In 1942, Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies, and the consequences for the mixed-race population known as Indo were immediate and lasting. When the war ended and Indonesian independence followed, many Indo families fled to the Netherlands, a country they had never seen. Among them were children born to Japanese soldiers and Indonesian women. Their Japanese features marked them in a society where Japan was the enemy. Many learned the truth of their parentage only in their sixties, if at all. Miyuki Okuyama’s Dear Japanese, published in 2015 by The Eriskay Connection, takes these lives as its subject.

Okuyama is a photographer and writer born in Japan and based in the Netherlands. Her approach is subjective documentary: she records compatriots abroad, drawn to a group whose existence was often treated as a family secret. The book’s portraits are not neutral records. They are accompanied by places and landscapes that carry associative Japanese elements—signs and motifs that feel displaced in the Dutch environment and beside the Indonesian features of the subjects. This visual tension is central to the book’s method.

Dear Japanese was conceived by Okuyama, who also wrote the text. Rob van Hoesel and Carel Fransen designed the volume. The 128-page Swiss-bound softcover, in English and Japanese, measures 28.6 by 21 centimeters. The sequencing moves between faces and environments, allowing the reader to sense both the particularity of each life and the shared historical predicament.

For collectors of photobooks that treat war’s long aftermath, Dear Japanese offers a sustained meditation on identity and belonging. Okuyama’s position as an immigrant from Japan—sharing pride in being Japanese while also feeling alienation and guilt—gives the work its reflective edge. The book does not resolve the traumas it documents. Instead, it presents them with a restraint that respects the difficulty of the subject and the dignity of the people portrayed.