shashasha

With her “Internal Notebook”, Japanese artist Miki Hasegawa explores the topic of child abuse in Japan. Driven by her own anxiety of inadvertently abusing her own children, Hasegawa began to research this delicate, difficult topic.

Presented using photographs, inserts and fold-outs, diary entries, notes, quotations and reports, Hasegawa attempts to give visual shape to suffering and trauma that are an invisible part of society. Though the topic itself is—sadly—universal, Hasegawa’s “Internal Notebook” approaches the issue in the specific context of Japanese society. Through closer looks at numerous specific cases, she provides external overviews as well as the individual perspectives of the victims of child abuse, without losing sight of the conditions (personal and social) that may have contributed to the abusers’ actions.

“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.” (from the artist’s statement)

All texts included in Japanese and English translation.