Sasebo — a town on the western edge of Japan, ringed by mountains and sea, home to a U.S. naval base and a shipbuilding industry. Grey warships lie at anchor in the calm of Sasebo Bay, and the scant flatland is taken up by the naval base and the towering cranes of the shipyards. The ordinary houses, left with nowhere else to go, spread across the town's hillsides like a proliferating living thing.

Once no more than a small fishing village, Sasebo was chosen as a naval port in the late nineteenth century and went on to undergo one of the most extraordinary population booms in Japan's modern history. This tabloid-format photobook captures the overcrowded townscape — every man-made structure crowding and overlapping, as if to tell the story of that compressed history — and the people who live within it.

The first volume of Sasebo Project, in which photographer Osamu Matsuo documents his hometown of Sasebo from a range of perspectives.