Hey! Hattori

At my house I have a cat named Hattori-kun. Hattori-kun fled from Futaba, a town in Fukushima, when the Great East Japan Earthquake devastated the area in 2011.

At the time, I wasn't much interested in photographing cats. But as I spent time with Hattori-kun, I gradually became attracted by his solitariness and at the same time his loveliness.

One day, when I was looking at the photographs in the last few frames of the roll of film I had taken, there was Hattori-kun with an expression on his face that was just like mine. From beyond the coarse granularity of the photographic film, those eyes gazed steadily back at me as if clinging desperately to life. Far from home, completely domesticated, here was his true nature, the expression of a wild animal he showed for a brief moment only to me. "Photographing something loved"

We go with the flow of the scenery outside the small window, and I want to be engrossed forever in taking pictures. But a cat's clock advances at a very fast speed, so I know that Hattori-kun's clock will get ahead of mine and stop before mine does. Until then, I will love this mysterious, elusive creature and capture in photographs the Hattori-kun only I can see.

This photograph collection is a story of love I and Hattori-kun have spun together.