The Newest Ruins, the Deepest Nostalgia
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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.
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