Meiro Koizumi

In the State of Amnesia

Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr. Nobuhiro Tanaka, who damaged his brain when he had an accident when he was 21. Since then he has been living with a memory disorder. I asked Mr. Tanaka to memorize a testimony of a Japanese soldier who served in the war in China during WWII. Unlike in Germany, those testimonies of Japanese as aggressors in the Asian countries have been hidden, repressed, and untold in the Japanese society. Today, 70 years after the end of the war, people almost completely forgot what we did in the continent, and how aggressive we were. During the 2 days of shooting, Mr. Tanaka had to memorize a testimony of a Japanese man who confessed his trauma of killing a small boy while on a secret mission. But because of his memory disorder, the camera captured the situation where the more he tried to remember the words, the less he can remember the lines. And in the end, no words came out of his mouth, and all the words escaped from his memory. This footage was used to create the 2 channel video and sound installation.”