My stay in Tokyo marked the beginning of what would become my way of life for the following decade: travelling and reflecting on the experience encountered through photography, drawing and writing. This is where I produced the first of many later travel sketch books. The idea came about after a month or so in Tokyo, by which time I had began to notice minor everyday life details that contrasted sharply with anything encountered before and stood as even possibly odd when perceived from a different cultural background. I began collecting these observations in the form of simple black and white ink drawings done with a naive touch and commented on the visual with short sentences in French, a few of them in the form of puns referring to French expressions that unfortunately can hardly be translated into English. I now realise that these observations seemed unusual or even strange at that time due to their being restricted to Japanese society. Number of them, such as the breathing mask, the talking traffic light or the disposable chopsticks have become normal occurrences in many other countries without connecting to anything specifically Japanese any longer. |