Japanese salarymen may be getting a bad rap: perhaps they’re a bit more fun than we think they are, and by the looks of these photos, some of them have decent leaping abilities.
This is what we can see in the latest book by photographer Yuki Aoyama, who wanted to show another side of Japan’s professional class, the dark-suited salarymen we see crammed into trains and working long hours. As quoted in Quartz, Aoyama explained that “Salarymen are very common ‘creatures’ or ‘figures’ in my country, who do not seem to have any original personality, [due to] the same or similar colors of suits and shoes. I wanted to bring out their hidden individuality by making them jump.” And not just jump alone, mind you, but next to their daughters—whose expressions range from “Standard Salaryman” Deadpan to “Gee, My Dad Is Kind of a Dork” Giggle. Aoyama had been working on the Sorariman project (the term itself is a play on words, as “sora” means sky in Japanese) for several years, and his “Musume to Sorariman” was just published last month. You can sample a few of these pops catching air below.
The Tokyo-based photographer’s other project, Schoolgirl Complex, is a little less family-friendly, but the series of books generated by the project has received rave reviews, and even been turned into a feature film. We’ll see if these jumping dads can make the leap to the silver screen themselves…
—Alec Jordan
Images courtesy of Aoyama Yuki
