In her text to this important collection of photographs, Asako Imaeda writes of its "strange harmony, a precarious harmony that is the result of the introduction of human activities and artifice into the landscape." Amid the concrete and the asphalt burgeon bushes and vines, flowers and grasses. An abandoned factory in the paddies, a concrete block wall topped with barbed wire, a sump in reclaimed land -- all are home to weeds and sprouts, mosses and sedge.
Yet the images are not to be interpreted as an expose of Japan's man-made ugliness, nor as a celebration of beautiful nature's revenge. Rather, the equality of what man has made and what he has not lies in the balance of these pages. With carefully calculated "natural color," with no anecdotal nor even symbolic intent, with not a human being in sight, these photos do not stand as "mute evidence" since they do not condemn.
Yoshiko Seino at first glance appears to have photographed what most photographers would have avoided. "Japan," now a matter of a selective eye artfully getting around the gas stand in front of the pagoda, is nowhere in sight. Neither is there any ecological message.