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Kai Yokoyama

Photographer
    
The day you were born, I wasn't born yet
Location: Tokyo
Nationality: Japanese
Biography: Kai Yokoyama is a photographer based in Tokyo, Japan. Starting out as an architecture student at Saitama University, he switched his major to photography and completed his studies at Tokyo College of Photography. He has traveled the world... MORE
Public Story
The day you were born, I wasn't born yet
Copyright Kai Yokoyama 2024
Date of Work Apr 2020 - Ongoing
Updated Oct 2020
Location Tokyo
Topics Birth, Buddhism, Deaf, Documentary, Emotion, Essays, Family, Isolation, Loss, Love, Memory, Pandemics, Photography, Sadness, Soldiers, War, Water
This is what I have to do now with my life.
When this pandemic began in 2020, I lost control like people around the world.
I talked with my parents more than ever and shared almost all my time with them.

I searched for photos of my family in the past.
I walked where my late grandparents lived and kept taking pictures.
Then I tried to connect the present and the past.
It was a kind of spatiotemporal movement as if I went back to where my soul had been.
There were memories full of love and sadness.

This April, my father said, "This year's cherry blossoms don't look beautiful at all."
I couldn't help feeling the death from the scattered cherry blossoms.
It reminded me of war I didn't know.
Cherry blossoms are drawn on the fighters, and the military song says,
"Since we are flowers, we are doomed to fall. Let us fall magnificently for the country."

My grandfather went to the Pacific War.
He came back and gave birth to the daughter who gave birth to me.
I think it's a miracle.
There are countless reasons why I wasn't born here.
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The day you were born, I wasn't born yet by Kai Yokoyama
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