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Kosuke Okahara

Kosuke Okahara was born in 1980. After studying to be a teacher in Tokyo he opted for photography and joined the Vu agency in Paris in 2007. A freelance since 2010, he lives and works in Tokyo. His photojournalism has appeared in Aera Magazine, Foto8, The Wall Street Journal, Courrier International, Russian Reporter, Newsweek Japan and other publications. A winner of many awards, he has exhibited around the world.

"In 2004 I realised that because of all my travelling I didn't really know my own country. What does it mean to be Japanese? That's something very hard to pin down in a hyper-codified society that cultivates a perfectly neutral exterior.
One day I ran into a woman student from the institute where I'd taken my degree. We became friends and not long after she confessed that she had been injuring herself for years. Why? Because she could not find ibasyo, a Japanese term I translate as "the physical and emotional place where a person can exist", or "inner peace". This failure gives rise to a deep malaise which cannot be communicated in a society with a culture of shame. In Japan you must not complain. You must suffer in silence. This applies to me too: as a child my family life was marked by violence on a daily basis. I took refuge in total silence – and, to be honest, I too practiced self-injury.
A project on the subject began to take shape. I contacted people on the Internet who had posted photos of their self-inflicted wounds: twenty of them replied, and were enthusiastic about the project. But most were still living with their parents, who refused to let them be photographed – some parents didn't even know their child was harming himself. Finally six young women barely out of their teens consented to admit me into their lives and their struggle with suffering, but in some cases it took a year to get that far.
I spent four years with them. There were times of great distress, but I also thought I detected also fleeting moments of ibasyo when I was photographing them or they were taking photos themselves. All of them told me my pictures were an incentive to deep reflection. My dearest wish is that they should discover a life for themselves through my vision of things, and ultimately achieve an understanding of the importance of their existence."