Year's end

It's been a short year here in Japan, because it essentially began on March 11. The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant breakdown changed Japan for the year; changed those affected for ever; and we'll see if it continues to change the country as it perhaps should.

This is a screen-style illustration I made using a few of the few photos I took in Sendai. The text says, "Our house was washed away," which is what one child whispered to us. The tsunami wave in the illustration is meant to be a reminder of the initial TV images of the wave viewed from above. In fact, in the middle tree of the third screen from the left, there is a concrete panel stuck on the bent trunk (you can just see it in silhouette), so the illustrated wave also reflects the height the wave reached here along the open shoreline.

Crowd-sourced infographics

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has started a website this month to show facts about Japan via submitted infographics – like the one on the aging population, above. Interested designers can submit an illustration on a topic, using expert data, and chosen ones are uploaded. Like any crowd-sourced illustrations, much of the quality is not high, but at least it is an interesting idea from a government, picking up on infographic popularity.

Slowly painted fast food

Another neat idea from the designers at Nendo to celebrate cup noodle at the (yes, there is one) Cup Noodle Museum. These are urushi (lacquered) cup noodle pots – the lacquer applied to an actual cup noodle package, to create a mix of the disposable and the permanent.

Portraits: 27

Keith Piper, artist, in front of his work at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1987
As we are about to see Meryl Streep's performance as Margaret Thatcher in the new film The Iron Lady, this is a small reminder of how plenty of people – like Piper, who back in 1982 had co-founded BLK Art Group to link art with politics affecting black people – saw Thatcher's presence at the time as a negative one. I also took a shot of Piper in front of another of his large paintings – of children in Soweto – thinking that Thatcher filling the framing of this photo might work against it being an image of Piper. But I think his pose and expression belie the domination of Thatcher in the frame. There's an article about Piper's work at the time here, through which I learned only as I write this 25 years later, that one of his paintings – sourced "from other people's photographs" – was from a photograph I took of a woman who had been raped by the police. (She is second from left in the photo at the top of the page.) A strange coincidence across time. For City Limits.

For more on these portraits see here and the portraits tag on the right

Photo feature on Tsukiji fish market

 Although it's a popular tourist spot,  I hadn't visited Tsukiji fish market before I went to make this CNNGo photo feature – even though I first came to Japan 14 years ago. So, this was a chance to remedy that.

Post nuclear

Here's a slightly strange one. The artist Kenji Yanobe is known for his post-apocalypse-style, anime-inflected creations of imaginary "atom suits" and machinery, and his, for example, "Standa" – a large sculpted figure which unfolds as it detects radiation to turn its face to a "sun". Taro Okamoto is also known for his anti-nuclear mural which hangs in Shibuya station, his many sculptures, sometimes in public places, across Japan – notably the "Tower of the Sun" in Osaka. Okamoto is now dead, and Yanobe is a contemporary artist who, in a current exhibition inherits part of the mantle of Okamoto with his specially created new "Sun Child" at the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum. The video above comes from that museum and celebrates the work and the history of both artists – including an image of Yanobe wearing one of his creations in the ruins of a school in Chernobyl. But the video passes without a mention of Fukushima. Is it taken as read (as The Japan Times assumes in its review)? Or deemed inappropriate or difficult to mention – even though both artists have works questioning nuclear power or disasters? A case of bad timing? Or good timing for Yanobe's suits which always seemed entirely fictitious before and now don't need an obvious link – a link that may seem tasteless or an abuse of a disaster for publicity? (Does it take time and distance, like that we have from the Chernobyl accident?)

I've enjoyed seeing various shows of Yanobe's work before, so I'll try to see this one.

Hello world

Hello Kitty continues to take over the world. An arts magazine from Japan (Geijutsu Shincho, September 2011 cover), Elle in Taiwan (December cover) and news that Sanrio (the company behind Hello Kitty) have bought the Mr Men. Gosh.

Portraits: 26

Euzhan Palcy, film maker, in a club room, London, 1989
Palcy was promoting A Dry White Season, which she had directed, but at the time I'd only seen her first film – the excellent Rue Cases Negres, an independent, small-scale film about a boy potentially escaping the prejudice and poverty of sugar cane work by getting a scholarship to a university in 1930s Martinique. Though I liked that film very much, I only now realise that I haven't seen a subsequent Palcy film – even A Dry White Season (which featured Marlon Brando, who chose to appear in it after being impressed by her direction and social understanding in Rue Cases Negres). Time to get some films out on DVD and make amends. For City Limits magazine

Alicia Partnoy, poet and ex-political prisoner, London, 1988
Alicia Partnoy was imprisoned for two and a half years without charge from 1977, during which time she was also abused and tortured – one of thousands of the "disappeared" after the military coup in Argentina. I can't remember why I met her outside rather than indoors somewhere, but the alley and high wall were intended to hint at that imprisonment, a placing which I was even then vaguely wondering (as I still do now) if it was too simplistic. On the other hand, there was no particular reason to photograph her on any other London street or cafe, and another part of me thinks that the end result is not so bad. She moved to the US, forced out of Argentina, in 1985 and wrote a book, The Little School, about the time of her imprisonment. She teaches at a US university, and writes – see this video of a poetry reading (and with impressive hair now streaked with grey).

For more on these portraits see here and the portraits tag on the right

Magazines, nudity and politics

Now here's a design question: is a Pakistani woman posing nude on a magazine cover in Pakistan a challenge to the pervading culture or merely a sop to the culture of men wanting to see naked female flesh. It gets more complicated when the actress – Veena Malik – sports an ISI tattoo, hence poking fun at the intelligence services of Pakistan and when she claims she wasn't entirely naked but that the magazine airbrushed out a thong. (Although, while she is suing the magazine for misrepresenting her, a thong is little to remove in terms of defining whether you are "nude" or not in the pose on the cover.)

Pakistan is not always soft – either governmentally or socially – on certain breaches of that pervading culture, so I wish her well and that she remains safe. And I will leave it to others to decide whether this is a Germaine Greer-esque challenge, or a wrong fork in the equal rights road and only a "win" for the continuing success of lads mags. Meanwhile, a satirical magazine in India imagines the ISI chief gracing the same magazine's cover…

Family.Life.

I mentioned Bruce Osborn's family photos before. He has recently been making a series of portraits of families in the tsunami-hit areas, featured this month in a spread for the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in-house magazine. Extraordinary shots of family groups against a backdrop of the devastation they experienced and still live amongst. Families celebrating life and ackowledging loss, putting a positive portrait-face to the world. Even in the situation of the family in the main shot above – on the steps of their destroyed apartment with the father's destroyed office building behind, from where he was rescued while others they knew were less lucky – there is a sense of family and life. (And hence the title I gave the spread.) There's plans that the work will feature in a newspaper article soon and, next year, a TV documentary.

Olympian challenge

I went to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan press conference by ex-Olympus CEO Michael Woodford a week back. He has exposed Olympus' shady finances (putting it mildly – the FBI and fraud offices in both Japan and the UK are now investigating). It's big news here in Japan, and Woodford is both articulate and personable in presenting it. For the FCCJ it was a very big event – 342 people present, 21 TV crews, 16 still photographers (and me). Covering it for the FCCJ's in-house magazine, Number 1 Shimbun, I didn't have to get that specific reportage shot needed for newspapers or magazines (of which, though, I did get one or two) so I used the auto-panorama function on my FujiFilm X100 to pan round the room to get the sense of crowd and interest while Woodford was speaking. Click the picture for a bigger version. And read Telegraph correspondent Julian Ryall's article (on this month's Number 1 Shimbun web version) explaining the history of how the news broke here.

Hikikomori

Hikikomori – the word for those Japanese who live isolated, mostly alone and in their rooms, even if in a family house – entered the Oxford English Dictionary as an import word in 2010. There is a report on the condition/situation in El Pais with David Coll Blanco's accompanying photos – sadly, the word is an export to the world. David's pictures are excellent, sympathetic, strong reportage portraits from a New Start centre for those seeking to leave behind their hikikomori life. Click on the "ampliar" icon to see the photos.

Loss and scale

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami undesigned a lot of Japan; the natural destruction went well beyond anything man-made. Perhaps it even left behind for, those whose work is design or architecture, a question of what is design and its meaning after such an event – and this is what an exhibition at the architecture gallery Gallery MA tries to assess. It's not as idle a question as it might at first seem – after the loss of life, there was mass destruction to homes and townscapes, and questions of how to plan and rebuild.

The exhibition ("311: Lost Homes") doesn't tackle the question of design's place directly – or pretentiously. Or even ultimately try to answer it. Despite posing the question, the show is more to do with human loss and an attempt to place a response via the work architects. It looks back – using architectural models usually used for showing future plans. In the gallery, there are table-top models of selected damaged areas – scaled representations of approximately 500m-square sections of now-damaged towns and villages – as they were before the tsunami (or in one case, before they were evacuated because of the nuclear crisis). The models are accompanied by a very brief summary of each area's history, plus a before and after the tsunami aerial shot of the same area the model represents. The effect is poignant, even loving, in its recreation, yet without directly addressing questions of what to do next in terms of building, towns and communities, manages to just hint at them. There are no close-up images of destruction, no direct human details, yet the exhibition surprisingly isn't distant, or at least is still affecting in its "distance". It is one interesting response from architects among many responses to the disaster from people of all walks of life.

On the walls alongside the models are a few graphical representations of statistics to do with the destruction – the magnitude of the quake, amount of radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant etc – titled "311 Scale", which can also be seen online here.

Top: a model in the exhibition showing the Arahama area near Sendai, where the tsunami reached 4 kilometres inland. I only made one trip to the damaged area, and the photo below was taken at a position just above the centre of the photo of the model above. I took it including the buildings, although you can tell by the background of the photo, many buildings were just washed away.