In 1969 Shomei Tomatsu first visited Okinawa, then still under American military occupation, to continue his investigation of the Americanisation of Japan at its source, the base of bases. He arrived expecting Okinawa to be more Americanised than the rest of Japan and was struck instead by how the islanders survived with their own originality and intensity. That local intensity, with the light and colour of the tropics, moved him from black and white to colour, in which, he later said, his pictures first move toward the essence of Japan but do not stay there and then leap to the other side of Japan, whose landing site is unseen. First published by Mainichi Newspapers in 1975, the original Pencil of the Sun is recognised as a watershed in the history of Japanese photography. This edition presents it as two volumes in an acrylic slipcase. The Pencil of the Sun 1975 is a redesigned version of the original collection of black-and-white and colour images, with all but two of the original pictures and Tomatsu's text of 1975; The Pencil of the Sun 2015 collects unpublished colour pictures from his travels, with critical essays by Toshiharu Ito and the anthropologist Ryuta Imafuku, and extends the journey from Okinawa across the islands of the Southeast Asian sunbelt.