A book about the ties that bind Japan to an under-considered part of its recent history: the people who, in both directions and for different reasons, crossed the sea around the island nation. Moyuru Tsurusaki began the project, which stretched over a decade, with the human legacy of Japan's imperial ambitions in Manchuria, photographing the Japanese left behind in China, often orphaned or abandoned when settlers fled home at the end of the Second World War, who spent the post-war years between two nations without fully belonging to either. Alongside them he shows their descendants, ethnic Chinese of Japanese heritage, and young Japanese sent to this part of China by their employers. He then looked west to Myanmar, from where Japan had begun taking in refugees: images from the Mae La refugee camp give way to photographs of the refugees' new lives in Japan. The last third crosses the sea to the east, to Brazil, home of the largest Japanese community outside Japan, where the first 790 Japanese farmers arrived in 1907 to work on coffee farms and where today more than 1.4 million citizens claim Japanese heritage; the theme folds back once more onto young Brazilians of Japanese descent who were called back to work in Japan's car factories during the bubble economy. As juror Daido Moriyama wrote, the author captures with acuity and warmth the complex human relations between Japan and Manchuria, Myanmar and Brazil, and the essence of photography: memory, commemoration and documentation.