Hirotaka Abe brought his 3-year-old daughter, Rian, to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to see off her mother on a flight to Fukuoka.
Hirotaka Abe brought his 3-year-old daughter, Rian, to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to see off her mother on a flight to Fukuoka.
Father and daughter were not glum, however, as they clasped hands, made funny faces and jumped in the air as photographer Katsuhiro Ichikawa captured the moment.
“That was perfect--almost,” Ichikawa, 60, told the pair on March 7. “But maybe we can do it better. This time, let’s try jumping higher and smiling more.”
The photo, as well as nearly 600 others, are currently on display at the observation deck in Haneda Airport's Domestic Terminal 2 as part of the "Tohoku Smile Project"--Ichikawa's way to bring messages of hope from people throughout Japan to residents of the northern Tohoku region that was devastated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
An advertising photographer based in Tokyo, Ichikawa began gathering the photo messages in January 2012. Before he undertook the Tohoku Smile Project, Ichikawa was documenting rural life on his in-laws’ farm in Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, no more than 16 kilometers from where the shaking of the earth and the tsunami contributed to a triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The landscapes and still lifes that he began to capture in 1998 resulted in the photo book "Fukushima: Naraha-machi, Futaba-gun, 1998-2006,” which he decided to publish in 2011.
"The place always looked the same whenever my wife and I used to visit," he says. "So I decided to start taking photos just to see what, if anything, had actually changed."
Ichikawa has visited the farm since the 2011 disaster, but he says the world he tried to depict in his photos is gone forever.
“It was declared part of no-entry zone. Although we are allowed to enter again, it’s hard to work because we can’t stay overnight. In any case, I feel there is no need for me to continue taking pictures there because my camera wouldn’t capture what has happened. The farm looks the same as it always has because it wasn’t damaged by the quake, but now it’s under an invisible veil.”
Instead of concentrating on the loss, Ichikawa says that he came up with the idea of collecting messages of hope from students, businesspeople, sports stars, tourists and anyone else willing to spare him time.
"People don't usually embrace or hold hands in Japan because we find it difficult to physically express out concern for others," says Ichikawa. "But people will do so if they know it's a photo shoot. Then they actually touch each other, and hopefully some of their warmth comes out in the images."
When Ichikawa first started, he says, his subjects smiled but often the messages they wrote were quite somber. Occasionally they would break down right as he was about to press the shutter.
"Now, people strike amusing poses without my having to coax them too much, and their smiles are genuine. The messages they write down are also much brighter," says Ichikawa.
For Abe, posing with his daughter had special significance as Rian was born the day after the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake.
“It may not seem like much, but I wanted to let people in Tohoku know that my family hasn’t forgotten them,” Abe says. “My daughter will never remember anything of what happened back then, but maybe she’ll remember today and why we posed.”