Skinship

Skinship is a Japanese term that describes the skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart relationship between mother and child, or other family members. Through an experience of loving touch, a child learns to care for others.

It is considered important for a child’s healthy development and for strengthening family bonds.

While skinship is widely recognised in Japan, what many people are unaware of is that the term does not actually originate from English culture, but rather has its roots in Japanese culture.

Personally, the concept of skinship felt completely natural to me, even though I had never consciously thought about it or deliberately practiced it before. It was only after I was arrested in New York for my family’s snapshots showing skin-to-skin closeness that I realised how unique and potentially shocking it could be in other cultural contexts.

Back in Japan, I gave birth to my son in 2012. While breastfeeding, there was no longer any distance between my son’s body and my own. It felt symbiotic in a way I had never experienced before. I started to capture that feeling in self-portraits and photographs of my growing son by mother’s eye.

Motherhood liberated me from constraints; the sense of shame about my body and the hypersexualisation of the female body. Making this work has helped me heal wounds from my past.

Dr. Hajime Yamaguchi, a researcher of skinship wrote in his book “about 60 percent of the human body is made up of liquid, and even the skin, which defines the body’s boundary, can be seen as something fluid.” 

The feeling of skinship might be similar to the feeling of being in water. When skin touches skin, skin touches water — like water touching water — boundaries might disappear and elements blend together.