the Japanese islands of Florent Chavouet

By Guillaume Loiret

Posted today at 6:00 p.m.

Is it the song of the cicadas, the stifling heat, or the spectacle of the pines flowing into the waves? There is something Mediterranean in the Seto Sea, this long maritime corridor that stretches in the center of Japan, between Kôbe and the Strait of Shimonoseki. But in this mare nostrum to the 700 islands discarded like confetti, where desertification advances and vegetation invades the ruins, Japan seems to be returning to the wild. So much so that on some islands, men have given way to animals. Thousands of cats, rabbits, deer or peacocks have become the main occupants. “It’s like a great replacement, but by animals”, laughs Florent Chavouet, who has seen the islands of the Inland Sea of ​​Japan (Seto Naikai) change during the ten or so trips that have brought him here.

Florent Chavouet, in Okinawa, Japan, in 2016.

“The island is a land that fascinates me, and in particular the way the Japanese populate it. I am easy prey for this kind of environment, because it is very different from what I experienced when I was little. ” For him who grew up in the middle of France, in a flat and rural Nivernais, the islander is immediately exotic. The loving island, it decentre. After a trip to Tokyo from which he made his first Japanese album (Tokyo Sampo, editions Picquier, 2009), Florent Chavouet imagines the robot portrait of his ideal island – “An ordinary island, with a population of less than 500 inhabitants, accessible without a bridge” – and chooses a little at random that of Manabeshima, where he will spend two months, armed with a sketchbook and a rudimentary Japanese (Manabeshima, Picquier, 2010). Since then, he has returned to the region at the rate of one trip per year. By ferry, on foot, or by bike on the Shimanami Kaidô, a 70 km cycle path that connects several islands in the Seto Sea.

The Santora hotel-hostel on Manabeshima Island in 2014.

Florent Chavouet found the Japan that suits him there. Country, funny. The simplicity of relationships, the sense of the collective, the shôchû (potato, rice or barley brandy) that we share. A kind of homecoming, because the Japanese word which means “island”, shima, originally referred to a village community. There, he also likes the peaceful rhythm, the time that slowly slides over days punctuated by the back and forth of the ferry. “The Japan of the small islands is a Japan which has time, which gardens, which lives outside. It is a certain luxury, which contrasts with what can be seen in Tokyo. “

Our selection : Motionless trip to Japan

But this oil sea and its peaceful islands have not always lived at a senator’s train. The Setouchi region has long been the Japanese terminus of the Silk Road, and a necessary passage when sailing from China to the heart of the country, Kansai (Kyoto-Nara-Osaka region), trying to avoid the pirates who swarmed there. Seto was thus a “Corridor of civilization”, wrote about her the geographer Philippe Pelletier, before becoming in the so-called high growth period (1955-1973) an industrial sea: steel, paper and petrochemical factories grew there, causing ecological disasters from which the region suffers again.

You have 53.05% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.