…[I]t seems necessary first to ask why [Tomatsu’s] inquiry was important. Why should it

…[I]t seems necessary first to ask why [Tomatsu’s] inquiry was important. Why should it not have been good enough for Japan to be the fifty-first star amid the stripes, as Tomatsu once called it, and, anyway, why did it matter to him? Perhaps it will not be overreaching to propose that the shattering of Japan in the war was also the shattering of Tomatsu himself, and that it was himself he had to re-create, just as the cities had to re-create themselves where little remained but burnt planes. Buried within every person is a point of intersection between the unique matter of which he consists and the generality of the nation in which he was made – a point where one is inextricable from what one believes one’s nation to be –and it is of the essence of Tomatsu’s work that it makes the national personal and the personal national. Beyond this it is difficult to see. – Leo Rubinfien, “Shōmei Tōmatsu: The Skin of the Nation” -- source link

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