Hokkaido

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AKAAKA

Photography

Japanese Photography

Hardcover

180 pages

275 x 216 mm

ISBN 9784865412215

Japanese, English

Feb 2026

This photobook centers on Hokkaido, the land where photographer Motonari Tagawa spent his formative years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.

What was once a gaze directed solely toward nature before him gradually expanded to include the historical layers inscribed in this land, as the distance that emerged after moving to Tokyo gave rise to a sense of Hokkaido as both a foreign place and yet something like a second home.

The modern history of the island began in 1869, when this land—long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu—was renamed “Hokkaido.” Modeled in part on the United States, another nation shaped through colonization, the new Meiji government pressed forward with rapid settlement and modernization. Beginning with the establishment of tondenhei—settler-soldiers—waves of migration from Japan’s main islands followed. In response to the nation’s expanding wars abroad—the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War—more than two million settlers eventually made the journey north.

Toward the end of the Second World War, Hokkaido received survivors of devastating air raids on Japanese cities, including the Tokyo firebombing, as well as repatriates returning from Karafuto (Sakhalin) and Manchuria. In the decades that followed, the island continued along the path of postwar recovery, further development, and economic growth. More than a century and a half has passed since the land was given its modern name, and these layers of time now form the ground from which today’s landscapes emerge.

Nearly ten years into his life as a photographer, Tagawa—whose previous work Across The Sea (recipient of the Newcomer Award from the Photographic Society of Japan) drifted across the seas of his hometown Nagasaki—has continued to walk the northern land, as if tracing on foot a movement that parallels the westward drift of the sea.Two decades have passed since his student years. Much has changed, much remains the same.

What kind of place, then, is “Hokkaido”?

On a road trip that carries him across the entire island, the photographer encounters portraits of people, traces inscribed in the land, and the echoes of his own memories. Along the way, he records the scenes that appear before him on medium-format film.

The landscapes that unfold before us stand at the intersection of long durations—where nature and development, memory and history, personal time and modernity converge.

Gazing at the Hokkaido that emerges within these overlapping layers, this photobook quietly brings into view both the island’s present and the layers of time that shape it.

AKAAKA