Hiroh Kikai (鬼海 弘雄, Kikai Hiroo; 18 March 1945 – 19 October 2020) was a Japanese photographer best known within Japan…Hiroh Kikai (鬼海 弘雄, Kikai Hiroo; 18 March 1945 – 19 October 2020) was a Japanese photographer best known within Japan for four series of monochrome photographs: scenes of buildings in and close to Tokyo, portraits of people in the Asakusa area of Tokyo, and rural and town life in India and Turkey. He pursued each of these for over two decades, and each led to one or more book-length collections. Although previously a respected name in Japanese photography, Kikai was not widely known until 2004, when the first edition of his book Persona, a collection of Asakusa portraits, won both the Domon Ken Award and Annual Award of the PSJ. In 2009, the ICP and Steidl copublished Asakusa Portraits for an international market.
Kiyoo Mogi (茂木 清夫, Mogi Kiyoo; 1929 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan–6 June 2021) was a prominent seismologist. He was…Kiyoo Mogi (茂木 清夫, Mogi Kiyoo; 1929 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan–6 June 2021) was a prominent seismologist. He was regarded as Japan's foremost authority on earthquake prediction and was a chair of the Japanese Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction (CCEP). Mogi was also a director of the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, a professor at Nihon University and a professor emeritus at Tokyo University. Due to the seismic activity in Japan, Mogi also took an interest in the safety of nuclear power in Japan. In 1969, Mogi predicted that there was a possibility of a shallow magnitude 8.0 earthquake in the Tōkai region of Japan, an area that has experienced a number of previous large earthquakes. Following the passing of the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasure Act, in 1978, Mogi was appointed to the newly created Earthquake Assessment Committee (EAC) for the expected Tokai earthquake, charged with warning the government if the quake was imminent. He went on to chair the ECA from 1991 until he resigned from the post in 1996 after failing to persuade the government of the need to take uncertainty into account when issuing warnings.