Exhibition

The Minamata Disaster: Photo exhibition by Shisei Kuwabara

Award-winning photographs in the Main Bar from May 10 - June 6, 2014

"This book will perhaps be my last work during my life as an impoverished photographer who began with Minamata disease and returned to it in the end. If I were to do a photographic exhibition now, what kind of exhibition would it be? With this thought in mind, I attempted to select photographs from among approximately 30,000 frames of film. The result is this photo-documentary. I opened with the latest news of the Supreme Court judicial decision because I am a news photographer. I hope to imagine the surprise of the readers when they are told that an image of the deceased patient who finally won her lawsuit is among the photographic film I took 53 years ago while she was alive. The continuing scene of the two memorials is the present culmination of this drawn-out disaster. It is probably not easy for young readers to grasp what this disaster is about when they see the opening sections. I hope to describe and investigate more than a half-century of the Minamata disease's passage up to the present to today's youth. The only thing that I can do is to leave behind these photographs."

The magazine design of Andrew Pothecary
Graphic design by the art director of Number 1 Shimbun
in the Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi

April 5 - May 9, 2014

Design and journalism go hand-in-hand. How to get the story across? How to attract the reader to open the magazine, to read the article, to get an immediate visual summary of the story? And even just to entertain the reader. For Number 1 Shimbun - a magazine that not only contains excellent journalism, but is also partly aimed at a journalist readership - advice from a famous designer on the three rules for achieving good magazine design comes to mind: read the text, read the text and read the text. Each design is a conflation of the facts into a small poster, a concise summary ? and an identity. The designs are not only the face of the publication, but play a part in being the face of the Club's journalist membership.

Number 1 Shimbun has been published for 46 years, and I have worked on it for 7 years. We're getting the stories by the Club's correspondents (and sometimes the stories about the correspondents) out there, and, I hope and intend, looking good.
-----------

Soma-Nomaoi Horse Festival

Photo Exhibition by Tadashi Kumagai & Mayumi Takahashi
Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi
March 1 - April 4, 2014

In June 2011, 3 months after the Great East Japan Earthquake, we met horses that had been rescued from the tsunami and areas around the Fukushima Nuclear Reactors. They were being fed and cared for at the Soma Nakamura Jinja. Historically, it is the location for the 1,000-year-old Soma-Nomaoi Horse Festival, but at that time the shrine was the center for relief operations in Fukushima. This was the beginning of our documentary on these proud horses whose lives had been uprooted by the disaster.

One year after the earthquake and nuclear accident, the Soma-Nomaoi Festival was revived. In the heat of July, about 400 horseback riders dressed in samurai armor engaged in the races and mock cavalry battles. This annual event is the heart and soul of Soma and Minami-Soma people. We have been documenting the festival since its resumption and will be there again this year. Cheering the horses and their riders, we pray for the area's speedy recovery.

Photo exhibition by Taisuke Yokoyama: Dedication to Two Watermen, Jacques Mayol & Tiger Espere

Feb. 1 - 28, 2014 at

Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi.

I have been fortunate to meet watermen who shared a close relation with the ocean.

Being raised in Kamakura, with a lifestyle anchored in surfing and the ocean close at hand; I believe they reveal all the knowledge and wisdom I need in life. Meeting any waterman is a fantastic experience, but as a photographer these two individuals helped construct a platform on which to build my life. Although both are departed, their memories are still vivid in my mind.

Jacques Mayol and Tiger Espere.

If you who have met either of men, there is no need to explain how special they were. Both had powerful messages, existing without airs and at one with nature.
Having access to such extraordinary watermen, I felt a duty to document their lives and not embellish them.

David Coll Blanco: a global eye for joyful irony

Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi.

Dec. 7 - Jan. 10, 2013

When he died at age 39 in September, David Coll Blanco, the talented photographer from Barcelona, left behind many friends from a decade in Japan. David also left behind a body of work worth celebrating: a portfolio remarkable for its warm eye for the joy to be found, ironically, in the most unlikely places.

A selection of images from David's years in Japan (2001-2011), and his explorations of Europe, Asia and the Americas, will be on display in the FCCJ Main Bar. The Club's Masukomi sushi bar will feature images from Onjuku, the Chiba fishing port where he spent his final three years in Japan, living with his wife Mimi and infant daughter Maia (who is now five).

Organized and curated by his friends, with generous support from the Spanish Embassy, Desigual and Due Due, this exhibition is a celebration of warmth and light in the darkest month of the year. At the end of its run, the images will be available for interested collectors, with proceeds going to Maia.

The Exhibitions Committee

PRISM Tokyo 2013 Photo Exhibition by Jasna Boudard

Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi

Nov. 2 - Dec. 6, 2013

The exhibition "Prism" offers a method to view reality from a different perspective. The collection presents women from Europe and America, although they may appear to be from places beyond your imagination. Jasna does not alter reality with photoshop, but rather works with other artists and uses her creative mind to bring a surreal feel to her work. Viewing her photographs is as if looking through a prism, at a rainbow layered with colors, designs, and lights. The prism is thus a means to refract our ordinary vision into a magical one. The images of this exhibition present a dreamlike and poetic twist on portraits in the Main Bar, along with a series on Jasna's world travels in the Masukomi Sushi.

The Shine of Khmer Children (1994 - 2010) Photo exhibition by Saito BAKU

Main Bar and Masukomi Sushi

Oct. 5 - Nov. 01, 2013

Having become embroiled in the war in neighboring Vietnam, civil war broke out in the peaceful Kingdom of Cambodia following the Lon Nol coup d' état in 1970.  Even after the Vietnam War ended, the killing continued in Cambodia, as a result of appalling ethnic cleansing, a war with Vietnam, and internecine conflict between four rival factions.  Peace was finally achieved at the Paris Peace Conference in 1991 and a general election was organized through the efforts of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), establishing a democratic constitutional monarchy under King Sihanouk. The restoration of the monarchy and a policy of reestablishing Khmer culture were adopted in order to imbue the people with a feeling of national pride, and at the same time, the ‘Angkor’ site was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today, the cities are filled with young people who know nothing of war and whose eyes shine with hope for the future.  These children of Siem Reap, the gateway to the Angkor ruins that has survived the confusion of war and now echoes to the sound of reconstruction, look forward to the rebirth of national pride founded on the former splendor of Khmer culture.  

Saito BAKU