Reflections on Memory and Disaster

Dr. Les Joynes, who is a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in Art, shares his reflections on Tōhoku, Through the Eyes of Japanese Photographers, jointly organized by Japan Foundation and The Velammal International School (TVIS), in Chennai

Tōhoku … When we hear this name some of us will be familiar with its location in the rugged northern part of Honshu, the main island in Japan. Tōhoku Region (in Japanese: Tōhoku Chiho) comprises six Japanese prefectures: Akita, Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, and Yamagata, and a prefecture we are all familiar with, Fukushima, that was the site of not one, but three nuclear meltdowns at the flooded TEPCO nuclear power station that released radioactive iodine-131 and caesium-137 into the soil, ocean and atmosphere. In 2015, the Kobe Shimbun reported that there were more than two-hundred thousand people displaced. A 2021 report from Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency reported the Tōhoku events resulted in more than nineteen thousand deaths, more than six thousand injured and more than twenty five hundred missing. A 2021 report by Japan's Reconstruction Agency revealed that there were still a thousand residents still living in temporary housing.

Instead of documenting the anxiety wrought by Japan’s worst nuclear power plant disaster, this exhibition documents the times from 1940s to weeks just preceding the 4-11 disaster. Images display pastoral and bucolic images of village life, the solitude of nature and traditional celebrations that are embedded in traditional Japanese culture. It is the very absence of any reference to the disaster that makes the viewer feel a sense of impending calamity which will befall these often smiling subjects unaware of what is about to happen. -- Curated in 2012 by Iizawa Kotaro, the exhibition features works from Japanese photographers including Haga Hideo, Oshima Hiroshi, Naito Masatoshi, Tatsuki Masaru, Lin Meiki, Tsuda Nao, Hatakeyama Naoya and the photography collective, Sendai Collection. The photos focus on the historical and sometimes romantic reflections of Tōhoku by its inhabitants and by observers. Through black and white and color photography time is captured as if it is a life-form embedded in amber. To be beheld, turned over and over in one’s hand - something frozen in the moment.

Owing to the nature of the mechanism, the photographic frame is selective – and the subjects depicted in their villages seem unaware of our existence seeing them from the future, but sometimes their gaze wanders outside the frame, behind us towards something that even we cannot see. Through the images we feel the solitude and emotional challenges faced by communities living on the fringe of nature. But what is authentic? And what does “authentic” index? Can authentic mean a favored memory? I am reminded of my own family albums, heavy black leather bound folios kept on a cabinet in our family home in Santa Barbara, California. In the early 1960s my mother carefully selected and collaged family photographs into the ivory-colored pages. The photos ranged from 1920s sepia toned stern-faced studio portraits to 1950s and 1960s carefree color snapshots of smiling family members and friends mingled with newspaper clippings highlighting weddings, births, deaths and graduations. These albums served a point-of-reference for the family to identify and locate close and distant relatives both living and dead and put places and events into a context.

Memories evoked by photographs are themselves constructed, curated, preserved and passed on as a legacy. But memory can be mutated. In the 1990s, my mother then in her mid-seventies set to work to re-curate the albums. As such she created a revised history. Some photos of family members were removed leaving haunting white spaces in the yellowing heavy paper sometimes with remnants of paper where the photo was cleaved. I believe that for my mother, revising these albums was a therapeutic way to manufacture a different view of events - a different story – one where trauma was mediated by being omitted. And the more the trauma was hidden the more I thought about it. The exhibition, Tōhoku, Through the Eyes of Japanese Photographers, then is a construction of a “normal” – the pastoral, the historical, and the quotidian of life in Tōhoku. Each passing moment experienced by the subjects captured unaware that destruction would rage through their towns, homes and lives. As observers reading these images in sequence we are aware of the fragility of these moments constructed as if on the edge of a steep cliff. I am reminded of the breath that one might instinctively draw just before and accident. Chiba Tetsuke (b Akita Prefecture ,1917-1965) shares reflections of local inhabitants that are so idyllic that they could be stills in the early films of Ozu Yasujiro’s contemplative and personal stories. They evoke a feeling that one is observing an idyllic if not “Honmono no Nihon” – an authentic Japan. Kojima Ichiro (b. Aomori, 1924-1964) chose for his subjects villagers and the natural the rough beauty and sometimes forbidding rustic especially in his 1957 photo Twilight, Jusan, Goshogawara-shi which depicts a solitary bundled up villager walking on a rural dirt road in front of a store at dusk evoking a sense of solitude along Japan’s frontiers. The works of Haga Hideo (b 1921 in Dalian. Manchuria) share images of local communities in religious festivals and dance punctuated occasionally with personal expressions of revelers and children facing the camera.

Bold temple masks photographed in the 1980s by Naito Masatoshi (b 1938 in Tokyo) document the centuries old folk religions and traditions in Tōhoku in particular the Dewasanzan-jinja, a Shinto shrine and pilgrimage site in Yamagata Prefecture. Color lambda prints of larger-than-life temple deities pierce the protective veil and the perceived safety of the museum as if to challenge the observer to awaken and take notice that they are not in a dream. Oshima Hiroshi (b in 1944 in Morioka in Iwate Prefecture) presents images of village life, domesticated animals, and one image of an unknown villager, his face blank with a stare that could be that of detachment, surprise or bewilderment. Two images in the exhibition: View from a window, 1959 Morioka and Koiwai Farm 1958 contrast scenes of a funeral procession and a picnic. The funeral procession in View from a window, 1959 Morioka shows two vehicles driving on a gray overcast village street. Black and white framed funeral portraits of the deceased are mounted on a four-wheel escort vehicle which is followed by a hearse. In contrast, the Koiwai Farm family portrait is reminiscent of Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. It is a portrait of a middle class Japanese family portrait – a father in a suit and tie, children, one dressed in a black military-style seifuku uniform. The family sitting on the freshly mown sun-lit grass gives them an air of insouciance - that everything is, and will remain, prosperous and safe. Standing apart in the exhibitions is a series of saturated chromogenic prints by Lin Meiki (b. Yokosuka in Kanegawa in 1969) created in 2011. These images explore water and flora in deep greens, frozen blues presenting on one side an abundance of nature - and in the context of the exhibition of shy ambivalence.

The color works of Tatsuki Masaru (b. Toyama Prefecture 1974) depicting more contemporary inhabitants in Tōhoku captured in 2007-2008. These images reflect the direct flash of the camera giving them a sense of immediacy and directness. The subjects nevertheless pose for the images. Some showing a sense of pride and perhaps defiance.

The works of Sendai Collection, a photography collective initiated by Ito Toru which includes photographers Ito Toru, Ouchi Shiro, Kotaki Makoto, Matsutani Wataru, Saito Hidekazu, Sasaki Ryuji and Anbai Reiko include portraits of inanimate buildings in Tōhoku: pachinko parlors, soba shops, CD and DVD shops all in a state of stasis if not paralysis. A Japanese artist well known for documenting the aftermath of the 3-11 disaster is Hatakeyama Naoya (b. 1958 in Iwate Prefecture). The images selected for this exhibition however include the “pre-math” (in contrast to aftermath) of the destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami – these are captured in picturesque and meditative images of the village of Kesengawa from 2002-2010. And finally, we see the work of contemporary artist, Nao Tsuda (b. Kobe in 1976) which explores almost formalist composures of winter landscapes compounding an almost suffocating feeling of isolation. His blue-tinged work Kamoaosa, Akita (2011) frames a hillside view of the village in clouded diffused light. The moored boats, like bathtub toys in a blue-chilled sea lay exposed and defenseless. It reminds us that time is almost out – that the event is ascending and all will change forever. Memory is an elusive conception. How are our personal memories related to and influenced by the overlays of collective memories. How does the photographic image capture, shape and preserve memory and how can those preservations relocate our perceptions of an event. As in the creation of family photo albums memories can be aggregated, curated and mutated. In a photography exhibition like Tohoku, Through the Eyes of Japanese Photographers, images and the captured memories therein, can co-exist in multiple layers containing both trauma and tranquility. As spectators we observe the images in the exhibition intertwined with our own knowledge of the destruction that will transpire. The exhibition enables us to overlay and imprint a new parallel vision – one of calm and tranquility that can co-exist in our minds. The exhibition visits major cities of India and in 2022 marks the 70th Anniversary of the establishment of Diplomatic Relations between Japan and India.

About the writer Dr. Les Joynes (US) is an artist, critic and Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi. A Columbia University Research Scholar on visual cultures, he has curated and produced exhibitions in the UK, Japan, France, Brazil, and China and served on the curatorial team of the inaugural Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” in Taiwan. His works has featured in Art in America, Flash Art, Springer Vienna, NHK television Japan, Art Monthly London, Sculpture Magazine, Commons & Sense Japan, the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) and ProjectAnywhere, in Australia. He is visiting professor at Renmin University, Beijing and Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Joynes is recipient of numerous awards including the Monbukagakushō (MeXT) Scholarship, Japan (1997-2001), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016) and the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Educational Excellence Award (2022). He received his BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Tokyo, MSc. from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, PhD from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University and Post-Doctorate from the School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Mr. M.V.M. Sasikumar, Director of the Velammal Educational Trust and Mrs. Gitanjali Sasikumar, Director - Academics, Velammal Knowledge Park, Mr. Murali Cheeroth, Chairman of the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi, Mr. Koji Sato, Director General, Japan Foundation in India, Mr Kenjj Miyata, Deputy Consul General and members of the Consulate-General of Japan in New Delhi, the artists and administrators of the Cholamandal Artists Village, the Fulbright Scholars Program and the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF).