DM: Overall, the subjects of the pictures that I take come from snapshots of street scenes in cities in Japan, like Tokyo. I shoot as I walk along the streets, as I walk around cities. That is my basic method of taking photos and so I haven't really changed the main subject that I photograph over the years.

THC: As you walk around a city, how do you decide which images you want to capture on film?

DM: When I'm walking around a city without my camera, I don't really bother paying attention to what's around me. But when I have my camera with me, all the senses in my whole body, not just my eyes, come alive and begin to observe things. When that happens, my memory and all the various elements within me come out. So all the various things, like my memory and my interests, look outside of me, and I am then able to see all sorts of things. My body becomes an antenna.

THC: Your early photos tended to be blurry and out of focus, while your later ones are mostly crisper and sharper. What accounts for this change?

DM: Actually, many of my more recent photos are also blurred, although overall I don't use that style as much as before. People tend to have that opinion, that my style has changed a lot. But when I was younger, in the past, I was interested in not just the main subject I was shooting, but also the aura, the feeling surrounding the subject. The aura surrounding where I stood and the general atmosphere in the city-these various auras interested me. I wanted to somehow capture them in my photos. In order to do that, I would use the no-finder technique-that is, taking the photo without looking through the viewfinder. In order to capture in photos what I wanted, I naturally came to use that technique often. Due to this no-finder method, my photos tended to be blurry and out of focus. Later, I came to realize that I could convey the aura that I sensed around a subject even through more defined images. Even now I do use the no-finder technique sometimes, but since cameras have become automatic taking blurry images is harder to do. In the past, there was no such thing as automatic focus.