Yonehara Yasumasa (born 1959) documents the nightlife of Tokyo by immersing himself in it befriending young women at nightclubs and capturing their jubilant mood through spontaneous photographs with his Polaroid camera. In the series Tokyo Amour, Yonehara takes this narrative one step further and transports us from the nightclub to a nearby love hotel. These photographs are in fact relatively free of explicit nudity. However, the repetition of imagery, like the frames of a ribald, silent movie viewed through a hand-cranked mutoscope, as well as the neon pink case in which he frames them lead us to feel that we are surreptitiously viewing the passionate conclusion to a “night on the town.”

As a longtime resident of Harajuku District in Tokyo, Yonehara has been actively involved with promoting the eclectic fashion movement from that area, examples of which will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Harajuku: Tokyo Street Fashion (November 19, 2015–April 3, 2016).