[1] He taught in secondary school and worked in oils, printmaking, and experimental movies.
[3] Kurata won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award in 1980 for his first book, Flash Up.
For the black-and-white photographs here, Kurata used flash and a medium format camera,[4] resulting in a detailed portrait of a world of bōsōzoku, gangsters, rightists, strippers, transvestites, and so on: as Parr and Badger point out, these are old subjects; but in his "highly polished, detailed" work, Kurata "has an unerring instinct for pictures that suggest stories".
A long stay in Mongolia in 1994 led to the book Toransu Ajia, which continued color work of the Asian mainland started with Dai-Ajia.
In 1999 Kurata's book Japan won the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award (講談社出版文化賞) for a work of photography.