TOKYO X. Photographs by Shunji Ohkura. Afterword translated by Ralph McCarthy, captions translated by Shii Ichiba, envoi by Giles Murray. Tokyo: Kodansha Intl., 2000, 216 pp., 251 plates with endpapers, 3,800 yen.

In the afterword to this remarkable collection of pictures, the photographer says that "in the unprecedented chaos in the economy" he found a "phantasmal Tokyo that had been assimilated whole by computers and transformed into a virtual city."

He began to feel that he had "stumbled into an alien sort of world where everything and everyone was transmitting a certain message I'd never picked up on before."

This was in the late 1980s when people were beginning to find parallels to George Orwell's 1948 novel "1984." To Ohkura it indeed seemed that Japan was "immersed in the process of becoming a highly regimented, electronically controlled society from which there was no escape." This was the message he set out to record and interpret -- chronicling a whole decade of close attention.