Griffin Travel | Japan April 2025

Join the Griffin Museum in partnership with Nobechi Creative for a trip of a lifetime in Japan this coming spring 2025. Participants will experience Tokyo, Kanazawa and villages that maintain the remnants of Edo Period (pre-1868) living visible all around. We will create many photo opportunities, visit small shops and meet artisans, learn about traditional crafts and embark on optional day hikes on the most beautiful stretches of the mountainsides of Central Japan. We will visit with craftsman making sake and miso and we also visit a washi paper washinery. This will be a trip to engage all the senses. The trip will be led by photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood and be an immersive experience for all.

Jane Evelyn Atwood was born in New York and has been living in France since 1971. Her work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore.

In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. It was partly on the strength of these photographs that she received the first W . Eugene Smith Award, in 1980, for another story she had just started: blind children. Prior to this, she had never published a photo.

Atwood limits her stories to those which truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary (in some cases, years) to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, eventually managing to gain access to some of the world’s worst penitentiaries and jails, including death row. This monumental ten-year undertaking (encompassing forty prisons in nine countries of Europe and Eastern Europe, and the United States) remains the definitive photographic work on women in prison to date. It was published as a book in both English and French in 2000 and continues to be exhibited internationally.

Jane Evelyn Atwood describes her method of work as ” obsessive”. She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely understood the one at hand and her own relation to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.

The trip includes 12 nights in well appointed unique accommodations, 10 dinners, with 2 dinners free for people in towns that have lots of great options. 2 lunches will be provided when we are on the move.

Class size:

minimum of 6 participants, limited to 8 participants

Class level:

Intermediate-to-advanced amateurs and professional photographers

Itinerary

• April 5: Meet in Tokyo, stay in Tokyo
• April 6, 7 and 8: Kanazawa
• April 9, 10: Gokayama World Heritage
• April 11, 12 and 13: Takayama
• April 14, 15: Mino
• April 16: Tokyo
• an optional bonus day in Tokyo can be arranged. Let us know if you are interested in an extension and Tokyo excursion.
• *Subject to final arrangements.

Included on the trip –

• Two nights at a hotel in Tokyo, the first and last day
• Three nights at a contemporary Japanese-design hotel in Kanazawa
• Two nights in a traditional thatched roof farmhouse converted into guest houses in Gokayama
• Three nights in Takayama
• Two nights in Mino. We will say in a converted merchant mansion and warehouse

• All domestic travel in the itinerary: bullet train, local train, rental cars, and taxis.
• All admissions to sites and museums
• Personalized instruction from our photographer instructor
• Logistical support from Nobechi Creative
• Detailed itinerary and information package on Japan and the destinations

Not Included on the Trip –

•  International airfare
• Travel insurance
• Alcohol
• Meals not in the itinerary, snacks and sundries, etc.

Let us know if you have any questions about the trip. Contact Crista Dix at the museum by phone at 781.729.1158 or by email here.

The Griffin Museum will send confirmation of deposit upon receipt. After registration, more information about the trip will be sent from Nobechi Creative in early 2025.