Tsugaru | Shimokita gathers two of Kazuo Kitai’s northern journeys into one volume. The first half draws on a 1970 trip to the Shimokita Peninsula, at the far north of Honshu; the second comes from visits to the neighbouring Tsugaru region in 1972 and 1973. Both areas had long been isolated and barren, their winters bitterly cold, and local speech, legends and older beliefs survived there into the modern era. The region was known for shamanism and for communion with the dead around Osorezan, the holy mountain. The publisher’s edition is a slipcased hardcover with forty duotone plates.
The book marks a turn in Kitai’s working life. He dropped out six months into his first year of art school, a rebellious streak that carried him into the protest movements of 1960s Japan. He self-published Resistance in 1965, then followed radical student actions through Barricade, Agitators and, in 1971, Sanrizuka. As that decade closed he became disillusioned with political themes and turned to the everyday life of ordinary people. Shimokita was his first journey in that direction, Tsugaru a continuation of it. In 1976 he received the inaugural Ihei Kimura Prize for his exploration of rural Japan. This book is where the rural work begins and then extends: the subject is no longer protest but the texture of daily life in places whose customs and landscape are bound together.
What distinguishes the volume is its pairing: two series made a few years apart in adjacent regions, held under one cover. The isolation, the cold and the surviving beliefs the two areas shared form the ground on which continuities and differences can be read across the sequence rather than through either set alone. Kitai, born in Manchuria in 1944, began photographing in the mid-1960s and remains active; his reputation is closely tied to the protest photography and to the rural work that earned him the Kimura Prize.
Nazraeli Press issues the two series as one slipcased hardcover with forty duotone plates. The pairing is the book’s substance: Shimokita and Tsugaru together, so that a photographer’s return to the same northern conditions can be followed as one sustained engagement rather than as separate episodes.
