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."

Related Exhibitons

鈴木幹雄「命の記憶 ─ 沖縄愛楽園1975」展 会期：2025年5月17日（土）～10月31日（金） 時間：10:00～17:00（入館は16:30まで） 会場：沖縄愛楽園交流会館（沖縄県名護市済井出1192） 月、祝休み、入場無料 【前期】5月17日（土）〜7月23日（水） 【後期】7月26日（土）〜10月31日（金）※ 東京・京都の展示作品を含む ---------------------------------------------------------- at PURPLE（京都市中京区式阿弥町122-1 3F） 会期：2025年5月23日（金）〜 6月22日（日） 時間：13:00〜19:00 月・火休み、入場無料 ---------------------------------------------------------- at TOBICHI（東京都千代田区神田錦町3-18 ほぼ日神田ビル1F） 会期：2025年6月26日(木)〜7月13日（日） 時間：11:00〜19:00 6/30（月）休み、入場無料

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