Friends,
After two and a half long years, Japan finally reopened its borders to foreign tourists. Within a week of reopening, my father Michael visited me for the first time. I’ve been living in Japan more or less for nearly 20 years (albeit spending large chunks of time overseas the first decade) so this was a long overdue visit. It was his first time meeting my son as well, as Tennbo has only traveled to the United States once (when he was an infant). So this was an important visit for all of us.
The timing was right, as I was mostly between projects and so I had the space to devote myself to showing him around Kyoto. The weather was perfect, slightly autumnal, lots of sunshine and almost no rain. This was his first visit to Asia in nearly fifty years (and the only other time had been Turkey and Israel), so much of what he saw and experienced was novel. It was nice to be reminded how beautiful the city might be when accompanying someone experiencing it for the first time. We took a trip just the two of us down to the art islands in the Seto Sea, Naoshima and Teshima, as well as an excursion down to Takamatsu for its famed garden, Ritsurin, and the workspace and museum of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. But mostly we just hung out, walking the dog, cooking and eating, drinking lots of coffee, playing board games with Tennbo, watching baseball games, and talking about life. We’ve never been estranged but for complicated reasons that need not be mentioned, we really hadn’t spent much time together for the past thirty years. So to have this time together meant a lot for both of us. And I was glad that my son felt connected as well, to finally have a grandfather in his life.
If you’re coming to Kyoto: When my father visited us, he stayed downstairs in my space, The Moon Room. It’s a beauty of a design unit that, along with the Cocoon Room, once provided me a stable income to focus on visual narrative and darkroom photography for many years until the pandemic hit. More than Covid 19 itself, it was the Japanese government’s closed-border policy that really made the past three years a financial ordeal. Japanese generally prefer to stay in hotels, so I’d long been dependent on the custom of international visitors. I’m thrilled the borders are finally open to tourists, not only for myself but also for the thousands of other businesses affected by pandemic-era isolationist policies.
It’s also just nice to see tourists on the streets again. Folks are friendly and easygoing, and happy to be here. If you do come to Kyoto (or know someone who is) please be in touch, as I’d be happy to make some arrangement for you to stay in one of my rooms downstairs. I’m a longtime traveler and I was one of the earliest to open my spaces on airbnb in Kyoto. I know the city well and have created an online guide for those who stay downstairs. I set up links to the airbnbs earlier, but here is my website with information on the spaces as well. Hope you or your friends might be able to visit someday.
House of Tennbo: As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I have a zine collaboration being published by Tour Dogs. The zine is a mixture of Instax pics shot by myself and my son between Christmas 2020 and the summer of 2022 (so between the ages of five and seven for him). I don’t know if it’s because of all the terrific films we’ve watched the past few years, Tennbo’s observations of my working life as I’m sequencing prints for various projects, or if it’s just a DNA visual aptitude thing, but the kid has a very good eye and has taken some extraordinary images for a child as young as he is. No doubt he has had some strong encouragement from his father, but I love what he has been able to do at his age. The zine is essentially a surreal photo album of blown-up Instax photographs illustrating aspects of our daily life: our games, dog walks, garden visits and mischief-making.
Part of the fun of the zine is figuring which of the images are his and which are mine (the photographs are listed by place and author in an index in the back). It’s on sale on the Tour Dogs website for a mere $9 plus shipping (and Trey, the man behind TD, can ship internationally as well). I’m a little late getting this finished so copies are almost sold out, but there will be a second printing soon if you miss it. While you’re there consider picking up another issue or two, as there have been a number of beautiful zines published recently.
Lately reading: I’ve not had as much time as I like for reading these days. Recently, I managed to finish Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom. Published in 2018, it is a prescient analysis of Vladimir Putin that all but predicts his invasion of Ukraine, and warns that the (un)reality of life in Russia— where there is no longer anything like “truth” or “facts”— could easily happen in the US, especially with some American political leaders crying “fake news” enough times to sow doubt into the system. Snyder’s breakdown of Putin’s political philosophy and how its blueprint is being co-opted by other aspiring authoritarians is a necessary, if difficult read.
What I’d rather digress into is a recent New Yorker article titled “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?” by Joshua Rothman. The thought piece suggests that over a long life we— consciously or not— assemble a narrative that has any number of personal quirks but that at its heart, we view ourselves as either “continuers” or “dividers,” meaning that we either see our selves as having had steadfast personalities throughout our many stages, or that out arc has been “episodic” in that there have been distinct life phases in which we have lived quite different lives.
I’m probably alone in often ruminating often over my life story. There are not many photographs of my childhood and only a few videos of me as a youngster, so it’s difficult for me to imagine what I was like as a child. Looking back, I believe I was a sheltered indoor kid, shy, lacking real world experience but enjoying a rather rich and fantastic imagination who loved comic books, novels, and movies at the cinema. In my 40s now with a much clearer awareness of selfhood as an adult, I see a number of my life decisions as attempts at courage, efforts to overcome the diffident, mundane childhood that composed my early understandings of self. Thus, the carousing in my 20s, the adventures and long travels in Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in my 30s, and through it all artistic ambitions, a conviction that for all my ordinariness, there might be something beautiful and long-lasting about the stories made and those yet to be created. They are both a counterpoint to that quiet wallflower kid as well as a manifestation of his imaginary life. But it’s not so simple as Rothman points out:
Thinking of some old shameful act of ours, we tell ourselves, “I’ve changed!” (But have we?) Bored with a friend who’s obsessed with what happened long ago, we say, “That was another life—you’re a different person now!” (But is she?) Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see. Even as we work tirelessly to improve, we find that, wherever we go, there we are (in which case what’s the point?). And yet sometimes we recall our former selves with a sense of wonder, as if remembering a past life. Lives are long, and hard to see. What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are?
Because of the work I had to put in to overcome my fears and believe in myself, I usually think of myself as a “divider,” actively seeking to overcome my horizon limits. But for all the travel and adventures and late nights experienced I am perhaps most content buried in a book or watching an old movie. Lately, I love reading my childhood comic books to my son. While traveling, I am never without something to read, and my chosen discipline, photography, while often having collaborators, is mostly a life of solitude, of wandering discreetly in crowds and of thousands of hours in the darkroom, experimenting with colors and atmosphere.
Part of the joy of hosting my father was showing him that I was my own man— he did in fact notice this, saying approvingly that I was a fine parent and that I’ve built a good life for myself. It had been years since we spent this much time together, but it was fascinating to see us following familiar scripts known so well from decades past: watching the World Series together, talking politics (we’re on the same team), sharing history books; we have similar tastes regarding certain foods (not crazy about persimmons or strong cheese flavors). I noticed he was perhaps slightly calmer than when he was in midlife working as a Century City corporate lawyer, but as an older man in retirement, his demeanor and expressiveness was more or less unchanged. Like two actors reprising old roles we picked up the thread where we’d left off and though this was his first time visiting me in Japan, there was an extraordinary familiarity to the experience of having him here. Rothman writes:
The passage of time almost demands that we tell some sort of story: there are certain ways in which we can’t help changing through life, and we must respond to them. Young bodies differ from old ones; possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade. When you were seventeen, you practiced the piano for an hour each day, and fell in love for the first time; now you pay down your credit cards and watch Amazon Prime. To say that you are the same person today that you were decades ago is absurd. A story that neatly divides your past into chapters may also be artificial. And yet there’s value in imposing order on chaos. It’s not just a matter of self-soothing: the future looms, and we must decide how to act based on the past. You can’t continue a story without first writing one.
My son is now seven years old. Between his mother and I exist tens of thousands of photographs and videos of him. There is a plethora of evidence that he enjoys dancing, singing, reading and playing with his dog. Before we know it he’ll be a teenager, later a young man, perhaps a father. He’ll have all the digital evidence he’ll need to reflect on his own lifetime evolution, whether he’s a divider or a continuer, or like most of us a little bit of both. Wherever he is and whatever he’s doing forty years from now in the brave new world of 2062 (when he’ll be the same age I am now), I hope he’ll still be dancing, singing, reading and enjoying the company of animals. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and he’s off to a good start.