A Photographer’s Odyssey Throughout the Japanese Archipelago

This article initially appeared in Aperture, Spring 2016, “Odyssey.”

An adventurer turned photographer, Ishikawa Naoki has journeyed from the North Pole to the South Pole utilizing solely human-powered automobiles. He is the youngest particular person ever to have scaled the very best peaks on all seven continents, in addition to K2, one of many world’s most hazardous mountains. But Ishikawa, who was born in Tokyo in 1977, doesn’t journey out of a want to beat nature—however reasonably, as he says, to be able to relativize his personal perspective.

For his collection Archipelago (2009), remodeled ten years, Ishikawa traveled across the quite a few island chains within the seas to the north and south of Japan. The artist’s twenty-first-century challenge to reposition Japan—as soon as seen as being on the far fringe of the world (“the land where the sun rises”), as one cluster in an extended chain of islands in Asia—and to rethink its historical past and tradition in that context is an act redolent with implications. From the southernmost tip of Kyushu he traveled to Okinawa, the Yaeyama Islands, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, and Kinmen, a tiny group of islands located inside a hair’s breadth of the Chinese mainland that has a number of instances turn into the positioning of fierce territorial battles between Taiwan and China. For his travels within the north, he went to Sakhalin, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea—and even so far as Haida Gwaii within the Gulf of Alaska

Throughout the islands, Ishikawa devoted himself to documenting native festivals and practices, in addition to individuals’s day by day lives. “There are certain realities that disappear when you package them up in language,” he says. “My idea is to break through all that, and simply present the things in the world.” His work makes an attempt to view afresh customs and ceremonies, teasing out histories and cultures on the margins which were missed in favor of cities like Tokyo and Osaka.

Festivals within the Tokara Islands, to the south, and likewise in additional islands, are fairly completely different from these you would possibly discover on Japan’s most important island of Honshu, having extra in frequent with traditions in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, or Taiwan. In a world we’re frequently being informed has shrunk with the facility of the Internet and the results of globalization, fascinating customs and practices abound which might be distinctive to specific cultural and non secular topographies. “Before we had political boundaries, it was each local area, each locality—that was all that mattered,” Ishikawa explains. “The world was made up simply of individual places.” As we stare upon such locations via Ishikawa’s eyes we expertise this topographical uniqueness in a direct, unmediated approach.

The pictures on this collection are sometimes in comparison with Shomei Tomatsu’s prizewinning 1975 e book on Okinawa, Taiyo no empitsu (The pencil of the solar). But the impulse behind Tomatsu’s pictures is completely different in character—his are real-time paperwork shot via with experiences of the political realities of the postwar years. Ishikawa’s work, set in present-day Japan, effectively previous the postwar interval, is impelled by a extra epistemological challenge, an try to specific the concept of what it’s to know. Facing each north and south, he suits collectively the varied items of an archipelago of his personal design. Today, in 2015, pivotal modifications are occurring in Asia that might by no means have been foreseen when this assortment first got here out seven years in the past—the China–U.S. summit assembly, the historic assembly between President Xi Jinping of China and President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan. The archipelago that Ishikawa envisioned now appears located just like the lengthy arc of a bow taut with the strain of what was but to come back within the relations between Asia and the remainder of the world.