“Inudorino me toujitsuni sadamarazu — on a winter day, the hunter struggles to take aim. This haiku by the late Seiryu Inoue is a phrase I particularly like, because the scene it evokes is reminiscent of Inoue himself, and the countless street pictures he made all seem condensed in that one line.

He was a documentarist who vividly portrayed with his hand-held camera the everyday life of people in the skid rows of Kamagasaki in Osaka in the nineteen-fifties, and the image of his captivatingly intrepid style is still very much alive in my mind. It was more than sixty years ago that he taught me, a newbie who had just plunged into this world in Osaka, on the spot what working in the street was all about — and it did not happen in the form of verbal lectures.”