Remembering Lives Lived Wholeheartedly 

─ Okinawa Airakuen 1975

Mikio Suzuki 

You know, there's a leprosy colony in Okinawa called Airakuen. 

People there suffer greatly from discrimination and prejudice.

Go and take photographs that will rectify that.

The director is a friend of mine, so I'll write a letter of introduction for you.

In 1972, Mikio Suzuki, a photographer working at International News in charge of photo spreads for the magazine, Graph Century, had come up to the rooftop of Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi on the invitation of Ozora, the big sky poet (real name, Yoshi Nagai) whom he had become acquainted with through gathering material for reporting about him. Ozora practiced an ascetic lifestyle somewhat similar to takuhatsu", wandering through cities and towns asking for alms, playing the mandolin, and singing hymns, children's songs, and songs he composed while appealing for world Suzuki had written about him in a feature article for the January edition of Graph Century that year titled "With mandolin in hand, the wandering white-bearded poet Ozora." The event on the rooftop of Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi was a performance by Nagai's friend, the finger whistling musician Daizo Tamura. After the performance, Suzuki casually took a photograph over Tamura's shoulder of the two men talking together. Tamura suddenly turned to face Suzuki and loudly said to him the words at the beginning of this essay. This surprised Suzuki as he had only met Tamura that day, but he thought of it as just one more remark heard in the course of his regular on-location reporting work. For Suzuki, Hansen's disease was something remote that he vaguely remembered hearing of somewhere.

Suzuki, plagued with doubts about the work he was doing photographing subjects assigned by the company, left International News in 1973. He set out traveling without a fixed destination for the purpose of self-reflection and, recalling Tamura's words as if they had been a promise, Suzuki resolved to photograph the National Colony Okinawa Airakuen (abbreviated below as Airakuen or the colony) on Yagaji Island in Nago City, Okinawa Prefecture. Suzuki set himself the challenge of experiencing and photographing the reality of Airakuen for an entire year. He visited the colony for the first time in December 1974. Suzuki struggled with the task of taking photographs that would serve to rectify the discrimination and prejudice that Tamura had confronted. He visited the colony seven times until January 1976, where he stayed, engaging with the residents and recording the scenery around the colony and the daily lives of the residents with his camera. The photographs taken at Airakuen amounted to approximately 2,300 individual photographs on 72 rolls of negative film. Some of the photographs were exhibited at Passman Hall within the colony from April 20th to 22nd, 1975, and they were also sent as mementos to many of the residents who were the subjects of the photographs. Suzuki was aware that the photographs he had taken for the purpose of documentation would be difficult to disclose to the public, but he took the precaution of confirming the possibility of releasing them to the public in the future. He mentions toward the end of his diary that although he had obtained the consent of many of the residents for the photographs to be made public, there were a number of factors that did not allow for public release.

Suzuki's photographs left behind at the colony were discovered in the process of conducting the Okinawa Airakuen fact-finding investigation and subsequent compilation of the collected testimonies obtained, which began in 2002, the year following the victory in the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Leprosy Prevention Law. With Suzuki's permission, thirteen of his photographs were published in Okinawa Prefecture Hansen's Disease Collected Testimonies: Okinawa Airakuen Edition (Okinawa Airakuen Residents' Association, 2007). In June 2015, seven of the photographs were displayed as a permanent exhibition at the Okinawa Airakuen History Museum, which was opened as a resource center. Additionally, 64 photographs were displayed mounted on panels in the 2018 special exhibition "Okinawa's Scars" (held from April 1 to August 31). This marked the first time the photographs were presented to the public in an organized form.

.

"I felt the heaviness of each person's life now, which I didn't notice during the photo shoots.
They couldn't live outside of Airakuen. In that restricted space, that situation, what is the focus of their lives?"

── Airakuen Photographing Diary 

Mikio Suzuki

"Among the portraits taken by Suzuki, those depicting scenes of peaceful daily life at the colony, serene religious rituals, or people engaged in pleasant conversation at banquets may stand out. The surprise, uncertainty, hesitancy, and joy the photographer felt at being warmly invited into the daily lives of the residents and spending time with them factors in the subtle play of emotional richness and complexity even in their facial expressions and movements. But in reality, repercussions spread and, at times, the photographs aroused violent opposition.[...]

What underlies Suzuki's photographs is a rigorous and exhaustive inquiry into whether it is truly possible to depict the human being in an authentic and accurate way--what we see in the photographs is what ultimately remains after this extremely intense experience."

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The Ten Foot Square Hut

Kengo Noguchi 

These are the people who live in dwellings on the streets and by the riversides.
I was amazed by the diversity of their personalities and living spaces,
and visited from time to time to make small talk and photograph them.

To live, to inhabit, to sleep. What kind of life and freedom does each human being desire?
In the ordinary course of daily life, I stop to think about it. Various thoughts come to mind and then disappear.

Starting around my late teens, I would tuck my camera into a backpack and travel with a free spirit through rural areas. I would look for cheap hotels to stay at, or pitch my tent outside at campgrounds, all while taking photographs along the way.

However, when I was in Tokyo, I wandered around the city indulging in the pleasures of urban life. I sometimes found myself drinking with people I came across who were houseless and living on the streets, and captured them in photographs as I listened to their bitter and sweet stories from the past.

During my rural travels with no plans on where I would sleep each night, and while roaming aimlessly through city streets, I began to wonder how people managed to live by riverbanks and in parks inside of makeshift huts, blue tarpaulin sheets, and tents. What sort of lives did they lead? I decided to visit them and ask about it.

Most of them said they made a living collecting aluminum cans and other things that had been thrown away, while improvising to make do with the bare necessities of life. It's not difficult to imagine that some people live this way out of economic necessity. But there are also many people who embrace this way of life out of personal preference. Great diversity is to be found in the human narratives that unfold within living spaces resource- fully fashioned out of still functional discarded items that are the product of this coun- try's system of mass consumption and disposal.

Several names are used to refer to these people, such as "homeless" or "park inhabit- ants." But as I continued to talk with and photograph these people, I came to feel that none of those names were suitable. Each person had their own living environment in a makeshift hut or temporary dwelling, so I began referring to them as iori* people.

*The Japanese word iori signifies the austere temporary dwelling of a recluse or hermit.

Whenever I visited iori people, I had the sensation of wandering into an imaginary space, something like an air pocket removed from the clamor of the city, where I could remember things forgotten amid the busyness of daily life. I became aware of biases held by society and in my own thinking regarding freedom, what should be accessible or avail- able to the general public, conformity to social norms, and what constitutes common sense. With this awareness, I felt my perspective on the fabric of everyday life undergo a gradual shift.

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