It seems strange to speak of degrees of uniqueness: either something is unique, or it's not. And yet Japan's society and culture are so singular, so different from anything to be found anywhere else in the world, that Japanese culture can reasonably be declared the world's most unique.



In 2007, Taylor Chapman traveled to Japan, hired by the Japanese government to teach English to high school students. As he learned the language, Chapman also grew increasingly fascinated by the culture, finally deciding to undertake a collective portrait of Japanese contemporary society.



Trained in photography at Yale and versed in the history of typological photographic projects, Chapman took his inspiration from a German photographer of the 1930s and set out to photograph all segments of society, from bakers to bankers, from housewives to policemen to hardened gangsters. Over 50 of the resulting images are contained here.



This book is for anyone interested the dynamics of a culture in transition, or of the tensions of tradition and modernity, or simply in all the myriad oddities of Japan.