Speech by Radboud Molijn at the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Natural Stories by Naoya Hatakeyama, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam 16 December 2011.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let me start with a confession: I have been asked to open Mr. Naoya Hatakeyama’s exhibition, in my capacity as Managing Director of DUJAT, but certainly not as an expert on photography, let alone on Japanese photography. So what you will hear from me is a not a treatise on the ins- and outs of the work of this master photographer, but it will be rather the result of a personal journey that I made after having been asked to address you here in this wonderful Huis Marseille.
Being involved in the promotion of the Dutch – Japanese economic and cultural relations, my first question of course was, when asked to speech this evening: “where is the Dutch connection when it comes to photography in Japan” – and “when looking to Mr. Hatakeyama’s work: is there any Dutch relationship as well?”
To start with the first question: well, there is. The first photographic tool (camera) was brought into Japan by a Dutch ship in 1843 to the trading post Dejima, but was taken out of the country in 1847.
Somehow the daimyo, Lord Nariakira Shimazu of Satsuma (now Kagoshima), who had developed a great interest in western, i.e. Dutch learning, managed through the Dutch to obtain the first daguerreotype camera ever imported into Japan, and he ordered his followers to study it and produce photographs. On September 17, 1857, a portrait of Shimazu in formal traditional dress was produced and this photograph is now a designated “Important Cultural Property” by the Japanese government. So, there is indeed a Dutch connection to Japanese photography. And you know, this is good because every fact and link between our two countries that we can include in our common history reinforces the more than 400 year old Dutch – Japanese relations.
But, for today there is something at least equally important. Is there some common ground between the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and the Dutch? I am not talking about a possible source of inspiration: I don’t know of any and that is not what I mean. No, what I mean is something else – and that had to do with what I learned – and read – when looking, studying, reading Mr. Hatakeyama’s work and in particular “Natural Stories”.
Mr. Hatakeyama, in your letter to Philippe Forest, who wrote a preface for your book Natural Stories”, I was struck by the following sentence:
Pour lutter contre l’indifférence de la nature envers l’homme, et pour survivre chaque jour, nous avons besoin d’agir, même si c’est de façon unilatérale, pour produire et attribuer du sens à la nature. Il ne me semble pas erroné de parler de cette action comme d’un acte de création de récit. Tout comme la création d’un paysage, la création d’une histoire entre l’homme et la nature nous est nécessaire.
“To fight against the indifference, the unresponsiveness of Nature vis-à-vis man and in order to survive everyday we need to act, even if it is in a one-directional way, in order to give meaning to Nature.”
And here is what I see as a connection between the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and the Dutch. This goes back to the years from 1860 – 1890 when the Dutch “Watermen” were active in Japan, “water-engineers” such as Johannis de Rijke, Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder and George Escher. The Dutch filmmaker Louis van Gasteren has made an impressive book on this subject. When Japan opened up, the Japanese government turned to experts outside Japan to catch-up with the West. To stereotype: the British were asked to come to Japan for their knowledge on trains, the French for the army, the Germans for the legal system. The Dutch were invited for something else: to intervene in Nature, or better said: to act, even in a one-directional way, vis-à-vis Nature. What were they asked to do? To redesign harbors such as Osaka harbor and prevent the natural sanding – and the same counts for the harbor of Yokohama. They were asked to reinforce dikes at Otsuka. And to tame rivers, such as the Yodokawa, to design a canal from lake Biwa and to do the engineering for the Tonegawa canal, that created much space for agriculture as it tamed Mother Nature’s flooding.
Nature has not much mercy for Japan: apart from earthquakes and volcano’s, there is rain, there are floods. Do you know that there is apr. 10x more rain in Japan than in this wet country? So what to do than to act unidirectional against Nature? This is what we as Dutch are used to do, and results you can find in the exhibition of the Dutch photographer Siebe Swart, also opening this evening.
But apart from these historical facts and events, I would like to tell you a little about the “mental journey” that I made when preparing for this small speech.
Mr. Hatakeyama, when you would take the risk to look into my soul (not to be recommended), you would see that my, let’s call it “natural inclination” is more towards music than towards the visual arts. In fact, I somehow have always avoided the visual part. But your work has at least changed this partly. Let me try to explain. When comparing the impact of music to the impact that your photographs had on me, I discovered as a simple consumer that music provides me solace, it provides comfort, consolation. And: music is confined, at least in its physical conditions. When listening in my house or in a concert hall to music - in my case often classical – I may be taken away by the music, it even can disquiet me, but my seat, my room, the concert hall will be always the ultimate point to return to. And that is a comforting idea.
Watching your work I am thrown back to the starkest reality. It confronts me with Nature. And not the nature that we often take for Nature – also in Japan – as the moon, the cherry blossoms, the four seasons that Japan has patented. No, the Nature as you show us is beyond comfort. It is of a completely different dimension than what we humans can grasp.
Yesterday, when you guided me in your exhibition, I asked you at one point: Hatekayama-san, how do you define “Nature”? There was a silence – and then you answered me, “it is beyond what we can imagine. You even can not say that it is good or bad, or beautiful or ugly”. “Do you include in “Nature” also the non-visual phenomena such as what we cannot see, like gravity and cosmic radiation?” I asked. “Yes”, you answered, “but Nature remains beyond words”. Nature as something that we of course can speak about, but that remains beyond our imagination.
2 months ago we organized here in Amsterdam with DUJAT a Dutch – Japanese seminar on new energy, titled: ”Re-thinking Energy”. We invited two astronauts, a Dutch and a Japanese. Both had, independently from each other, the same statement about Nature: when they were in space in their protective space shuttle, they realized “Nature has no mercy”. And they are right: Nature is not only “cherry blossom, the seasons or a beautiful moon over Tokyo”. Nature is also what you find in space: minus 270C, cosmic radiation, an extreme hostile environment for us humans.
And yes, that is exactly what we can see in this exhibition, including the very moving and sad pictures of your hometown Rikuzentakata. It showed us that Nature indeed has no mercy, but that the only way to survive is to create a relation with it, to create “une histoire” as you state, to accept Nature as it is and where needed to act, even in a one-directional way. It is the only way to cope with Nature, that phenomenon that is beyond words, that is not to be defined, the unspeakable… but that is part of our reality. Or perhaps, Nature is the ultimate reality and our role in it is very tiny. This is what you show us on your photographs: Nature is the ultimate reality and we humans are only a very, very small part of it. That is why there are no, or very few human figures in your work. And that is the story about Nature that you tell us in this important, disquieting and unsettling exhibition, that I herewith declare to be opened.