The first impression you get from Taishi Hirokawa's new collection of photographs Still Crazy is of time standing still, a pervasive deathlike stillness. The pulse, breath and noise of life seem to have been almost entirely swept away. These images give you the feeling of looking through binoculars at a distant and strange world.
Yet Hirokawa's theme is certainly not something irrelevant that we can gaze upon serenely, for these photographs show the nuclear power plants currently located all over Japan.

Japan's nuclear reactors at power plants from north to south-said to number 53 in total − are almost exhaustively photographed, from Tomari Power Plant to Maki Nuclear Power Plant, Second Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, Tsuruga Power Plant, Takahama Power Plant and Genkaki Nuclear Power Plant, to name but a few. The collection even includes photographs of nuclear reactors under construction and in operation.
Although these nuclear power plants are situated in various locations throughout Japan, you cannot help noticing as you turn the pages that they all look uncannily alike. Their standardized square or cylindrical structures are set against the natural backdrop of the sea with no sign of movement or humanity. Even after putting the book down, this deathlike stillness lingers on in the mind.

However many pages you turn, you have the irritating sense of making no progress, and even when you reach the end it still feels as if you have remained in the same place from the start. But I do not think these feelings of being transfixed and deja vu come simply from the uniform design of the nuclear power plants or from the similar scenery of their coastal locations. The sensation of deja vu, of being enclosed in one place, as well as the sense of looking back on an event in the distant past, are surely responses that Hirokawa is deliberately aiming to evoke.
Nuclear power plants are a stark, incontrovertible reality. Yet most of us live as if they are none of our business or have become irrelevant to us. Although they are part of reality, we cut them off from our everyday lives and carry on as if oblivious to their very existence. By portraying nuclear reactors as something from a distant world and creating this tense, atmosphere of tranquility and frozen time filled with a mood of deja vu, Hirokawa is apparently trying to expose and criticize this oblivion.

In this respect, the images in this collection that I found particularly interesting were the set of two photographs at the beginning. The first shows families bathing at the seaside. Here is a typical Japanese summertime seaside scene−parasols, boats, and a Shinto torii gate near the beach. Just one thing seems out of place: a nuclear reactor is visible beyond a small rocky mountain on the completely indifferent to its presence.
Waiting on the other side of this page is an image that makes your blood run cold. Like a fixed-point observation study, it is taken from almost exactly the same position as the previous photograph, but now all the bathers have gone, leaving only the nuclear reactor forced to undergo the disturbing experience of seeing our own future. The fascination of Taishi Hirokawa's Still Crazy seems to lie compressed into moments in time.

Yoichi Iijima　Architecture Critic
Asahi camera, November 1994