Nature's Treatment

Nature's Treatment: Statement

Humans attempt to stabilize landscapes. They line coastlines with wave-dissipating blocks, install concrete lattices on hillsides, and dam rivers. Slope protection frameworks, river revetments, erosion control weirs—each of these structures constitutes an intervention applied to failing terrain. Nature's Treatment is a project that reframes such civil engineering interventions as medical acts—as forms of treatment—and documents their progress through photography.

Treatment is always accompanied by uncertainty. At the moment of intervention, we cannot know whether it is correct. Its effectiveness is confirmed only years, or decades, later—and sometimes even that assessment is overturned. Treatment is nothing other than the act of making choices without knowing their outcomes.

Two experiences underlie this project.

In early childhood, I suffered from Kawasaki disease—an acute febrile vasculitis of unknown origin that remains unexplained more than half a century after its discovery. Because my symptoms were clearly manifested, I was photographed and recorded as a case sample. I became part of a medical chart. The accumulation of such patient records eventually led to the establishment of treatment methods that minimize aftereffects, even without understanding the cause. But when I was treated, that knowledge did not yet exist, and I was left with lasting effects. I continue to be monitored through regular checkups.

The second experience was my father's stroke. At the hospital where he was taken, a different diagnosis was given. Suspecting a stroke based on his condition, I decided to transfer him to another hospital. My father survived. But what I want to convey here is not a narrative of "my judgment was correct." I still cannot rule out the possibility that a different choice might have led to a different outcome. Choices are irreversible, and the appropriateness of an intervention can only be assessed in retrospect.

When I saw the rows of wave-dissipating blocks on the Notsuke Peninsula, I recognized the same structure. There is something to protect, a line is drawn, an attempt is made to fix it in place. But whether that intervention was correct cannot be known at this moment. Assessment always arrives late.

I was once on the side of being recorded in a medical chart. Now I photograph from the side that creates charts. Each photograph is a progress record of treatment applied to the land. I do not judge the rightness or wrongness of intervention. I simply observe and document moments when human boundary-drawing cannot keep pace with the speed of nature. The record exists as material for someone in the future to render judgment. Just as the record of my Kawasaki disease changed the treatment of later patients, this record of landscape, too, is left for an evaluation not yet visible.