Proximity to pain
TAKEDA Ayari

Just recently, the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Hokkaido and the northern part of the Tohoku region were registered as World Cultural Heritage Sites by UNESCO. Here in Aomori, eight sites were registered. Of these, the Sannai-Maruyama Site is particularly prominent as a historic site from the early to mid-Jomon Period. Evidence of people settling down, forming communities, creating ritual sites and making a living has been accumulated, along with traces of the periods that continued afterward, and built the foundations on which we live. The reason why we have been able to discover more about these ruins, which are supposed to lie beneath the ground, is largely due to excavation research carried out prior to public and other developmental projects.
　　Also in Aomori Prefecture, prior to the Mutsu-Ogawara Development Project that began in the late 1960s, many prehistoric remains were uncovered by excavation research conducted in Rokkasho Village at the base of Shimokita Peninsula. These sites were documented and preserved, and today, energy-related facilities, including nuclear fuel cycle-related facilities, national oil stockpiling bases, and wind farms, stand upon these sites.
　　Rokkasho Village is a town known for its energy industry, where cutting-edge research into nuclear fusion, said to produce permanent energy, and reprocessing of nuclear fuel used in nuclear power plants is carried out. Yet, traces of human lives from the past have been lying underground for tens of thou-sand years. Today, we can only see activities that are visible on the surface of the earth, however, using video and photographs, Yoshida attempted to reweave the histories of people from the past with what we can see today.
　　The Jomon Period kamekan jar-coffin, which contained the almost intact bones of a woman, was excavated from the Iyasakataira Ruins in Rokkasho Village. The radioactive waste in the container, called ‘Canister’, awaits permanent disposal in the basement of the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, also built in the Iyasakataira area. In the video work, An archaeologist’s Report, Yoshida views those two– one WAS lying underground and the other HAD BEEN–as two “deaths”.
　　Here, the voice of a man who was assumed to be “an archaeologist”, gives a somewhat detached account regarding the background of the excavation of the Iyasakataira Ruins, starting with the history of the development of Rokkasho’s land. The footage showing the landscape of Rokkasho Village switches to the remains of a woman and a jar-coffin in which her bones were stored. The man continues to reflect on the found items, suggesting the human bones were those of a young woman in her teens, and that burial in a crouched position may be an indication of the Jomon people’s desire for rebirth, and so on. On screen, while they continue to show the bones in detail, the narration gradually starts to take a strange turn, with discrepant terms, such as “ashes of death” (nuclear fallout, a colloquial term for fission products) , “Uranus and Pluto”, and “storage pit”. The affinity of the words and images would make it difficult for viewers to interpret each separately. The narrative may even slip past our conscious understanding. Yet, the story moves on with intermingling facts and strange statements, referring to the enormity of the energy stored underground, which might be relegated to a trace of our lives in the present day, with the word “Promethean fire”.
　　Facing the panel on which the video is projected are seven sets of photographs entitled Illuminated land. In contrast, the pictures depict the present-day landscape of Rokkasho Village in an obscure way. A handout distributed at the venue reveals that these landscapes are the excavation sites, including the Iyasakataira Ruins mentioned in the video, where traces of past human activity were found. These places are not maintained as archaeological sites today, and are likely reclaimed land.
　　Based on his new research in Aomori, Yoshida has reworked the extent to which we can observe today, anchoring together the past, tens of thousand of years ago, with the pres-ent and the future.
　　While Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” is known as a book about war photography, it also writes about the attitudes of those who look at the photographs.

“We — this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced any-thing like what they went through — don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. […] Can’t understand, can’t imagine. […]”[1]

What should “we” be when we look at the activities of people (including those were sometimes accompanied by pain) who were there, but whom we cannot initially see through pho-tographs and images, or when we look at the future through what is there?

[1] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (into Japanese) Fumio Hojo(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2003), 126‒127(https://www.wildreflections.photography/contextual-research/susan￾sontag-regarding-the-pain-of-others-week-3)

[Translator: KATO Kumiko (Penguin Translation)]