Someone Else’s Japan

Mike Matas shot over four thousand photographs on a trip through Japan with his partner—Kyoto to Nara to Hakone to Tokyo, tea houses and morning markets and shrine gravel, the whole slow itinerary—and instead of filing them away in albums he cut them into a single long video set to a clean, plinking melody. The result is a genuinely effective argument for a place I haven’t managed to visit yet.

Japan has been sitting in the back of my head for years, more fantasy than plan. Watching Matas’s footage does nothing useful about that. Every frame lands like a gentle, unhurried reproach. The light through paper screens. The proportion of a torii gate against the treeline. You know watching someone else’s travel video won’t move you any closer to actually going, but you watch it three times anyway.

Matas came up designing interfaces—Push Pop Press, then years at Apple shaping how touchscreens feel in the hand—and that instinct is visible in the editing. Nothing is hurried. Each shot gets enough room. He photographs with the care of someone who has thought hard about how images move through a screen, which is maybe what makes the video feel less like a holiday album and more like a small act of longing captured and set free.

Everyone I know seems to have been there before me. Maybe that’s how Japan works: you arrive when you’re ready, or you spend years carrying the idea of it around like a debt you haven’t settled. Either way, watching four thousand frames of someone else’s November there is better than nothing. Barely, but still.