When I first came to Japan to live back in 1999 in lived in a city called Okegawa. One day I was accosted outside the supermarket by two women of about 60 years of age who asked me if I was residing in this city and explained that they were part of the International Friendship Association of Okegawa. They told me that each month there was a newsletter put out by the city office and sometimes in that newsletter – usually eight pages long – a non-Japanese resident of Okegawa was introduced. I was asked for an interview to which I agreed happily since I saw it as a chance to promote my upcoming solo exhibition in a nearby city, and then they told me of the previous foreigner, a Chinese girl, who sent a copy home to her mother and her mother said, “Wow, you are famous now!” My interview appeared the following month where I introduced myself and my home country. The exhibition was mentioned almost as an afterthought at the end of the interview.
A few years later I self-published a couple of small books through a service provided by a big publishing company in Tokyo. I only made 50 copies of one and 30 of the other (all of which were sold or given as presents) but they attracted the attention of the photo editor for a magazine published by that same company, and as a promotion for their self- publishing service I was asked for an interview, probably because Japanese like to promote the use of their services by foreigners so they can look “international”. Following the interview, the editor asked me to submit photos to the magazine and a year later I had a two-page spread with an interview and four of my photographs in one of their issues. That was 2004.
Previous to that time, I had entered many photo contests and a number of my photographs had been chosen for exhibition and a few had even won prizes or appeared in books of the contests’ best entries. I was interviewed by a reporter in Okegawa on three occasions for my awards and also by local papers in a city up north when I won the grand prize in a contest up there. In spite of all these achievements I was by no means famous. It takes more than a few interviews and some contest awards to become famous. Thinking back to my interview in the newsletter, I recognized that in a city of about 74,000 people only the bored and the elderly read the whole thing to the interview with a foreigner on the back page. That the Chinese girl’s mother had said she was famous was just a joke.
My efforts to promote my photography continued from 2004 when I returned to Canada and started advertising to camera clubs that I could do slide presentations for a fee and I got a number of engagements where I also sold two new books I published myself. I was invited to an annual seminar and asked to present two programs, one of which had so many attendees that I was given the auditorium instead of a classroom and for the next two years they asked me back again but as I had returned to Japan I had to decline. I also submitted articles and photographs to magazines and started seeing them published too. By 2006 I had articles published in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Was I famous yet? Hardly. I knew that many people had done much more than I had and were indeed known to a good number of photographers but still not recognized nationally or internationally. Very few outdoor photographers really become “famous”.
So now here we are in 2009 and this month a short piece I wrote
about a mountain I love has appeared in the monthly newsletter of an
association of which I am a member. There’s my photo and my tale, all
written in Japanese, composed by me but heavily edited by a native
Japanese speaker in order to make grammatical sense of my error-laden
writing. I sent an Email message to the editor to say thank you for
accepting my article and to say it looks great. And she replied with
these words:
“I’m glad you are pleased with how it turned out. You’re famous now.”
Thank you. I will accept my fame with humility and bow low before my crowds of admirers. Good lord. If it’s fame that I truly crave then I have barely taken that first step on that proverbial journey of a thousand miles. But I can see the joke. I have heard it before.
