In conjunction with the exhibition Nakajo Sings, Nakajo Dances—Letters, Pictures, and Shiseido, currently on view at the Shiseido Gallery, this interview series invites people who knew Masayoshi Nakajo well to reflect on his work and presence.

Through shared memories, conversations, and recollections from the field, a portrait gradually emerges—not only of Nakajo the designer, but of Nakajo the person.

The first guest is photographer Takashi Homma, who contributed to numerous projects including Hanatsubaki. In this conversation, Homma reflects on their first collaboration in Lithuania, the unusually free atmosphere surrounding the making of the magazine, and the personal friendship that developed between them in Nakajo’s later years.

—Your first collaboration with Nakajo was a shoot in Lithuania. Before meeting him, what kind of image did you have of him—and of Hanatsubaki under his direction?

I probably knew Nakajo was directing the magazine, but what I really wanted to see were the photographs. At the time I was working in Higashi-Ginza, so I’d go to the cosmetics counters in the Ginza department stores and pick up copies of Hanatsubaki.

The ones I especially liked were the issue photographed by Cindy Palmano in Cornwall, in the UK (November 1990), and the one about the Dogon people in Africa (April 1990). I also liked the issue titled Ordinary People (May 1991).

Thinking about it now, maybe the issues I liked were the ones that didn’t feel very “Nakajo-like”—or maybe the ones that didn’t look heavily designed (laughs).

I started working with Hanatsubaki in the early 1990s, after returning to Japan from London. I was showing my photographs everywhere I could, and that’s when I met Nakako Hayashi, who was an editor at the magazine. The first thing I did was shoot portraits for pages she was editing—people like Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima.

After doing that a few times, I ended up going to Lithuania with Nakajo. I think that was probably the first time I actually met him. Before that, I had the impression that his direction would be quite strong. But once we started working together, I realised that wasn’t really the case. My impression changed.

—Why Lithuania?

You’d have to ask Nakajo that (laughs).

Back then, if you travelled abroad for a shoot, you were expected to produce material for two issues. One of the concepts was a ballerina dancing in various locations. The other showed landscapes in which illustrations were placed within scenes in the forest.

The entire storyboard had already been decided before we left. On location we basically followed it. But compared to advertising shoots I had done before—where everything from lighting to composition to how the product appears is precisely controlled—this was much more relaxed.

Nakajo didn’t say anything about how I should shoot. There were no instructions about the camera or anything like that. The storyboard existed, but the model’s pose, the framing of the background, or the angles—those weren’t fixed. I had the impression I could shoot quite freely.

For me there was no stress at all. I think he gave me assignments that suited the way I work.

—Were there ever times when you felt the photographs weren’t quite “your style”?

Maybe the Los Angeles issue (November 1997). But that was mainly because of the compositing design Nakajo added later. I don’t remember him giving strict instructions during the shoot.

It wasn’t unpleasant or anything. But apparently Nakajo himself later felt that he had “tampered with Homma’s photos,” almost as if he had been a little mischievous about it. I didn’t mind at all (laughs).

Actually, something just came back to me. For the New Zealand issue, I had turned down two other jobs in order to go. When I told Nakajo that, he said, “You shouldn’t turn down work.”

But I turned them down for you! (laughs)

Designers can sometimes take on multiple jobs at once without going on location, but photographers actually have to be there (laughs).

—(laughs) He really did things his own way.

Right? I remember thinking, come on—that’s a bit much.

For Nakajo himself, working on Hanatsubaki must have been incredibly free. There was a client, but also not really—it existed somewhere between a magazine and advertising. At the time the budgets were quite generous as well.

He must have been able to push for exactly the visuals he wanted—of course in a good way. Keiko Hirayama, who was editor-in-chief then, and the other editors too, seemed to be working to make it easier for Nakajo to realise his ideas.

And the fact that this continued for forty years—that’s really extraordinary. When you look back at it now, it’s project after project of remarkable ideas.

—When people talk about him, it doesn’t sound as though they followed him out of fear. Rather, they seemed to want to help him make things happen. He was someone people loved. In the book Design and Me Masayoshi Nakajo, you mention that he once told you, “The magazine is the most important.”

Yes. The first thing Nakajo said to me was, “The magazine is more important than the photographer.”

He really emphasised that the magazine itself came first.

There was a period when we worked together quite intensively, but after that a long time passed without much contact. Then about three years before he passed away, we suddenly became close.

Kazunari Hattori, Yukio Nakamura, and Fumio Tachibana had started organising small gatherings around Nakajo, and I was invited to join. When I went, he seemed genuinely happy that I had come.

Apparently he had been telling people, “I’ve been seeing Homma a lot lately.”

Personally I never had any negative feelings about the past, but it seems Nakajo had been thinking about it. So when I started addressing him warmly as “Nakajo-san,” he seemed pleased.

The portrait I took of him around that time has become an important photograph for me.

One time he gave me a pair of John Lobb shoes. He said he had bought them on an overseas shoot but they were too heavy to carry home. We both signed them.

I also received several postcards from him.

Right before he passed away, I had asked him to design a photobook I was making about Tokyo’s landscape. One of the postcards was his reply saying he couldn’t do it because of illness. In the end Kazunari Hattori designed the book.

Someday I think I should frame that postcard.

—That’s incredible. Even though the postcard only contains a few words, it has so much character. It really conveys his personality. It seems he was very fond of you. You were still seeing him shortly before he passed away.

There were a few places he liked to go, and we would go together. He drank and smoked.

Normally in that situation the younger people would order for the senior person, right?

But Nakajo would say, “I know what I want. Don’t order for me.” And then he’d order everything himself. That was funny too (laughs).

—You’re both from Tokyo. What aspects of Nakajo felt particularly Tokyo-like to you?

I talked about this in my book as well. The first time I thought Nakajo was interesting was when he wrote something in a magazine called Dictionary:

“I think about knocking young people down. Is that bad?”

That slightly mischievous, humorous sharpness felt very Tokyo to me.

Nakajo grew up around Nishi-Shinjuku, and my grandparents lived in that area, so I used to go there often as a child. The area around Ogikubo, where Nakajo lived for many years, was also close to the school I attended when I was a teenager. There were quite a few overlaps.

And then there was his office in Roppongi-Itchome. It was a very small office with a large copy machine sitting there—no long, stylish meeting table or anything like that. And that somehow made it cooler.

Doing something overly polished would have been a bit uncool. That attitude felt very much like a real Tokyo person.

—Of Nakajo’s many works, which ones do you like most?

What I like most are the Mt. Fuji paintings he showed in his solo exhibitions.

When designers hold exhibitions, they often present them as a showcase of their past work. Very few present mostly new work. But Nakajo’s exhibitions were usually filled with new pieces.

I have enormous respect for that.

—You first worked together in 1996, and Nakajo passed away in 2021. Even with periods when you didn’t see each other, that’s a relationship spanning twenty-five years.

But we really only started talking properly during the last three years.

Still, it made me very happy.

I don’t know if the negatives still exist, but when we were shooting the balloon photographs in Los Angeles, Nakajo held a balloon and said, “Take a photo that makes it look like I’m flying in the sky.”

I think the negative must still be somewhere. I should look for it.

Takashi Homma
Photographer born in Tokyo in 1962. After working at the advertising production company Light Publicity, he became a freelance photographer. In 1999 he received the 24th Kimura Ihei Photography Award for his photobook Tokyo Suburbia (Korinsha Press, 1998). From 2023 to 2024 he held the solo exhibition Improvisation at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
He began contributing to Hanatsubaki in the November 1994 issue and photographed the magazine’s covers from 2000 to 2002.

Keiko Kamijo
Writer / Editor

Writes and edits on culture, design, and art. She has also edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Part-time lecturer at Musashino Art University. Author of Toys and Design (Seigensha).
Recent editorial projects include Thinking about Nordic Design: The People, Eras, and Identities Behind Iconic Works in Product Design, Architecture, and Textiles by Chiharu Watanabe (Seibundo Shinkosha), and Eleven Sites of Proofreading and Copyediting: How We Read Texts by Satoko Muta (Anonima Studio). She writes the column “Korean Culture Correspondence” for the magazine BRUTUS.
https://www.instagram.com/keique