At the end of October 2005, I moved from Kyoto to Los Angeles. The dry air of LA and the everlasting blue sky were so empty, and the emptiness was strangely comforting. The Internet had passed its infancy and was soon entering the age of social networking. From this magical network of information, I happened to discover that an old acquaintance lived in the next town over. That was Miss Erochica Bamboo, the burlesque performer.
When I was still in graduate school studying sociology and dancing and taking pictures at drag queen parties at night, she was either on stage dancing as a go-go girl or simply on the dance floor as a flamboyant guest. Her appearance was always coquettish yet sophisticated, with the air of a professional performer.In fact, she was the only professional burlesque dancer in Japan at that time, which I learned after she won the Miss Exotic World competition held annually in the Mojave Desert in 2003. After winning the honor of being the number one burlesque dancer in the U.S., she had since moved her base of operations from Japan to L.A. and started working in the United States. It was a strange coincidence that someone I knew from a small club in Kyoto was in the next town over, but it made me possible to spend some good times with her, sometimes having coffee with her and sometimes her inviting me to dinner. Sometimes I even went out to the bar where she was performing and took her picture.Eventually, she began organizing burlesque parties in Tokyo, and I again begged her permission to photograph the events, with my usual onlooker's guts as usual. She graciously allowed me to do so.
And this series of photos is the result. Although the shooting period was short, the series of photos captures an explosion of energy and light which comes from the birth of neo burlesque movement in Tokyo. As a photographer, it is one of the greatest blessings of my life to have been able to document this brilliance.This series probably documents about 600 images, of which the photos shown here are only a small fraction.
