In 1983, at the age of eighteen, Katsu Naito left his small Japanese city of Maebashi, in the Gunma Prefecture, and headed to the United States. “New York City is a place for kids like you to go and get disciplined,” his mother had told him as she scanned ads for overseas job offers. He didn’t argue. At the time, Naito’s greatest love was disco, and his mother, unwittingly, was ushering him straight to its center. For his first three years in the U.S., Naito was contracted to work as an assistant chef at a Japanese restaurant on Columbus Avenue, a job that helped him get a green card. He spoke little English, but he’d go dancing at the Paradise Garage night club, and at the end of each day he found “a kind of calm,” he said, in looking at books by Diane Arbus, which he browsed on the shelves of A Photographer’s Place, on Mercer Street. Her photographs reflected something of his own wanderings along the city streets that he had not yet found a way to express. “They just stole my heart,” Naito told me. A sushi chef at the restaurant showed him how to work a Leica, and how to develop film.
