Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan

140 photographic studies in gravure of over 50 of Japan's most perfectly developed young men - Young men who in their single-minded devotion to a rigorous training regimen might even be called Japan's new breed of samurai. To quote from the accompanying essays, these studies do indeed "raise physique photography to the level of photographic art" and, for the first time, show the Japanese male physique "in all its strength and beauty of symmetry, in all its splendor and melancholy and, yes, its poetry"; they are studies which, like the explosive appearance of Toshiro MIfune upon the cinema screens of the world, will lead to a drastic revision of the popular view of the Japanese male as a "drooping, speckled figure of a small man with a frail body wrapped in Western dress." They are the work of Tamotsu Yato, one of Japan's most promising younger photographers, whose photographs have been published in leading magazines in Japan, American and England, and who here takes a big step forward in his life work of studying the human form in its many aspects.