Photographer Lieko Shiga, who has lived in Tohoku since 2008, creates a compelling monologue in Human Spring 2020, her first foray into video. Just before daybreak, a young male figure emerges from the darkness of the black screen. The voice-over tells of her experience staying in temporary accommodation. Her neighbour experiences a type of mania with the arrival of spring, beginning a winding narrative that talks of spring both as a phenomenon with special significance to northeastern culture, as well as a concept that ruptures the worlds between living and dead. The figure on screen is slowly revealed with the break of day, always keeping an unrelenting, energised pace as he strides through a distinct coastal Tōhoku landscape—the ocean and land unambiguously separated by the high seawall.