Production photographs – Tsunagu/Connect Live

Photographed by Ikin Yum

“No one knows how many Japanese women live in the UK. No one knows their reasons for moving here. No one knows their varied loves or hates, their achievements or mistakes, their opinions and contradictions. No one knows their stories… So we asked them.”

Production photographs of Tsunagu/Connect Live, photographed by Ikin Yum. Premiered in 2022 at Shoreditch Town Hall.

Four Japanese women are your tour guides on a kaleidoscopic journey across continents and decades, from Shōwa era Japan to the bedsits of 90’s London, via the Empire Windrush’s final voyage and present-day immigration nightmares.

Memories. Fears. Aspirations. The women reveal the complex, multi-layered reality of migrants reconciling with rootlessness.

“What price must we pay to create a third space, in neither one nation nor the other, where we finally have room to be ourselves?”

Where exhibition meets performance, Tsunagu/Connect Live is an immersive promenade adventure, inspired and informed by the stories of women who were born in Japan but who have settled in the UK since 1945.

23 – 30 April 2022
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London
EC1V 9LT

Promenade performance with limited seating available

Tickets: £16 (£12 concessions)

Running Time: Approx. 75 mins

Age Guidance: 12+

Trigger Warning: Contains some swearing, mild drug references, outdated views (including racism) presented in a historical context