DOMYAKU （土脈）The Veins of the Earth

As the history of an old farming household draws to a close on land bearing ancient remains, I see within loss a return to the earth—a current flowing into new life.

I live in a rural area of Japan where ancient archaeological remains survive. Through marriage, I became part of a farming family rooted in this land for several centuries, and I have spent much of my life here. Through photographs of my family, the living beings around me, and landscapes changing with the seasons, DOMYAKU explores the invisible flow of time and memory through the land.

DOMYAKU is a word I coined. In Japanese, do（土） means earth or soil, while myaku（脈） refers to veins, pulsations, and the currents through which life and memory are passed on. I feel that the earth, like the human body, has veins running through it.

I photograph present-day landscapes reflected in an old mirror preserved in our house. Through it, I seek traces of the past inscribed in this land and the presence of those who once lived here. Faces in an old group photograph, the bodies of family members living today, and cherry blossoms returning each year hold different layers of time that overlap within my daily life.

The village is gradually losing its inhabitants, and the house our family has cared for across generations is approaching the end of its continuity. I once understood this transformation as loss. Troubled by my inability to pass on the history of the house, I watched the landscape change.

Yet as people became fewer, plants spread over houses and paths, and animals returned, I began to recognize another time unfolding—a time different from our own. The gradual disappearance of a house may also be a process through which the land returns to nature. Where buildings decay and return to the soil, new life is already beginning to emerge.

Death is not the opposite of life, but part of a cycle that never ceases.

Walking around my home, I photograph the life unfolding in everyday moments and the traces left by past existences. Through my relationship with one house and its surrounding land, I explore how all forms of life, including human beings, exist within the earth’s continuing cycle.