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Subject: “Tokaido” | Sent: 7/4/98 12:03 PM

From: KP Knoll, explorer@gis.net 

To: Cella_sift@earthlink.net | Enclosure: do(sm).JPG 

Message: My love: the Tokaido (TO: east - KAI: sea - DO: road, path) was built in 1603 to join Kyoto (then imperial residence) and Edo (where the shogun had his capital, now Tokyo). In 1832 the Edo fire brigade traveled down to Kyoto with the "improbable duty" of escorting a horse to Kyoto. The horse was a gift from the shogun to the emperor. Ichiyo Hiroshige was one of the minor officials (artist!) engaged in the undertaking. He was sketching the 53 stations: these were resting points, dictated by tradition and convenience, each one about a days travel from the next. Back in Tokyo he rushed to publish the series consisting of 55 prints (53 stations plus one for Nihonbashi today a very busy subway station) where they started and one for Sanjo Bridge which led them into Kyoto, so the series begins and ends with a bridge. 

. . .

Austrian photographer KP Knoll spent four years in Japan teaching at a national university. Issues of alienation, foreignness, and adaption reigned. When New York artist Cella came to visit in early 1998 she was enamored by faint traces — evidence, a photograph of her estranged parents in an Okinawa train station in 1957, the year she was born. A series of Hiroshige prints from the “53 Stations of the Tokaido” fired both their imagination. They took a road trip retracing Hiroshige’s journey.

Klaus worked with an obscure chinese plastic toy camera, Cella, a pocket-size digital video camera. Barely able to read menus, road signs, station names, much less make sense of a strange familiarity of cultural transplantations, they talked about medieval japanese travellers leaving only a trace in the reeds after a night’s rest and envied them from their sometimes seedy business hotels. They discussed problems of linguistic and cultural translation which occurred between them and a culture that provides an ideal screen for foreigners to project dreams and nightmares onto. 

573 electronic letters and four months later they met again to complete their project. The feeling of otherness, a common theme for both KP Knoll and Cella, became resonant again. For KP Knoll, an alien, residing in a provincial japanese town, there is a sense of not belonging at home, and a longing for Japan when he is not there. For Cella, there is no home except where she is. And,there is an uncanniness in part due to being raised in a moving home surrounded by the souvenirs of her parents' home in Japan before her birth. 

Seven decades after World War II, and a generation removed from the bitter trade wars of the 1980s, Japan and the U.S. developed a sense of mutual trust and respect, as both allies and partners, with an active political, economic and military relationship, though tended to see each other's social traits very differently.

While concerned about the potentially voyeuristic, culturally consumptive aspects of such a project the artists also see a certain irony in their sensitivity to cultural intrusiveness within a culture that mimicked American culture in many ways.