Scars of the Peninsula (2015) opened the memories of the Tanna Basin, which had been folded into the exhibition space in the previous year’s Memories of Tanna, back out into the basin itself. KURUBUSHI-BASE on the northwest side of the Tanna Fault and Keigetsuzan Chokoji Temple on the southeast side were conceived as two protective housings for wedge-shaped monuments indicating the direction of the fault’s lateral displacement. In the 1930 North Izu Earthquake, the west side of the fault shifted south and the east side north; this actual crustal movement determined the placement and direction of the works. Moving between the two sites expanded the viewer’s scale of imagination from the body to the basin and further to the Izu Peninsula.

The wedge-shaped monuments brought together three backgrounds: an earlier idea for a minimal wall, the massive seawall of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant seen after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the lateral displacement of the Tanna Fault. Even the seawall—22 meters high and 1.6 kilometers long—appeared in aerial photographs as a thin band along the Pacific coast. The sense that a huge human-made structure could appear fragile before the scale of nature transformed the wall into a wedge indicating geological force. Their fault-facing surfaces used polished Otsu plaster under the supervision of Hirokazu Shiraishi and roiro-polished urushi made by me, layering mirror finishes produced by human hands with the geological “fault mirror” created as rock masses grind against one another underground.

During the exhibition, a dialogue with Yohei Kurose, a geology lecture by Masato Koyama, and geotours were held. On the final day, the Chokoji monument was ritually burned after chanting and a soul-removal rite by Chief Priest Kakinuma; the KURUBUSHI-BASE monument was likewise ritually deconsecrated, then cut apart with a diamond cutter and distributed to visitors as keepsakes. Rather than preserving the work permanently, the exhibition included its appearance in the site, the time shared there, and its final disappearance or dispersal. This became decisive for the subsequent direction of the Cliff Edge Project.