Rock Punk Disco

Rock Punk Disco: Photographs 1960s-1980s collects Katsumi Watanabe's black-and-white street portraits of Tokyo's Shinjuku nightlife, made over three decades in the district's bars and alleys.

PPP Editions published this limited edition of 300 copies, illustrated throughout with Watanabe's photographs of musicians, hostesses, punks, and disco-goers posed in doorways and under neon signage outside the district's small drinking establishments. The volume also includes a facsimile of Watanabe's own text, "Discology," reproducing his account of the scene he spent decades photographing.

Watanabe worked as a street photographer in Tokyo's Shinjuku entertainment district from the 1960s into the 1980s; his other books, including Shinjuku Gunto Denden (Banseisha, Tokyo), draw on the same body of gritty nightlife photography. His negatives, largely unpublished for decades, have since been gathered into several books documenting the countercultural fringe of postwar Tokyo nightlife.