When Eiko Otake and I hiked Mount Oyama just outside Tokyo last November, our conversation drifted from lamenting the fog obscuring our view of Mount Fuji to something far more sobering. Surrounded by a dense, towering forest, we found ourselves talking about death. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. After all, I work in The Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, and Eiko has created three performance pieces there, starting with A Body in a Cemetery (2020), presented with Pioneer Works.

We kept circling back to war—not just the ongoing violence between Israel and Palestine, but also the history of military aggression of and in Japan. It’s invasion of neighboring nations in the Pacific, America’s genocidal air raids in Tokyo, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s a subject deeply personal to Eiko. Born in Japan in 1952, she earned a master’s degree studying literature related to the atomic bomb and frequently teaches on the topic. It clicked for me then why Eiko’s work is so powerful. Her art isn’t a historical reenactment of devastation, nor is her body a passive archive. Instead, she draws our attention to how trauma reverberates and lingers in landscapes—like the empty streets and train stations in Fukushima—and potentially, in our own bodies.

I spoke with Eiko over Zoom while she was on tour with Wen Hui, performing What is War (2025), a new multimedia work. In the trailers posted online, their entangled bodies twist and turn, weaving together a series of personal recollections about war. They don’t (and perhaps never could) offer solutions for ending conflict, but instead pose a more pressing question: What is life in the shadow of war?

I want to start with the piece that you're currently touring, What is War. So much of it is about your personal recollections of conflict. What are your experiences growing up in post-war Japan?

I was born in 1952, which happened to be the year America’s occupation ended. It wasn't the Allies’ occupation, it was America’s alone. Japan’s delay in inevitable surrender allowed the US to air raid most Japanese cities and drop two atomic bombs. I grew up reading novels and seeing films created by the people who experienced World War ll. Even comic books had grotesque stories and descriptions, which I later realized were created by World War ll survivors. I learned that Japan’s military men often mistreated prisoners of war. Soldiers were taught not to surrender, but to kill and die. While they might not have talked about their experiences when they came back, artists depicted the horrors. My family was a little different. My father pretended he had tuberculosis. My uncle was sent to Manchuria, but he surrendered to Soviet troops and became a POW in Siberia for four years. He wrote about this experience later. My other uncle was a painter but pretended to be blind. So at a young age, I learned that even if people can’t change a system under fascist power, they might still try to disobey. When I was a child, I was surrounded by grown-ups who regretted Japan’s aggression in World War II. I knew many victims of America’s air raids, but they, too, recognized that Japan’s military perpetrated violence in the countries they invaded. Another side of the war, however, was that around 65% of Japanese soldiers starved to death. War is grotesque. It kills not only other countries’ people, but their own people.

You're making me think about Japan's current depopulation crisis. In a recent T Magazine photo essay capturing impermanence in Kyoto and Koyasan's landscape and abandoned buildings, the author wrote tellingly about "the discomfort of living in the knowledge that all steady states must collapse."

So many young people move to the big cities, especially Tokyo. There are communities that no longer have a bus line because so few people live there. It is not the Japan I grew up in.

You return to Japan often in your work. In a large series of photographs with William [Bill] Johnston, he captures you wandering the deserted streets of Fukushima. You went one, two, three times?

I went there six times. Five times with him starting in 2014. Our last visit was in 2019.

What was that experience like?

I saw how every land, every community, is so vulnerable. At this point even natural disasters are hard to distinguish from human ones, due to global warming—though a nuclear meltdown is clearly a man-made disaster. Near the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, communities became a no-man's land for a long time, because their people had to be evacuated. When humans were gone, plants and animals thrived and took over the land, yet everything was radiated. It's very upsetting. But it was important for me to be there and to be upset. You can measure the radiation by machine but you cannot see or smell it, even though you know it is there. As an artist and as a human being, thinking and knowing is not enough. I need to feel it so deeply that I cannot forget. If my body is upset, can other people see that in the photograph, or the video? If so, will they remember, too?

I wouldn’t have brought anyone else with me to Fukushima except Bill, who is a historian. In our early visits, the radiation was still high. I went because I was older, and radiation is more dangerous for younger people.

How has getting older affected your work? Or how do you think it will affect the next phase of your career?

When I was younger I had other obligations, from which I am now free. I can work as much as I want to. My parents are dead. Many friends I am happy to spend time with are also dead. My children are in their 30s and 40s. I'm 73 and a workaholic. I don’t know how many more years I have, so nothing is holding me back.

We've worked together now three times, and in our personal conversations we've talked often about aging. Stone 1 (2024), with Margaret Leng Tan, was a very physical performance. You both were constantly moving around Green-Wood’s historic chapel dragging, rearranging, and sometimes tossing piles of rocks. You were only illuminated by this large projection on the walls—a film that you made in a rock quarry in Sweden. You’ve asked me before, "What does it mean for our two aged bodies to have these large, massive rocks around us?" I'm curious how you would answer that.

I've been performing for 53 years, so this wrinkled body is like an older tree, and the old tree is still walking around. There's a texture to my body that is old, though granted some trees are much much older. But when I compare my body to stone, stone is more dense than a tree. Stone time is a whole lot longer than tree time. It’s humbling. Next to the stone, my time is really small. When I am with a material that is so different from our bodies, my understanding of all life shifts. We have joints where we bend, we have skin. It hurts when we do aggressive things. When Margaret and I performed with the stones, our audience saw a different time from our human time scale. We are both in our 70s. Yet our lives are still so short next to stone.

Working in a cemetery, there's this vulnerability to being around the dead, to talking about death, to talking about grief. In some ways I’d imagine it’s the same vulnerability with your body on display. The viewer is witnessing you and recognizing your body and how it’s aged, as you’re saying, in comparison to geological time.

It’s a very concrete feeling, holding stones. They’re heavy. They are hard. They hold a time that is of a different scale.

A cemetery is intended to be a forever place. You buy a lot, you build a memorial, and you think it will last the rest of time. What happens in 10,000, 20,000, 25,000 years? Cemeteries can’t last forever. Gravestones disintegrate, they fall over, they sink. Names become obscured. People stop visiting. The bodies buried deep underground don't stay in place. They get compacted, just like the earth does.

That is one of the reasons why I love working in a cemetery. People die. It’s on display. There's such a massive amount of what used to be bodies within the landscape. And even though you don't want to think about it when you walk through there, you know it on a subconscious level. When I performed A Body in a Cemetery, which was in late September in the middle of COVID, we chose a site that you had to walk a long while to get to. By the time I ended my performance, the sky was darker. When I performed Stone 1, all these fireflies came into the chapel. In Japan we say fireflies are the spirit of the dead. It was beautiful. And it just happened. It was the time of the year, the time of the day, the weather. In a cemetery we give away our power of planning and our power of choreography. We become an extension of the landscape and the time this cemetery holds.

Because Green-Wood is a beautiful, rural environment from the nineteenth century, sometimes people are like, "Oh, it's a park." But I always make sure to correct them. "No, we're a cemetery." You can't get away from the dead here. And in some ways we shouldn't get away from the dead. With A Body in a Cemetery, you were the sole performer in this massive, natural amphitheater in the middle of Green-Wood. You were attending to the gravestones, wrapping them, washing them, paying your respects. The audience was watching you in this beautiful act of care. It was at a poignant time, in the early days of the pandemic, when so many people were just taking stock of how much had been lost. Being there in the cemetery forced them to look deeper at that loss.

It's important to think about death. In a cemetery it can become abstract, even though there’s evidence of it all around you. It's not as immediate and sad as visiting your closest friend dying in a hospital. A cemetery is a great place for a human being to feel and to be able to think about death beyond our fading body, our friends who died, or maybe my grandchild who is going to live way beyond my life. Sometimes the grandchild passes before the grandmother, which is a tragedy, but there's nothing we can do to change that. I found so many graves for young children there too. The good thing is that even though we may not want to die, when we do, there might be a sense of attention given to it. That is what I call a personal death, unlike a massive death.

For me it gets personal. My husband is a priest who deals with death a lot. He describes religion beautifully as providing a framework for understanding what you're experiencing rather than simply saying, “Don’t worry about it.” I know not everyone is religious, but it does help to remind us we're not alone in facing mortality.

I'm not religious, but when my mother and father died, both of whom were not religious, we still had a Buddhist monk come. His chant allowed us to think and weep collectively with the people who knew them. I appreciated that religion made a certain culture that enabled us to collectively mourn rather than look at each other, not knowing what to do or what to say. You don't have to be a consumer buying an expensive gravestone. You just need to do what you think is appropriate to mark death. Not having an occasion is harder, at least for me. In war there are mass killings, in which your dying does not get personal attention or care. You die in the middle of many people screaming. Not only is your life taken away, but so is your individual death. I find that to be upsetting.

But even if you have a good death, in the comfort of your home, let's say, where there’s a funeral service and lots of people come, eventually memories of a person will fade. When does someone really die? When they are thought of for the last time?

My mom is very much still on my mind, because I talk about her with my sons, my friends, my cousins. But that will stop when I die. I remember my teacher performing his dances. I'm very much encouraged by my own recollection of those moments. I do remember. I think the death of someone I care about brings that person’s voice more vividly into my body. As I get closer to dying, I might ask myself what I want others to remember about me, and then I’ll ask myself once more. ♦