He was holding the rice in one place without moving for over an hour. As he glimpsed at my camera, I wondered “Is he holding the rice to eat? But he hasn’t eaten it during the time that I had been filming him”, “Does he only eat the leaves of the rice plant? But again, he hasn’t been eating whilst I was watching him”, “Is he waiting for tiny insects to eat? But he didn’t seem to be interested in other food”, “Is he just too lazy to move like the grasshopper was in the children’s story ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’? But he wasn’t singing like the grasshopper did in the book”, “If so, is he holding that thing so desperately to not lose it, much like how I desperately hold on to the memories of the one precious to me as he sadly begin to fade away as time goes by?”
It has been over a week since I started doing research about the rice harvest in Shinano-omachi. In doing so, my camera has been capturing rice desperately in order to find some questions in which I as an artist can be examined.
In addition, ‘grasshopper’ in Japanese is ‘Inago(いなご)’ which literally translates to ‘the children of rice’.
