Omokage
Omokage is a visual exploration of my homeland Japan—less a place than a feeling, suspended between memory and imagination.
Like many first-generation immigrants, I left my home country and grew up cultivating a deeply sentimentalized vision of Japan, one shaped by absence as much as memory. Over the years, that idea has become increasingly ephemeral and abstract.
The Japan I know is not a fixed geography but an accumulation of sensations and inherited stories: a woman’s silhouette cast in shadow, the thick aroma of cedar, the soft lilt of a Kansai dialect.
Omokage—a Japanese word meaning “visage” or “trace”—is an ongoing collection of photographs made over multiple visits to the country I once called home. It is less a comprehensive account of Japan and more a sensory archive of quiet longing.
