Tempura - HORS-SÉRIE - 100 PHOTOS INÉDITES DU JAPON

100 unpublished photos of Japan - The archipelago as you've never seen it before

Japan has to deal with its fair share of clichés. Just type ‘photos of Japan’ into a search engine to see how monolithic our view of the archipelago is: cherry blossoms, Mount Fuji, red torii gates, a woman in a kimono... What does this say about Japan? But more importantly, what does it say about us?

TEMPURA was born out of a desire to break these exoticising clichés, while highlighting the work of the photographers who accompany our journalists. Far from being merely an illustration of words, images also tell a story and are often sufficient in themselves.

In four years, we have accumulated thousands of photos from all over the archipelago, as well as countless portraits of artisans, artists, writers, activists, gangsters and fake rebels, ordinary Japanese people with extraordinary stories. These images of a Japan rarely seen in the media are what make our magazine famous and form the essence of our editorial line: to show a Japan that is different from the usual clichés, a little offbeat, but undoubtedly much more rooted in reality.

As the magazine format is inherently limited, we have kept these photographs, never published before, in the hope of one day being able to show them to you. For this special edition, we have selected 100 photographs that reflect our vision of Japan: raw,  intimate, uninhibited, sometimes eccentric, always sensitive and embodied. These photos come from both our reports and our personal archives from our exploratory travels, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a magazine about Japan. All this in a new, larger collector's format, completely redesigned for the occasion.