On Natural History

Yubari, Mikasa, and other areas that grew up around the coal industry are scattered throughout the Sorachi district in Hokkaido. The lake that appeared when a dam was built in the middle basin of the Saru River that flows through the western part of the Hidaka district whose headwaters in the Hidaka Mountains, submerged the place where the Ainu indigenous to the area lived and practiced their ritual ceremonies. The Saru River, a tributary of the Chitose River, which is part of the Ishikari River water system, was in the past the upper river basin of the Izari River, an important economic foundation forming the Ainu culture. In ancient times in Tokushima, the middle basin of the Yoshino River was the location of culture connected with a group called Inbe. The long Pacific coast in Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima was stricken by the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the accident at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant diffused a high concentration of radioactive material that accumulated in the Pacific coast area in Fukushima. For the time being, these places are the subjects I have chosen for Natural History.
The photographs taken in these different spaces are mostly of the conditions of the land and the vegetation that grows there and the water that flows and accumulates there; what we call nature is slowly and surely spreading out again through all of these places.

Keiji Tsuyuguchi