Reimagining War

August will mark 75 years since the surrender of Japan at the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet the vast scope of the conflict and the distance in time from the present day can make it conceptually hard to grasp. For the youth of today who have had no experience of war, this conflict is fading from memory and comprehension.

However, if we take the war as the point of origin of a ‘story’, we see that it is but one fragment of an ongoing process. Though some parts of the tale have been deliberately silenced, through will and courage we can reconnect the past with the present, and preserve the memory and significance of what occurred. In this webinar two prominent young photographers, Kazuma Obara and Miyuki Okuyama, discussed the intersection of the war, as history, with the future, along with some of their recent works of art.

Obara presented his ongoing project, “Silent Histories”, which depicts victims of Japanese invasion during the Second World War in Asian countries. Responding to political attitudes to ‘war history’ in Japan, Obara has travelled to the UK, Australia, Holland, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Korea to meet surviving victims of the war and their descendants. In his presentation, he explained how being a Japanese man affects his creative process. Okuyama then presented her finished project: “Dear Japanese: children of war”. The project is a documentary made from her perspective as a Japanese woman living in the Netherlands, portraying the offspring of Japanese soldiers and Dutch-Indonesian women, born during Pacific War in Indonesia, now living in the Netherlands.

presentation by Miyuki Okuyama

A video of the event can be found here:

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