Art museums in Ueno, and experience without explanation
My parents had both aimed to become painters. In postwar Japan they gave up that path, but they never stopped going to museums.
They took me to the museums in Ueno many times. Honestly, I was bored as a child. What I remember most is the long queue at the entrance.
But curiously, I have no memory of anyone explaining the works to me.
"This painting means this."
"This is how you're supposed to look at it."
No one ever said that. I just kept looking at originals.
That's why even now, I read the wall label after I've looked at a work, not before. "What does this mean?" comes second. "I kind of like this" comes first.
Photography as discovery
Most of my photographs were not made to express something I already had in mind.
The sequence is "discovery → emotion → image," not "concept → execution."
The struggle to verbalize isn't a lack of ability — the process itself is simply different. It feels closer to searching for what's hiding inside the world.
Research at the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science
While studying at Tokai University's School of Marine Science and Technology, I was admitted as an external research student to the Mikio Takagi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science, around 1985.
The theme was thermal infrared image processing from NOAA weather satellites — extracting the movement of warm water masses from sea-surface temperature distributions to look for early signs of El Niño.
The lab's culture differed slightly from the traditional academic model. Build first. Try it. Look at the phenomenon. Figure out the theory later.
Block-matching on two satellite images taken at different times to estimate motion vectors, then visualizing the direction and speed of warm-water movement as a vector field. That result was presented at the Television Society of Japan in 1986.
This experience is the origin of my interest in image processing. The process of "discovering" invisible ocean movement inside data arriving from a satellite connects somewhere to the feeling of searching for hidden forms inside a photograph.
Sidekick came from the same thinking
As I continued photographing, I found myself doing the same work over and over in front of thousands of star landscape frames — checking each frame for airplane intrusions, manually excluding them, adjusting the same sky again and again.
So let the machine handle it.
That thought led me to start writing Photoshop scripts for my own use. Sidekick wasn't born as a product. It was born from finding a problem in the middle of shooting and developing, and solving it.
For me, photography and tool development are both extensions of the same act of discovery.
The child who kept looking at originals in Ueno museums without explanation is still out there, pressing the shutter and writing code, looking for what's hiding inside the world.