“You are as strong as you allow yourself to be.”
What is your favorite part of the country and do you see yourself living in Japan in the long run?
My favorite part is Kyushu, I absolutely love it there. Although Yakushima is a real contender, I just need to go and spend an extended period of time there! Perhaps a month would suffice. I’d love to buy a rundown house in Japan to renovate, and then use it as an artist retreat for periods of time during the year. Somewhere in the mountains, with some land where I can have a garden is a dream I’ve had for a while.
When reflecting on the Fukushima Disaster of 2011, you spoke of invisible forces that underly the natural world. Since then, and really long before, the climate emergency has been raising to the boiling point we are currently heading. As much of your work relates to geology and the natural world, can you share your thoughts on all this?
Perhaps we should bear in mind, that this world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we only know in part, and the ecological balance they’ve created by working together is something we’ve only recently (in terms of earth’s history) begun to grasp. We’ve been on this planet for a tiny fraction of its history, and have undoubtedly wreaked havoc within a very small-time frame. We are wrecking the planet, especially the living part and the response to this particular crisis has undoubtedly been unacceptably weak. There is a disconnect and I have often wondered if that’s one of the root causes. Reciprocity and friendship with our environment, organisms and species is beneficial to both parties in more than one way and I believe we’ve lost a huge part of this.
A lot of people appear to be somewhat pessimistic about the future and it can be incredibly easy to find yourself trapped in that negative cycle. Personally, for me, I don’t think it’s necessarily beneficial to wake up feeling that the future is an approaching day of doom, it’s paralyzing. I’ve found that it makes it incredibly difficult to resolve issues when you yourself are overwhelmed with the scale of these issues and attempt to take on ‘everything’. We’re living in a society where we’re bombarded with an intense amount of information on a day-to-day basis. It’s impossible to emotionally and physically resolve all of these issues by yourself and to even be well informed on every issue, but I believe you can use your available time to dedicate it towards a few movements or issues where you’d like to create change. To quote Edward O. Wilson, “Study, understand, enjoy and protect.”
I also would like to just sort of mention that I believe that there needs to be a change in the language used to talk about the climate crisis and even our environment. I steer clear of the word ‘sustainable’ (it’s been overused by companies to essentially greenwash) and also words which sort of insinuate that nature is a separate entity to human beings. I mean, it’s not? You know, our planet has taken billions of years to create our environment which sustains us and without it, we would cease to exist.
