first day

first day is a handmade dummybook made through my encounter with the newspaper clippings, documents, photographs, and fragments of records my father left behind. My father was the initiator of the Hiroshima Die-In, which began in 1981 in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, and over many years he preserved printed matter and visual traces related to that movement. What remained was not a clean historical archive, but something more personal, partial, and worn: discolored newspapers, blurred ink, traces of selection, habits of cutting, and the bias of preservation itself. On August 6, 2024, restrictions began around the Atomic Bomb Dome. Later that same year, on November 23, my father died. Through these two events, I felt compelled to return to what had been left behind and confront it again. This book is not an attempt to explain Hiroshima or to make a direct political statement. Instead, it tries to hold the weight of time that rose within me when I came into contact with the traces of the movement my father initiated, and with the intensity of his commitment. Through photographs, newspapers, repetition, blank space, the pressure of the spreads, and the physical structure of the dummybook, first day becomes a record of how I received what remained. first day is part of TOBI:UNKNOWN, an ongoing project of handmade dummybooks that gather traces of gaze, memory, and time into physical sequences.