Born from his fascination with ancient architecture and a personal rediscovery of its beauty through materials such as wood, stone, earth and thatch, the aspiring architecture student Yukio Futagawa set out in the mid-1950s to photograph ‘minka’, the traditional rural houses of Japan. This experience would be instrumental in shifting his life’s work toward photographing rather than creating architecture. This large-format compendium of Futagawa’s images of villages and homes captures not only the sequence of history but also the essence of Japanese culture at a time when much of the country remained agrarian, not yet subjected to more recent, rapid modernisation.