Eleven years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. During this period, the affected areas along the Tohoku coastline have built huge seawalls, raised land, and created higher ground to create “new towns.” At the same time, large-scale reconstruction work was carried out simultaneously in the affected areas, resulting in towns that at first glance appear similar to each other. However, if we look at each of them, we find traces of people’s lives in each area, and these traces appear in the landscape as subtle differences.
Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, artist and poet Natsumi Seo has visited Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture and an increasing number of other areas hit by natural disasters in recent years, drawing pictures and writing while considering the words of the local people and recording the scenery.
In 2022, just 10 years after the 3.11, She has decided to compile the trajectory of her visits to the disaster-stricken areas into a book. Photographer Takuroh Toyama followed the path from the northern part of Iwate Prefecture to the central part of Ibaraki Prefecture from the fall of 2022 to the spring of 2023, connecting the dots and capturing the current landscape of each area.
The journey of the photo shoot, which took place in several stages, covered a distance of 700 kilometers. Sometimes together, sometimes individually, the two artists visited the disaster-stricken areas and captured what they saw and heard in photographs and words.
The book, which incorporates the photographs taken by Toyama from the perspective of a traveler who maintains a certain distance from the subject, and the voices of the land Seo has heard over the 11 years since the disaster, reveals multiple layers in which the present and the past, the distant and the near, intersect in a complex way.
