The Newest Ruins, the Deepest Nostalgia

The photography for People Pass, the Path Remains came to an end with my journey to Ehime at the beginning of this month. My travels along ancient routes, chiefly through the Kinki, Chūgoku, and Shikoku regions, concluded at the old Besshi Copper Mine and Oshima, an island that formed part of the Geiyo Fortress. There I photographed the remains of Japan’s modernization, as well as the paths linking them—paths that seem to embody the country’s headlong advance into a new era.

After tracing the passage of people from antiquity through the early modern period along routes such as the Izumoji, the Yamanobe no Michi, the Kumano Kodō, and Shikoku’s pilgrimage paths, I found myself following, at the journey’s end, the path of Japan’s modernization and Westernization from the late Edo period into the Meiji era. One discovery surprised me: these remains of a copper mine and a fortress, the most recent and perhaps the most forbidding of the sites I visited, stirred the deepest sense of nostalgia. They are part of the immediate roots of those of us living in Japan today. This is a history close at hand, extending just beyond the generation of our grandparents, whose faces still linger in memory.

With the photographs from this final journey added, the current portfolio contains 150 images, arranged as a single narrative with a rhythm shaped by jo–ha–kyū: introduction, development, and finale. Yet as I begin editing the work into a book and deepen its underlying concept, an entirely new sequence may emerge. A few photographs I had dismissed as failures may suddenly return to play an essential part.

For now, I need to set everything back to a blank page and reconsider the connections—and the gaps—between the record of my own vision in these photographs and the social and historical meanings of what they depict. I hope the editing goes smoothly. At the same time, I secretly hope it brings a sweeping reappraisal, something akin to a Copernican turn.

The old Besshi Copper Mine

Oshima Island

Sobiraki, Niihama

Nakajima Island

The Sea Roads

Iwayaji, Ehime

The Seto Inland Sea

Nakajima, Ehime

Nakajima, Ehime

On my photographic journey last month, I based myself in Matsuyama and traveled to such places as Iwayaji, a sacred site deep in the mountains, and Nakajima, one of the Kutsuna Islands. Since turning my travels toward Shikoku, I have focused primarily on the “henro-michi,” the pilgrimage routes linking the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku Pilgrimage. This time, however, my journey took a new turn as I began to follow the “sea roads” once traversed and controlled by armed maritime groups known as “suigun.” The suigun were multivalent communities: warriors and pirates, but also traders, pilots, and escorts who provided protection at sea. Even these tranquil waters of the Seto Inland Sea once formed part of a vast East Asian network of trade extending far beyond Japan to the Asian continent.

The high-speed ferry that left Matsuyama early in the morning soon entered Kōnoura Port on Nakajima. Shrouded in dense morning fog, the fishing harbor seemed, through the very act of withholding itself from sight, to speak all the more eloquently of the depths of nature and the beauty of this planet. Photography undoubtedly exists by the grace of the sun. Yet the darkness of night and the curtain of fog also sustain photography—as, in a sense, complex variations of sunlight itself.

As things now stand, “People Pass, the Path Remains” will come to an end with my final photographic journey at the end of this month. But that will mean only that the destinations of my own travels are changing. For as long as my feet can carry me, the path will always continue to stretch out before me.

On and on, as far as it goes.

You can view my ongoing project, “People Pass, the Path Remains,” here.

Where the Path Remembers Time

As the project enters its final stage of shooting, the theme of “the pilgrimage road” has begun to resonate more clearly as the central tone of People Pass, the Path Remains. In particular, I have focused intensively, over the course of my last four journeys, on the roads that lead through the sacred sites known as the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Temples. As I have mentioned before, these henro-michi —pilgrimage paths— possess a striking purity of purpose, especially when they pass through the mountains.

Hundreds of years ago, pilgrims walked these same paths. Pilgrims still pass along them today. And in the future, too, those who carry some form of prayer or wish within them will surely continue to follow the footsteps of those who came before, walking the same single thread of road. That road does not merely connect one temple to another. It also connects past, present, and future. In other words, a path is not only something that extends through space; it is also a device of memory, continually expanding through time.

I have once again published a revised portfolio, including several new works. Nothing would make me happier than if these photographs were able to convey, even in some small measure, the thoughts and feelings I have come to hold toward such paths.