The Unexpected Discovery
After over fifty years behind the camera documenting the human condition through black and white street photography, I thought I understood the boundaries between candid observation and portrait interaction. My work has always lived in that space where subjects are unaware, absorbed in their own worlds – documenting how people navigate public spaces, lost in their thoughts or devices. But during my two-week journey through Japan this past summer, those carefully maintained boundaries dissolved in the most unexpected way. What began as documentation of a Japanese phenomenon would eventually reveal itself as something larger – a photographic language that had spread across Asian cultures and even followed Asian tourists to the ancient streets of Rome.
Working the streets of Japan, I employed my usual method – observing, waiting, capturing those unguarded moments that reveal truth. The streets offered endless material: people lost on their phones, students scrolling through social media even while walking with friends, couples sitting together but worlds apart. But Japan also presented something different. When I spotted particularly compelling subjects – a weathered sake vendor whose face told stories of decades behind the counter, students whose uniforms couldn’t hide their individual personalities, an elderly woman whose traditional dress spoke of preserving old ways in modern times – I would approach them for portraits.
Making eye contact and raising my camera as if saying, “Excuse me, may I take your photo?” Before I could even explain my intentions further, or take a picture, a transformation would occur. Faces that moments before had been absorbed in daily life would brighten, shoulders would straighten, and fingers would rise in that unmistakable V formation. The peace sign – automatic, reflexive, joyful.
My initial reaction to this was frustration bordering on disappointment. Here I was, seeking authentic human moments, only to have them transformed into what seemed like performative gestures. These weren’t the raw, honest portraits I envisioned. But as this happened many times over, across different cities and demographics, I began to understand I was witnessing something far more interesting than individual portraits. This was a cultural phenomenon that deserved documentation and research, not resistance.
A Gesture’s Journey Through Culture
To understand what I was capturing, I had to understand the peace sign’s remarkable journey through Japanese society. The gesture entered Japan during the post-war occupation period, carrying its Western associations with peace and victory. But its true popularization came through an unlikely ambassador: Janet Lynn, an American figure skater who captivated Japanese audiences during the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics. Despite falling during her performance, Lynn smiled, waved, and flashed the peace sign, embodying a spirit of joy and resilience that resonated deeply with Japanese viewers.
What happened next reveals something fundamental about Japanese cultural adaptation. The peace sign didn’t remain a foreign import; it was absorbed, transformed, and ultimately claimed. By the 1980s, it had become embedded in Japan’s emerging kawaii (cuteness) culture, adopted by celebrities who used it to appear approachable and playful. The gesture evolved from its political origins into something apolitical, universal, and distinctly Japanese.
The sign serves multiple cultural functions in Japanese society. In a culture that values group harmony and can find individual expression challenging, the peace sign provides a safe, standardized response to photography – non-controversial, widely understood, and socially acceptable across all ages and contexts. It’s a democratizing gesture that puts everyone on equal footing, from corporate executives to school children, from elderly shopkeepers to young fashionistas. Everyone knows the script.
This cultural adoption was so complete that Japan became the epicenter for the gesture’s spread throughout East Asia. Through the influence of Japanese pop culture in the 1980s and 90s, the peace sign proliferated to Taiwan, South Korea, China, and beyond. The V-sign became fashionable across the region, each country adapting it while maintaining its essential character. What began as an American gesture imported to Japan became Japan’s photographic export to Asia, creating a shared visual language across cultures that had historically been divided.
The Evolution of a Project
The Japanese Peace Project emerged from this intersection of Western documentary traditions and Japanese portrait culture. Each image in the series captures a fascinating duality – it’s simultaneously a portrait of an individual and a document of collective behavior. The school students at the temple in Kyoto, sitting on ancient wooden platforms in their modern uniforms, all raising peace signs with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The three men in Dodgers jerseys at a small sake bar, bonding over the success of Shohei Ohtani, their peace signs as natural as their smiles. The elderly woman in Kaga, standing at a crosswalk in her dotted blouse, offering the sign with a joy that transcends generational differences.
What struck me most was the genuine happiness that accompanied the gesture. This wasn’t empty performance or reluctant compliance with photographic convention. Each person brought their own energy to the moment. The kimono-clad woman who had just performed our tea ceremony offered her peace sign with elegant precision. The vendor behind her dango skewers flashed the sign with entrepreneurial pride. The sake servers behind their bar gave playful variations, each adding personal flair to the universal gesture.
Working with my Leica Q2 Monochrom meant these portraits were captured directly in black and white – no conversion, no interpretation in post-processing. This immediacy created unexpected moments of magic. When I’d show subjects their image on my camera’s LCD screen, they’d often pause, mesmerized. They expected to see color – the bright reds of a kimono, the neon of signage, the green of temple gardens. Instead, they saw themselves transformed into something timeless, their faces rendered in the same tones as classic photographs they might have seen in museums. “Sugoi!” (Amazing!) was a common response, followed by closer inspection of this unexpected version of themselves.
The monochrome rendering strips away the visual noise of modern Japan – the neon, the colorful signage, the busy patterns – and focuses attention on the human moment. It connects these contemporary encounters to photography’s documentary tradition, suggesting that what I’m capturing is not just a quirky cultural habit but something deeper about human expression and cultural identity.
Technical and Philosophical Considerations
From a technical standpoint, photographing these portraits required adjusting my usual approach. Street photography typically demands quick, unobtrusive shooting – being ready for the decisive moment before it passes. But these portraits existed in a different temporal space. Once someone agreed to be photographed and began forming the peace sign, time seemed to slow. I could consider composition, even take multiple frames. The subjects were patient, holding their poses with practiced ease.
The Leica Q2 Monochrom became a conversation piece itself. Its retro look, its purely monochromatic sensor means there’s no color information at all – this isn’t a color image converted to black and white, but a camera that sees only in grayscale. When subjects saw themselves on the LCD, they were often seeing themselves in black and white for the first time. This immediate transformation – from colorful reality to monochrome art – frequently sparked genuine interest and wonder.
This shift in pace made me reconsider the relationship between photographer and subject. In traditional street photography, there’s often an element of taking – capturing something from unaware subjects. But these portraits were gifts, freely given moments of connection. The peace sign became a bridge between my Western photographic sensibilities and Japanese cultural expression. We might not share a language, but we shared this understanding: I wanted to make their picture, they wanted their picture made, and the peace sign sealed our agreement.
What surprised me most were the moments after I lowered my camera. Sometimes, particularly with younger subjects, they would ask for a selfie. There I was, a total stranger – an older American man with a camera – and they wanted to document our encounter from their perspective. In these moments, I found myself making the peace sign alongside them, participating in the very gesture I was documenting. The photographer had become the subject, the observer had become the observed.
Occasionally, when someone showed particular interest in their black and white portrait on my camera screen, I’d share my QR code so they could find my work online. A few reached out later for their portraits, and some even sent back the selfie we’d taken together – me under an umbrella in Kyoto, making the peace sign just like my subjects. Seeing myself in that image, fingers raised in the universal V, completed the circle of this cultural exchange.
Beyond Borders: The Pantheon Revelation
The true scope of this phenomenon became clear not in Tokyo or Kyoto, but in Rome’s Pantheon during my September 2025 trip to Italy. Under the ancient dome, amid the marble and centuries of Western history, I noticed two young women taking photos of each other. Following my instinct to help, I offered to photograph them together. After taking their photo with their phone, I asked if I could take one with my camera.
Immediately, reflexively, their fingers went up in the familiar V formation. The same genuine smiles, the same automatic response I’d documented throughout Japan. “Are you from Japan?” I asked, already knowing the answer from their practiced gestures. “No,” they replied, “China!”
This surprised me. This moment in the Pantheon crystallized what my project had actually been documenting. The peace sign wasn’t just a Japanese phenomenon – it had become a pan-Asian photographic language, a shared cultural response that transcended national boundaries. These Chinese tourists in Rome carried the same photographic reflexes as the Japanese students in Kyoto, the same coded behavior I’d witnessed across generations in Japan.
When I showed them their portrait on my Leica’s screen – themselves in black and white against the ancient Roman architecture – they had the same mesmerized reaction I’d seen so often in Japan. The monochrome rendering transformed a tourist snapshot into something more artistic, more timeless.
Reflections on Authenticity
This project fundamentally challenged my assumptions about authenticity in photography. For decades, I’ve pursued those unguarded moments that supposedly reveal deeper truths about the human condition. But in Japan, I discovered a different kind of truth – one that emerges not despite awareness but because of it.
The peace sign isn’t a mask hiding authentic expression; it’s authentic expression itself, just culturally coded in ways my Western perspective initially couldn’t appreciate. When that Soba Sensai in the striped yukata raised his fingers in the peace sign while holding his tray of soba, he wasn’t performing inauthenticity – he was authentically performing his culture’s relationship with photography. The gesture reveals how Japanese society has collectively negotiated being photographed in our image-saturated age.
The selfies that occasionally happened – where I found myself making the peace sign too – revealed another layer of this authenticity. The gesture wasn’t just something “they” did; it had become something we all did together, a shared language of photographic joy that transcended cultural boundaries.
The Universal Network
The Japanese Peace Project, I now realize, documents not just a gesture but an entire ecosystem of photographic exchange that defines our current moment. It captures how a simple gesture became a cultural bridge – first between Japan and the West, then between Japan and Asia, and finally between Asia and the world, all connected through the digital infrastructure of social media.
What started as frustration with a “ruined” portrait in Japan became fascination with a networked phenomenon. The project reveals how contemporary photography has evolved from an act of taking to an act of sharing, from observation to participation, from solitary artistic vision to collective social practice. From the elderly vendor in rural Japan to young Chinese tourists in Rome, the peace sign unites not just Asian cultures but all of us in this new photographic ecosystem.
As I continue to receive ”Likes” on Instagram from people I have shared images with, I understand that this project is never really finished. It continues to grow through each digital exchange, each shared image, each new connection made across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
The two Chinese women in the Pantheon, standing where ancient Romans once worshiped, flashing a gesture that traveled from America to Japan to China to Rome, connected to me now through Instagram, embody the strange loops of cultural exchange in our networked world. Their peace signs, captured in black and white and shared through Silicon Valley servers, remind us that authenticity in contemporary photography isn’t about capturing people unaware – it’s about documenting how we all participate in this vast, interconnected web of images and relationships.
The peace sign, I’ve come to understand, is just the visible symbol of something larger – a global agreement that we’re all in this together, all photographers, all subjects, all connected. Two raised fingers, a smartphone camera, an Instagram handle – these are the tools of modern human connection, creating a vast archive of encounters that would have been impossible just a generation ago. My project documents not just a gesture, but the birth of a new visual language for the connected age.
