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The Ooka River (大岡川） runs through Yokohama through at different heights depending on the tide and different colors depending on water quality, cloud cover, and the vagaries of visual perception. It is full of trash: bent bicycles, umbrellas, and home appliances litter its muddy bottom like junk left by the astronauts left on the surface of the moon, very quiet and totally left behind. Leaves, cans, and stryofoam float upon it. But among all that is also home to a remarkable diversity of organisms: fish very big and very small, crabs, turtles, ducks, oysters, a shocking abundance of jellyfish, as well a number of Japanese red rays. All this beneath the window of the apartment where we stayed.
It is brackish water - part salty from Tokyo Bay, part fresh from the flow originating inland. In this way very much like Yokohama, it is a transitory space in which creatures from different worlds and coexist and interact. Jellyfish & stingrays swim alongside ducks & red-eared slider turtles.
Artist Christa Donner and I collaborated on a video that merged elements of the river, the body, space, and flow with animation and video footage taken here in Japan, especially of the Ooka river. "Kawa" can mean "river" in Japanese, but also "skin" as homonyms (they are written differently, as shown in the title of the piece).
As part of the river inquiry I made a zine called "Doubutsu wa dou?" with translates roughly into "What about animals?" It talks about some of the surprising animals that can be found in the Ooka River, as well as problems with pollution and littering... It also asks what animal would you be if you could be one besides a human, and why. On the companion website some of these responses that people can email in are posted along with pictures of the wildlife in the river.
Many thanks to Kione Kochi and Shinobu "Terry" Terada for assistance on this zine project.
