Practising Humanity
The biggest spy exchange between the US and Russia after the Cold War took place at
the airport in Vienna. Who is ‘the most distant person’ for you? I asked a Kurdish Iranian
girl living there. After a pause, she answered me, ‘The Israeli’.
In South Africa where they celebrated the 25th anniversary since the Apartheid ended, it
was not only colour but also accent that became the marker for the conflicts, and thediscontent to their everyday life surfaced as the violence towards people came from otherAfrican countries.
While I was wondering about the number and disposition of chairs in such society, people
claiming the rights united regardless of their shades, to voice an objection and stand up
against the power.
Being freed from the Soviet Union rule after its disintegration, Latvia let Latvian andRussian language to halve the city and they tried to consolidate their identity by not being
the other.
I spent New Year’s in Moscow and I got a mug and saucer as a present. There is adecoration of blue net with golden accents, and it signifies the cross-glued windows ofhouses and the cross-light of searchlights that illuminated the sky when the German
besieged Leningrad during the Second World War.
To a great extent, the world moved. And it is moving and intertwined in a complex
manner. In the present of the society that once experienced the process of
democratisation and the people who gained the freedom, are new gaps between thepeople and everyday life in conflict with something else. These ‘anti-’ movements
manifest human nature in various forms. The act of resisting and counteracting would
root in one’s profound emotions, and the friction energizes the actor. It appeared to me
as the intense moment where one actively reflects and realises own being in the world.
人, the Chinese character of ‘human’ is a pictograph of a person with its back hunched,
but commonly believed to represent two people supporting each other. Ubuntu I cameacross in Johannesburg is African philosophy to perceive that ‘a person is a person
through other persons’. It is where two distant cultures meet. Introducing the basic
movement of a modern dance named contact improvisation, which I first experienced inVienna, I conducted workshops in South Africa, in an attempt to embody the overlap of
two worldviews. The dance was created in the 1970s in the US inspired by Aikido, aJapanese martial art where one receives the movement of the counterpart and responds
to it. Two people back-to-back sit down and stand up, leaning on and supporting eachother. In the attempts, there were successes as well as struggles, misunderstandings, newinterpretations, and some moments of emotional interactions and expressions between
the pairs and among those who were present at the workshops.

《Graphic Movements》2019, workshop + installation. Workshop view.

Loss of Taste
Around the time I lived in tranquillity away from the internet in a tiny flat on the top floor
in Paris, I developed a habit to read on paper while savouring my breakfast, and I cameacross with the writing by American writer Lydia Davis. Through collecting small
thresholds and using imagination but no dictionaries, the writer took delight to carefully
decipher the novel written in the language she does not understand, and she learnt theforeign language through it. Every day, I read it little by little so that it lasts until my next
trip to Japan, which grew a sense of contentment in myself.
On the way from Russia to Japan, I came to spend some time in London early spring.

While I was strolling up in Hampstead, I stopped by a bookshop to look for a book by
Lydia Davis. A collection of short stories in apricot, and of essays in grass green. After
nibbling the two books, I could not make my mind and went down the hill. Before long,most of the shops closed in the neighbourhood, the ambulance sirens began criss-crossing
day and night, and it became a luxury to take a walk once a day. Being alone at a friend’s
flat while she was away, I did not meet anybody for a long time after that day. Getting
hold of food supplies was not easy. Feeling hungry and living in the dysfunctional society,I experienced flashbacks of the earthquake disaster. It was also not clear if I was allowed
to continue staying in the UK, as I fell in the gap created by the conditions of the EU
long-term residence and the UK visa for Japanese, and their exceptions.
I felt suffocated reading the news on the internet every day. It was close to my limit to go
through a time of unrest alone where my existence not recognised. The flights to Japan
got suspended suddenly, and I set about to arrange the flight tickets to Stockholm. A few
hours afterwards, the Swedish prime minister announced the amendment to the entry
ban, which caused the flight suspension from the next week on. Flights got cancelled one
after another, and at deserted Heathrow Airport, I got on a packed airplane filled withchoking tension, to escape to Stockholm.

Right before I left London, I contacted a curator, who arranged the online board meeting
swiftly to accept me to ‘quarantine residency’ in Stockholm. All my close friends are inrisk groups. My days continued without meeting anybody even after the first two weeks
of self-isolation, but there was no pressure as if every single movement is being
choreographed. Staying in one place, growing vegetables, buying the food that one canstore, brewing banana wine. I appreciated the living that is not possible in my usual life
where I keep on moving, and the feelings from London started to fade.
The ferry goes back and forth between the neighbourhood I lived and the opposite shore.
Taking a boat to cross the water in the ample sunshine, even just for a few minutes, Ibasked in liberation as if I am travelling. On the other side of the water, I visit a small
annex of the city library. There is modern literature in English on the shelves, and so as
the Lydia Davis’s book in apricot.
The book is thick like a dictionary, and in the table of contents are the rows of titles andpage numbers. I open the page of whichever story that bears a title with the words thatcatch my eye, and read. The next day, I read the book in the same way. I look at the sametable of contents, but the words that attract my interest are never the same; I reach to nota single short story that I have read. What remains the same is the fact I can read them
too smoothly and the feeling of ‘out of place’.
Wanted to marry a cowboy but what he would want from an English professor who is alsoa daughter of another English professor, she writes, and calling herself ‘blue collar’ byworking as a typesetter at a newspaper. Her identity as an educated elite oozes out, andit makes me feel sick. And then I realise myself being cold, detaching from the writingsand viewpoint that I fell in love with, summing it up as intellectual play. My heart does
not leap with her writing and it does not conform with my heart, unlike how it was inParis. It feels as if I am fraying instead of appreciating the text. I find myself being
deficient to have such a distasteful perspective, and feel deserted.

Recovering the Viridity
There are translations of language and culture in the lives of people moving, and in these
movements are things that change, disappear, or be added. I have attempted to scoop up
what hidden in the shades of the process, such as emotions, deviations and assumed errors.
I named the project ‘After-Ripening & Corruption’ - Walter Benjamin described theprocess of translation as if fruits get sweeter and softer after it leaves the tree, and thechange of language is called corruption in linguistics, to perceive it as to rot; Translation
has something that resonates with the organic and moderate movements in nature.

It has travelled through different platforms where I become a stranger. I develop what
emerged at the last location further in the new local context through social experiments
and workshops with the people I encounter. There I bring out their human instincts andactive attitude, and appreciate the changes that occur in the course. The project stems
from my recognition of and sentiment on the distance I earned by leaving my mothertongue and having been inspired by various cultures I experienced.

《Shifting Minds》2020, workshop + installation. Installation view.
Photo: Takahashi Kenji. Photo courtesy: Tokyo Arts and SpaceI feel awkward in Japanese, meanwhile various expressions in Japanese started to appear
fresh. Influenced by new surroundings, my thinking began to sail away from theviewpoints of people in Japan. Between the gaps of limited vocabularies in each languagethat I acquired, my thoughts grow. I am away from both what I had matured and being
accustomed to the new. How do I perceive this situation? The following two phrases,
freed from ’correct’ use of language, make sense for me:
自分の言葉にたどたどしさを取り戻す(I have recovered the viridity in my own language)
I got some accent in the way I look at the world
I questioned how such words could resonate with people rooted in their native land. I
have thought that the great change in the living environment occurs only when one moves,like emigration. This spring, instead of people, the world moved. The meaning of simple
everyday actions, such as moving and touching other people, has changed, and our lives
came to need many and great translations.

Salmon Run
熟 is a Chinese character that signifies to cook, ripen, get accustomed to, to reach to thesufficient or complete state. It depicts how the mutton being simmered – the four dots atthe bottom flaming up.
I read a news article telling that they found the evidence of the world’s oldest culture tocook food in a pot in the northern Japan. Inside the unearthed vessels were traces ofsalmon being cooked. Pot dishes can treat many people, and it exists all over the worldreflecting the locality. I heard that during a long bus journey in Africa, they stop on theway to cook each meal with a pot and share among all the passengers, and continue thetrip. I remember the convivial moment in South Africa, forming a lump of Pap with myfingers and eating Skopo in a circle. They cook in Potjie, a cast iron pot that stands withthree legs and it can be as big as a person fits inside.
Such a pot existed in ancient China, Ding, of which form illustrated in its Chinesecharacter 鼎. I encountered this character in the word ‘trilogue’; being combined withanother character meaning ‘talk’, it means three people facing as if the legs of the ancient
Ding pot. Three generates a different dynamics than two. The Chinese character of 郷
has various meanings such as village, hometown, and also to receive, to resonate, and tohead. It represents two people seating face-to-face with a feast in-between. When weplace the chairs opposite to each other, our eyes meet. When we place the chairs side byside, we have the same view. Whether it is two chairs or three, however they are arranged,
is there anything that can connect the people who take the seat? Around the time I wasreflecting on the question recurring in the everyday life occupied by conflicts, I received
an invitation to South Korea, a neighbour of my home country.
The act of dividing the world, distancing others, resisting the invisible may be the least
commonality amongst us who deal with the obscure and the absurd in our lives as humanbeing. And so as the ageing, which we all experience and is not possible to go against.

In the culture of Korean traditional food are organic phenomena of maturation andfermentation to preserve, and it turns the material to have ‘youth-preserving’ properties.
Juxtaposing such food culture that holds the counter-actions of ageing and resisting
ageing, I like to observe how the people accept and resist ageing in society and ruminate
on human nature – I am growing my thoughts while I am spending time on a remoteisland in Sweden close to the Finnish border.