Photography, for me, is not a way of recording the actual reality, but it is a personal act of connecting the past and the present, drawing a line between two distant points in time and space. This way of photographing the inmost and subjective reality is rooted in my identity, which is divided into dimensions since I moved out my country, Japan. Through working on the different photo series, I am trying to create a kind of bridge from the current reality to the things in the past and in the distance, to home, and to the origin.

Since I moved abroad, I have been photographing consciously and unconsciously in order to acquire images, which compensate the loss of past and home. Whether photographing anonymous subjects with intuitive manner using a simple plastic camera, or carefully constructing a fictional mimic world in front of a camera, my images are inclined to capture the long discarded emotions or the traces of disappearing histories, somehow related to myself.

As an expatriate, I am interested in the subjects, which go beyond time and space. It might be a natural course for me to question my own identity through photographing. I often capture images of my home, expatriate Japanese or the images that trigger recollections of my childhood. In the meantime, I construct certain scenes to photograph what I am missing in the present. In my images, a viewer sees an evident attention to nostalgic, obscure and slightly ominous places, which I believe, have association to human subconscious. Since I have moved to the Netherlands, I have become quite aware of my background: Tohoku region, the northeast of Japan, seems to be the contrary of my current home. Unlike highly organized and urbanized Netherlands, my old home in a small village seems to be somewhat haunted, full of strange tales and superstitions. Although my depiction on certain images is instinctive, the images seem always convey the quality which reclaims fading emotions such as childish fear and anxiety from my childhood.

My artworks are always motivated by the fact that I left home to live in foreign lands. The physical and psychological distance between the past and the present is always visible in the images. And the photographs are the trace of my attempt at reflecting my perception of the reality, which distances itself from the past, yet persistently connected to the past.

2012