Mr. Kubota, a prizewinning member of the distinguished photographers' cooperative Magnum, also reports on other phenomena, like the cremation of bodies in Bali, compulsory Buddhist training for boys in Myanmar and a mass rally of schoolchildren in North Korea to celebrate the 80th birthday of President Kim Il Sung in 1992. Still, even if the show has some extraneous material, it is noteworthy for its wide-angle view of Asia's struggles, from a mother and her baby roosting on the streets of Calcutta to farmers repairing a canal damaged by flooding in Hunan, China. Urban scenes loom large. In Bhaktapur, the ancient capital of Nepal, men hack up buffalo meat on the street as a wistful dog watches. In the Indian town of Fatehpur, Rajastan, a man leads a camel past a bus packed with passengers even on its rooftop.
Huge crowds are an Asian commonplace.
But there are more optimistic views in which mastery of the land and extraction of its riches still pose a hopeful challenge. Among them are an image of a farmer plowing his green-terraced rice field behind a team of water buffalo against the magnificent backdrop of Mount Agung, Bali's tallest and holiest mountain. Another shows a flock of contented-looking sheep being milked in Nei Mongol, China, the highest quality grazing grass in the country stretching away in a green prairie behind them. In the city of Baotou in the same province a sizable crowd of workers on bicycles reports for early morning duty at the Baotou Steel Mills, whose 60,000 employees produce 1.5 million tons of steel a year. You can't eat it, but steel, an essential product for China's modernization, has a great deal to do with keeping rice on the table.