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I am always surprised by how moments happen. This businessman stopped to touch this flower just as I raised my camera up. I guess we are both lured by the promise of Spring.

Times have really changed. I went to Shinjuku yesterday expecting to see the women’s figure-skating finals from Vancouver broadcast on one of the big screens. I thought there would be a crowd. Instead I found small groups of people watching the competition on their cellphones. (six photos)

Minoru Iguchi has taken some pretty good pictures over the years — most of them on or about Oct.11. That’s the day, back in 1959, when Iguchi, now 75, married his high-school sweetheart, Tatsuko, three years his senior. Ever since then, on every anniversary of their wedding except one, he’s set up a camera on a tripod and snapped a photo of himself and his wife enjoying their dinner. She on the left and he on the right, they look out from the frame directly at the camera, with a hint of a smirk on his face and a mask of patience on hers.

That’s pretty much is all there is to the photo exhibition “A half-century of Wedding Anniversaries,” running until Feb. 21 (this Sunday) at the Seigetsudo Gallery in the Ginza district.  maybe we’ve all seen fast-motion videos of people aging on youtube, so Iguchi’s photos shouldn’t seem special. Except somehow they is. These photos don’t speak  so much about speed as a remarkable stability.

At first glance, very little  changes in the Iguchi home. But the close you look the more you see: The couple’s rice-maker s continually upgraded: They change houses three times; Mother-in-laws move in and pass away; Late in life they take in a cat, replaced by a photo among  images of the Iguchi’s grand-nieces and -nephews. Meanwhile the couple age, but it’s hard to point to exactly when they become old. Iguchi credits much of that to his wife’s hair dye.

“I didnt start off trying to make a statement, I just saw a chance to a record of our everyday lives,” says Iguchi, a former photographer and cameraman for NHK. “But by continuing this long it’s taken on several meanings.”

“I think my wife thought I’d eventually give up,” he adds. “And partway though I got the sense that she was tired of humoring me. I think that she’s as surprised as anyone that we’ve gone this far.”

Daisaku Ikeda and two men in the background:

A curry shop in Yutenji:

Plain-clothes policeman outside the American-style hamburger restaurant in Sendagaya, photographing rightist sound trucks: