Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993 In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and…
Shortly after the devastating earthquake and ensuing Tsunami hit the north-eastern coast of Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister Kaoto Kan addressed the assembled press in Tokyo with a brief statement expressing his sympathies to those affected by the disaster. In his short statement, Kan alludes to a deeply harbored anxiety in Japanese culture as he…
Nobody Knows, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2004 How to represent trauma? This appears to be the overriding question in the movie Nobody Knows, or Daremo Shiranai, by the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Nobody Knows depicts the lives of four children who were left abandoned by their mother. The oldest child is the 12-year old boy…