Thanks for a very thoughtful comment, Charles. I'm happy you enjoyed reading this piece. Kawabata is one of my favourite Japanese writers, but your comparison to him speaks more about the subtlety of your literary appreciation than my writing skills. Daido is also very quotable, and I greatly respect him for saying he used to be 'against photography' – I'm very inspired by his iconoclasm and rebellious attitude.

I share your nostalgia for Kodachrome, though I mainly used Fuji Provia and Velvia slide film while shooting in Japan. Yes, the digitization of film is a labour of love I've dreaded to begin for years… and maybe for the better. So many images online have been cannibalized by AI [not a judgment, just an observation], and my sloth has resulted in thousands of photos that no AI model has touched. But I assume they will absorb them into their training data as soon as I post them online, even with notices in metadata, watermark, and captions not to do that. I had an idea that making photo books available only in print would delay this process, but it is a barrier for audiences who are used to getting everything 'for free' on their digital devices. Here, Medium serves as a fair compromise, and comments like yours convince me this is an excellent online home for my images and stories surrounding them.

So, thanks for sharing your thoughts again, and all the best.