N6 - 4q: Kyoto

Shunning human interaction aside from his family, Kyoto has gone further into his own mind, perhaps searching for solace.

He has decided that he does not want to understand or speak english. As he gets accustomed to his new surroundings where he no longer has to, he is speaking to the people around him about things that seem illogical. 

He talks about a boy, his boy. Not his forty-two year old son who came to visit him with his nineteen year old granddaughter three days before he left the United States (see http://n64qkyoto.tumblr.com/post/55849525281/7-18), but a boy that plays with light and has the moral fortitude to be kind to all people.

The resounding thud of the towel being thrown in sets in deep, resounding in the bones of a man's skull down to the base of his spine.

In the new hospital back in his home town of Nishinomiya, Kyoto is dealing with the implosion of his dreams, face to face. A younger man with the physical capacity fit to do something about it would be pondering options filled with grim. Kyoto doesn't have that choice. He is stuck in bed forced to be taken care of as he waits out the rest of his life in a dry daze. 

T minus 12.5 hours...

Late yesterday evening or early this morning, Kyoto's sister made it clear that her daughter persuaded her to keep the foreigner with a camera out of their home. She apologized profusely and appreciates all the help Kyoto is getting on this side of the world. I will meet her and her daughter at the Tokyo train station.

Less than 3 days till departure and Kyoto's life is going through one dramatic turn after another. Today he met his son who he hadn't seen since he was a baby (around forty years) who introduced him to his granddaughter. The family was filled with mixed emotions as they looked back at the genes they came from. 

Kyoto's family is feeling pressure from the idea of a foreigner coming along with their brother judging by the swing of their response from welcoming to reticent. The feelings are completely understandable. 

Today when we went to the hospital to visit Kyoto, Chika had a chance to talk to his sister on the phone. She explained my artistic visions to her up to a certain extent. Confused about this foreigner that is following a brother she considers a failure, and homeless, back to Japan, she is nonetheless being very helpful and open to the idea.

Hello and good day! My name is Sasha Gransjean and I am an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California.

I am currently working on a short film series based on the themes of nature vs. technology that mixes reality and fiction, weaving documentary and produced footage together to tell a story. 

Recently, one of the subjects in the series underwent some huge changes in his life. 

In 1968, Kiichiro (or Kyoto as he is known to his friends in Los Angeles) left his company job in Japan, along with all the security that went along with it, and came to the US in search of social revolution. His idols at the time were socialist leaders like Fidel Castro and revolutionaries like Che Guevara.

Times were hard and to try and find stability for himself in the US, he opened a small aquarium in Los Angeles where he began to sell pet fish to people in the neighborhood.

More than 40 years later, that's where I found him. The aquarium had an air of forgotten magic about it and I didn't know how I could work a story into it but I knew it needed one so I went there with a talented photographer (and good friend), Chika Okazumi, and we began to talk to him and ask about his life, film his shop and what it had become.

He was using the biological system of filtration for his fish tanks which gave everything in his shop the feeling of being alive. The shop had become not only his life but his home. Fish were selling slowly for a while so he had moved in and was sleeping on a couch-bed that blended in with the forgotten air of the rest of the shop. It seemed like a portal to another time; just another hole in the wall store in the big bustling city of Los Angeles.

In the course of knowing Kyoto, he has been evicted from his fish shop and through the support of long time friends and customers he has been helped into a nice home for the elderly. Being in the shop was no longer something he could manage financially, or physically. Kyoto has a body that is much older than his 73 years and a spirit that still yearns for the revolution he came to this country in search of. 

As if seeing him through that major change in his life wasn't enough, he has now has decided to go back to Japan.

He has not seen his sister (whose husband is sick with cancer) or his brother in close to half a century. He will be reunited with them soon and I will be escorting him home. 

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