The Empire of Signs

Invited the first time in 1966 by his friend Maurice Pinguet (1929-1991), then Director of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo, the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980), after making three trips, decided to paint a picture of a Japan shaped by signs, codes and conventions, nobility and beauty, violence and emptiness, even in the districts, train stations, stores, theaters and gardens. Through the faces, food, paper, graphics, pachinko, the author of Mythologies addresses with a gentle phrasing the "out there" as a fabulous "cabinet of signs", sometimes flirting with a very Western imagination. A real travel guide in the company of a freely speaking intellectual with a love of language. According to Maurice Pinguet "Japan, that Japan, his Japan - was the utopia of desirable for Roland Barthes." A classic, essential to read and read again.

Skira 1970, Seuil, 2005.