Japan does the wacky.

The really wacky.

Anytime anyone tells you folks are uptight in Japan... well... they are. But they aren't. Understand?

Okfuture.net » Photo Series Of Japanese Peeping Toms:

"Here is a fascinating story about a series of photos taken of Peeping Toms in Japan in the 70’s. These furtive voyeurs were sneaking around parks late at night in search of romantic encounters. The photos were taken by photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki while he was taking a walk with a friend through a park late at night...

“I had my camera, but it was dark,” he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Mr. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the ’70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them.



“Before taking those pictures, I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them,” Mr. Yoshiyuki wrote recently by e-mail, through an interpreter. “I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”"

Via Boing Boing.