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album description: japan is a country known around the world for beautiful arts, architecture and nature. while all of these things do exist, the overwhelming impression on walking around both town and countryside in japan is one of extreme ugliness! some twenty pecent of the japanese population is employed by the construction industry whose basic function is to lay concrete whereever they can. they are extremely efficient in carrying out their task, and one can see them hard at work all across the country, just as one can see the result of their previous work... along with the concrete, everywhere you look you can see a dense forest of telephone and power wires, with not the smallest attempt to mitigate the eyesore. along with this where there is prettiness in japan, the japanese seem to do all they can to hide it behind neon signs, vending machines, advertising signs, and anything else they can cram into the punters' field of view... then there are the forests all across japan that have been replanted with monoculture, turning the once beautiful countryside into a bland monotone of a single green. this effort has also caused a vast increase in hayfever amongst the japanese, and totally failed to revive the forestry industry - its supposed purpose...... there is more, but for now i'll try to let pictures show the story - i intend this album to serve as an ongoing catalogue of the ugly and the fatuous in japan... elsewhere in my photographs you can find more pleasing visions of japan - it is these views that make the deliberate destruction that started in the 80s and is ongoing today so much the more henious.

image description: another wonderful institute in japan are the pachinko parlours that fill towns big and small. pachinko is a form of gambling involving pinball type machines in rows, such as could be found in slot machine rooms of a vagas casino. the noise and the smokiness in such place are truely atrocious.. but far more unreasonable is the visual blight their garish advertising plastered exteriors offer to the outside world. the police far from stopping such visual pollution actually own huge stakes in the pachinko companies. this could explain just why there are so many of them: even in areas with nothing in the way of shops, apart from maybe one convienience store, you will usually find a pachinko parlour.. if not two or three.... this is in fact a pretty example - most aren't remotely up to these standards.

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