This haunting portrait reveals the suppressed history of marriages long considered taboo
EDITOR’S NOTE: explodeWe look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling the stories of how both modern and historical images are created.
Under a sheer white cloth, four family members sit together on tan leather chairs; The woman in the middle is holding a baby in her arms. They stare sharply at the viewer; Their hidden but visible state is a powerful metaphor. Now in their 60s, they were born to a Japanese soldier and his Vietnamese wife during the years when Japan occupied Vietnam in World War II. Like others born from these taboo unions, they dealt with social difficulties and the lifelong absence of their fathers. Although some troops remained after the war, many families faced forced separation by the mid-1950s, when soldiers were asked to return.
Such was the case for the family of Lê Thị Xuân and Yoshiharu Shimizu (Vietnamese name Nguyễn Văn Đức), who had two sons and a daughter pictured above. When photographer Phan Quang took this portrait of the siblings in 2014, the family consisted of four generations, including the great-grandchild sitting on the woman’s lap. The photo is from “Re/cover,” a larger multi-year series that Phan started and completed a decade ago to tell the stories of these families. In each of the portraits, she is covered with a white veil, a symbol of both marriage and silence. Some of the work will be exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in France this summer and autumn.
Due to Japan’s occupation, any union between Japanese soldiers and Vietnamese women was subject to extreme prejudice, including its military’s harrowing history of sexual slavery through “comfort women.” In “Re/cover,” Phan sought out families whose untold stories were born of mutual consent and love.
“Japanese soldiers who married local women were often looked down upon by their peers because these women came from a ‘smaller’ country at the time,” Phan said. “On the other hand, Vietnamese wives and children were stigmatized because they bore the lineage of a former occupying force.” Their children’s dual identity led to legal and social difficulties, a kind of intermediate situation in which they were unable to fully integrate into Vietnamese society or visit their father’s hometown.
“It was as if their lives had been completely erased by history, and they themselves seemed stuck in a melancholy cycle of the past, with no way out,” Phan added.
Lê Thị Xuân photographed for “Re/cover”. Xuân was one of the few living wives Phan Quang was able to locate when he began his research. -Phan Thanh Quang
While Phan was doing the work, he recalled that Xuân, one of the few Vietnamese wives still alive, “spoke of her love with surprising warmth and devotion.” The photographer said Shimizu voluntarily stayed in Vietnam after World War II to join the Việt Minh resistance opposing the French colonial occupation. The couple married in Hanoi and lived together for nine years before breaking up with Shimizu. “Their love was genuine, and she remained deeply proud of her husband and carefully guarded his belongings for decades.”
Without recognition from the Japanese government or a way to Shimizu’s family in Vietnam Although they emigrated, they never reunited as a family. Phan explained that Shimizu faced difficulties when he returned to Japan in 1955 and was unable to support them financially. In 1986, when Vietnam underwent historic reforms and began opening the country to travel, he returned with his new Japanese wife to see his adult children. Xuân “received them both with extraordinary generosity,” he added.
Finding the families of “re/cover” posed challenges for Phan, who spent years of reporting experience tracking them down and gaining their trust. Although he wrote more than 200 letters to Japanese consulates, historical institutions, and other organizations, he received inadequate responses, attributed to the sensitive nature of the subject.
While developing the series, she thought of the curtain as a visual medium after visiting a traditional Japanese kimono workshop in 2013. Phan saw connections between Japan and Vietnam in the use of the curtain; A factory in Kyoto began producing voile fabric for kimonos in 1955; He explained that the same fabric is also widely used for bridal veils in Vietnam. The year 1955 was also a symbolic year as it was the year Japanese soldiers left Vietnam. He said bringing the fabric from Japan to Vietnam “created an invisible connection” between the two countries.
“Re/cover” blends both staged photography and documentary. Curator Nadine Hounkpatin, who is organizing a larger exhibition in Arles that includes Phan’s paintings, said that the body of work shows types of photography that tell deeper truths.
“Even a decade after its creation, Re/close remains a compelling reflection on photography’s ability to organize, well beyond its claim to record the meaning of the world,” he wrote in the exhibition’s press materials.
Japan at the time Phan was making the series some steps Recognizing and repairing shattered history with the meeting of former Emperor Akihito with 16 children descended from these Vietnamese and Japanese marriages in 2017. Phan said it was his “deepest wish” that the families he photographed would be recognized as citizens.
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