I was born in 2000 in Kumamoto, Japan.
In 2019, I entered the School of International and Public Policy at Osaka University. I began working as a photographer in 2020, developing a practice focused on documenting everyday life and human relationships.
From the beginning, my work has revolved around the theme of division—why it is so difficult for people to simply be together, and how shallow forms of connection, like those on social media, can sometimes deepen our sense of separation. This inquiry became personal when I lost my stepmother to suicide. I found healing through living in a Japanese share house, where people not related by blood became like family through the act of sharing meals and daily routines. That experience shaped both my worldview and my artistic practice.
In 2021, I began traveling across Japan and abroad as a backpacker, living nomadically, selling my photographs on the street, and making work while hitchhiking and engaging with people along the way. In 2022, I extended my practice to Europe and Southeast Asia, focusing on how lived experience and community can be forms of creation. After graduating from Osaka University in 2024, I based myself in a share house in Mie Prefecture, Japan, and continued to explore these themes through my photography.
Since June 2025, I have been based in London. I currently live in a share house and work at a vintage apparel shop, where I am responsible for both sales and photography/video production. Living in London has brought a renewed awareness of social divisions, especially around immigration, class, and the emotional flattening often seen in online communication. These large-scale issues can feel distant or abstract, but I try to approach them from a micro, personal level—through small, real, lived moments that I witness and create.
My recent projects include:
“Tender Hours ” – a series where I visit other share houses, cook meals, and photograph the gentle entanglement of lives around the table. While I frame the experience as a photo project, my aim is to create new relationships through the act of sharing food—a form of intentional but non-performative interaction.
” ‘ ‘ ” – a visual journal of everyday life and cultural layering in London, photographed from the upper decks of buses, capturing a city constantly in motion and transformation.
Rather than documenting division directly, I aim to practice and visualize the possibility of togetherness. I don’t want to make work that negates or accuses, but instead to gently open up new spaces of empathy and shared life—without denying difference, and without erasing pain.
hanayamashita.com
Instagram: tediii.1124
