Chloe Jafe
Okinawa My Love
Published by IBASHO and the(M)éditions, 2023
Photographs: Chloé Jafé
Texts: Élodie Cabrera
Design: Teun Van Der Heijden
Over the years, Chloé Jafé has developed a writing style that is both visual and documentary, viscerally personal. From her 7 years of immersion in Japan (2013-2019), Chloé Jafé brings back images in steely black and white, moist and harsh, tender and fierce, which reveal a new vision of an opaque country.
His trilogy, composed of the chapters “I give you my life”, “Okinawa mon amour” and “How I met Jiro”, highlights the little-known and subversive aspects of an archipelago where modesty is de rigueur.
When she left in 2013, Chloé Jafé had a plan to create a multimedia work on women in the Japanese mafia. It was only after learning Japanese and fully immersing herself in Japanese culture, and more particularly that of the “Yakuzas” that she was able to complete this project, 6 years later. During this latency period, she discovered the island of Okinawa. Her sentimental wandering took the form of a diary, which became 4 years later “Okinawa mon amour”, the second volume of her trilogy in Japan. Then, in 2018, she found herself confronted, in Osaka, in the Nishinari district, with another Japan. It was then that she planned the third part of this trilogy.