shashasha

In the Miyakoan language spoken in the southwest of Okinawa, the word “Sudiru” means “rebirth” or “resurrection.” The book presents a crossover between Keisho Okamoto (1938–2024), folklorist and head priest of the Ryuhozan Shoun-ji temple on Miyako Island, and his grandson, the calligraphy artist Daichiro Shinjo.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, Keisho Okamoto researched and recorded the local beliefs and folklore of Miyako and the surrounding islands. His photographs, originally not intended for publication, capture practices and rituals held in various villages. These events, rooted deep in the past, express a profound spiritual connection with nature.
Divided into nine chapters, "Sudiru" presents Okamoto’s photographs in dialogue with Shinjo’s calligraphic art.
In addition to Okamoto’s photographs and Shinjo’s calligraphy, the book illuminates their collaborative project through a conversation between the two, and includes further information on Okamoto’s work and Miyako’s local beliefs in essays by Takanori Shimamura and Naoki Ishikawa, along with extensive captions and a foreword by Daichiro Shinjo.

“It felt to me that I was seeing something unchanging personified by the people in my grandfather’s photographs that contradicted the changes in the landscapes of Miyako Island I noticed each time I returned home. here are people who held nature in reverence, were sincere in their prayers to the gods, and lived in harmony on the island as a community of individuals with shared values and traditions in alignment with the natural world This is the beauty of Miyako Island, this is its unchanging abundance, and I feel that ‘rebirth’ is truly the spirituality that continues to nurture them.”
― from Daichiro Shinjo’s foreword