Japan Before Me

Four thousand photographs from a week in Japan. Mike Matas traveled through Kyoto, Nara, Hakone, and Tokyo in late November with his girlfriend, riding trains between temples and tea houses and markets. Instead of filing all those images away, they made them into a video with some tinkling piano music underneath. The kind of thing you watch and feel that specific ache, knowing someone else got there first and got to live in it for a week. Japan is one of those places that haunts you even when you haven’t been, and watching someone else’s footage just makes it worse.