@Alice: Thanks. Matsuri is really cool. Her attitude is great!

@Mel: I have shot Matsuri at least once previously, and Marie shot Matsuri last month.

Funny, I told Matsuri there would be at least one comment about smoking not being cool. ;-)

An ardent non-smoker myself, I carefully thought about whether I should show her smoking or not. I don’t want to make smoking look cool. But these are documentary photos, and Matsuri smokes, so I decided truth mattered more.

What do you think? Should I have asked her to drop the smokes, or are JS readers mature enough to know this is not a habit to emulate.

@2046: I love your description, Hollywood glamour girl from the ’40s. That’s exactly what I felt, too. I am intensely curious about the kind of photographs that Matsuri will shoot.

@petitesam: Thanks. I find your comment intriguing. You feel many people take up smoking as a statement of style? I always had the impression that it had to do a lot with the basic human need to belong—eg. if the majority of your friends smoke, or the people you want to identify with, you will feel inclined to do so, too. Probably they both matter. I wonder which one has the greatest pull.

@Lia: Same here. I see thousands of people every day, and over the years have also shot many thousands of people. So I don’t always recognize the people that I previously photographed. But with Matsuri that is no problem; she is deeply engraved onto my memory.

@Mel: Interestingly, yesterday an American friend and I talked about smoking in Japan. We were at an organic restaurant in Harajuku. The restaurant is almost completely set up for smokers, with just a tiny room for non-smokers (where we sat all by ourselves). She mentioned that it always shocks her friends from the US that smoking is allowed at an organic restaurant.

@petitesam: Although I am not a great fan of smoking, it worries me that we move towards outlawing this vice. We know what happened when alcohol was outlawed in the US between 1920 and 1933 (Prohibition). It funded a dramatic growth of organized crime. Making the use of certain drugs illegal has also made many a criminal filthy rich and has raised violence to scary levels. I hope regulators aim to control usage, and don’t try to eradicate it (because they will surely create new bigger problems).