Kai Yokoyama - The day you were born, I wasn't born yet
Photographer Kai Yokoyama writes, "The day you were born, I wasn't born yet." His musing traces the temporal arc between present and past, and therefore, became the likely title for his series below. When the pandemic began in 2020, like many others, Yokoyama’s grasp of control loosened. He found stability however, through spending time with his parents and re-connecting to his past. On days in which Yokoyama went for walks, he’d walk to where his late grandparents lived and took photographs as a means to connect his present being with the past. He writes, “It was a kind of spatiotemporal movement as if I went back to where my soul had been. There were memories full of love and sadness.” This April, his father said, "This year's cherry blossoms don't look beautiful at all." As their pink and white petals scatter in the air, the inevitability of death falls to the ground.
The ubiquitous cherry blossoms have, for a very long time, been synonymous with Japan and the Japanese. From the 19th century into WWII, cherry blossoms came to symbolize a soldier’s sacrificial honour of “dying like beautiful falling cherry petals” for their country. Yokoyama remarks how Japanese military songs sang "Since we are flowers, we are doomed to fall. Let us fall magnificently for the country." His grandfather, he writes, “Went to the Pacific War. He came back and gave birth to the daughter who gave birth to me. I think it's a miracle. There are countless reasons why I wasn't born here.” And so, as the world shifts, and the blossoms fall, the earth evokes mono no aware, 物の哀れ–the pathos of it all.
- Alexa Fahlman
The lights of the building across the street from my apartment building. I took this picture on the first day of isolation due to the pandemic. I didn’t know why I took this picture at the time.
My grandparents had an arranged marriage in 1935.
My grandfather became deaf after he came back from the Pacific War.
Little is known about where my grandfather was and what he did during the war in 1944-1945. He didn’t tell his family anything about the war.
When my mother asked her father about the war, he was always angry and said, “Don’t ask me that.”
My mother’s family photo. She says, “This uncle did a lot of bad things in the Pacific War.” My grandfather is not in the picture.
I live in the downtown area on the east side of Tokyo where my grandparents and parents lived.
The place where I live was destroyed by the Tokyo air raid 75 years ago.
My paternal grandfather was too short to go to war.
My mother doesn’t go out because of this pandemic, but she wears a kimono at home. This is a moment of her late mother.
One of my aunts died when she was a child, and my other aunt committed suicide when I was little.
I was born at dawn. The day was a month earlier than my scheduled date.
I was separated from my parents for a little while in the neonatal intensive care unit, wearing this name tag with my mother’s name on my ankle.
My mother is the first daughter her father had after he returned from the Pacific War.
In Buddhism, the deceased changes their name when they die. A board with that name on it.
My grandmother passed away on the last day when the soul of my grandfather, who died 49 days ago, is said to remain in this world.
My grandfather came back from the Pacific War and stayed here for a few weeks for medical treatment.
My relatives always say that I look like my grandfather. But it always gave me the fear that one day I might go deaf too.
As I continued to make this work, I knew that I could find out about my grandfather’s war history by applying to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices, so I tried to do that. He had trained near where I grew up and where my mother worked. This was a fact we didn’t know at all. It is said that he was trained as a soldier here.
A picture of my parents when they were young.
When I began to make this work, there was one other phrase that stayed with me for a long time. The opening line of the old Book of Hojoki by Kamo no Chomei.
“The current of the flowing river never ceases, yet the waters never remain the same. In places where bubbles form on the surface, burst and vanish while others form in their place, never or a moment still. People in the world and their dwellings are the same.”
It made me realize that I have to accept this life and flow through it like a river. This is something that is connected to my grandparents and ancestors, and I realized that they also flowed through the river.
A photograph becomes the past when it is taken.
Isn’t photography a means of finding a connection with he past and the dead?
I think so now.