My images are often taken with the perspective of an expatriate Japanese. For more than 20 years, I have been living away from home and it was after I moved away from home when I started photography. Yet, my creations are deeply rooted into my childhood in Tohoku, northeast Japan. Being away from home became one of my most important drives for photography. Through photographing, I seek connections to my origin.

When I was settling down in my new home, as a reaction to the new environment, I tried photographing using alternatives ways (a self-made pinhole cameras, shooting self-built models etc.), as an improvisation for photographing actual home. Compared to my home in a rural village, my new home seemed thoroughly modernized and overly organized, leaving little space for raw and improvised places to feed human emotions. In the photography, I wanted to try creating alternative realities, which may re-connect me to my familiar world and childhood memories.

In 2011, the devastating earthquake hit north Japan, causing the Tsunami and the nuclear power plant explosion. These events in my homeland urged me to face the fact that one’s home is not a stable place and shocked my innocently unsuspecting idea that my home would be there forever. After that, I started new series: travel photos shot on my way from Holland to Tohoku with trains and a ferry through Eurasia to measure the physical and psychological distance, and an ongoing project on my slowly changing home. At the same time, I tackled documenting the Japanese-Dutch war children born of the WW2. Through working on these series, I hope to capture the world directly surrounding myself, through my own views as an expatriate.