Here we have another addition to a personal project. This time around I met with a woman who practices and teaches Japanese flower arrangement, or ikebana (生け花) as it is known in Japanese.

The location for this set of photos was an old house located on the quiet back streets of an older area of Tokyo. It was a fairly small home situated in the kind of area...

A quintessential element of Japan, at least for me, is tatami. It's difficult for me to form in my mind a basic concept of Japan without also visualizing Japanese structures, new and old, that are filled with these simple woven straw mats…

In the late spring of a previous year, I spent the better part of a day out at a small Shinto shrine in rural Chiba Prefecture working on another addition to my personal project. Once again I was photographing people involved a certain cultural and traditional aspects of Japan. 

On this occasion I was photographing two women who had previously worked at Shinto shrines as miko. Miko, or shrine maidens, as they are called in English, fulfill a number of roles and responsibilities at the larger shrines that employ them…

While not a cultural aspect native to Japan, Buddhism nevertheless has a long history and very deep roots in Japan's culture. So naturally, the purveyors of Buddhism, Buddhist monks, fit well with my current and ongoing project to photograph people who are involved in or connected to the traditions of Japan.

Earlier in the year, in continuing with an ongoing series of portraits focused on the traditions and crafts of Japan, I spent a day with a few women who practice the art of Japanese tea ceremony and worked with them to create various photographs.

In recent months, I have been putting a fair amount of my time and efforts into a personal project in which I'm photographing people involved in some of the traditional arts and cultural trades of Japan. With several of these shoots already completed, and several more in the planning stages, I'm well along my way into creating a new collection of work.

One of the more recent shoots that I've finished was for a practitioner of kendo. Long a traditional activity of Japan, kendo is a type of martial art/sport derived from an extensive history of Japanese swordsmanship…