‘AKB 80’s’, the Other Face of Akihabara by Seiji Kurata

Between 1986 and 1989, Seiji Kurata documented the buzzing atmosphere of Kanda market in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Fresh produce, the loading and unloading of lorries, exchanges between customers and traders… Nothing escaped the eye of the photographer, who compiled these three years of images in a book entitled AKB 80’s, after the acronym for Akihabara 80. 

Seiji Kurata is a Japanese photographer known primarily for his black-and-white photographs of Tokyo residents, with a continued interest in gangsters, strippers, cross-dressers, and bosozoku, gangs of young bikers that were popular in the 1980s. Born in Tokyo in 1945, he graduated from the capital’s National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1968, then honed his craft alongside Daido Moriyama before going freelance. 

Capturing a changing city

By choosing not to focus on the electronics stores and other shops dedicated to manga, anime, and video games that started to flourish in the district in the 1970s, but rather on Kanda market, Seiji Kurata conveys a certain melancholy for a bygone Tokyo. ‘While riding around on my bike photographing Tokyo for this book, I was unable to glimpse any vast rice fields in Tokyo as they have all vanished. Akihabara, or should I say AKB, no longer shows me a view of its vast former wetlands. Nor are there any nighthawks soaring in the darkening sky, to listen to at the end of the day’, he stresses in the text that appears at the start of his book.

AKB 80’s is the first series in the three-part project by Seiji Kurata entitled Toshi no Zokei (which can be translated as ‘deconstruction  of the urban landscape’). The second series, The Deconstruction of Cityscape II, compiles colour photographs taken in Tokyo between 1980 and 2009, while the third and final part, The Deconstruction of Cityscape III, is composed of black-and-white photographs shot between 1998 and 2008. 

Most of Seiji Kurata’s photographs are exhibited in the permanent collections at the Brooklyn Museum and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. 

AKB 80’s (2016), a book of photographs by Seiji Kurata, is published by Zen Foto Gallery and Little Big Man.