“I spent my entire adolescence, from the age of 6 to 19, in Yokosuka, the place where both my body and mind grew. Yet I do not consider Yokosuka my hometown, and I retain few sweet or happy memories of those years. In a way, this was natural: Yokosuka, a city marked by the presence of the American military base, was not a comfortable place for a girl who had just moved there at the start of primary school. My father worked in Yokosuka, far from our family home in the countryside, and that move was an enormous cultural shock for me, for better and for worse.
 
I began my career as a photographer by photographing Yokosuka. The city's intense contrast between light and shadow somehow created particularly photogenic landscapes, while its own history seemed to leave invisible scars every day. YOKOSUKA STORY, the autobiographical series with which I began my career, is precisely a photographic story about myself and how I grew up under the influence of that atmosphere.
 
From YOKOSUKA forms the final chapter of my series on Yokosuka. To make it, I photographed extensively around Dobuita Street and the EM Club, places I had not photographed in the earlier series. Looking back, I remember that at first I had to force myself to enter those spaces, because they were places parents forbade young girls to visit. The first time, I could not even take a photograph and simply ran home.
 
In the 1980s, Dobuita Street was no longer as busy as it once had been, and most of the cabarets catering to American soldiers had closed. To organise an exhibition of my work, I rented one of those abandoned cabarets for six months, a space of about 330 square metres, and painted its interior walls red with the help of local artists and performers. At night, I closed the premises completely to turn it temporarily into a darkroom. I brought my enlarger there, built a boat-shaped wooden tray myself, cut rolls of photographic paper and enlarged both the images from YOKOSUKA STORY and the new photographs made for From YOKOSUKA. The From YOKOSUKA exhibition brought together 200 photographs, including two prints measuring 180 × 120 cm and ten measuring 120 × 80 cm.
 
The cabaret was called 2nd New YOKOSUKA. It had two stages, a horseshoe-shaped table, seating for approximately fifty people, a mirror ball hanging from the ceiling and a large outdoor neon sign that still worked. During the exhibition, switching on that enormous sign each evening, with its hundreds of bulbs spelling out the name 2nd New YOKOSUKA, became part of my routine.
 
Although it lay outside the American military base, Dobuita Street was a kind of “Little America”. Bars and cabarets bearing the A-sign, “Approved for US Forces”, lined both sides of the street, where business was conducted in dollars. The area had been a thriving entertainment and prostitution district that had grown with successive wars. It was on that same street that I photographed, developed, printed and finally exhibited my images. Through the From YOKOSUKA series, I was able to bring numerous memories and thoughts from the past to the surface, as though printing them on photographic paper.
 
Although it no longer exists, the 2nd New YOKOSUKA cabaret remains in my photographs. The From YOKOSUKA exhibition arose from my confrontation with Yokosuka, a place towards which I had long felt rejection and hatred. I no longer have anything to regret about Yokosuka. Even Yokosuka, understood as a proper name, has moved away from me. The place that had been my starting point finished fulfilling its role and became part of the past. I will probably never visit Yokosuka in reality again.
 
Something has ended. Goodbye, Yokosuka. And thank you, Yokosuka.”