shashasha

“Okinawan Prospects” is the seventh entry in Kazuyuki Kawaguchi’s “Prospects” series. The concept of the series is to observe a region’s history and to document its future prospects. While the previous six issues featured regions on Japan’s four main islands, “Okinawan Prospects” focuses on areas closely related to the history of the Ryukyu Islands, in particular Amami Oshima, ie, Okinawa, Iheya and Kikai. Shot over 15 years in the latter half of Japan’s Heisei period (1989–2019), Kawaguchi documents Okinawa’s changing cityscapes, the daily lives of its people, the state of its nature, and the ever-present blue sea that surrounds it all, photographed with an eye not for the idiosyncratic vistas that stick out from the rest, but for the many inconspicuous scenes and sceneries that together form a place’s identity.