HASEGAWA, Miki - Internal Notebook

Video: https://vimeo.com/341776117#at=0 (by photobookstore.co.uk, thank you!)


"Miki HASEGAWA developed her dummy book titled 'Quiet…' to later become the photobook 'Internal Notebook' in the workshop 'Photo Book Masterclass' in 2015 given by the Dutch book designers Teun VAN DER HEIJDEN and Sandra van der Doelen, and Yumi Goto, the director of Reminders Photography Stronghold.

After the workshop, Miki had further improved the book under the mentorship of Yumi, published limited edition of 66, and held a book launch exhibition at RPS. After the 66 editions were sold out, her dummy won special mention at PHOTOBOOX 2017, a part of an international photo festival PHOTOLUX in Lucca, Italy.
This award led this dummy to be published as trader’s edition of 500 copies.

The cover design and binding technique have been renewed, and part of the images has been re-edited.
It is now bilingual, Japanese and English. CEIBA edition photobook is a faithful reproduction of original photobook by Miki HASEGAWA.

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With her own anxiety that she could have abused her daughter, Miki HASEGAWA started her research on child abuse cases.
HASEGAWA interviewed the child abuse victims, photographed their portraits, and collected and edited materials that summon up their childhood memories such as their diaries, notebooks, and photos.
This photobook project 'Internal Notebook' is her attempt at visualizing the invisible sufferings and traumas of the abused children from her own perspective as a mother and a possible child abuser.

"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.

'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)