Partners

My photographer friend, Takao Iwasawa, told me as we were hanging out, "My parents' house is close to here, would you like to go eat there for lunch?" I took him up on his offer and visited his house. I knew that his father was a monk at a magnificent temple. I remember having a lot of conversations with his mother and father over lunch. I was surprised when his mother told me, "Two years after we got married, he went to train in the mountains and didn't come back for 35 years." So I asked them on the spot, "I want to publish this story in a magazine, so I want to come again with your son as the photographer and me as the interviewer."

I asked Iwasawa, their son and photographer, to write the preface of this feature for PARTNERS #2. He wrote about his parents as follows:

"Five years ago. Until father came back home to us, he was only around once a month—that’s how I knew, somehow, that our family was out of the ordinary. There are four of us: my father, who serves as the head priest of a temple, my mother, my sister, and I. Yet I only have fun memories. When father came home, he would take us to all kinds of places, such as flower beds blooming beautifully with milkvetch. Perhaps to preserve his memories, father always carried a camera—taking photos of my mother, my sister, and I, stashing us away in film.

After I turned 22, I spent three years undergoing ascetic training in the mountains. There, for the first time, I shared all three daily meals with my father. It was a strange relationship: we seemed to be less father and son than teacher and pupil. At the temple, my father played an important role, and the environment made it impossible to speak with him casually. But every so often he would call me to the back and quietly scold me over my posture.

Five years ago. Having finished his ascetic training, which stretched over 35 years, father came home. I remember even now how my mother cried the year before last, spending the New Years holiday together as a whole family. When he sat at the dining table in the living room, my father was just a father, and nothing more.

It’s been 15 years since I first owned a camera; I’m a little ashamed to admit that this was the first time I’ve photographed my parents. For society at large, I would guess they look like a perfectly respectable husband and wife getting on in years. When I turned the camera on them, however, I felt something shy about the two—the same obvious embarrassment displayed by any couple. During the shooting, we were a photographer and his subjects, not parents and their child. I looked at them through the lens, and thought about how glad I was to have been born to these two. The following concerns my parents, whose faith was unshakeable.”