Munemasa Takahashi has restored and returned 340,000 photos that were washed away by the 2011 tsunami to their rightful and grateful owners.
Munemasa Takahashi has restored and returned 340,000 photos that were washed away by the 2011 tsunami to their rightful and grateful owners.
Takahashi, 33, a freelance photographer first thought that building houses for victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami was paramount. However, he soon realized he could use his photography skills to improve the lives of those affected by the disaster in other ways.
After seeing people rejoice when they were reconnected with their photos, he became aware that “regaining their photos is regaining their past.”
Most of the photos he has restored were collected by the Self-Defense Forces who were sent to the town of Yamamoto, Miyagi Prefecture, on support and clean-up missions.
Takahashi’s project has restored an estimated 750,000 photos, and he is still seeking to return more than half of that number to their owners.
Extreme care is necessary because wet photographs are easily damaged, he said. After he soaks the photos in water and then gently removes the mud with a brush, he takes digitized photographs of each and enters them into a database so people can easily search for them.
Friends and acquaintances have donated cameras and tripods to Takahashi’s project. He in turn has taught volunteers the proper techniques on how to make copies of the photos.
Takahashi spent a year traveling to seven cities in four countries, where he exhibited some of the photos that were so damaged that it was difficult to identify the people in the pictures.
He said some of the people who came to his shows wept after viewing the exhibit.
“Photos such as those held by any family helped the visitors imagine that people like them were living in the affected areas. The photos had such power,” he said.
In February this year, he authored a book on his project. The book is titled “Tsunami, Photographs, and Then,” and was published by Tokyo-based Akaaka Art Publishing Inc.
In the book, he describes in both Japanese and English how to clean photos. That way, his methods can be used to help others in disaster-hit areas overseas.
He hit upon the idea after the exhibition in New York when one person asked him how to restore photos that suffered water damage from a hurricane.
Takahashi will donate the royalties from the book to the town of Yamamoto.