Devotion is an ongoing series by Sly Morikawa documenting Sanja Matsuri, the annual Shinto festival held in Tokyo’s Asakusa district. First published as a photobook with Friend Editions (Jp) in 2024, the project captured the presence of yakuza families within the festival.
While the yakuza remain central to this new body of work, the series expands its focus to the rhythms and atmosphere of Sanja Matsuri itself: moments of anticipation and exhaustion, collective ritual, celebration, and quiet reflection.
Sly Morikawa is an artist and photographer whose sensitive, dreamlike photographs capture the intuitive interplay between intimacy and desire. Morikawa explores the dualities of the human experience—light and dark, calm and chaos, beauty and tension—by drawing on recurring themes of sex, subculture, and self. Through her depictions of the angelic and the unorthodox, she invites viewers to reflect on their own agency, whilst presenting a world in which one can suspend biases and taboos.
In 1969, vanguard photojournalist Martha Cooper was living in Japan while interning with National Geographic magazine. It was there the young Cooper first encountered 入れ墨 (irezumi, Japanese traditional tattoos) which she captured with both a sense of reverent beauty and anthropological fascination. Eventually compiled and published in 2011's Tokyo Tattoo 1970 these photographs pre-date Cooper's formative time at the New York Post and the legendary Subway Art, and straddle an uncomfortable line between editorial storytelling and pure-hearted artistry. Martha Cooper soon became ubiquitous as an individual representing the protean relationship between an artist and their apparatus, and stands as a key figure informing the work of Sly Morikawa, whose irezumi photography exhibited together in Long Distance Relationship (2024) at Komiyama Tokyo G, Japan.
'To be able to see something that beautiful amongst brokenness takes a very keen eye'
An uncredited individual makes this claim about Cooper in the 2019 documentary Martha: A Picture Story but is equally applicable to Sly Morikawa's approach to photography. Brokenness in relation to Cooper often refers to her work in the urban decay of 1970s Bronx and Sowebo between 2006–16, while Morikawa has long captured her reading of beauty among the underbelly of society. Rather than glorifying criminality or fetishising exploitation, Morikawa honours her subjects with dignifying respect. Her photography mystifies our reading as candid or choreographed; the people, places and moments composed within her viewfinder present themselves within fleetingly perfect moments of circumstance.
For Devotion, Sly Morikawa's debut solo presentation at China Heights, the artist returns to Asakusa, Toyko for 三社祭 (Sanja Matsuri), an annual Shinto festival renowned by locals for it's rowdy nature and culture tourists for a glimpse at the elusive members of the yakuza. Held on the third weekend of May, the streets around Sensō-ji and Asakusa-jinja are flooded with domestic and international tourists, enjoying the revelry of packed food stalls and parades of 神輿 (mikoshi, portable shrines). Yakuza involvement in this ancient matsuri began in the 1950s during a period of decline in the Asakusa area, when mikoshi enthusiast clubs volunteered to assist in the parade, many of them syndicate members. Their continued participation fostered a culture of temporary acceptance and visibility during this festival, with it being labelled outside Japan as an unofficial "Yakuza Festival." A photojournalistic approach to the criminal participants of this matsuri may tell us who each person is and why they are in this situation – character studies on the 親分 (oyabun, boss/father figure) or 兄弟 (kyodai/brother figure) and their intersecting roles between business and spiritual operations. It is easy to imagine the outcome of such a narrativised framework. You could even picture a sensationalised headline proclaiming the so-called community service of criminal organisations. Wow – what a scoop!
Needless to say, this is not the method in which Sly Morikawa operates. For the artist, Sanja Matsuri is a beautiful coalescence of many long-held interests. When photographing people participating in the act of creating community, Morikawa possesses an elegance in developing intimacy and access developed through respect and reciprocity. The grace in which she navigates inter- and extra-personal relationships is evident in the quality of her photography (technical expertise aside). Morikawa has integrated her film camera into her singular way of seeing (and understanding) the world creates an atmosphere of calm acceptance in which respect is not dutiful but courteous. In disarming her subjects of prejudice about The Photographer as a tool for editorialism, the artist is allowed to capture extraordinary scenes which, in turn, challenge audiences of their internalised prejudices of social and cultural phenomena.
That such a generous artistic practice results in photos of overwhelming visual interest and ballerina-like grace is testament to Sly Morikawa's unique methodology. Once more, as Morikawa offers us a glimpse at the complex rawness of life filtered with devotional care, one more we are granted the opportunity to exist in a rare reality in which the subtle rhythms of rituals great and small become visible. Martha was in the yards with Dondi, Sly was smoking cigarettes with the yakuza.
Words by Con Gerakaris