Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, has always offered photographers a timeless canvas on which to show creative courage. Some collectable contemporary photographers, such as Michael Kenna, have arguably produced their most coveted work in this region, playing with light, line, and form in a deliberately reductive approach. Michael’s images have always boasted simplicity rather than shying away from it, and his season of choice in Japan has always been winter.

Snow is a photographer’s friend because it simplifies, and this seems particularly apt in Japan, where the
zen of calm is cherished. In rural areas, there is a conspicuous and multilayered removal of noise. Hokkaido is the antidote to the urban madness of Tokyo, and this will never change. If National Geographic produced a series on regions of the world where a region was an allegory to its culture, I bet it would have a section on the serenity of this island at the edge of the world.

Like many others who find themselves in a creative industry, I go to Japan regularly for my fix. There is a visual dissonance that prompts and guides, and I embrace that to the full. When the unfamiliar is packaged with excellence, it instructs and stimulates, and this country offers that cocktail with greater intensity than anywhere else in the world.

I’ve been an ambassador for the Japanese company Nikon in the United Kingdom and Europe for several years now, and I have worked consistently with the brand at both a testing level and also at key industry events such as Photokina in Cologne, Germany. It has served to reinforce my great respect for a national culture that has a default position of pride and perfection in all that it does.