Floyd Takeuchi was a 25-year-old journalist reporting for the Gannett News Service when he went to Bikini Atoll in 1978. Three years earlier, roughly a dozen families had attempted to resettle their 586-acre home island; they had been relocated during Operation Crossroads-the first of a series of nuclear detonations conducted by the US Navy in the Marshall Islands. The resettlement failed-the island was still too contaminated-and the hundred or so residents were being ferried five hundred miles southwest to Kili, the island where the larger community had lived since not long after they were evacuated in 1946.
The returnees were greeted as heroes on Kili, where a new generation of Bikinians was growing up having never set foot on their home island. It was then that Floyd had an epiphany. Parts of the Marshall Islands were becoming the stuff of stories and dreams: Some places had literally disappeared-three islands in Bikini were completely vaporized by the nuclear detonations-while others, though still there, lay beyond the horizon. "It was the first time I saw up close Marshallese dreaming of their homeland in kind of mystical ways, with the understanding that they would probably never see it again."
Floyd went on to cover significant stories over the ensuing years, including as a reporter for Guam's Pacific Daily News and as managing editor for the Daily Post in Fiji. He traveled throughout the Pacific to interview presidents, prime ministers and kings. He covered the negotiations that led to independence for the distinct island nations commonly lumped together as Micronesia: the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Kiribati and Nauru. He served as news director for Hawaii Public Radio's statewide network and as a foreign correspondent covering Asian financial markets for Bloomberg news in Tokyo. In 1997 he returned to Hawaii from Japan to become editor-publisher of Hawaii Business Magazine and president and COO of its parent company, which was then known as PacificBasin Communications. Eventually, he shifted away from print journalism in favor of photography and began self-publishing books on a variety of subjects: School on the Hill: Micronesia's Remarkable Xavier High School; Pasefika: The Festival of Pacific Arts; Halau: A Life in Hula among others.
Above, a taxi glides across the calm waters of Chuuk Lagoon, in the Federated States of Micronesia. For most of his career, 69-year-old journalist and photographer Floyd Takeuchi has documented the people, archipelagoes and atolls of Micronesia. His latest project might be his most ambitious: to photograph the hundreds of islets and atolls of the Marshall Islands before they disappear due to rising sea levels. On the previous page, Takeuchi's portrait of an uninhabited islet in Chuuk Lagoon.
Through all of this, Floyd says the memory of that day on Kili has lingered. "It's something I've been thinking about for so long that it just resides in my brain." And the island, along with the rest of the Marshallese archipelago, is something that Floyd, now 69, hopes to document before it's too late.
Floyd Takeuchi was born on the atoll of Majuro in 1953; his brother Gary, two years later. Majuro is now the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, but when Floyd and Gary were growing up, the Marshalls were still part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a United Nations-mandated entity set up in the wake of World War II to administer the vast expanse of atolls and islands that runs from the Marshalls in the east through Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the west. The Trust Territory was a temporary arrangement, existing until each island group decided on its political status after centuries of colonization by Spain, Germany, Japan and the United States.
Floyd's parents, Clarence and Sachiko, were both born and raised on Oahu, but Clarence had long dreamed of other islands. "When my dad was in Farrington High School in the 1940s, he discovered Pacific Islands Monthly magazine in the library and became entranced with names like Pago Pago, Papeete and Port Vila-all those exotic names of the time," says Floyd. Within two weeks of graduating from Farrington in 1945, Clarence was in the US Army, and was eventually assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps. He and Sachiko were married in 1952. "In the early '50s the Trust Territory administration headquarters were at Fort DeRussy, so Dad went down there one day just to poke around and discovered that they were looking for electricians in the Marshall Islands. He put his name in, got hired pretty quickly and initially went down there to run the power plant."
The whole of Majuro Atoll is a bit under four square miles of land. Today its population hovers around twenty-seven thousand, but in the 1950s Floyd estimates it was closer to two thousand. "Being on Majuro was a life-changing experience for my parents: It defined their lives and gave them purpose," he recalls. "There were maybe twelve American families ... twenty-five or thirty expats in all. There was a Protestant missionary-Eleanor Wilson-and of course the Jesuits: Father Len Hacker, from Upstate New York. And that was it: All the rest were Marshall Islanders, so I grew up bilingual, and somewhere in my brain is a five-year-old's vocabulary of Marshallese. There were hardly any cars, it was safe to go around-people kept an eye on you. It was a wonderful upbringing."
Takeuchi, who grew up on the Marshall Islands atoll of Majuro, has been taking photographs of life on the various islands of Micronesia ever since his parents gave him his first camera at age 10. Above, a church service in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia.
The family relocated to Maryland while Clarence attended Johns Hopkins University, then settled on Saipan, where the Trust Territory headquarters were then located and where Floyd attended middle school before becoming a high school dormer at Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu, from which he graduated in 1971. Clarence and Sachiko stayed on Saipan until they both retired in 1982 and moved back to Hawaii for the first time in thirty years.
Floyd's parents gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie Fiesta, when he was 10, and he has been taking photos ever since. "I gave serious thought to doing photojournalism when I went to college," he says, but there was one problem: "I'm colorblind and was concerned that I would not be able to pass the basic photography tests. I have a preference toward black-and-white photography regardless, and I really have no interest in being a commercial photographer, but when I do shows I've got a really good printer who balances color for me." Instead he took up his "other passion": writing.
Floyd graduated from Boston University with a BS in journalism in 1975, and two years later earned an MA in Pacific islands studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It was during his time at UH that he went truly pan-Pacific. "I was probably the luckiest graduate student in the world," he recalls. "I got an East-West Center fellowship. In those days the center's Communication Institute was doing what we used to call transnational communication studies: looking at what was being sent by shortwave radio from Washington to China, measuring the usage and things like that. I looked at the Pacific, and there was very little television in those days-the primary way most Pacific Islanders got a visual introduction to Western culture was through movies. There were a lot of movie theaters as well as rural movie teams that went out with battery-operated projectors. So I proposed doing a 'status study of commercial cinema': what was being shown, where it was being shown, and how it was being received in terms of official policy. I put every Pacific country and territory in the proposal, and by gosh they approved it! So I spent six months traveling everywhere, except for what was then the Ellis Islands-Tuvalu today-and Easter Island. And I watched movies-I saw enough kung fu movies to last a lifetime, but I also spent time with people like film censors. I was in a censorship session in Fiji where they outright banned an American 'blacksploitation' film that probably should have been banned everywhere. For a Pacific island studies major, that was absolute heaven."
"The fact that he was born and raised on Majuro and has lived and worked his entire life in the region has given Floyd a special connection that people here and on other islands respect," says Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, who worked with Takeuchi. "His photos especially tend to build pride among people who see them." Above, Takeuchi's photo of dancers from Guam performing at the 2008 Festival of Pacific Arts in American Samoa.
As a journalist, Floyd built a name for himself throughout the Pacific. Giff Johnson, the editor of Majuro's weekly Marshall Islands Journal, has worked with Floyd for decades, including a stint as managing editor for Pacific Magazine when Floyd was its publisher. "The fact that he was born and raised in Majuro and has lived and worked virtually his entire life in the region has given Floyd a special connection that people here and on other islands respect," says Giff. "His photos especially tend to build pride among people who see them. His latest project, The Micronesians, is a fine example of how he takes on an idea with his photography-in this case challenging Hawaii people's assumptions about Micronesians. It is powerful in its beauty and simplicity."
For The Micronesians, which was part of a three-photographer exhibit of portraits that ran in Honolulu's Downtown Art Center earlier this year, Floyd created a series of black-and-white photos featuring nine highly successful women from throughout the region who are contributing to Hawaii society in a variety of ways-as lawyers, government officials and East-West Center administrators; scientists and social workers. All were dressed in a type of skirt specific to parts of the Caroline islands-which is not where most of them were from. Floyd had to persuade several of his subjects to wear something they otherwise wouldn't, but the homogenizing move had a purpose: "This photographic project is a modest attempt to force locals in Hawaii to face their own prejudices," wrote Floyd in the exhibition catalog. "It uses the so-called Micronesian skirt as a symbol of the latent discrimination that festers in our contemporary society. Hopefully these portraits of women of accomplishment and distinction are a visual wedge to begin breaking up the assumptions that we use to shield our ignorance."
The message at the heart of The Micronesians also speaks to a defining feature of Floyd's photography: It is personal. "I was trained in traditional American journalism to be impartial and fair, which still has value," he says. "But I think I become a better photographer when I am engaged emotionally in the subject, and in the case of the Micronesian community in Hawaii, I'm emotionally all-in. I'm not of the community-I don't think of myself as Micronesian. I'll always be an expatriate, but I have close ties through friendships."
In a land of water, sailing is both a necessity and a sport. Above, Takeuchi's camera captures a twenty-five-foot Marshallese outrigger sailing canoe cruising at about fifteen knots on the lagoon of Jaluit Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
The Marshall Islands became an independent nation not long after Floyd visited Bikini as a young journalist. On May 1, 1979, the republic became self-governing, and in 1986 it entered into a Compact of Free Association with the United States, which formally established the country's status as a sovereign nation. The compact also gives Marshallese citizens the right to freely enter, live and work in the United States, and today roughly one-third of the population lives overseas, with significant communities in Hawaii and such disparate places as Springfield, Arkansas, and Bend, Oregon. For some the move is temporary; for others the islands may be forever beyond the horizon. Sea levels are rising, and low islands throughout the Pacific are seeing the impacts. The highest point in the Marshall Islands is roughly thirty feet above sea level. Kili, which is still populated by Bikini descendants, has been inundated by waves several times since 2011, with seawater contaminating drinking wells. Last year the Marshall Islands government released a National Adaptation Plan that aims to keep the islands habitable, but surveys among Marshallese expats point to climate change as one reason they might never return.
Time is short to document the Marshalls as they currently exist. So it is that Floyd's long-ago vision on Kili has become the seed for a project that could become his most important and lasting body of work: A Dream of Atolls, in which he hopes to collaborate with two other photographers to document islands and atolls-inhabited or not-throughout the Marshalls. This is no small undertaking: Though its total land area is only 66 square miles, the archipelago consists of five distinct islands and twenty-nine atolls, which in turn contain more than 1,100 islands and islets, spread across nearly 775,000 square miles of ocean. It's not humanly possible to capture every piece of land, but the aim is to capture the place as a whole, as it exists today.
The current goal is to begin in 2023, pending a lot of fundraising and an easing of pandemic-related travel restrictions in the Marshalls. For Floyd there are additional challenges. In 2017, while island-hopping in the Marshallese atoll of Jaluit, he sustained what at the time seemed a minor injury. "I grew up out there wearing rubber slippers. Getting in and out of boats on the various islands, sand always gets under the strap and occasionally breaks your skin. So I had a quarter-inch cut on the top of my left foot. ... I've had millions of those over the years."
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For The Micronesians, a photographic exhibit that ran in Honolulu's Downtown Art Center earlier this year, Takeuchi (seen above right) created portraits of members of Hawaii's Micronesian community, partly as an effort to dispel negative stereotypes surrounding the Islands' newest immigrant group. Above left, Takeuchi's portrait of Arsima Muller, an attorney originally from Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
This time was different: Five days after he returned to Hawaii, he was in Queen's Medical Center battling sepsis. He now walks with a cane. Meanwhile, a year prior to that incident, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's-it's not something he usually broadcasts for fear it will define how others see him. But he does acknowledge that it affects his ability to see this project through. "I have a window of opportunity that's going to shut at some point, so I'm conscious of the fact that I've got a relatively limited amount of time to do work that's meaningful for me," he says. "At the same time, with the rising tides, an even bigger window of opportunity is closing for the Marshall Islands, so we have a sense of mission."
In addition to Floyd, the "we" includes two principal collaborators: Neil McPherson, a landscape photographer and retired pastor at Nuuanu Congregational Church, will join Floyd in documenting the environment-for some of the uninhabited islands, that means living aboard a dive boat for days at a time. Paul Whitehouse, a British citizen, will make selected portraits using the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process. "We are primarily trying to document the physical geography, but for those islands that are inhabited, we want to have some photographs that capture the sense of the community, so we plan to have Paul do an entire island community-possibly Romrom Island on Majuro Atoll, which is about sixty people. He can commute from the hotel by boat every day and do his chemical magic to preserve the plates in the evening." ‘
Ultimately, Floyd hopes to turn his long-held vision into something of value for the place that not only embraced his own expat family but helped define his worldview. "I always think of the Marshallese living abroad who, over the next couple generations, will likely never see an outer island, and some who may never visit even Majuro-people who grow up without their land and in some cases without their language. In that process, their worldview becomes very different. So my hope is that this project brings some definition to their dreams."
