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A kabuki actor transforms himself into a female character for a performance in Tokyo. It's a meticulous, time-consuming (and definitely ambidextrous!) process, and in every brushstroke, every gesture, you can't help but feel the resonance of centuries of craft and ritual.
On Sado Island, just off the west coast of Japan, a soba master cuts traditional soba noodles. While the ingredients are simple, making soba with consistency, uniformity and speed is not — something I quickly learned when I hatcheted my way through the process after his demonstration. But he made it look so easy: he seemed merely to think soba, and out it would come.
A detail from a fence near Tenryu-ji Temple in Kyoto. Meticulous, composed details like this seem to be everywhere in Japan – it's a designer's country.
At a welcoming ceremony in Hagi, Japan, the present looks in on the past.
Stone in balance with bamboo at the historic Kikuya House in Hagi, Japan.
For a designer like me, Japan brought revelations at every turn. This tiny little detail — a sheathed tree in the Samurai Quarter of Matsue — is a good example of why.

Some of it is simply about composition. But even more revelatory, it’s the design philosophy that seems interwoven through so much in Japan: an audacious yet somehow respectful stylization of nature. Here, it’s bamboo, proposed as a clean, orderly, yet still organic interpretation of the bark grain it reaches toward.
I have a sizable collection of images from this trip grouped under "manhole covers of Japan" – so many excellent ones. Another good example of the priority this country puts on design, even underfoot.
A placid pond near Tenryu-ji Temple in Kyoto. In Japan, even nature feels like it's been composed.
The deed? Done. Not advisable to enter Busan, South Korea’s boisterous, bustling fish market with fins.
The royal Korean burial mounds at Tumuli Park Flying Horse Tombs, Gyeongju, South Korea
A small, thoughtful gesture at the base of the largest brass Buddha in the world at Tōdai-ji temple in Nara, Japan.
A lone worshipper at the Torii gate leading to the “floating” Shinto shrine on Miyajima.

Because the island was originally considered sacred, pilgrims were forbidden – an obvious design flaw worship-wise. So in a parse worthy of the finest $500/hr attorney, the shoreline at both high tide and low tide was calculated, and in the 6th century, a shrine was built on pilings in between: technically not on the island, your honor! Pilgrims – of any species – come on down!
Around the side of Nigatsu-do Hall at Nara's Todai-ji temple complex, a railing worn smooth guiding thousands of hands separates two kinds of people: worshippers descending down to a quiet, hidden shrine, and those same worshippers, now in some way not quite the same, as they ascend back into the din.
Hiroshima leur amour. A hipster couple from as far away from 1945 as you can get strolls Hiroshima Peace Park, Japan, epicenter of the atom bomb devastation during World War II

Bound for the Inland Sea

Circumnavigating the west coast of Honshu with a stop in South Korea

A couple strolls Hiroshima Peace Park, Japan | © Matt Giraud Photography

When I got a chance to circumnavigate Japan on a tour with a tenured professor specializing in Japanese cinema, I packed my bags. Amplified by his fluency in both the language and the culture, it unveiled to me a Japan I could never have discovered – much less shot – on my own.

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