Satō Shintarō’s Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow)

Dense three and four-story white and yellow buildings fill most of the image in an incongruous pattern, with snow-covered roofs. In the background, several bridges cross a river, and three skyscrapers dot the far skyline under a dark night sky.

Satō Shintarō, Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow), 2005, chromogenic print, 16 x 20 in., Mead Art Museum.

Introduction

Urban photography can often serve as a window into modern life. Urban photographers tend to focus on the mundane or regular people, objects, and events that are common in contemporary city living. In doing so, urban photography can be a powerful tool to uncover the nuances of human life. Japanese photographer Satō Shintarō, therefore, utilizes cityscape photos to convey several messages about city life, particularly as it relates to his home, Japan. In particular, many of Satō’s urban photographs highlight the often complex relationship between humans, weather, and the natural environment. Urban photography also fits into historical narratives, demonstrating the evolution of anthropocentric landscapes over time. In Japan, photography served as a means to capture and demonstrate a series of transitions from rural to urban, ancient to modern, and imperial to democratic. As a result, Satō’s work also fits into a larger context documenting a cultural evolution in recent Japanese history.

Description

In the digital photographic print Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow), Shintaro highlights an area near his hometown in eastern Tokyo, Japan.1 The image features a relatively dense group of residential buildings as photographed from an elevated surface, creating a sea of pastel whites, greys, and yellows. The buildings are mostly uniform in height, several stories tall, and are arranged in a seemingly incongruous pattern. In the distance, a series of bridges with the blurred red lights of passing traffic are visible, as is an emerging cityscape in the background punctuated by several tall towers. Along all the buildings in the foreground, white snow-capped roofs blend in with the white facades of many residential buildings, giving the impression that the roofs are normally white. In the middle of the image, a small tin-looking smokestack rises several stories above the rooflines. 

Image in Geographic Context

Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow) was taken from a fire escape on the outside of a building in Shinkoiwa, a small neighborhood characterized by proximity to a rail station, in the broader Katsushika City area. The image looks out on the Arakawa River, which holds the Metropolitan Expressway suspended on a bridge in the middle of the river. Further in the distance, the outlines of the Funabori area are visible on the banks of the river, including the Tower Hall, which is the tallest building in the skyline. The bridges that cross the river connect east and west Tokyo by train and car. Each element in the photograph seamlessly blends together, giving the impression of a continuous landscape from the foreground to the background. Shintaro’s portfolio often focuses on urban landscapes with complex visual patterns. As a result, this image reflects Shintaro’s desire to portray places that are special to him, while commenting on cultural and meteorological complexities that affect those places.

Snow and Japanese History

Across his entire career, Shintaro’s work focuses on Japan.  He is particularly interested in examining the relationship between important places and culture through photographic representation. In the late 19th century, Japan’s cultural identity was governed by relationships to rural places and traditional lifestyles. As a result, Japanese art, including famous woodblock prints, often focused on rural themes. Following World War II, with a change in government overseen by allied occupation, Japanese cultural landmarks began to shift. For example, art historian Jonathan Reynolds details how, despite an increased societal focus on technology, some Japanese art genres continued to focus on rural subjects to express nostalgia for a bygone age.2 Later in the 20th century, however, urban and avant-garde photography movements began to embrace Japanese modernity. Photographers like Daidō Moriyama received great acclaim in the 1960s for their street photography work.3 Satō builds on the legacy of Japanese urban photography by commenting on a new era of Japanese modernity. In the early 2000s, Japan was undergoing a series of cultural transformations not unlike those in the 20th century. New technologies and popular media, like Nintendo’s game consoles and anime productions, were gaining popularity.4 At the same time, social and demographic concerns related to a punishing economic recession, political uncertainty, and declining birth rates were straining the Japanese people’s relationship to these advances. Satō makes several choices that reflect these sentiments, including a longer exposure time that blurs the bridges’ auto traffic, potentially indicating the dizzying speed at which modern transformations are occurring. Similarly, the contrast between the modest residential buildings in the foreground and taller buildings in the background gives the viewer a sense of intrigue and also alludes to the modernizing future.

From the left, a series of white three- and four-story residential buildings gives way to higher buildings in the distance. In the middle third of the image, a river is crossed by several bridges, including one that floats along the river’s contour with blurred red taillights from traffic. Three grey skyscrapers are visible in the distance, and a dark night sky fills the top half of the image.

Figure 1: Sato Shintaro, detail of Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow), 2005, chromogenic print, 16 x 20 in., Mead Art Museum. Photo by author.

Humans and the Weather

In addition to Satō’s positioning in Japanese history, Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow) also comments on the human relationship to weather, particularly in urban environments. Aesthetics scholars, including Mădălina Diaconu, have highlighted the unique connections between human perception and weather.5 In particular, using techniques from the philosophy field, Diaconu explains that weather is not just represented, but is felt by those who experience it. Satō’s work uses several elements to encourage the viewer to feel the weather. First, the artist’s physical location on a fire escape is exposed to the elements, and places us in a position to imagine feeling the weather just as Satō did.6 Second, Satō’s image obscures the presence of snow by contrasting it with other white surfaces, like the building facades. In choosing to depict the snow and buildings together, Satō makes it difficult for a first-time viewer to recognize that the scene is snow-covered at all. As a result, Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow) reminds us how often weather seems to exist in the background, particularly in cities that are well insulated from natural forces. However, once you notice the snow, it is hard to forget. 

Urban Landscapes and Hyper-local Environments

Lastly, Satō’s photograph emphasizes the power of depicting hyper-local environments, particularly in cities. Cultural geographer Mia Hunt examines how large urban landscapes have smaller, segmented parts like neighborhoods and blocks.7 These smaller sections, like the ones Satō tends to explore with photography, have unique characteristics and contrast with each other. For example, in this image, where Satō captures the Shinkoiwa neighborhood, a smokestack is present in the photo’s center. The smokestack in Shinkoiwa is notable, given the surrounding residential buildings, and Satō chooses to center it in the image. The smokestack gives the neighborhood a distinctive hyper-local marker and may also have an impact on the neighborhood’s air or weather. In conjunction with the snow on the ground, which is a rare weather event in Tokyo, Satō may also be making a statement about climate change and its effect on meaningful, local environments.8 Together, these characteristics illuminate the many choices that Satō made when taking Snow, and help the viewer unpack the photo’s meaning. 

Three and four-story residential buildings with yellow, white, and grey walls are visible throughout most of the image, with a tin-like smoke stack emerging directly in the middle. A slightly higher building is visible in the upper middle of the image, and the river cuts across the image’s top quarter, with grey-white bridge struts emerging. 

Figure 2: Satō Shintarō, detail of Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow), 2005, chromogenic print, 16 x 20 in., Mead Art Museum Photo by author.

Conclusion

As a whole, Shinkoiwa, Katsushika-ku (Snow) provides powerful commentary on the evolution of Japanese culture, the human relationship with weather, and the importance of local communities. Satō’s work asks the viewer to think about how weather impacts, or does not impact, our daily lives. The photograph also demonstrates to the viewer the importance of focusing on small parts of a place and emphasizes the value in narrowing the frame with which we view our surroundings. In doing so, just as details like the snow-covered roofs or hidden smokestacks emerge in the image, hidden beauty in our lives also emerges.

Footnotes

  1.  Shintaro, Sato. “Sato Shintaro Photographer | Official Website.” Sato Shintaro. Accessed March 26, 2025. https://sato-shintaro.com/. ↩︎
  2. Jonathan M. Reynolds, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), xiii–xxx. http://www.jstor.org.amherst.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctt13x1j9d.4. ↩︎
  3. Sandra Phillips,  “Daido Moriyama,” SFMOMA, accessed May 1, 2025,https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Daido_Moriyama/. ↩︎
  4. Matthew Hernon,  “Japan Back Then: The Stories That Gripped the Nation in the 2000s,” Tokyo Weekender, March 2, 2021, https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/japan-back-stories-gripped-nations-2000s/. ↩︎
  5. Mădălina Diaconu, “The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies,” in Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life, ed. Richard Shusterman (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 38–59. ↩︎
  6. Shintaro, Sato. “Sato Shintaro Photographer | Official Website.” Sato Shintaro. Accessed March 26, 2025. https://sato-shintaro.com/. ↩︎
  7. Mia A Hunt, “Urban Photography/Cultural Geography: Spaces, Objects, Events.” Geography Compass 8, no. 3 (March 2014): 151–68, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12120. ↩︎
  8. Japan Meteorological Agency, World Weather Data Tool, accessed March 26, 2025, https://www.data.jma.go.jp/cpd/monitor/climatview/frame.php?s=7&r=0&d=0&y=2025&m=2&e=0&t=750.122549019608&l=2807.5&k=0. ↩︎