Asahi Camera
Scholars including Prichard, film historian Yuriko Furuhata, art historian Ken Yoshida, and curator Charles Merewether highlight the importance of this critique of the effects of Japanese rapid-growth-era capitalism and its pursuit of progress on the Japanese landscape in 1970 for Provoke generally, but especially for Nakahira. Nakahira was thus disturbed to find this "are", "bure", "boke" style appropriated by commercial advertising, most notably by Japan Railways' Discover Japan campaign. Discover Japan had started the same year that "For a Language to Come" was published as a means of promoting travel on the newly-expanded national railways after the inevitable post-Expo '70 tourism drop-off, and were thus closely linked with high-growth-era capitalism, Japanese nationalism, and Cold War era geopolitics. Nakahira published a response to this campaign in a collaboration with photographer Kazuo Kitai for the May 1972 issue of "Asahi Camera" entitled "Discovered Japan." Against this appropriation of his earlier style, Nakahira gathered together images of urban detritus that Yoshida describes as "records of effacement and exhaustion—taken at sites of dilapidation and depression incapable of supporting adequate life...Deracinated things fail to establish a cohesive whole or a syntactic logic as remnants loiter meaninglessly in a state of any-space-whatever: and old electric pole, a canted shot of a sedan, trash, a dead fish." Prichard identifies this incident as an important inflection point in Nakahira's post-Provoke practice that leads him to take a critical stance toward his idealistic belief in the ability of a particular style to avoid co-optation by the forces of commodification.