"Is my shirt OK?" asks Nobuyoshi Araki as he straightens it to give me a good view. "I looked through my things, but this was the most newspaper-appropriate one I could find."
The print on his T-shirt is of a prostrate naked woman, tied up in red rope, with a lizard facing her crotch. "It only shows breasts, you can barely see the bottom half . . . right?" Araki insists with a laugh.
It's 8 p.m. and Araki, one Japan's most infamous photographers, is at his favorite bar in Shinjuku's Golden-gai, flipping through the new photo book of his current exhibition at the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, "Koki no Shashin: Photographs of A Seventy Year Old." Being interviewed at the bar is his idea. I had planned on talking to him at the gallery while taking in his exhibition, but with a celebrity of his stature, it's difficult to even consider disagreeing.