YOSHIKATSU FUJII PHOTO EXHIBITION “Five Before the Fall” December 20 – 28, 2025
As part of our program in December 2025, we are pleased to present Yoshikatsu Fujii’s solo exhibition “Five Before the Fall.”
Fujii, working from the perspective of a third-generation A-bomb survivor (Hibakusha), has been creating the “Hiroshima Graph” series since 2015. Through this long-term project, he has revisited overlooked testimonies of history, traced the lives of people in Hiroshima, and confronted the fading scars of war, with the aim of passing these memories on to future generations.
Emerging from this ongoing exploration, his new work “Five Before the Fall” takes the special attack weapon “Kaiten” as its theme, delving into the questions that lie between personal memory and historical record. Beginning with a fragmentary memory of his grandfather—who once told him, “I used to build human torpedoes”—Fujii examines the reality of the weapon itself, the images of young soldiers smiling in group photographs, and the social atmosphere and individual thoughts behind them. Rather than framing the past as “noble sacrifice,” this work seeks to question why such sacrifices came about, and to continue reflecting on what they mean for us living today.
Coinciding with the exhibition, the artist’s book “Five Before the Fall” will also be published. Updates regarding the exhibition, the book, and related talk events will be shared via social media. We warmly invite you to visit and engage with the work.
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
“Five Before the Fall”
My grandfather once told me his war story when I was a child.
“Listen, grandpa wasn’t caught in the atomic bombing because I was in Kure, I mean, in the Navy. There, I was making human torpedoes, too,” he said. “Of course, nobody told me what they were building, but the blueprints told it all.”
As I had taken it for granted that he was deployed to a battlefront somewhere or caught in the atomic bombing, I found his story somewhat anticlimactic. Still, the image of my grandfather a little proudly telling me “I was in the Navy” remains fresh in my memory.
As a matter of fact, there is zero evidence that he was involved in manufacturing Kaiten, the manned torpedo. No one in my family has ever heard of such a story. It’s just that the words “I was making” coming out of his mouth simply stays in my mind.
Those were the years when laying down one’s life for the country was the ultimate virtue. Ideologies of those in power and the public mindset of the day created those monstrous artifacts — suicide-mission weapons, and consequently many lives of the youth were taken.
Even after the war was over, it has been common practice to see their death as “noble sacrifices” as their stories were passed on. I get this sense of discomfort with the tone of the narrative that justifies the unbearable fact.
To start, it is crucial for us to take a hard look at and ask ourselves what made them sacrifice their lives.
In today’s Japan with the war-renouncing Constitution, it is difficult to imagine people’s sense of value in those days. Nevertheless, I have a strong desire to keep seeking an answer to the question—why did they have to die?
While going through records of the days, I came across a group photo of the members of a suicide-mission unit. In the photo, being aligned in neat lines, they have a big smile on their faces, which is entirely unexpected and surprising to me. I also learned that the suicide mission wasn’t something that was forced on soldiers; rather, they volunteered to carry out the suicide mission. However, that “free will” was in name only; it can be easily imagined that quite a few of them had no choice but to volunteer under invisible pressure. It gives me cold shivers just thinking of how they were really feeling inside behind those smiles.
On the flip side, my grandfather might have been on the “making” end of those horrific weapons. What was on his mind while working on them? What kind of resolve did he have? Perhaps, he may simply have been just doing as he was ordered. Maybe, embroiled in the war, people did not fully grasp the real significance of the death of someone. Even so, why did he tell the story only to me, and not to anyone else in the family? Now that he is long gone, I have no way of knowing the truth.
The memory of the war passed to me by my grandfather himself and those smiling faces of the young soldiers on the suicide-mission captured in a photo are not just bygones simply to be left alone and written off; they are posing questions to us living today. We can truly connect ourselves with the past only by looking hard at the reasons behind oh-so-many sacrifices, keeping reflecting on it, and taking a pledge not to repeat the same mistake ever again. That’s the memory we should quietly engrave in our heart. That’s what I believe.
Text by Yoshikatsu Fujii
Yoshikatsu Fujii Photo Exhibition “Five Before the Fall”
◎Exhibition Period
December 20 (Sat) – 28 (Sun), 2025
Open daily 13:00–19:00 / Admission free
◎Opening Reception & Artist Talk
December 20 (Sat) from around 2:00 PM
Please note that the reception and artist talk will begin at 2:00 PM.
*The exhibition will be open from 1:00 PM.
◎Venue
Reminders Photography Stronghold Gallery
2-38-5 Higashi-Mukojima, Sumida-ku, Tokyo, Japan
(6-minute walk from Hikifune Station, Tobu Skytree Line / 5-minute walk from Keisei Hikifune Station)
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
©︎Yoshikatsu Fujii / Five Before the Fall
Profile｜Yoshikatsu Fujii
A visual storyteller whose practice centers on photography, Fujii has been working on long-term projects exploring memory, family, historical events, and history. He primarily publishes in small-limited edition, hand-bound photo books. Fujii was nominated for the 2014 Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award, received the 2015 Self Publishing PHOTOLUX Award, the 2018 The Anamorphosis Prize, and the 2024 COSMOS PDF AWARD.
His notable exhibitions include: Chobimela International Photo Festival (Bangladesh, 2017), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival “Phantom Pain Clinic” (China, 2017), Breda Photo Festival “To Infinity and Beyond” (Netherlands, 2018), PHOTO 2021 “Not standing still: new approaches in documentary photography” (Australia, 2021), KG+SELECT (Japan, 2021), and the Everspring Museum of Fine Arts curated exhibition” Lived Happily Ever After” (Taiwan, 2022), among others.