Kōjō Yakei: A Photo Book of Japan's Factory Nights

There is a particular problem with a factory night cruise. You spend ninety minutes in front of something genuinely extraordinary, in the dark, on a moving deck — and the photographs you come home with are, by the laws of physics, mostly not very good.

Japan solved this before you arrived. There is a whole small publishing category for night-time industry, and the neatest of them is a modest A5 book called simply 『工場夜景』 (Kōjō Yakei — “Factory Night Views”), published by Futami Shobo in 2015.

Where the Pictures Come From

This is the part that makes it more than a coffee-table object.

The photographs are selected from the “Factory Night Views: Festival of Beauty” photography contest, hosted by the City of Kawasaki and run jointly by five industrial cities. These are not stock images bought in; they are the winning entries of people who went out to these canals and waited.

If you have taken the Yokohama factory night cruise, the Kawasaki chapter is the water you were on. The boat runs the Shiohama, Tanabe and Minamiwatarida canals, and the plants you saw from the rail are the plants in the first section of this book — photographed properly, from a tripod, by somebody who did not have an engine vibrating underneath them.

What Is Inside

• Kawasaki — the Keihin belt, and the largest section
• Yokkaichi — the Mie coast, including the famous “blue moment” over Shiohama
• Shūnan — the Setouchi plants of Yamaguchi
• Kitakyūshū — Kyushu’s industrial waterfront
• Muroran — Hokkaidō, where the cold does something particular to the light
• Factory nights across Japan — shorter coverage of Tomakomai, Ebetsu, Hachinohe and others

Alongside the plates it works as a guidebook: maps of the viewing spots and notes on where to stand, which is the half most photo books leave out. Japan claims this as the first “night factory” photo book published anywhere, and the format — pictures plus a walking guide — has been copied a great deal since.

Two Honest Warnings

The text is entirely in Japanese. There is no English edition. I say this plainly because I would rather you knew now than when it arrived.

That matters less here than it would with a novel. The book is overwhelmingly photographs; the place names appear in a form you can match against a map; and the viewing-point diagrams are drawings. If you want something to read, this is not it. If you want something to look at, and to work out where a photograph was taken from, it works in any language.

It was published in 2015. Plants get rebuilt, viewing platforms open and close, and some access notes will have aged. Treat the maps as a starting point rather than as current information, and check anything you intend to travel for.

Why It Travels Well

• A5 and 127 pages — it slides flat into a suitcase and nothing about it can break
• Around ¥1,540 including tax — less than a cruise ticket costs for one person
• Hard to find outside Japan — this is not a title you can casually order at home
• It ages well — photographs of industry at night are stranger, not more dated, ten years on

Price and Where to Buy

In person, look on the photography or subculture shelves rather than the travel ones — Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and Maruzen in Marunouchi both carry the genre, and browsing it is a pleasure even if you cannot read a word.

How to Have It Delivered to Your Tokyo Hotel

Amazon Japan and Rakuten can both deliver directly to the hotel where you are staying. Ordering a few days before your flight home works well — you simply collect the package at the front desk. Set the shipping address to the hotel, and add the hotel name and your guest name exactly as it appears on the reservation.

• Please check with your hotel in advance that they accept parcels for guests
• On Amazon.co.jp, the English display toggle is at the top right of the screen. Rakuten is a Japanese-language site, so your browser’s translation feature is the easy way through

Who Is This For?

Anyone who came off the boat at the Red Brick Warehouse slightly stunned, scrolling through twenty blurred orange smears and thinking that is not what I saw. This is what you saw.

It is also a good gift for a photographer at home — not because they will travel to Kawasaki, but because the book is a study in how to photograph light in the dark, and that is portable.

→ Related: Yokohama Factory Night Cruise: 90 minutes through the Keihin canals

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