The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" may be an overused cliché, but it breaks down the power of images and their influence on how we perceive our surroundings. People remember best what they see and process visuals 60 000 times faster than text. In fact, we can understand what an image means in 13 milliseconds.

Images tell stories and bring us closer to geographically unreachable places. So, even though most people in western countries haven't been to Japan, they hold a very distinct image of what the country and the people are like – at least it's the picture they have in their head. After journalists, photographers play an essential role in transferring information and creating our individual perception of the world and of foreign countries.

While stories from Japanese society and its [sub]cultures are easily accessible on the net nowadays, a few decades ago, this wasn't the case. Especially before its rise to a financial world power in the 1980s, the Occident did not see Japan as an equally developed country. It paid little interest in the cultural and technological products that were about to hit the markets overseas. Japan’s export offensive shocked the people in the West and fundamentally changed their perception of the country. Nippon became a feared financial player on the global market.

In the early years of the bubble era, a young photographer from Canada landed in Tokyo. His name was Greg Girard, who heard of the island from an Australian traveler he met on an earlier trip in Brunei. He became witness to the beginning of an extravagant phase in Japan's history and brought his impression to the people in the West by capturing Tokyo and its inhabitants with his camera. Through his lens, an occidental audience saw a modern – if not to say futuristic – megapolis that was nothing they ever thought of.

When Japan began to get more influence and power on foreign markets, selling more cars, electronics, etc., than domestic competitors, the West started to fear the upcoming superpower from the East. Moreover, its people became richer than most people from the US or Europe, which allowed them to travel the world, shopping for luxury goods in cities like Paris or New York City.

Switching the perspective, the world's cultural hotspots were close for the Japanese, and most of what was becoming trendy on the streets of NYC or Paris was already a part of its pop culture. However, Tokyo was still a distant star for the Occident.

“Young Japanese were out in the world reporting back to Japan about what was happening in New York, London, Paris, etc. If you were in Tokyo, these places didn’t feel far away. But, if you were in the West, Tokyo still was.”

— Greg Girard

In Girard's photos, you see a Japan that, up to this point, was unknown to the West. His pictures are a time capsule bringing us back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when information didn't spread as quickly and where you couldn't just jump on the streets of Tokyo via Instagram, YouTube, or Google Earth.

To better understand the shift of the Western gaze and what the country was like at the time for a Canadian, Sabukaru sat down with the photographer and talked about the Bubble era, film rolls, and America's "faded dream" of Japan.

Hello Greg, thank you for your time. Could you please introduce yourself to the Sabukaru network and tell us a little about yourself?

I’m a Canadian photographer. I spent most of my career, more than thirty years, living in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. I’m back living just outside of Vancouver now, a place I spent most of my young life trying to figure out how to get away from

What drew you initially to the East, and what made you move to Tokyo?

It probably comes down to this picture. This is the photograph that made me want to go to Hong Kong:

Hong Kong Harbour, 1962, by Eliot Elisofon. A name that’s largely forgotten now. I saw the photo in 1972 in a book on photography published by Time-Life, borrowed from the library.

While on my first trip to Hong Kong and South-East Asia in 1974-1975, I met a young Australian traveler in Brunei who had just come from Japan. He described the stylized gestures of the platform conductors at train stations in Tokyo, and the mannered voices of uniformed female elevator attendants at department stores, and it was unlike anything I had ever heard about Japan, and so I decided I would try and visit as soon as I could. I ended up moving there in 1976.

When you moved to Tokyo, it certainly wasn't the same city as we know it today. Can you take us back with you and describe how life in Tokyo was during the late 70s and early 80s?

No, I suppose it’s not the same city and yet to me it still feels the same in so many ways.

I arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 1976 on a Korean Airlines flight from Honolulu. I didn’t really have a plan other than to see the place with my own eyes. I stored my luggage at the airport and took the monorail into the city. Darkness fell as I rode the Yamanote Line, the entire loop, around the city, looking at the view as the train pulled in and out of all 26 stations. When I reached Shinjuku for the second time I got off. It looked like the brightest, noisiest, most crowded spot. I wandered around Shinjuku and nearby neighborhoods all night, drinking coffee here and there, making a few pictures, and by morning I knew I wanted to stay. I was 20 years old.

I found a job teaching English and got to know the city little by little, learning the trains and subways and by walking the various neighborhoods. I found a four and a half tatami room west of Ikebukuro. [Someone must have co-signed the lease agreement for me since foreigners needed a Japanese sponsor at the time to rent a place]. There was a single shared toilet at the end of the hallway in the building I lived. Not a flush toilet, which wasn’t all that unusual in older, wooden two-story buildings at the time and trips to the sento [public bath] in the evening.

When I wasn’t teaching or photographing, I spent a lot of time in jazz cafes. They were still pretty ubiquitous at the time in Shinjuku and Shibuya. I’d go to see photography exhibitions at Nikon or Canon Salon or one of the other galleries. In Nishi-Ogikubo, there was a place to rent a darkroom and I’d print my black and white pictures there. I saw a lot of movies, mostly second-run films in theatres showing double bills. My Japanese eventually got to the point that I could figure out what films were playing where by reading the listing magazines. There were cinemas all over Tokyo, most of them having been built in the 50s or 60s. On weekends, I’d go see all-night films, 3 or 4 films playing from midnight to 6am.

Walking in the city, riding the trains, walking through train stations or department stores, the visuals on the billboards and posters were on a whole different level. To a young newcomer the photography and design were otherworldly, mesmerizing. Looking at it from the vantage point of today, it’s almost as if the internet already existed in Japan but not in the West. How else could you explain that everything that was going on in the West at the time [in terms of music, film, fashion, etc.] was already part of life in Japan? And yet, the West knew nothing about what was happening in Japan. And of course it had nothing to do with technology. It was pure interest and appetite on the part of the Japanese.

Young Japanese were out in the world reporting back to Japan about what was happening in New York, London, Paris etc. If you were in Tokyo these places didn’t feel far away. But, if you were in the West, Tokyo still was. That would change soon enough. Bladerunner in 1982 introduced us to the notion that our urban future had distinctly Japanese characteristics. [In 1982, no other Asian place was remotely “futuristic”. China was just beginning to get up off its knees following the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution].

You experienced Tokyo before, during and after the bubble economy. Spoken from your perspective: How did these times change the city and its people?

I really can’t speak to how it changed people in Japan but I do see how Japan changed in the way it was viewed and thought about in the West during that period. Pre-bubble, unless you were in some way interested in Japan, it’s unlikely what was served up by the usual channels in the West would give you any idea about what was going on in Japan. Japan was modern in its own way. The West always has had a hard a time thinking about a place as being modern unless the place is trying to mimic the West. Next, during the bubble years, as Japan started buying up global assets, the West came to fear Japan. Japanese were travelling the world, vacationing and lining up to buy luxury products in Paris, London, Hong Kong and New York.

It was a first for the West to see Asian people richer than western people. Post-bubble, while the economy stagnated it seems that in contrast Japanese cultural influence spread far and wide, often still under the radar of more mainstream media. But the internet and social media allowed for like-minded people to connect. And especially in the last few pre-covid years, people were now visiting Japan in ever greater numbers. Tokyo had sort of become the new Paris. Foreign but not too foreign. Manageable for a first-time visitor.

What made Tokyo special for you as a photographer?

In a way it’s so simple: the feeling that “I had no idea the place was like this, and I’m going to make pictures that show what its like”. Part of it is maybe the conceit of a young person who isn’t held back by how much he doesn’t know. Maybe the obliviousness that’s required to start almost anything. But, more to the point, there was also just the pure excitement of waking up every day in Tokyo. It was a thrill to be living there, and I made it mine by photographing it.

Being a photographer from the West, capturing life in Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other Asian regions, do you feel a special responsibility for how people from the West see these countries? Especially since you took photos at a time when platforms like Instagram didn't exist.

I started out making pictures for myself, travelling and living in various places in Asia. Early on, I sensed that for a picture to be good or interesting it should also resonate somehow for a person who was living in that place. But that’s far from a responsibility. Many years later, when I figured out how to make a living working for magazines, I most definitely felt responsible to do a good job for any magazine that hired me. Part of that responsibility is to try to get it right about what’s going on in a place.

And whether I was photographing for myself or photographing for a magazine I never really considered it in terms of any anonymous western audience. It’s more a case of trying to bring out what’s there, hidden or exploding in front of you, and for people who know the place or the situation saying, “yeah, that’s what’s like”.

In an interview, you stated that, on the day you bought your first camera, you went out to shoot photos at night. We can see your love for nocturnal landscapes in photo books such as Tokyo-Yokosuka. Where does this fascination for life at night come from?

I don’t really have an answer for that. It’s wrapped up in early wanderings as a teenager and the thrill of seeing into the night in a way that photography does differently that the version of night your own eyes give you.

Would you mind introducing us to the techniques you use and have used to create these nightly photos?

I use a tripod, and positive film. It pretty much all stems from that.

You created much of your work from Asia before your professional career as a photographer began in the late 1980s. How did your approach to things change when you stopped taking the photos "for yourself"?

When working for a magazine you literally have to walk past things you would have stopped to photograph earlier for yourself. For better or worse. Better because you need to save your film for your story. Worse because you sort of have to ignore the part of you that likes the way the light is falling on the back of the red headed woman sitting in the seat in front of you on the airplane, for example. But things have moved on. Digital allows for almost infinite picture making. And picture editors have evolved as well. They’ll get the red head picture.

As we can see from your series Hotel Okinawa, which was shot between 2008 and 2015, you keep returning to Japan. What does the country mean to you as a person and photographer?

On one hand I guess I’m just one more foreigner who fell for Japan at an early age. On the other there are some pictures in Japan I want to see that, as far as I can tell, haven’t been made yet. There are endlessly good pictures, great pictures, being made every day in Japan, but not the exact ones I want to see [though some come close]. If I discovered that somebody had already made those exact ones I want to see [and make] then I’d give the project up and figure out something else to do. Though I guess I’ll always come up with some reason to return. Like a lot of people I’m waiting for Covid travel restrictions to lift.

In Hotel Okinawa, you captured the influence of the US-army bases on the prefecture. The preface title is "A Faded Dream." How did you feel this faded dream when taking those photos?

On my first night in my first little apartment in Tokyo in 1976, I was laying there listening to music on a transistor radio, feeling deliciously far from home, when the spell was abruptly broken at midnight when an American voice announced, “you’re listening to the American Forces Far East Network”, and the Star Spangled Banner began to play. After news from the United States, local public service announcements followed.

About upcoming activities on various bases in the Tokyo area: officers wives luncheons, bake sales, high school fund- raising car washes. It sounded like small town American life from the 1950s. Except these small American towns were in the middle of Japanese cities. I was curious about this strange legacy of US victory in WW II and so started spending some time photographing in the towns near Tokyo that hosted US military bases. Fast forward to 2008 when I was living in Shanghai, and after ten years in China deciding I wanted to return to that idea about the bases that had surprised me one night in 1976. So I started writing letters to the US bases in Japan and eventually got permission to photograph.

I visited more than 20 US bases in the region: in Japan, Korea, and Guam 2008-2009. In Japan the largest concentration of the US military is in Okinawa and so I started spending more and more time there, looking at this relationship between Okinawa and the US military, and it ended up becoming its own body of work.These bases in Japan and throughout the region were established when the US more or less inherited the world after WW II. Life on base mirrored life in small town America while off-base the host nations were recovering from the devastation of WW II or the Korean War.

Over time the world changed, with the host nations becoming modern urbanized societies and economic powers. While on the base the social and architectural landscape seemed part of an earlier time when the US was unchallenged. Perhaps more than anything it was the mere fact that the bases were there, still there after more than 70 years, that made it seem that the bases existed in a parallel world that only shared geographic space with the host country and its inhabitants.

The Western view of Japan can often be very clichéd, romanticized, or even fetishized. Has this always been the case, or did you notice a change here?

Western views of the non-west are probably going to continue to be cliched, romanticized and fetishized for some time to come. The difference now, compared with the time I first started wondering about Japan, is that you can absorb a lot more without actually having to be there [though, as ever, there isn’t really any substitute for being there and throwing yourself into a new fast-moving stream].

I alluded to it earlier but it maybe bears repeating, the perception now that Japan is accommodating to and manageable for visitors. Not too long ago the foreignness of Japan would have deterred a lot of people from visiting [exactly the same thing that attracts others]. But these days [just before Covid anyway] it seemed to me like it was the new Paris. A 21st century version of what Paris was to North Americans in the mid to late 20th century.

What's next for you? Do you have any upcoming projects planned?

I’m working on a couple of new books, photographing close to home, and waiting for Japan to re-open.

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About the author:

Peter is a writer and senior editor from Berlin. In his studies, he began to dive into Japanese culture and its perception overseas. Partially located in Tokyo, he continues to research culture and wheter it’s possible to eat more than two bowls of ramen a day.

Edited by Mizuki Khoury