Photographers I like: Satoko Hashimoto

There are so many absolute fabulous photographers here in Japan which still have no web site, so they are practically unknown outside of Japan. I decided to start a series of introductions to some of these photographers and their projects.

Satoko Hashimoto is one of these photographers. She did such an impressive, unusual project which cumulated into one of the best exhibitions I ever saw. The project is called 蝸 (translated as “Snail Shell”) and shows the inside of the huts of homeless people living in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

But how she was able to get these pictures is even more impressive.

I’ve met Satoko at the end of 2001, she replied to an ad I posted, looking for a bilingual assistant. She just came back from a trip to Uzbekistan and was not very happy with the photos she took, so in exchange for helping me with my shootings, I taught her the basics of photography.

She was a very fast learner and a natural talent, so it was a pleasure to watch her progressing and deciding to turn her life around by starting to study photography seriously at the Tokyo College of Photography.

One day we found ourselves in the Ueno park in Tokyo, where I tried to get the trust of some of the homeless people living there because I was curious about their life and wanted to document it for an assignment. It was very difficult, especially being a foreigner, so Satoko made all the talking.

Somehow she was convincing enough that I got great background stories and was able to get permission to photograph some of the homeless people and their improvised huts. In a surprising chain of events, we soon got introduced to “The Boss of Ueno Park“, an impressive man who basically was the leader of the people living there. We didn’t even know that the homeless people were kind of organized and even followed a strict hierarchy, but all suddenly made sense.

Unbeknownst to me, Satoko was always interested in social issues and always looked at homeless people and wondered how they lived, but she never could imagine simply to start talking to them…fortunately being my assistant, I made her to and she realized that they are regular people, just living for whatever reasons under totally different circumstances.

After a couple of visits in the park, my involvement ended and I worked on different projects. But for Satoko it was not over, she became even more interested, befriended the “Boss of Ueno Park” and visited him regularly. She always brought a camera but never used it, because she wanted to create a trustful relationship first. Many visits later she made a decision and asked the Boss if she can stay in the park, living like the homeless. He was surprised, but agreed to her unusual experiment.

This is how it started. For the next 6 weeks Satoko was living in the park, had her own hut and became involved. In short time, the homeless people became like a second family to her. She always carried a camera but photographed her new family only if she got permission, which happened about 6 out of 10 times she asked.

It was all a very unique and new situation for her, she learned about the hierarchy among the homeless, the unwritten rules, the daily routine, how simple live can be and the incredible back stories of the people living around her.

While technically living in the park was not allowed, the park organization, the local police and the homeless had some kind of symbiotic relationship and were tolerated. For example the homeless cleaned the park every morning and – organized by the Boss – even left the park temporarily without trace when the emperor announced a visit in one of the many museums in Ueno park.

The day started early for Satoko and her new family, every morning they got up at around 5:00 to 5:30am, then cleaned the park of trash and leaves before they had a simple breakfast. After breakfast, some of the homeless went to work, others stayed in the park or attended the countless religious charity organized events, where – after confirming the match of their religion (which the homeless handled very flexible, changing their believes based on who organized it) – they got free food.

Since nobody had electricity in their huts, they went to bed after the sun went down at around 20:00 to 20:30 every day, basically living the simple life just as people a hundred years earlier.

Additionally to portraits she took in the park, she became very interested in the improvised, but often cozy huts the homeless built to live in. At first she photographed them with her Nikon F3, but she decided that the camera was not appropriate for the level of detail she found in the huts, so she started to use a huge 6×8 FujiFilm GX 680 film camera for this task.

After 6 weeks of living in the park, she went back into her apartment to develop the first films and – living healthy outside in the fresh air and not being used to air condition anymore – she developed pneumonia and spent the next 3 weeks in a hospital.

When she was released, she regularly came back to the park to keep in contact and soon moved back and kept working on her series.

All together she spend several months living in the park.

Showing her pictures to the Tokyo College of Photography, she received a lot of praise and got encouraged to hold an exhibition.

At the end of 2006, almost 2 years after she moved first into the park, she held 2 very successful exhibitions in the Nikon Salon in Tokyo (see first photo) and Osaka.
After the exhibitions she also got featured in the influential Japanese magazine Aera with a double spread.

The last picture below was her very own home of several months in Tokyo’s Ueno park.

Today she still keeps going to the park and still takes pictures of the people and their huts, but times have changed, the Boss moved away and the former friendly coexistence between the park organization and the homeless is broken, so most of the people who live there now don’t really own semi-permanent huts and sleep unprotected or just under a sheet of plastic. The number of homeless people however has increased.

I really am a fan of Satoko, because I rarely met a photographer who showed that much commitment to create the photos she wanted. So I look forward what she comes up with next!

Satoko Hashimoto can be reached at satokohashimoto {at} hotmail {dot} com.