Following the earthquake that shook the Pacific coast of Tohoku, waves of 30m ravage inside Japanese land. Accompanied by his Geiger counter, Kosuke Okahara spent 4 years to document the consequence of Fukushima disaster as well as the life on the ground. His images guide us to enter a world filled with emptiness and apprehend a reality that has lost its colors.

Little by little, I began collecting fragments from the Fukushima disaster.

I photographed moments that said something to me, especially moments that would not disappear in mere seconds. They were scenes that would linger in time, just like the radiation that lingered in Fukushima. I was collecting the fragments of people, ruins, landscapes, little odd scenes, and beautiful moments that existed within the devastation.

“How will people in the future who will see these photographs react and comprehend this disaster?”

I strolled around Fukushima with that question in mind.

It has been more than four years since the explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. People continue living in the region without seeing much amelioration. I have no idea what will happen next.

The only thing I can do is to leave these pictures for the future generations, so that they can learn from history, as well as for them to come to terms with what this disaster truly means.

Winston Churchill once said that, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

I hope my photographs will serve a purpose.

Kosuke Okahara

“Recurring recollections of his time in a town started infiltrating the dreams of a photographer, pushing him to return to the dream and leaving reality.”

“blue affair” is an experimental shortfilm and a photobook based on the photographer’s dreams of his time spent in the town called Koza.

In the pictures captured in Koza by Kosuke Okahara, I don’t see the photographer. It’s not because he was the one photographing, or for some other physical reasons. I don’t find superficial emotions emanating through his lens from either the subjects or from the photographer. This might not make sense, but it feels to me as though while the photographer was with his subjects, looking directly at them, he was actually observing from another realm. What is left are pictures free from superficial emotions such as warmth and sadness and left with an almost unbearable weight of presence. Without a doubt, in those moments, while sharing the same space, he was observing from some other dimension.

– He was surely in the dreams.

Tatsuya Ishikawa / Creative director
(An excerpt from the afterword of the book)