Let’s make something out of a little imagination.
Based in Los Angeles and Tokyo. Available for travel.
SELECTED CLIENTS:
Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Blaze Pizza, Buitoni, Cayman Jack, Chili’s, Disney Music Group, Gentleman Jack, Hydro Silk, Jamba, Johnny Rockets, La Brea Bakery, Mint Locations, Nescafe, Nestlé Pure Life, Purina, Smirnoff, Starbucks, Steve Madden, Target, Therabody, Tradewinds, Yonex
I grew up in a small town called Fukude, Japan and spent my childhood there. It is located about halfway between Tokyo and Kyoto. It is the kind of town where many people know each other and people say hello when they pass by. There was one family restaurant called Joyful and a McDonald’s, which is gone now, where I often hung out with friends and talked about what it would be like to be an adult and live in a big city like Tokyo.
My hometown is surrounded by the ocean and green tea plantations. There were plenty of rice fields and I liked riding my bicycle through them while looking at the scenery. Japanese cantaloupe is famous in my town and we could often get it much cheaper than in big cities. When someone goes missing in town, often an elder who got lost, there are speakers from town hall all over the town and they announce that someone is missing.
There is this bridge over a river in town that I rode my bicycle across every day to go to junior high school. As I climbed up the small hill to the bridge, I always wondered what life was like over the blue sky, beyond the ocean or far away in a big city. Imagining and creating were becoming part of my childhood. Making a good time out of “nothing” was my normal routine.
I was greatly inspired by architects Tadao Ando and Frank Lloyd Wright. After studying architecture in Tokyo for a little while, I decided to move to the US to pursue landscape design, which was not a big area of study in Japan back then. Just learning how to communicate in English was hard enough in the beginning, but I gradually stepped into the world of art after I discovered my love for painting by accident at a free art drawing workshop I took for fun.
I started taking a similar approach to painting when taking photographs. It was in a sense like painting inside a camera frame and there were so many things I could capture in the vivid new city of Los Angeles. Before I knew it, I was spending hours figuring out how to take better photos. I remember when I saw a photograph by Orie Ichihashi, a Japanese photographer, I wanted to know how she did it and how she captured her photographs. Eventually, I started taking a night class at ArtCenter College of Design while studying at college during the day.
The moment I knew I wanted to become a photographer was when someone complimented a photograph of a cupcake from my new favorite cupcake shop. At the time, cupcakes were booming and new stores were opening everywhere. With my sweet tooth, I started exploring cupcake shops on my bicycle and took photos along the way. When someone complimented one of my photos, I somehow took the compliment very seriously and decided that I should become a photographer.
Up until 2 to 3 years into my professional photography career, I was using two strobes that had only two switches, strong and weak, that I bought on Craigslist for $80. I was embarrassed by my old, cheap equipment, but fortunately, none of the clients I worked with ever complained about what gear I was using. The more experience I gained, the more it became clear to me that the camera and other equipment were just tools. Just like painting, what mattered was how I used them. The way I take photographs became more intentional and confident.
