Centred on Hokkaido, where Motonari Tagawa spent the years from eighteen to twenty-four, this photobook widens a gaze once directed solely at nature into one that takes in the historical layers of the land, as the distance that came after he moved to Tokyo made the island feel both foreign and a kind of second home. The island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu, was renamed Hokkaido in 1869 and, modelled partly on the United States, was settled and modernised at speed by the new Meiji government, starting with the tondenhei settler-soldiers and followed by waves of migration that, in step with the wars abroad, brought more than two million settlers. At the end of the Second World War it also took in survivors of air raids on Japanese cities and repatriates from the colonies. The book is a road trip through these layers of time.