Curated for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the exhibition brings together images from the 1930s, 1940s and early 2010s
“Le gayi dil gudiya Jaapaan ki, pagal kar diya mujhe… Jaapaan, love in Tokyo,” sang Koji Sato, Director General, The Japan Foundation, after charming the gathering with his Hindi at the preview of Tokyo Before/After, a travelling photography exhibition by the foundation and the National Gallery of Modern Art. He opened with a “Namaskar” and said, “Main humari taraf se bahut bahut dhanyawad kehna chahta hoon ki Ministry of Culture ne humare proposal ko dil se accept kiya. Apart from the layered infrastructure, I noticed the city had frugal yet functional infrastructure,” he said. “The exhibition allows us to encounter the dynamic city of Tokyo through two distinct moments in time and to discover through photography the subtle continuities between memory and human experience,” he said.
Beyond the nostalgia, the exhibition itself looked at a Tokyo that has undergone extraordinary change. Koji Sato, Director General, The Japan Foundation, on what people in Delhi and Tokyo have in common For Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, who has travelled to Japan, the exhibition brought back memories of seeing the old and modern city coexist. “My memories of going to Japan are filled with a lot of love and inspiration. It is a resilient city. When I visited Tokyo, I saw the old city and the modern one. Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, Director General, NGMA Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, Director General, NGMA, found another connection between the two countries in the photographs.
