KIZUNA

Emily O'Brien (EO), Kizuna Archive Team, interview with Alan Labb (AL), Photographer

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EO: Before getting involved with this project, what was your understanding of what happened in this region?

 

AL: We had friends in Sendai at the time of the disaster, and my wife is from Kobe. We reached out immediately when the tsunami occurred. We were watching and reading the news and well versed in what was going on. 

 

I don't know if you know this, but I was involved in Kizuna 6 and 7. I curated the images for 6. The edit that got shown wasn't my final edit, I still have my final edit, which I think was more substantial, but some of the images were more dystopic. It was from 6 that I believe the idea of traveling to Japan for 7 came about. 

 

I was invited to a dinner at the Consulate's house after (I curated Kizuna 6). We discussed that while trying to educate an audience about current conditions, we are using photojournalism to do that. Most of the work that I had curated for 6 was sourced from photojournalism. If you want to tell a story of recovery, you can't rely on the sensationalism of the news. I believed someone to gather current information on what's happening now and show progress being made in increments. Of course, I never imagined I would be asked to do this as an assignment. But, it came at the right time. I was on sabbatical. I'd been traveling to Japan to the Tokyo University of the Arts that summer. I was planning to spend extensive time there, so I just added a three-week photo shoot for Kizuna 7 to my schedule. A lot of things I photographed didn't end up in that final cut. For some subjects, I did my own research, found a lot of the subject matter that the theme for Kizuna 7, "Women in Tohoku." I was photographing for purposes simultaneously. As an artist, I wanted to make my images, but I also needed to make something to use for the Kizuna exhibition. 

 

EO: That's super interesting.

 

AL: I went to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant as part of my research and was surprised I could get in through a connection of Yoko Nage's, Takashi Miike. Unfortunately, I couldn't take my camera out unless I received permission to photograph. I was allowed to photograph a few images at an experimental robotic lab, So I think there's a lot of information I've not been able to process or unpack.  

 

EO: Yeah, going off that, how did you view this whole experience? Did it change the way that you understood the region or the event? Did it change your experience as a photographer?

 

AL: Oh yeah. It changed me in profound ways, I think. First off, I have to say that I'd never been to the Tohoku region. Even though I must have been to Japan 20 times, it was usually the Kansai region of Tokyo. I'd been photographing in Shikoku, specifically for the Tokyo University for the Arts, but I'd never in this area before. I'd never traveled just by train, without a car and support. My wife came along as a translator -- she was a Japanese language teacher -- but she's not a professional translator. We hadn't worked on a collaborative project since we first met over thirty years ago on a grant in Japan, so it was exciting to work through a project together. 

 

But it was also surprising and, at times, profoundly sad. On the first day of our trip, we stayed at an inn in Kamaishi. I had been given the name of the owner and was asked to photograph her and her daughter. They ran the inn together. They had our reservation, but there was a mix up with whoever contacted the Minshuku from the Sister Cities organization. The owner and her daughter didn't know I was planning to photograph them. So I began photographing with the daughter, Keiko. She was caught off guard and froze up. She didn't know who I was or why we were there, so I realized I had to back up and explain the project from the beginning. I quickly learned not to make further assumptions about the arrangements and to re-confirm everything. She and her mother were my first subjects on a long list, and I wasn't at all sure they were going to let me photograph. 

 

So we took a break, wandered around the town, and I went to the shoreline because I figured that that's where you go if you are trying to imagine the horror of a tsunami. I found a rescue wall that had a ladder built into it, and it had a sign pointing upward. We met a man drinking heavily on his porch next to the rescue wall on our walk, and we introduced ourselves. Through conversation, I discovered he had lost his entire family. He was suffering from a nasty bout of survivor's guilt. He was crying and kept telling us repeatedly that the only thing he learned from this experience was to run like hell and never look back. All of his friends who turned around to save family had perished. That first encounter set the tone for our travels. He lived at the edge of this ladder and was one of the few fortunate people to survive. But I think he thought he was unlucky to survive the disaster. We heard horror stories throughout our time in Kamaishi.

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The town is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the most expensive wall ever built. An oil tanker was forced through the wall by the impact of the wave, creating a channel of water that made the situation worse than if there had been no protective wall. All the water was focused in one direction through the narrow gap created. As people would take me around the town, they would describe areas how high the water was. Here it was 10 meters, and here it was 30 meters. You just had to, in your mind, imagine the unfathomable height of the wave. You could still see debris from where objects floated upward and snagged on high branches in the trees. It was emotional. No matter how much I had read, there was no question it didn't prepare me for that. 

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EO: I can't even imagine. Even just seeing the aftermath.

 

AL: Right. And we were there to focus on positive stories of progress, right. There were a lot of positive stories that I was able to photograph, too. But the intensity of that first day. I was there to (photograph) the women of Tohoku, and the script provided stated that many fishermen's wives would help sell fish at the market. I went to try and interview fisherman wives for our theme. But there were no women in sight. The fish cannery had been rebuilt and just recently reopened. Once I heard the explanation; the women were way too busy at home trying to put their family's lives back together to resume their traditional roles back at the market. It made sense that they were absent. I don't think the group helping organize the event back in the United States could have imagined this shift. 

 

EO: Yeah, and that brings me to the next question, which was: did you go into this with an idea of the type of photos you wanted or was it more spontaneous as you started taking them? 

 

AL: I began the journey with a pre-arranged script. Once in Japan, with help from friends, we benefited from additional research and excellent recommendations. Our friend Kikue in Sendai is an intercultural communication instructor and consultant. She provided many new ideas and directions. Through her, we met the women who started the rose garden and many of our other subjects. She had a much more extensive and more localized network than what we could access in Chicago. For example, my original plan included an animal rescue—a heartwarming story of a woman who saves abandoned animals from the disaster. We traveled to a small donated house that had been converted to a cat rescue. Truthfully, it was not at all photographic—room after room of cages, stacked floor to ceiling, like a prison. The feral cats were well cared for, and volunteers pet the cats that let them come close. However, most would never be adopted because it was impossible to socialize the pets. The whole scene was impossible to photograph. I could not figure out how to make it work in this dark, cramped space and had to abandon the project. Unfortunately, I rented a car for that image and drove 100km for that photoshoot. I also lost a day but did manage to find other things to photograph along the way. I began the project following a script but had to be open to new subjects and places we found along the journey. 

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EO: Were there any specific photos that stood out, even to this day? 

 

AL: Yes, before I began this project, I was photographing garden spaces around Kyoto. After looking at all the images, I realized a tie between what I had done in Tohoku and the ancient gardens I was photographing. The gardens illustrate humanity's ability to conquer nature over time. Literally, through pruning, cutting back, and multigenerational cultivation to create an ideal pictorial landscape. And then there is the tsunami. In 20 seconds, it obliterated thousands of years of culture and planning. I thought of them as two sides to the same coin. I showed the images from Tohoku and Kyoto gardens together for a sabbatical exhibition. Probably my favorite image is of rice being grown just eight kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Now I'm not sure who was going to eat that rice. Still, it exemplified an attitude of the people I met along the way, that despite the devastation and radiation, this is a survivable scenario to be overcome with time. There is a fifty-year clean-up plan discussed at the nuclear plant to rid the land of contamination. In garden terms, this is a relatively short length of time. I thought of rice patty as a sign of resilience and positivity. Of course, I knew none of this when I first made the image. The sun came out, the landscape glowed, and I pulled off to the side of the road and made the image. I found out later about how close I was to the contaminated nuclear core and that this was the first rice planting in this area since the disaster. 

 

EO: It's so cool to hear your perspective on these images. 

 

AL: In hindsight, I was constantly on the move, the project took somewhere between two and three weeks to photograph, but I would have preferred two or three months. The stories would have been more expansive, and I would have been better able to know and learn from my subjects. I travel to Japan most years and would like to go back to Tohoku soon. 

 

EO: Once the exhibit was up, what was your reaction? Was it what you initially imagined? 

 

AL: The Kizuna exhibition interested me because it was very different from any previous photographic exhibitions. Usually, an exhibition statement is a paragraph of text. Writing the text for this exhibition was intense, and I spent a long time working on it. I received criticism from curating Kizuna 6 because it was visual but did not provide specific information about current conditions. For Kizuna 7, I overcompensated by telling a story through written details. The text was not separate but incorporated into the exhibition panels. I also designed the panels to roll up for portability. This version of the exhibition was easy to move to multiple locations. 

 

EO: And how did those exhibitions differ from others that you've done? 

 

AL: It's entirely different. Because I didn't feel like this was my story to tell. Usually, my work is introspective. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have been photographing scenes and locations of environmental poisoning, manufactured disasters. This past semester I co-taught a class called "Imagining the Invisible," which centered on Nuclear Disarmament. My experience with Fukushima plays into the curriculum I'm teaching (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). But even within that work, I don't have to explain things the way I did with this particular audience. I saw this as more editorial than my usual work. It's different than anything I've done before. 

 

EO: And so this was a turning point in your own career. 

 

AL: It started to make me think about my content and how work should shift depending upon the audience. Some things worked well for this audience but would not translate in a traditional gallery. But yeah, it was a worthwhile experience. And that's what I was hoping I would get from this experiment, which worked for the groups that sponsored my travel and me. 

 

EO: Ok. And if there's one thing that you want people to know about Kizuna, how would you explain that to someone? 

 

AL: Wow. Well, the fact that it's been ten years of marking time. In the beginning, the focus was on the disaster itself and the humanitarian need. It's overwhelming and incalculable for me to imagine 20,000 people being instantaneously disappeared and many more affected. As I mentioned, my wife is from Kobe, and I remember well the anxiety associated with the earthquake. We had days of not knowing what outcome to expect, and it was excruciating. But that experience didn't prepare me for the stories that I heard in Tohoku. So many people that I photographed shared their stories, but often they would break down and cry. And I would too. I couldn't help myself. So even as I was searching for a positive story, it was apparent that their lives could not reset and return to a time before the disaster. Instead, everyone lives in a new normality where that sadness would be there, buried deep. I think that's interesting and disarming. The whole project is trying to talk about recovery, where we go from here, and how we all move forward. However, the past is ever-present.

 

One of the photoshoots I did was of a Shinto Shrine. The priest was a woman. Members of her family had the priest at this site for at least twelve generations. She was the second woman to hold the post, and her mother had run that shrine before her. The shrine disappeared in the tsunami, and the government decided that people could not move back to this lowland area. It was too dangerous. So the village it served moved 30 km away. But out of tradition, she rebuilt on the exact location as an exact replica. And people came to visit and pray. They traveled the distance because they held tight to the memory of what was left behind. I spent a few nights at a hotel on the edge of the exclusion zone. From the room's back porch, you can see the bags of radioactive waste still piled up behind the hotel. The government was still rebuilding the area train station. The hotel was on the frontier's edge. When I interviewed, and photographed the owner, I asked why he built a hotel at this location. He answered, "because no one has a home here anymore." Seven out of ten locals have permanently relocated. If they're young, they don't want to move back because they're afraid to raise their children here in the shadow of the nuclear plant. But they need to visit because of their ancestors. And they need a space to return to, and that is why this hotel is here. 

 

EO: That's so awesome. I only have a couple more questions for you, but I appreciate that you're willing to talk to us. I think it's so clear how Kizuna has shown the resilience and connectivity between people and the empathy that people have for each other. Even your experience, not understanding the language but still talking to people and then gaining that insight is, I think, really special. 

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And so now, this Kizuna project is going to be the last one that happens on a yearly basis. How do you think this is going to change the commemoration of 3.11 as we go forward? 

 

AL: Well, I think we'll still pause on 3.11. Whether Kizuna has a formal pause or not. And I'm glad to know that the archive will be available to look back and see how we marked it for ten years. It's kind of unique to me that with all the other things we've been through -- not to belittle this, this is enormous -- but even though there's an ongoing chronicle of events that occurs, (3.11) continues to resonate. And for me, I don't think I'll ever be able to put myself in that first-person perspective of the pain (the experience of 3.11) that I heard of from others and did not experience directly. But it was heartbreaking. I came back from that trip shaken to the core, to be honest. So I feel both connected and remiss. I haven't been in touch for a few years with the people I met and photographed. Although our only connection was at times the click of a shutter or an hour-long conversation, I feel forever connected.

 

EO: Do you have any questions about our project, or thoughts on things that you'd like to see as someone who worked directly with Kizuna? 

 

AL: Well, it sounds like you're going to deal with stories of the photographers and the writers involved later. So one thing I should mention about the way (my exhibition) came together. I brought a recorder, and I recorded people when I talked to them. Kimiko would converse with them because I speak very little Japanese, and then we came back and worked with a host of native Japanese-speaking women here (in Chicago). Everyone took a section and then translated what was said, and then I tried to take all that raw material and incorporate it into the panels. In many ways, those panels are not just my voice. They're the voice of those collective women that I interviewed along the way. And of course, there were several men along the way too. And I think that fact is essential, so this is different from my artwork. It's not a singular voice. It's a collaboration. 

 

EO: Thank you so much.