Fugensha is pleased to announce the release of “Tokyo Whirl”, the first photography collection by aerial photographer Yoichi Yoshinaga.

Yoichi Yoshinaga is a photographer born in 1977 in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo. After graduating from the Department of Photography at Osaka University of Arts and working as a staff member at an architectural model production company, they became a freelancer and built a career in aerial photography. Eventually, they stepped into the field of "aerial railway photography," which they had longed for since their student days, and since their first solo exhibition in 2011, they have been creating their own unique world called Soratetsu (“Toritetsu” refers to railway enthusiast who shoot train photographs. “Soratetsu” is a combined word of Sky and Railway in which refers to the act of shooting trains from the sky), presenting their work through solo exhibitions and books.

Their new photobook, “Tokyo Whirl”, features 103 aerial photographs of Tokyo’s urban terrains, taken from airplanes and helicopters between 2010 and 2025. Since first photographing their hometown of Shibuya from the sky in 2010, Yoshinaga has made it their life’s work to capture Tokyo while circling around major areas such as Shibuya Station, Shinagawa Station, Tokyo Station, and Shinjuku Station.

The photographs included in this book are not only valuable records of the dynamic transformation of the megalopolis Tokyo, but also capture everyday scenes where railways, cities, and people intersect—seen from a bird’s-eye view, an extraordinary perspective. They turn the usual scenery we see from the ground completely around, and offer us a new point of view and versatile way of thinking.

An original essay was contributed by Norihisa Minagawa, president of the Tokyo Suribachi Society, who knows Tokyo’s charms from the “pedestrian’s perspective” and calls himself a “secret railway enthusiast.”

“Yoshinaga’s photographs not only show that the everyday life we experience from the perspective of the pedestrians unfolds as a part of larger historic frameworks, but also that Tokyo’s familiar, ordinary scenery is filled with irreplaceable memories and unique moments.” — Norihisa Minagawa, “Stories from Tokyo’s Skies”