Subwaygram: Japan 1996 (Glimpses of Japan's Subways, 1996)

In the summer of 1996, photographer Chris Maliwat boarded the subways of Tokyo and Kyoto with a camera and a quiet urgency to observe. Shot on black-and-white film during Japan’s “Lost Decade” and in the shadow of the 1995 sarin gas attack, these images capture the silent rituals of public life—commuters immersed in thought, glances exchanged and avoided, and the small gestures that shape a shared, often solitary, urban rhythm.

Only decades later did Maliwat come to understand a deeper current running through the work. His grandfather, a Filipino soldier, survived the Bataan Death March but died in a Japanese prison camp. The photographs, once seen as early student exercises, now reveal an unconscious effort to reconcile inherited trauma with the human texture of everyday Japanese life—to hold clarity and compassion, memory and forgiveness, in the same frame.

Subwaygram: Japan 1996 is both companion and counterpoint to Maliwat’s acclaimed monograph Subwaygram. This series invites reflection on how we move through the world with the weight of history, and how even in transit, we carry what we do not yet fully understand.