Chroniclers of Water (2018) was held at the Kano River Museum sixty years after the 1958 Kanogawa Typhoon. Survivor interviews and archival photographs digitized for the project reconsidered a disaster still remembered in Izu but receding into history. The museum itself held extensive records of the typhoon yet was little known even locally. Cliff Edge Project organized the exhibition; Takuya Isomura, Yusuke Suzuki, and I produced the video, Aya Suzuki composed the music, and Hideki Ishii, Kazuo Kogure, and Keiji Matsumoto appeared as people who had experienced the typhoon.

At the center was a 31-minute interview with Matsumoto, who had watched the flood from higher ground in Kumasaka and long hesitated to call himself a “victim” because his house was not washed away and he had not even been wet. His testimony was shown with archival photographs, a brick from the washed-away Ohito Bridge, a replica and 3D data of the Yuai no Zo memorial, and ladders recalling improvised crossings during the flood. During the exhibition, Matsumoto also stood in the museum and spoke directly with visitors. Through the exhibition, the inquiry deepened from geological and civil-engineering traces remaining in the land toward individual memory and silence. This left a question that would continue afterward: how can someone outside a disaster approach the experience of those directly affected?

Related programs included Mitsuhiro Wakayama’s photo exhibition Typhoon and Order and the talk “Art Updates Disaster History.”