shashasha

Japanese artist Keijiro Kai immerses himself in traditional fighting festivals around the world, exploring the origins of the sport (for example, in series such as "Shrove Tuesday" and "Opens and Stands Up") and essential questions about human culture and life. In recent years, Kai has focused on festivals in Japan.
The photographs in "Ashes to Ashes" were taken in 2018 and 2023 and depict the Toba Fire Festival, which has been held at the Toba Shimmeisha Shrine in Nishio, Aichi for more than 1200 years. Two huge pillar-like torches are lit and participants, divided into two teams, jump in and out of the fire to retrieve sacred trees and ropes.
Kai shows these scenes up close, as if he were part of the teams. His spectacular photographs capture the heat of the fire, the thick smoke, the exhaustion, the relief, the danger, the primordial chaos that unfolds and transforms the festival into a temporary manifestation of another world.

“Fire never grows old or mossy – it is always old, new, and perpetual. For 1200 years the same fire has emerged every year and raged through this town. The participants are deressed in the traditional costumes passed down from their ancestors, crafted from narrow nobori flags – they unknowingly establish a connection with the past as they immerse themslves in a fire identical to that witnessed 1200 years ago.”
― from Keijiro Kai’s afterword