Rei
Reijiro Mochizuki www.mochizuki-reijiro.com

Born in Tokyo, 1977, Rei is a painter and one of founders of HATOS. From a young age he learned sketching and calligraphy. At 16, he began traveling both at home and abroad as a snowboarder. Drawing is one of his main avenues of expression, and his own, distinctive style is entirely self-taught. He has participated in numerous events doing live-painting. He prefers a nomadic style of life, but now lives and works in Tokyo

Hooky

Souichiro Fukuda

back in Japan where he hit the ground running. He’s worked as a photographer at Sputnik Beach since 2002, and has shot a long list of documentary subjects. In 2004, when Tripster traveled though Japan, holding parties on an English double-decker bus, he was invited to join the ride, going from Hokkaido to Okinawa over a three month period. These days, Hooky continues to enjoy the pleasures of photography and his work is a reaction to things he sees in his day-to-day life.

Uncovering present-day Japan through a 131 day, 34,033km journey.

Survival Drive is the incredible journey taken by two artists to document the present-day of Japan. Travelling by car, painter Reijiro Mochizuki (a.k.a. Rei) and photographer Shouichiro Fukuda (a.k.a. Hooky) spent 131 days crossing the country, clocking up 34,033km in the process.They’re not the first artists to undertake such a journey. Some 200 years ago, the great ukiyo-e artist Hokusai Katsushika made a series of woodblock prints called ‘36 views of Mount Fuji’, depicting the volcano in different seasons. Hokusai travelled across Japan capturing not just the landscapes, but also the local people and their daily lives. The journey he took to complete the series was a form of art itself, and travelling was the way of life for the artist back then.To interpret Hokusai and his works, Reijiro Mochizki and Souichiro Fukuda undertook this immense journey across Japan, paying their respects to the old master and creating a series of sketches and photographs of the things they encountered along the way. For this book, we carefully selected the best of their work, along with maps of journey, photos of recording devices, and extracts from their blog.