdrawn. Hands had been acquired. The scramble crossing was being absorbed by global tourism capital. What I had seen for years without truly seeing came suddenly into focus the moment I looked at that \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eartwork. The end of the Shibuya I knew had been underway for a long time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Reincarnation,\" in its original sense, presupposes the continuity of the soul. Even in death, its essence is carried forward into the next life. But what is happening in Shibuya is something altogether different. Concrete turns to ash, and upon that ash, new concrete is raised. Form, to be sure, is reborn. But the soul is not carried forward. The memory of place, the cultural context, the accumulation of time — these are erased in the name of redevelopment, replaced by a uniform city without character, and what should have been reincarnated is instead reduced to ash, painted over in grey.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have no intention of joining the chorus that romanticizes the past and laments that things were better before. And yet, that loss cannot be measured in numbers. The hours spent in Tower Records. The view from the rooftop of Seibu. The smell of music, cigarettes, and culture that once breathed in the darkness of back alleys. The warmth of bodies pressed close, and the wet, particular atmosphere of this city. These disappear without being recorded — surviving only in the memory of those who knew them, fading as those memories fade. I have only just realized, looking at that \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eartwork, that I myself was part of what is disappearing. Cities must change. But the question is whether that change carries a soul with it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis work is a record of a witness who arrived too late — a question pressed into form before the erasure was complete, an inquiry into \"Ashen Reincarnation,\" the grey rebirth of a city.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"motake photo store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51610362741026,"sku":"SHIBUYA2025-001","price":3300.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/9414\/9922\/files\/ZINE01_panel.jpg?v=1778150887"},{"product_id":"cambodian-taxi-driver-monochrome-zine-edition","title":"Cambodian Taxi Driver - monochrome zine edition","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat: A4, 48 pages, saddle-stitched, monochrome offset print on uncoated paper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWorldwide shipping available\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCambodian Taxi Driver — a photo-essay film that began as a novel, twenty years on, remade as a monochrome zine.\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow did Cambodia come to be where it is today? What do the people who live here now carry inside them? What does this society still leave unresolved? And where does that smile, that richness of spirit, come from? Out of those questions came Cambodian Taxi Driver, released in 2010 — a photo-essay film built from still images of my own unfinished novel, set to music. This zine is my own attempt, looking from where I stand today, to revisit Cambodian Taxi Driver and reassemble it in monochrome.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe work premiered at the Cambodia International Film Festival 2011. Music direction by Isao Yamazaki. It was screened, with an accompanying photography exhibition and sale, at an event in Waikiki hosted by e-mail foster parents — a volunteer organization supporting Cambodian orphans. DVD booklets were sold at several shops around Siem Reap. After a series of gallery showings in Japan, the work eventually came to a quiet pause.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2025, fifteen years after the work first appeared, I returned to Siem Reap — my first visit in twelve years. The pandemic had thinned the Japanese crowd to almost nothing. Korean capital, once the dominant presence, had given way to Chinese; the West has come back in force, and around Angkor it's Western visitors you see almost everywhere. Guides who once spoke fluent Japanese now move more easily in English. Across the country, crackdowns on the scam compounds keep coming, though how clean things will really get, no one yet knows. Tensions along the Thai border have surfaced again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe world, this country, Japan — none of them are what they were. Some things have changed. Some things haven't. And some things, it turns out, were only ever what I had imagined them to be. Age makes visible what younger eyes could not see. The goodness of this country has not yet reached the world. That is what drove me to make this zine. Twenty years since that journey. The search continues.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStory\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCambodia, 2008. Thirty years after the civil war, Siem Reap is riding high on the Angkor tourism boom. Son, thirty, lost his father to the war. His mother stayed behind in the countryside. He lives with his two younger brothers and makes his living as a motorbike taxi driver. Sa — his childhood friend, his best friend's younger sister — left her family a year ago and has been working at a karaoke club ever since. When Son drops off a customer there one night, the two come face to face again. The same day, Sa loses her place to stay. She turns up at Son's door, and with her comes Takuto, a Japanese backpacker who had been Son's fare that morning, now stripped of everything he owned. An unlikely household begins. Somewhere along the way, Son and Sa fall in love. But the tuberculosis that has been quietly hollowing Sa out begins to show. Son puts her on the back of his bike and starts riding into the dark, heading for Takeo, where her family lives. A reunion that came too late — and from here, their fates begin to bend.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"motake photo store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51669357003042,"sku":"CTD2026-001","price":4400.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/9414\/9922\/files\/CambodianTaxiDriver_012.jpg?v=1779701604"},{"product_id":"paris-2007-forme-dune-ville","title":"PARIS 2007 - Forme d'une Ville","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat: A5, 48 pages, saddle-stitched, monochrome offset print on uncoated paper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWorldwide shipping available\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e— Victor Hugo, \"Les Misérables\", trans. Charles E. Wilbour\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe city built in pursuit of happiness — whom does it make happy now?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the time of Les Misérables, nineteenth-century Paris was, by all accounts, the center of revolution, poverty, riot, state power, and urban reconstruction. People rose in pursuit of liberty, equality, and happiness. But the twentieth century that followed — was it truly a century of happiness? War, occupation, the end of colonialism, immigration, capitalism, the city turned to tourism, the troubles of the suburbs, terror, division. Even now, well into the twenty-first century, Paris remains there, still carrying the weight of what the twentieth century left behind.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn my twenties, Paris held its own particular place in my life. I walked its streets without rest, and I regret now that I did not take more photographs. 2007 was the last time I went. Paris then, bearing the revolution of the nineteenth century and the hope of the twentieth, still kept the form of an older city in its wet pavements, its cafés, its newspaper stands. It has been a long time since I last set foot there. Nineteen years on, what kind of city has Paris become? I hear its streets have been made more beautiful — but has it become safer? Wealthier? More livable? Or has the city once promised happiness simply taken on a different unease?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think about what it means to edit, nineteen years later, the photographs I took then. The nineteen years that lie heavily between the young photographer and the older editor leave no mark on the city that was their subject. The me of that time was naive about social questions and saw only the surface structure of the city. Shots driven by inspiration alone, looking as if they meant something but with no necessity of place or time — the contact sheets were full of them. While selecting, I am often seized by the urge to go back and shoot again. But the Paris of that time is no longer within reach. What remains is only this single body of photographs, where the present and the past are layered into one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the middle of processing the files, my thoughts drift to the city I now live in — to Tokyo, and to how its city-making is done. In every country, people try to make the cities they inhabit better. They mount revolutions, build institutions, lay roads, tear down buildings, open plazas, welcome migrants, draw tourists, keep the economy moving. And yet the city always betrays those intentions, with disarming ease. A city built for happiness pushes someone else out. Streets opened in the name of freedom become places of surveillance and unease. A city polished in pursuit of wealth keeps its residents away the more its value rises. And still, people see daybreak in the structure of the city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis work is a record meant to ask where the human will to make cities better has finally drifted — a question pressed into form. It was made as the second volume of the documentary monochrome series that began with SHIBUYA 2025 — Ashen Reincarnation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"motake photo store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51672526848290,"sku":"PARIS2007-001","price":3300.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/9414\/9922\/files\/PARIS2007_01.jpg?v=1779793711"}],"url":"https:\/\/store.motake.com\/en\/collections\/frontpage.oembed","provider":"motake.com ONLINE STORE","version":"1.0","type":"link"}