Issue 01

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Issue 01

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Cover by Jason Weller.Issue 01 - March 15, 2015

He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

 ~ Douglas Adams (from The Salmon of Doubt)

Table of Contents

Issue 01

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Click on the # or content to jump to page

Theo Kogod

Technical Details

Contributors

Alex McLaren

Jason Weller

Nayalan Moodley

Will Fitch

CATerWaULTheo Kogod

Jason Weller

Contributors3ft Left is publish bi-monthly and we don’t want you to miss anything.To receive new issues as soon as they are released, sign up here.

Title Fonts:Cover & Contributors - Packt by Simon StratfordNon-Fiction - Tokyo Pop Star by Michael MuranakaFiction - Inked God by Segments Design

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The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions.

3ft Left magazine contains photographic and artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and bears.

This 3ft Left issue is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You are free to share this work in its original form for private consumption. No commercial use is permitted. No editing, adaptations, derivatives or changes are permitted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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Welcome to 3ft Left Magazine. Our name comes from a line in Douglas Adams’ unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt and the idea that such a minuscule change can be the difference between a picture to revere and one to discard.“He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.”

We would like this magazine to become more than just a glimpse of the Japan seen in postcards. By sidestepping to the left, we hope to offer a unique perspective on life in Japan. While emphasizing Japanese street photography, 3ft Left will not be limited to any one style of photography. The contributors are free to fill their pages as they’d like.

We are starting with four photographers and one writer as regular contributors, or Residents as we’ll refer to them, and plan to grow the team to ten by the end of 2015. We have Tokyo and Nagoya represented in this inaugural issue but aim to gather contributors from more cities as we continue. We’d also like to publish bilingual issues once we recruit a translation team, so don’t be surprised if you notice more and more Japanese along side the English text in future issues.

The seeds of this magazine were planted by Neil Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech, and a manifesto on legacy projects by Chris Guillebeau (he’s since written a similarly themed book, titled The Happiness of Pursuit). Our goal is to “make good art” by sharing the intoxicating beauty found in the streets of Japan. We are flâneurs roaming, searching, yearning to capture light and maybe even time itself. We hope you’ll join us on the journey and watch us grow along the way.

Sincerely,Will Fitch (editor) & the whole 3ft Left team

Resident Writer

Theo is a writer, teacher, wanderer, and occasionally dabbles in the black arts of editing. Being dyslexic, Theo didn’t learn to read until he was ten years old. The next year, he began writing his first attempted novel. After getting his Bachelor of Arts from Guilford College, he moved to Japan to teach English. When he’s not writing or researching geeky historical facts, he enjoys reading comics, eating exotic foods, spoiling his two cats, and rebelling against the laws of physics. A lover of history, he has climbed the heights to Dracula’s Castle, crawled through Minoan sewer ducts, and explored the outskirts of Edirne in pursuit of stories. You can follow him on his blog The Modern Skald.

Theo Kogod

Caterwaul illustrations by 皆川修人 (Minagawa Shuto).

Minagawa Shuto

Resident PhotographersWhy I take photos? Top reasons.

1. Special occasion.2. Everyone else is taking photos.3. I need something for Facebook4. I’ve got a camera and I’m going to use it.5. I got a camera in my smartphone and I want to use it.6. It’s helps me see the world better?7. There is no No.78. I like to find out about my camera and all the kinds of photos it can take.9. I like to find out about myself and all the photos I could take.10. All of the above.

I also take photos for my internet shopping site otaku.com.

Alex McLarenI was born in Middle America, but I currently find myself in Nagoya, Japan. It

was here in the spring of 2013 that I found my love of making photographs.

I began prowling Nagoya daily on the hunt for anything photogenic. As time went by, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the city. I started outdoors and on the street, but eventually I ended up exploring stranger and darker venues.

Recently, my fascination has shifted to people. We are in a transformative period unprecedented in human history. Our species is making incredible headway in all facets of life, moving us rapidly towards an efficient singularity. While this progress is undeniable, the concept remains bittersweet in my eyes.

In order to enter this palace of modernity, it seems we are leaving our individ-uality at the gates. Even in my short lifetime, I have witnessed a substantial amount of the change. Across the world, what to eat, wear, watch, read, and idolize are merging into similar, if not identical, entities. Our paths are narrowing. As a consequence, it is becoming rare to catch a glimpse of a true individual.

It also makes it that much more fun to try.

Jason Weller jcweller.com

I’m an expat South African freelance multimedia content creator working out of Tokyo.

I am passionate about underground, reactionary subcultures. The stubborn nails that refuse to be hammered flat. Because the best human beings I’ve ever met are the ones most looked down upon by the herds of sheeple that make/partake in the mass, blind consumerism that is “proper” society.

Nayalan Moodley darc.jp

I learned to shoot on my parents’ old soviet Zenit when I was in high school. Shortly after university, I traded in both my film and digital cameras for a compact point & shoot. I’d been taking your standard vacation snapshots for a while at that point. No longer creating shots but instead capturing memories. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but my artistic interest was peaked anew after watching Jason fall down the photographers’ rabbit hole. I decided I, too, wanted (back) in.

The back cover was shot from the hip while longboarding - just before my point & shoot switch. My other shots, made in the summer of 2014, are a return to the camera I started with, the Zenit EM, and from the first role of film I’d shot in close to a decade. I feel like I’m starting from scratch, but it’s a great feeling.

Will Fitch

TOKYOSTREETSTowering monoliths of glass and steel rise high

above the Tokyo streets, casting long shadows as the skies redden with dawn in the Land of the Rising Sun. Before the day’s first light crests the horizon, many have woken to prepare for the long hours of a day’s work. In those first hours of the new-born day, people flow like a river along the streets and railways on their way to work.

Modern Tokyo is a city of contrasts. Fiber optic veins carry information through the city’s techno- vascular system to pass information from the present to the future, while the ancient Torii and Temples stand as reminders of the life of yesteryears. Disney charac-ters compete with popular anime titles for the atten-tions of children and adults alike, and western fashions can be seen in storefront windows with kanji lettering embossed across the glass.

A man in Shibuya holds his phone aloft, staring through his glasses at his Android’s Gorilla Glass screen. He stands still, staring at the screen as people pass him by.

A woman stands with pursed lips on the brick- cobbled curb of a Tokyo street, an argyle shirt hanging from her in a tapestry of red-and-blue linework. She looks out from beneath painted lids with a disaffected gaze, pouting as she holds her phone in a limp hand.

These are moments of every day life frozen in time.Just as Utagawa Hiroshige immortalized The

Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido with his stunning

ukiyo-e prints, so too do modern photographers manage to capture the essence of a place at the exact moment they witness its profound beauty. And just as trains replaced the popularity of walking the Tokaido’s long route for those traveling between Tokyo and Kyoto, so too has the camera (or for many people, the camera phone) supplanted the ukiyo-e woodcuts as a preferred way of showcasing images of beauty.

But the arts of the past are no less beautiful to modern eyes.

Street photography captures a moment of daily life and preserves it for eternity. It need not be on the streets, per se, but is focused on elements of daily life. Plenty of photographs out there have captured a well-rehearsed kabuki performance during a dramatic moment in the story or the neon glow of the Tokyo skyline at night. These make for great pictures any photographer would appreciate, but the eye of a street photographer is drawn more toward the transient moments in daily life.

Two youths in gothic attire stand in the crosswalk, white striping the black of their clothes and dyed hair just as it does the pavement beneath their feet. They raise hands in horned fists. Her hands make the symbol used both for “rock on” and for a cuckold’s horns. His hands vary the symbol—their extended thumbs signing “I love you.” Crowds of people part behind them, as they stand shamelessly in love.

Street photography is about the small moments in real life. A black-suited salaryman who stumbles out of a bar into the snow and spews vomit in the streetlight of a back alley. A young couple kiss in a Tokyo park as the autumn trees blush yellow all around them. Friends raise their phone and take a selfie, oblivious to the homeless man squatting on the ground behind them. Neon lights cut through the dark ambience of a nightclub as young people dance through a blur of motion.

These are the sorts of moments that define street photography.

The point of street photography is to go out into the world and capture the moments that are all about you. Each new experience in life gives the photogra-pher a chance to capture another perfect moment. Or capture an imperfect moment in the right light.

As people rush between home and work and migrate between the bivouac of Tokyo shops, the roads are not a place most people exist—but the space occupied between locations in the constant grind of movement.

But in the moments between places, someone stops at a street corner, or runs their fingers through their hair, or kisses their lover on a bridge in the rain, and in that moment there’s a click as the image is burned into the film or transmuted into 1’s and 0’s. The people go on their way, but the moment is already set in time, chronicled in light and memory.

Written by Theo Kogod.

“Kou,” he breathed, but no sound passed his trem-bling lips. 

He searched the house again, and called his brother Koji and his girlfriend Yuna--the only people with keys to his apartment. Neither answered. In their voicemail, he asked if they’d been by his apartment, but didn’t say more. 

He remembered how he and Koji had caught a frog one summer when they were kids and kept it as a pet without telling their parents. Their mother found it while they were at school and waited ‘til they got home that evening so they could watch her as she stepped on it and threw it out with the garbage. That had been his first pet. He hadn’t owned another until….

Well, until now.

Yuna had given Kou to him when the cat was just a kitten. It had been the best gift anyone’d ever given him, and somehow, Kou made the small apartment into a home, and made Yuna less a girlfriend and more like family. He didn’t have the heart to tell her. Or the strength.

He ripped through the mess of his apartment, scatter-ing papers across the floor and roving through the disor-ganized tumult of his home. He looked through every-thing and saw nothing, turning his home into a wasteland amidst his blind search. Finding nothing, he kicked over his table. A stack of important papers rained their slow descent—proclamations of debt, unread and unpaid. 

Ken stumbled to bed and drowned his sobs in sake. No paws kneaded the covers above his heart. No purrs sang to him. And there were none of the “I love you” headbutts rubbed from a feline temple. 

The nightmare of pain continued after his eyes were closed, but he did not really sleep, and in the morning, he did not really wake. 

Sometime between his fourteen-hour workdays of caffeinated angst and the insomniac delirium of nights spent swimming the sea of karaoke bars, Ken stumbled through the door to his apartment where he knew he’d find peace. 

In his experience, peace accompanied guilt, as Kou greeted him with the expectant headbutts and neck rubs every cat dolls out to show affection to its human. This would be followed by demands for food and clean water, which he prepared even as he peeled away the skin of sweat-soaked clothes and set out a clean suit of compa-ny-approved work attire for the following day. Then he’d collapse on his futon and Kou would cuddle up to him, purring soft vibrations of joy as Ken rubbed the cat from neck to tail. 

Kou would return the favor by rubbing the side of his face against Ken’s temple, as if to say “you’re my human and I love you.”

And every night, Ken drifted from the day’s chemi-cal-fueled delirium of cubicles and empty cups into the peaceful slumber of cat cuddles. 

Except tonight, Kou hadn’t answered the door. 

He called the cat’s name, but the only sounds to answer him were the dull buzz of his fridge and the growing silence in his heart. 

He began to look frantically, until he saw the window. Near the top, he’d left it open—a gaping 12cm hole. He’d done it to let wind breathe some cool life into the stifling summer heat of his apartment. He hated opening his door each evening to a waft of air like boiling oil, the atmosphere a humid soup that clung in his throat and curdled the drink in his stomach. He also thought Kou would be more comfortable with some room to breathe. 

But the cat loved to jump. 

It was cute how he jumped. One moment he’d be on the kitchen floor. A second later he’d be arcing through the air to land upon the counter. Sometimes he’d even manage to get into the cabinets fitted just below the ceiling if Ken left them open. 

Ken imagined a bird flying past the glass, or perhaps some scent of fish drifting on the breeze from another apartment, and he wondered if such enticements might have lured the cat to leap.

He looked out the window’s open crack, and the breeze blew in like the winds of death, a cold chill creep-ing across his face. He stared down into the six-story abyss, his heart falling out of his chest into the garbage cans below. 

CATerWaULIllustrations by 皆川修人.Written by Theo Kogod.

She’d cry when she heard the news. She might leave him. He might leave her. He just didn’t know what to think or feel. 

On the train, he leaned on the handlebars like a gallows offering, swaying pendulously in the speeding stretch between stops. Elbows bruised his ribs as com-muters fell into one another, strangers struggling to maintain their space as more people crowded on and jostled out at every station. Finally he reached his stop, and pushed his way past the throng of uniformed school children, salarymen coming off work, and unidentified scowls. 

The walk to Yuna’s was only three blocks from the station, but the uphill slope sapped his strength as his pores wept beneath the oven of the summer sky. 

When he finally got there and used his key to enter the building, he climbed another seven flights of stairs to get to her, and then, finally at the green-varnished frame of her door, just stood there.

He didn’t know what he’d say. 

She’d loved his cat, almost as much as he had. She’d even adopted Kou’s brother, a tabby from the same litter named Kiriko. 

He knocked. Her voice greeted him first, and a moment later the door swung open. 

“Ken!” she shouted, the surprise of her smile warm on her face, and then she saw his state and she cooled, tensing. “What’s wrong?” she asked, hesitantly. 

He stepped inside her home, passing the threshold without another word. 

Ken felt a furry head nuzzle against his ankle. A pang stabbed through him. Kiriko was so similar to Kou, but he knew the difference in the force, the purr, the move-ments of his cat. 

Then he felt the second cat headbutt his ankle, its temple pressing into his leg. 

“Poor Kou’s been crying for you since I picked him up. I got him when I went by your apartment the other day, and he was leaping up toward the open window to get at a bird. I didn’t want anything to happen, so I brought him here. You got my note, right? I left you a message,” Yuna said. 

He looked at her, then looked down at Kou, nuzzling his temple into Ken’s ankle to proclaim “I love you.”

The memory of important papers tumbling unread from his upturned table returned to him. He could curse himself, but he was too relieved. 

Smiling as he looked back up at Yuna, he didn’t say a word. He just lowered his head, pressed his temple against her, and nuzzled.

He was late to work for the first time in four years. His boss lectured him for fifteen minutes about responsi-bility and commitment to the company, and he didn’t even have the strength to properly apologize. 

After work, he didn’t go to the bars. Instead he explored the garbage cans behind his apartment. Climb-ing through the filth, he burrowed for Kou’s body amidst the refuse. He found plenty of biological stench—rotten scraps of hair, meat and flesh, the skeletal husks of fish and a shiny tin can reflecting his distorted features back at him, but there was no cat. Just more garbage. Occa-sionally, he’d look up to see the open-mouthed glass face that led to his own apartment six stories up. However, there was too much garbage, and he could not rifle through it all. After an hour, he quit. 

He’d only discovered how much of himself was missing. 

That night he ignored Yuna’s calls as he wept into a bottle of sake and looked at photos of Kou buried in the bivouac of files on his laptop. He began vomiting before he reached the bottom of the second bottle and left a phone message at work to say he was sick. He knew his voice slurred into the machine, but didn’t care. 

He woke sometime after noon, if it could be called waking without a meow expectantly demanding breakfast. He had thirteen missed calls, half of them from Yuna. He decided to see her after she got off work. The only other number he recognized was his brother Koji’s. The rest were probably calling to collect on his debts, as though he had anything else to give.

The rest of the day, sobriety bled into his cerebel-lum as the toxins tumbled out his guts from both ends. 

At 7:00, he finally set out to see Yuna. He didn’t know what he’d say, but he had to tell her that the cat she’d given him—the “rescue kitten” as she called it—was gone. 

Technical Details Table of Contents

While our team does not apply strict editing rules to (street) photography, we do think it’s nice to distinguish shots that are done in-camera. We’ll be adding tags to denote limited editing in addition to the film icon for those who want to know at a glance. Minimal crop to correct for parallax or viewfinder coverage will be ignored and still considered an out-of-the-camera shot.

ootc - out-of-the-camerawbo - global white balance only / co - crop only / lo - basic level tweaks only / bwo - B&W conversion only

wb + c + l + bw - combinations

Film Icon

Pg Body Lens Additional info Ltd Edit

C Canon Rebel T3 Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II f/2.0 1/400 ISO400 cbw

4 Sony α7S Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA lo

5 Sony α7S Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA7L Zenit EM Helios 44m 58mm f2 Kodak Gold 200 co

7R Zenit EM Helios 44m 58mm f2 Kodak Gold 200 co

8 Zenit EM Helios 44m 58mm f2 Kodak Gold 200 ootc

9 Canon 5D (Mark I) Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM f/1.4, 1/2500, ISO 10012 Canon PowerShot G7 X13 Canon PowerShot G7 X14 Canon 5D (Mark I) Canon EF 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 USM f/8.0 10sec ISO100 430EXII Flash cbw

15 Canon Rebel T3 Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II f/1.8 1/80 ISO100 cbw

BC Olympus SP-510 UZ

Issue 01

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Back cover by Will Fitch.

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Issue 01

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