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"I got my first camera when I was five years old, and as a schoolboy, I was always taking pictures of abandoned houses and villages."
I took my first photograph at the age of five when I went on a trip with my father to Kameyama, Mie Prefecture, to take pictures of steam locomotives. I had an Olympus Pen at the time, and was already mad about cameras. Later on, as a primary school student, I got interested in abandoned houses and villages, and used them as my subject.
There was a coal mine near the town we lived at the time. Although it had been a thriving concern in the fourth decade of the Showa era (1965-1974), it fell into decline in the fifth decade (1975-1984). Even to a kid like me, the deteriorating mine works were disturbing, and seemed to reflect a cooling off of life itself.
Let me tell you a story I heard when I was still only in the second or third year of primary school. The house we lived in was near the Hagiwara Irrigation Canal, which was a project undertaken in the Edo period by a man called Jubei Hagiwara to provide the village with water during times of drought. Tragically, he was killed in a rock fall before construction was completed, and with the canal left unfinished, his name was forgotten and erased from history. But even now, whenever snow falls, a line becomes visible on the surface of the ground where the canal would have been. There are no ruins or other physical evidence of the canal, and when I heard the story, I recall being moved by the ephemerality of a man hidden in the shadows of history. This anecdote was probably what led me to become interested in abandoned houses and the like.
At university, I majored in architecture, but after graduating I went to a photographic college for two years and then on to a job in a ward office. I finally became independent in 1996. Actually, from the time I entered the photographic college, I'd been thinking about compiling a collection of photos of the Okuhida mines. You can see some of the shots I took as a student in the "Mines in Okuhida" collection which was published in 2001. In that book, I tried to tell the story of the mines as a sort of historical saga, flowing on the river of time. People often have a negative image of mines, viewing them as nothing more than factories, but in fact they have given us many good things.
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