Japanese Beauty, published in 1997, belongs to the period when Hiromix became one of the most recognisable figures in the new Japanese photography of the 1990s. The book captures the photographer’s immediate world: female friends, rooms, Tokyo streets, nights out, journeys, fashion, self-portraits and small everyday moments photographed from an entirely personal perspective. Hiromix uses the camera as an extension of her own life. Her seemingly spontaneous and carefree images have a deliberately direct aesthetic: imperfect framing, frontal flash, intense colours and situations that seem to have been photographed just before disappearing. There is no clear separation between the photographer and her subjects; Hiromix belongs to the very world she is photographing. Japanese Beauty is particularly interesting as a portrait of a generation of young Japanese women who began to represent themselves from a perspective different from the male gaze that had dominated much of Japanese photography and visual culture. Beauty, friendship, sexuality, fun and vulnerability emerge through the experience of someone within that world. The result is an intimate, energetic photobook, deeply rooted in 1990s Tokyo, where the personal diary and photography blend until they become virtually one and the same.