One cold night in Tokyo Yumi Umiumare performed at Yudo, an old Japanese house in Mejiro used as an art gallery and gig space. Yudo means well in old Tohoku dialect. Water from Koshu run slowly underground to Yudo where suijin, the water god is enshrined in its main tatami room. Mesmerised by her every movement, [...]
My friend Wakako gave birth to Shihoko earlier this year. Dancer Wakako Asano and I have been collaborating on our project In Repose, which involved creating site specific performances in Japanese cemeteries around Australia in remote locations such as Townsville, Broome and Thursday Island. She had told us when we first began our project that exploring [...]
Chinkon was originally composed by composer Mark Isaacs in 2006 especially for Satsuki Odamura‘s bass koto for our project In Repose. This year I added images to Chinkon, and a version dedicated to the victims of the recent disaster in Japan had been created. This morning I posted a news item on my news page [...]
The Japanese Cemetery in Cowra is known because it is where the Japanese soldiers who died during the famous Cowra Breakout are buried. It is less known that about third of the people buried in the cemetery were civilians of Japanese origin and or diaspora who died whilst in internment during WWII. The history of [...]
Every photographer, that is everyone with a camera has at one time or another photographed clouds in the sky. I too have photographed hundreds of clouds and cloud formations in my time both from the ground looking up and from an airplane looking down. But from today I would never be able to photograph clouds [...]