TOKYO — I stood in Ofunato, in Iwate Prefecture, with a photographer friend. We were mesmerized by a scene that seemed too outlandish even to imagine. She told me how her grandmother described clothes, reduced to rags, hanging from trees after Tokyo was bombed to the ground in World War II.
The realization that we were standing before a natural disaster on a similar scale — one that had happened in minutes, not hours — drove us into silence.
I decided then to return later when the cherry trees bloomed.
Cherry blossoms are so important to the Japanese people on a symbolic and emotional level. In winter, plum and apricot trees bloom sparsely and last for months. Cherry trees, on the other hand, blossom in a riot of flowers but only last one week before petals fill the wind with organic snow, which accumulates — white — on the ground beneath them. They represent the transience of life and also the return of life after a long winter.
Black and white removes the obvious, removes the botanical ostentation and lets us enter the spiritual, shadowy side of the rebirth on a grey day. I am after something more important than pinks and greens.
James Whitlow Delano has lived in Japan for 17 years. His work has been shown several times on Lens. Mr. Delano was in Rome when the earthquake struck but was able to fly back to Tokyo. He then proceeded tortuously to Ofunato, in the northern prefecture of Iwate.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misidentified the location of the photographs. They were taken in Ofunato, not Kitakami.
