Tanegashima 1543.
“In year 12 of the Tembun era, a large boat anchored in Nishimura Cove. It was impossible to know which country it had come from. It carried a hundred men. Their faces were different from ours, and they did not know our language. All those who saw them found them strange...”
It was my sixth trip to Japan. This time I wanted to travel alone and longer, about two months. I traveled 5,000 kilometers and lost myself on the shores between Tokyo, Kobe, Tottori and Hiroshima. Japan is the perfect place to get lost, to dive into a country that unites antithetical representations of technology and traditions. SHiMA is a project in search of borrows in this in-between, on the physical border along which I led and which marks the gap separating me from this ancestral and inaccessible culture.
