Good afternoon,
It is peak season in Tokyo for lotus flowers, which you can find in abundance in Shinobazu Pond in Ueno if you visit before 9 a.m., and heat-induced trauma, which, more selfless than the lotus, will find you as soon as you step out the door.
Summers in Tokyo are challenging for sure, but if I had to say a nice thing or two, I would this year, other than the lotus - the surreal beauty of which might be the most convincing argument for some divine power up there - choose Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Extinction exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art.
Featuring more than sixty photographs by one of Japan’s most renowned photographers, it is the most inspiring exhibition I have seen this year.
One of the recurring questions Sugimoto explores through his work is whether it is still possible to see the physical world around us as our primitive ancestors did - a question that is at the heart of his best-known photographic series, Seascapes - also part of the current Extinction exhibition.
The series brings together photos of bodies of water across the world shot over the last four decades using the same composition of the motionless sea, sky, and horizon, isolated from all objects and other contextual references. It is a deceptively plain composition, even bordering on cliché, but that is exactly the point.
In his search for a visual experience shared across time, Sugimoto focuses on what he describes as “the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth”. He reminds us that when we look at the sea, with everything else stripped away, we are looking at the same thing the earliest humans once did, and notes the sense of deeper belonging that visual connection brings:
“Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”
Since I first came across Sugimoto’s work more than a decade ago, I have been captivated, but more importantly comforted, by the idea of “ancestral home”, the calming sense of security it brings, and its exploration through isolated landscapes.
It is a simple yet deeply poetic way to think about the grip of remoter and wilder landscapes. Without the cultural and temporal context that the signs of civilization inevitably add to the experience, the instinctive connection between ourselves and the physical world becomes a little more evident; so does the broader sense of “home” that comes with it.
And this month’s letter is about that one place in Japan, with its vastness and wilderness, that I believe magnificently delivers on all of the sentiments I pretentiously described above: Daisetsuzan in Hokkaido.
I have been feeling a little possessed by Japan’s largest national park, fittingly known as the Playground of Gods, since I first visited about five years ago, and have returned whenever I could, most recently just last week.
In this country, where nature and culture are so deeply intertwined, landscapes are rarely experienced in isolation from their cultural and historical context. There is almost always something to remind us where we are, whether it be a shrine, a torii gate that marks the entry to the sacred territory, or a small jizo statue that is there to protect us as it did the pilgrims of ancient times. And that, in many ways, is what sets the hiking experience in Japan apart. It is its greatest appeal.
But then there is also, at least for me lately, the increasingly strong pull of a wilder, less mediated, less defined experience - without the vocabulary or the frames to tame it. And in Japan, Daisetsuzan, which feels significantly wilder and untameable, is the one place where nature, in all its majesty, pushes all those interpretive tools away and becomes the defining experience.
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