Statement
In 1957, my relatives emigrated from Japan to Bolivia.
In 2023, I visited Bolivia for the first time, following in their footsteps. How had they lived there? Had they been happy? I wanted to learn about their experiences and the community they had built.
As I traced unfamiliar histories, the circumstances of their migration, and the years they had lived through, my interest expanded beyond the story of a single family to the people who had made their lives on that land and the generations that followed. What does the place the first generation once set out for as their “destination” mean today to their descendants born there? I returned to Japan with this question.
To explore it, I began the project Destination and returned to Bolivia in 2026. Across generations, both the distance from Japan and the relationship with the land change. Yet these changes cannot be understood solely through the categories of first, second, third, and fourth generation. I sought to trace them through people and their surroundings: forests, cultivated land, homes, roads, and what remains.
For the first generation, Destination was a place they crossed the ocean to reach. For those born there, however, its meaning is different. Destination is more than a geographical place.
Has this land, once the destination of the first generation, now become a destination for their descendants?