The Lost Island

Yururi Island | The Island of Lost World
Photograph: Okada Atsushi
Year of production: 2019-2020
Shooting location: Yururi Island

The Lost Island

Okada Atsushi

In the summer of 2011, I visited Yururi Island off the Nemuro Peninsula for the first time. What I saw was a landscape deeply reminiscent of the vanishing nature of Nemuro, and traces of the history of the area, which flourished as a kelp fishing and horse-producing site. They were buried in the dense fog, forgotten, and illuminated me like a setting sun quietly sinking into the sea. Capturing those lingering lights in a photograph was the first dialogue with the “things disappearing.” The island’s horses will disappear…. And the island’s existence will be forgotten…. That summer, I was standing alone in the meadow in the afterglow of the sun setting down.

The dialogue with the “things disappearing” has continued in silence. The seasons passed over the island quietly, and I spent some of that time with the horses. The wildflowers drop their leaves as the island’s sea fog fades away into the grasslands. The horses begin to prepare for winter by putting on their winter coats. Soon, the island’s sky was covered with snow, the faded grass was painted white, and the stars began to illuminate the snowy fields. The horses cuddle together under the light, and sleep standing still, quietly, on the snow where they stopped for the last time of the day. And as the huge icicles covering the island’s cliffs gradually melt and the sea birds begin to sing there, another sea fog season comes to the island. The seasons pass over the island quietly. And the herds of horses emerging from the fog diminish in number as the years go by, and eventually, they are no longer “herds” at all.

Without being asked to do so by anyone, I commuted to the island alone from my base in Tokyo, and more than ten years have passed since then. The time I spent facing the “things disappearing” was painful, but when I look back on what I have seen, it is fragile, delicate, and yet beautiful. It felt like a sanctuary accidentally born, left behind, and remaining in the sea in the far north. I will never forget the summer day when I wandered alone in the dense fog looking for the horses, or the winter day when I walked through the snowfield by moonlight and welcomed the dawn with the horses. Like an imaginary island drawn on a map, the island exists in memory. The horses live on in the photograph. Everything becomes an illusion that cannot be traced. However, the island named “Yururi” in the remote sea still has a faint light in the dense fog.

Okada Atsushi / Photographer

Born 1979 in Hokkaido, Japan. Graduated from the Department of Photography, Faculty of Art, Osaka University of Arts in 2003, and received his doctorate (Art) from the Graduate School of Arts, Tokyo Polytechnic University in 2008. In the same year, he won the Kimura Ihei Award, also known as the “Akutagawa Prize of the photography world.” He has also won the Hokkaido Cultural Encouragement Award, the Higashikawa Awards Special Photographer Award, and the Fuji Photo Salon New Face Award. His published works include “I am” (AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2007), “ataraxia” (Seigensha Art Publishing, 2010), “THE WORLD” (AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2012), “MOTHER” (Hakurosha, 2014) and “Yasuda Shota Photo Collection: LIFE IS” (Magazine House, 2020). His works are in the public collections of the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the Kawasaki City Museum and the Higashikawa Bunka Gallery. He has been photographing Yururi Island since 2011.

He has been interested in Yururi Island since around 2009. However, landing on the island was not allowed except for academic research, and after nearly two years of negotiations, he came to the island for the first time in 2011 to take photographs. At the time, there were 12 mare horses on the island, but no males, and they were set to die out as their role ended along with the changing times. In 2017, six years after he started filming, only three horses were on the island. The purpose of Okada’s photography was to keep the existence of the island’s horses, which had been left behind by the times and whose existence had been forgotten by society, alive by capturing them in his works. Okada’s creative activities on the Yururi Island have continued for more than ten years.

http://okadaatsushi.com

On an Island Floating Between Life and Death

President of Planet Blue News Service
Former Editor-in-Chief of Tokyo Calendar
Hoshino Tomoyuki

I am afraid to start on a personal note. I was the one who told photographer Okada Atsushi about the existence of Yururi Island. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was in 2008 or 2009, not long after Okada won the Kimura Ihei Award, also known as the “Akutagawa Prize of the photography world,” in 2008 and became known as a talented photographer.

I didn’t have any particular intentions. I remember that I brought up Yururi Island as a “small talk” topic. I told Okada, born in Wakkanai and grew up in Sapporo, in a very light-hearted way, “I heard there is an uninhabited island in Hokkaido where only horses live.” So, to be honest, I was surprised when I heard Okada say a few years later, “I’m taking pictures of the horses on Yururi Island.” I thought that the island was restricted and that landing was prohibited.

Okada told me that right after he heard my casual chit-chat, he went to Nemuro many times from Tokyo, where he is based, and persistently negotiated with the city office, and finally obtained permission from the city office and the Ochiishi Fishery Cooperative, the landowners of Yururi Island, to film on the island.

Where did his enthusiasm come from? Okada Atsushi is a photographer who rarely explains the intentions of his work or the process of creation in words. Even for Yururi Island, he has rarely talked about the circumstances leading up to the shoot. However, looking back at Okada’s past works, I feel that I can get a vague idea of why he was attracted to Yururi Island. In a word, it was his thirst for the exploration of “life and death.” Okada must have wished to gaze at horses living and dying on an uninhabited island where landing is forbidden, in other words, a place where no one can watch over them or take care of them. And he might have wanted to face those lives and death alone.

Life and death. It is a theme that runs through the photographs of Okada Atsushi. “I am” (AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2007), the photo book that won Okada the Kimura Ihei Award, was composed mainly of portraits of women who repeatedly cut their wrists, reminiscent of broken glasswork. In “THE WORLD” (AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2012), the artist showed that the earthquakes and tsunamis, with their fresh scars, are unmistakably connected to our everyday world. In “MOTHER” (Hakurosha, 2014), by pointing his lens at the scene of a woman’s delivery, he captured the first moment of a human being’s life (although from that very moment a person begins to walk toward death). This attitude is clearly inherited in “Yasuda Shota Photo Book: LIFE IS” (Magazine House, 2020), the latest photo book taken by Okada. The series of photographs in this book, which focuses on the subject of a young artist with a brain tumor who has recovered from the disease, is far more than just a collection of idol photos, but constitutes a unique world in which the thoughts of a sensitive young man about life and death are transformed into vivid images.

For Okada, the horses of the Yururi Island, like other subjects he has encountered in his life, may have been the ones that brought the lens of his camera into focus on the theme of life and death. After the stallion was taken away, the possibility of birth disappeared from the horses of Yururi Island. One by one, the horses are dying of old age. In the photographs that Okada has taken over the past ten years, the image of a herd of horses quietly moving on the road to extinction against the background of the beautiful but harsh nature of Nemuro reveals the reality of life and death, stripped of its excesses. The deep self-harming scars on the arms of the woman featured in “I am” seemed as if each of them was a borderline between life and death. She was going back and forth between these boundaries. And Yururi Island is also located on such a boundary. The horses are living their daily lives on this island between life and death, following the path of their destiny.

Okada’s efforts to convey the inaccessible scenery of Yururi Island through photography and film have attracted much attention, and the name “Yururi” has been appearing in many media. This is certainly an achievement of the photographer Okada Atsushi. At the same time, however, I believe that the meaning of the works you can see on this website is not limited to just that. These works go beyond being mere documentary photographs and videos and strike a chord in people’s hearts because they express the source of Okada Atsushi’s creative passion, or in other words, the fundamental theme of his work. The true value of a photographer’s adventure around the Yururi Island surely resides there.