MIKI HASEGAWA

INTERNAL NOTEBOOK (signed and numbered)

66 editions only (all made to order) all signed and given the edition number by the artist (this is n°48)

Hardcover

184 pages + Family album archival (25pages)
101 original images, 71 Family album archival images
Languages : Japanese and English edition
232 x 170 mm

Photo/ Text / Edit / Print / Bookbinding : Miki Hasegawa

Concept, edit and art-direction : developed in the 2015 photobook making masterclass by Yumi Goto, Sandra van der Doelen and Teun van der Heijden, in collaboration with Reminders Photography Stronghold.

The number of edition 66 represents the 66th anniversary of the foundation of the Children Charter in Japan on the May 5th, 1951. When Hasegawa found this charter at the end of her daughter’s “Maternal and Child Health Handbook,” she was surprised to know that children had such right, and shocked to discover that such right was not really protected.

This books was shortlisted and awarded by following organizations :
Kassel Dummy Award (Kassel, 2017)
Special mention:
PhotoBoox Award, Photolux Festival (Lucca, 2017)
Unseen Photo Fair Dummy Award(Amsterdam, 2017)
Winner : The 7th Dali International Photography Exhibition Publication Award (Dali, 2017)

In March 2016, the Japanese Academy of Pediatrics announced that they estimated 350 children across the country died due to abuse. According to the Ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare’s tally, roughly 90 children per year die due to abuse, including forced double suicide. So 260 children’s deaths are being overlooked.　

This girl, who experienced violence and abusive speech in the home from the age of 3, is suffering hearing loss as an aftereffect. This boy’s younger brother was killed by their father when he was five, and he continued to suffer physical abuse after that. When this girl was in the second grade, she was left to live alone with only a 10000-Yen note, with no water or electricity supply, and she personally requested help from Child Services.

The men and women who I met told me : “I wasn’t left with any large, visible scars or bruises. The physical violence and abusive language I experienced for many years, the mental control, the sexual abuse, the negation of my individuality, and the neglect, aren’t visible, but they leave major scars which don’t go away. It’s hard to take, but other people can’t see this pain.” They suffer depression, self-harm, dissociation, panic attacks, PTSD, and other ailments, but one cannot see these injuries unless one actively looks for them. And they have written in notebooks about their hard-to-understand emotional pain.

The “Internal Notebook” is a notebook of the emotional cries of children raised in abusive homes. I have taken portraits of them, along with the diaries and notebooks they have kept.
I have also tried to show what their parents were like by arranging their childhood photographs and important possessions that evoke memories of those days. It seemed to me that their parents were no different from the rest of us in thinking that we were normal parents.

The people in this book do not only feel hatred and resentment toward their parents. There are those who feel anger at themselves, unchangeable sadness, and even question whether they must forgive their parents as they desperately keep themselves alive. So we can see that the ones who tormented them were not just their parents but other adults in society as well.

MIKI HASEGAWA