The Japan I Had Not Seen

The Japan I Had Not Seen (working title)
George Nobechi
2015~2020
"The Japan I Had Not Seen" is an ongoing project that began as I returned to my Japanese homeland for the first time since I became a photographer in 2015. Although I had grown up in Tokyo until I was eleven, and again worked there for ten years after university, in many ways, I felt like I had not truly seen this country on a deeper level beyond the iconic places.
I harkened back to the stories that I read as a child by authors like Kenji Miyazawa, who was born in Iwate Prefecture, where my grandfather was from, and with whom my family had some connections. Deep, mysterious, and at times, dark tales like "Night on the Galactic Express", "Matasaburo of the Wind", along with passages of ancient songs, poetry and history came to mind as I journeyed across the archipelago, camera in hand.

One such story was the story of Urashima Taro, an old fairy tale about a man who rescues a sea turtle and is taken to a beautiful underwater palace where he is wined and dined for what he thinks is a few days. When he departs to return to his village, the princess of the palace gives him a box with an admonition to never open it, but of course, he cannot help himself, and when he opens the box, he finds that 100 years had passed by above the sea, he turns into an old man, and
everyone who was familiar to him is gone. When I returned to live in Japan in 2017, many years after I had last lived there, and having changed careers entirely, I felt in many ways like the protagonist in this tale. Everything had forever changed. More than ever, I had an appreciation for my home culture, yet I also felt distant, disconnected, and removed from it in many ways. Being from a mixed background in a very homogeneous country, I realized that I would never quite fit in.

As I traveled up and down the country, mostly by
train, I came to slowly embrace this feeling of isolation I experienced and accept that this would be an essential part of my sensibility.

I make photographs when I feel a sense of otherworldliness from the scenes that I encounter. When photographing these Japanese tropes, I envision ways in which I can express as much freshness and strangeness as I felt when I encountered them, while drawing on the imagery I recalled from childhood stories, myth, history and literature.

Archival pigment prints will be available as follows: 24in x 34in : ed. of 10 + 2AP, 44in x 64in : ed. of 5 + 1AP. Small print offering TBC.

Recognition for this series includes the following awards: 2020 International Photo Awards: Honorable Mention for “Cryptomeria Forest at Dusk” and “The
Moment the Snow Fell out of the Trees”, Kolga-Tbilisi Photo Festival Best Single Shot Finalist for “Cryptomeria Forest at Dusk”.