A little background

Kuhaku was for the most part designed while I was functionally homeless. I had just graduated university in America and had made my way back to Tokyo. Thankfully, I have enough close friends here that I was able to sleep on any number of couches while hunting for a place to live -- a hunt which I assumed would only take a few weeks at most. In the end, I was without a place to call my own for over a month and a half. I spent that time wandering through the neighborhoods of Tokyo and working in cafes.

I arrived in Tokyo at the end of July 2003. The schedule for Kuhaku (at the time called "Grey") was to have it to the printers by mid September, which gave me no time to waste. So while I sweated my way through the back streets of Tokyo in the oppressive mid summer heat (in tow behind a barrage of real estate brokers) I was slowly but surely trying to piece together this book.

As you can see in the preface, our list of "places Kuhaku was made" is long, varied and rather bizarre. Immigrations offices and friend's lounges, cafes and restaurants and train stations. All the while I was taking notes in a small leather-bound notebook with washi-like paper. It looks like I picked it up in Japan, but actually I bought it from a small Italian man with a mustache in Philadelphia.

You'll often find people posting bits from their sketch books online with no accompanying commentary. While it's interesting enough to see, I always thought it would be a lot more useful and meaningful if there were some comments. So here are my notes:

1. Was trying to plan out how to go about photographing the Kuhaku chapter. The street ended up being a lot skinnier than I imagined. I first thought I could do a series of landscape shots of each side of the street. When I arrived, however, it quickly became apparent that I couldn't stand too far back without hitting the stores across the street. So this is a little sketch of trying to figure out how I was going to patch together the images to produce panoramics for kozyndan.

2. This is a sketch of a man in a cafe in Nogata, Tokyo. Nogata is located in northwestern Tokyo on the Seibu-Shinjuku line, about twelve minutes from Shinjuku. I was staying at my friend's $300-a-month, 18-sq.-meter apartment (just barely big enough for the both of us to fit on the floor -- my friend slept with half of his body in the closet) on the seventh floor of an apartment complex built for the 1964 Summer Olympics. The cafe, right next door, was full of coughing old men and stale with cigarette smoke. This is one of the old men. I was drinking royal milk tea.

3. This is the first rough sketch for the cover. For the most part, the stories in Kuhaku evoked in my mind a strong image of Tokyo. I felt that perhaps the best all encompassing visual articulation of the content would be some sort of cityscape. I didn't yet know where I was going to take the photos, but I knew they were going to be of Shinjuku. As you can see, at this time it was still called "Grey." (We switched to Kuhaku right before going to the printers in March.)

4. Basic layout sketches for the innards of the book -- text block and cover image placement. On the right is also a small list of things that need to be completed -- like deciding the size of the book.

5. More extensive notes on the layout for the kozyndan spread. I originally thought it might be interesting if we annotated all the images with weird facts about japan -- like the number of convenience stores and bicycles -- but thankfully we decided to use David Cady's surreal poem/short story about what life is like on the street. On the bottom right there's some notes on book sizes I took while looking browsing in Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. I brought around a tape measure and measured dozens of books that I felt had good proportions.

6. Planning out how chapter title pages would look. "No page#, no headers."

7. Layout comps for the Canned Coffee piece. We originally planned on including a coffee can image for every review but were unable to secure legal rights to all the cans. That's why you only see three images in the book. Not knowing this, I was planning a minimalist layout with harsh, stark white pages. The small can images would sit on one side, and the review on the opposite. In the end things didn't work out like this, although I'm really happy with how the chapter came out.

8. Some random layout notes. Trying to figure out what sort of images to use for each chapter -- like a man getting beaten at the Shibuya intersection for Groped. Or a "sleeping sallary (sic) man" for Father Hunters.

I love brainstorming in these notebooks. There's something pleasantly tangible about writing on paper when you're in front of a screen all the time. Even with the most simple layouts or lists, I tend to break my notebook out to tackle the assignment. All the layouts for this website were first sketched while eating curry (Indian or Japanese).

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. :-)

-- Craig Mod