KIZUNA

Emily O'Brien (EO), Kizuna Archive Team, interview with Mayumi Lake (ML), Photographer

​

EO: So the first question we have for you is: How did you get involved with this project?

​

ML: Well, I've known Yoko for, oh my god, since 1997-98, so when the 2011 earthquake happened, I had heard that she was organizing and fundraising for it and I joined that. But then, the  next year I was told by Yoko that we're doing an event and also a photo exhibition to show what it is like in the Tohoku area right now. 

​

She basically asked me to join, I think.  I don't know, it was 10 years ago. I don't really remember. But it's either  she asked me or I said “OK, I'm going to do it”. So yeah, there was a very quick decision for me to just, you know, join and help. 

​

First, what I did was just the documentation of the event. Mainly, for the first few years, I was doing video documentation. Then from Kizuna five onwards I started to get more involved with the actual production. And  there was a series of interviews of the people in Chicago who were affected by this earthquake, and so I did the video shoots for their interviews. So, basically,  I was doing the video documentation of the interviews and there was  another person who was doing the photos of those interviews. After that I started to do more and got involved with the actual production. By Kizuna 8 they had sent me to the Tohoku area to photograph people over there. So it's you know, it was gradually. My role changed gradually. 

​

EO: OK, thank you. Before getting involved with this project, what was kind of your understanding of the 311 earthquake and what happened? What was your initial response? 

​

ML: Oh, for that day?  I was attending a photo educators conference, so I was in Atlanta, which is, you know, CNN's city, right? During the conference, there was a morning right before I went meet with my friend who was also attending the conference and  I got a text message from my student who is Japanese American.

​

She texted me and said, “Mayumi you need to watch the TV.” And I was in Atlanta. Our hotel was covered with TV monitors and they were all running CNN footage. So,  I saw the news footage in like three-sixty surroundings. Of course, my heart stopped. I went back to my room and tried to call my family member, but somehow the wifi was not working in my room.

​

So, I went to my friend's room, who had a better Wi-Fi situation. Meanwhile, we were watching the TV, the news footage, and there was like wind and then they were showing that the rice field area was being washed away pretty much everything was washing away very slowly. My friend and I are watching TV at the time, side-by-side,  and I'm trying to call my parents. I think I tried for maybe two or three hours and finally connected. My family is in Osaka. They said that the whole country is under a tsunami warning or the coast is under tsunami warning. However, so far they were good. They're not hurt. 

However, my brother was in Chiba, and people don't know much about it here [in the US], but Chiba was severely damaged, not as bad as Tohoku, but the Bay of Chiba is all man made, artificially made, so the ground is very loose. His building was fine, but he said his area was affected a little bit and that's the news I heard.

​

 So. Yeah. And from, like, you know, over 10000 km away, there's nothing I can do. Right? But then I decided to go to the conference and go with my friends and I said, “OK, you know what we're going to do, let's go somewhere.” So, yeah, we went shopping. It's kind of like, is this the right thing to do? But there's nothing I can do and then I can't really, you know, stop thinking about it. And then what? I need to do something to comfort this horrifying feeling of helplessness. So, we just walked, we walked for like 40 minutes, just to walk and ended up going to a store and just looked at  stuff, so that I didn't have to think about it, but yeah that was a pretty horrifying day. 

[inaudible] 

​

EO: Yeah, I can't imagine. Like. I remember hearing about it because I was in high school and, like, even being so far removed from it. I, you know, those feelings of horror and stuff were there.

 

ML: Yeah, and this was actually the second time for me to deal with this horrifying feeling and trying to contact my family, because in 1997 there was an earthquake and then my family was hit at that time. And that was before the Internet. That was before Skype.

​

I remember literally just watching it on local news. You could hear people Chicago saying, “hey, by the way, last night there was a huge, huge earthquake in Japan, Osaka-Kobe area.” My father was working in Kobe at the time.  I spent, in front of that, you know, that long line, because it was 1997, 3-4 days trying to connect it to my home. 

 

At the end of 2011, thanks to Wi-Fi technology, it was quicker. I only needed two or three hours for me to contact my family members but back then, in 97, that was three days. So, I was like, oh my God, not again. So that's what I thought about on the day. 

 

EO: So were you in, or did you visit Japan for all of the years that you were involved with the Kizuna project, or was it just a couple of years? 

​

[Brief loss of connection]

 

ML: I'm sorry, I lost you. 

 

EO: It's OK! Did you travel to Japan for every year that you were involved in Kizuna? 

 

ML: With the Kizuna crew or just privately? 

 

EO: With Kizuna specifically. 

 

ML: No, no, no. Kizuna 8 was the first time I went there to see it. That was actually the first time I even traveled to the Tohoku area. Yeah, before then it was just, you know, I had  heard the name of the town and the area, but I only saw it in person during Kizuna 8. Before, I had only seen it through all those images. 

 

EO: And so while you were there, how did you decide which areas to go to and which areas to see? 

 

ML: That was already scheduled. When we were planning Kizuna 8, the Kizuna team would just tell me where to go and the amount of time to spend in each place. But then I proposed that since I am an artist, I want to feature  the people who actually make the stuff;  the artists and artisans. I want to see how their lives were changed. 

 

Based on my proposal, this idea, the Kizuna team and the JETRO Chicago team suggested a bunch of places. And then we had someone who would make a schedule for the Kizuna 8 photo shoots. She would call and  make the appointments. And some of them said “no, don't, don't, don't feature us” and they would say "Well I don't know, like what do you guys know about, you know what we've been going through". But, luckily we had 13 businesses say "yes, please, please visit us and photograph us." So that's how we went there. Yeah there was a long journey starting from Fukushima and you'd go up and we visited a total of thirteen places for seven days, I think. Yeah, it was six or seven days.

 

EO: So what were some of your thoughts while you were visiting these areas? Were there any like specific areas that really stuck out to you?

​

ML: Well, the first place was Kamiyama-san, who makes that Japanese sweet, and that was our first visit, but it was also one of the most memorable places we visited that day. I think we ended up spending a couple hours just talking to him and I took a load of photos.He was great. He showed us everything and explained the whole story of the shop. He spoke about his kids and how it affected them. 

 

I mean, everywhere was pretty memorable. Everybody suffered and then everybody had a different way to cope there. How they tried to regain their creativity, which I can totally relate to as an artist. The last place we visited was a business that makes ship banners, and it's a tiny, tiny place. It's so far away from any water. But, they said their business significantly suffered because for a few years no ship could go out for fishing. So they couldn't make any banners. Finally, they're slowly starting to catch back up and expanding to the different things besides ship banners. 

 

Everybody was a creative creator, so I can relate to that, you know, like I was thinking about that, what I would do, if anything were to happen, you know, if I lost my studio right now, or what if I lost everything? How am I going to regain my creativity? But then everybody says, well, there is nothing else we can do. This is all we know how to do. Yes, I feel exactly the same way. 

 

But then the ceramic maker, who makes the pottery. He was saying, I can't remember exactly what he said to us, but he thought that it was very ironic that if the earthquake didn't happen, then nobody would have cared about his little town. But, because this happened to so many people, so many people come to admire it. He revealed his new work building and he said that if this earthquake had never happened, nobody would come to visit his small business or nobody would know his little town's name. Because of this everybody, even people from the other side of the world, knows the name of this town and comes to visit him. It was like a bittersweet feeling for him.

​

EO: This is the last Kizuna project to happen on a yearly basis. How do you think the commemoration of 3/11 will change going forward?

 

ML: Well, you see that, although it was a very beautiful ceremony, I wish we could have gotten together in person. I met so many people in the Chicago area, not even just Chicago area people, but people from Tohoku. [Inaudible] I met so many people and they opened up my eyes so much. But yeah, I mean, I know it's a pandemic, but I wish that we could have still met and seen the photos and talked to the people in person. Hear the story from their own mouths, not through the computer screen. 

 

Yeah, but they do say that "OK, this is the last year of Kizuna" and then the next year, "are you going to do Kizuna?" So, I don't know, but 10 is one segment, right? Because I heard, when I was doing Kizuna 5, "OK, this is the last one." And then, you know, "In five years we're going to come back to do Kizuna 10 and then Kizuna 15 and then 20", but then we ended up doing it every year. So who knows?

 

But, when I was shooting for Kizuna 8, I heard that some people want to move on, right? They want to put those disastrous things behind. They don't want to see themselves associated with "oh those poor people.'' Their lives were changed, but they said, "OK, we we want to move on." And, so, I also feel like maybe we get, you know, the people at Kizuna also think that people have to move on and focus on so much more.

​

EO: I think that kind of goes along with what we're trying to do with this archive as well, just kind of preserve the past year as well as we can and continue to move forward. And, with that in mind, do you have any thoughts that you would like to see from this digital archive, anything that you think we should be focusing on? 

​

ML: I think it's important to archive what happens. What you see. But it's also like, some people don't want to be associated, because they want to move on. So I want people to think that even though there was a disaster and it affected people, their emotions are very complex. For some people it works and it was obviously devastating and life changing and horrible and for some people it affected the way they think about their life. So there's no single story and if the archive can show the layers of different people and their different lives, because everybody's experience is different. Even though this natural disaster happened, there's no changing that, there is way more complex way of life beyond that. I hope this archive can show that. And I know everybody is like, "oh, my God, can you just make this happen," right? Have you seen Shin Godzilla?

 

EO: I don't think so. No. 

​

ML: So, that movie was very, very faithful to what happened in the news footage, how people felt and so on. Towards the end of the movie, the one character says “this country was rebuilt from the scrap and filth”. And we saw that Japanese people are so used to seeing, you know, like from World War II, everything burned down, and even before that, you know the great Tokyo earthquake [inaudible]. So, we see it’s like the whole country t was burned to ashes, demolished, and it’s something that really can’t be controlled or is beyond the individual people’s power. But then we rebuild from there. Because I think it’s more that the people feel that they do not want to give up and they want to restructure their life from there.

​

So, yeah, I guess, you know, it’s not only the sad stories, and that’s what I want it [the archive] to do. That’s what I wanted to do for Kizuna 8. I wanted to show that this is how people are rebuilding their life. And you know, even before I left to go to that area, when I told my friends I’m going to the Tohoku area to photograph, they’re like “ooh, be careful, there’s nuclear contamination.” But so many people live there, right? And don’t think that place is like a big, polluted, dirty place. People do live there. There are people’s houses, and you know, people’s land and people live there. So, yes, I wanted to know that I helped to ease out all of those rumors. Rumors, which sadly effect all those businesses still today. So, yeah, I don’t know if that was an answer or-- 

​

EO: No, I understand. Thank you. That was actually your last question. But if you have any last thoughts you want to give anything on.

​

ML: So actually, ironically, I did Kizuna for 10 years, but right before Kizuna, Kizuna 7, I believe, there was a tiny earthquake going to Osaka, the northern part of Osaka. That's where I came from. So of course that's my parents hometown, my hometown, and, like, only four people died "only". But the thing is, it actually affected my parent's life. They ended up moving out of the house, because while their house survived in 1997, during the Kobe earthquake, however, 25-27 years later, the House didn't survive. It was still standing. But, you know, they would have had to fix the whole thing.

​

So then my parents told us that "it's OK, it's time for us to move out." And that's the moment that I feel like, not as bad as those people who lost everything in the 2011 earthquake or 1997 earthquake, but you know we lost my house, the one that I grew up in, due to this small earthquake. So it did affect certain people. Up until that point, I was just outside looking in and it made me think "oh, I feel so bad", right? But then when it happens, it feels like a, I don't know, I don't know how to describe it. It feels like you're losing something. You lose some parts of your body, your mind, your soul, and you feel like that. And as an immigrant, home has a very special meaning, because my parent's house signifies for me home, the place I can go back to. And so, I said, "oh, the house is gone." So that was a very you know, it's hard to say. Although it's nothing compared to the people who lost their lives and housing during those big earthquakes, I feel like at that point I was starting to understand what it's like for these things to be effective to the individual's life.