Japanese for Travellers

A Japanese-American raised in California, 24-year old Katie Kitamura returns to Japan to discover the country she left behind.

Travelling across this foreign landscape, she visits middle-class gambling halls, fight stadiums and giant shopping meccas, luxury care homes and cramped apartments housing four generations under a single roof. And she wonders in which version of modern Japan she might have belonged.

Defined by its adventurous youth culture, but with the fastest-ageing population in the world, renowned for its strict social code, but producing the black-comedy violence of Battle Royale films, the Japan she discovers is an often contradictory land of Godzilla toys and war memorials, of futuristic manga characters and brightly coloured vending machines.