The woman from Ethiopia, resplendent in a scarlet headdress and gold ear pendants, blended in splendidly with the vast dune plateau.

This was not Africa, however, but a unique wind corridor along the Tottori coast where great drifts of sand, attracting curious visitors from all over the globe, are fashioned into steep shelves. It may not compare to the great wind-raked dunes of Namibia or Tunisia, or the sand tombs of Timbuktu, but to come across formations like this in Japan is nothing short of stunning.

This otherworldly landscape, suggestive also of the massive Dune de Pilat, a short drive from the French City of Bordeaux I visited some years ago, provided the perfect setting for the surrealist photographer Shoji Ueda (1913-2000), known for placing figures in the sands for a series of highly compositional monochrome images he took in the 1950s.