Seido Kino

Issue 179

Japan's postwar economic development was driven by manufacturing. Afterward, increasingly skewed toward urban areas and leaving rural areas, the depopulation with declining birth rates and aging society triggered the problems of the increasing devastation of lands and the widening disparities in infrastructure, medical care, and transportation. This work is a photographic visualization of how the high economic growth of the 1960s has affected the typical two regions, Shimane’s village and Hiroshima’s city, just over the mountains.
History is cumulative. Landscapes are the result of someone's hopes and desires in the past. The past is regarded as a continuum of layers with the present, and history is revealed through casual landscapes in the form of uncovering photographs of the present taken at the same point.

What can be learned by digging up the background? Although there superficially appears to be a disparity between the two regions, as Japan moved from a developing country to a developed country, some things were lost in exchange for what was gained in each region. And some things were preserved.

Physicist J. C. Maxwell said, " The true logic of this world is in the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man's mind." But we wonder if those who lived in the 60s could have mathematically predicted then what the landscape looks like now. Where the value of growth resides is ephemeral. No one knows the future for both regions.

Seido Kino (he/him) lives and works in Kyoto, Japan.
www.kinoseido.jp | @kinoseido