Publisher/影書房

Google翻訳
"Thank You, Tokuyama Village" is a photo collection by Tadako Masuyama (1917-2006), who was born in Tokuyama Village, Gifu Prefecture, and spent her life gazing upon her hometown. When Masuyama learned that her village would disappear due to the construction of a massive dam, she took up a small camera called "Pikkari Konica" in the mid-1970s and continued to photograph the villagers, their houses, farm work, festivals, and the scenery of the four seasons. In a sense, she was not a photographer who took pictures to become a photographer, but a photographer who became one to remember her hometown. Published in 1987, the year Tokuyama Village was abandoned, this book contains approximately 200 color photographs that capture her feelings for her disappearing hometown. Masuyama's husband served in the Imphal Campaign during the war and never returned, and this experience of loss also contributed to her strong will to document things that were disappearing. Families gathered around the dinner table, people at work, children, festivals, and the changing seasons—what is captured there is the everyday life of the people who certainly existed there before the historical event of the "disappearing village." This is an important volume of the vast record that later culminated in "The Complete Photographic Record of Tokuyama Village," and a rare work in which the private memories of one woman eventually opened up to the memories of a community and to the history of Japanese documentary photography.