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The National

How AI helped Christopher Joshua Benton reimagine forgotten links between Japanese and Arab diving cultures

When the Portuguese first reached Japan in the 1500s, they didn't arrive alone. Alongside them came enslaved and indentured servants, many of them black. Given Portugal's footprint in the Gulf at the time, it's highly likely that some of the first black people to set foot on Japanese soil came from the Arab world, and brought with them elements from the region's culture. This idea sparked Christopher Joshua Benton 's latest project, From Toba with Love – currently being displayed at the Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (Tokas). His aim was to explore what he calls a 'comparative ethnography' between the ama divers of coastal Japan and the ghawwas, or pearl divers, of the Arabian Gulf. 'I was sort of curious about both the real and imagined connections between the Gulf and Japan,' says Benton, who lives and works in the UAE. That curiosity, rooted in a piece of speculative history, soon spurred Benton into an investigation of the two coastal traditions. From Toba with Love is a three-channel video installation housed inside a black lacquered structure inspired by the traditional amagoya, or hut used by Japanese ama – women known for free-diving for abalone, seaweed and shellfish. The installation features three films: Lover's Shell, The Copper Stranger and the titular From Toba with Love. It centres on an imagined romance between Mabrook, an African-born Gulf pearl diver, and Paru, an ama. For Benton, the love story between them was a vessel for questions about diaspora, cultural memory and the shared traditions of divers. It also tested his assumptions about the two cultures and revealed where imagination had to intervene. 'No matter how much research I did through books, it was completely different once you start doing fieldwork,' Benton says. Over the course of a three-month residency in Japan's Mie Prefecture, Benton set out to connect with local historians and ama divers. However, he quickly found that access wasn't easy. The lineage of ama – or 'sea samurai' as they are sometimes referred as – spans thousands of years across coastal Japan and South Korea, but their numbers today are small. 'It is estimated that there might only be 600 left,' Benton says. 'And it's so hyper-local so ama divers in one town might not know ones just in the town over.' Despite language barriers and difficulty approaching institutional archives, Benton eventually found a breakthrough. On his last day in Toba – the city in the Mie Prefecture that lends its name to the project – Benton met an ama diver. 'It was such a gift. She was really generous, and we had a two-hour lunch,' Benton says. Her name was Aiko – a former photographer who had joined a city programme designed to recruit younger women into the dwindling tradition. 'She's not from the lineage in the same way that most people sort of inherit it from their families, but she's one of the youngest ama for sure.' This interaction is touched upon in the third and final film. It also adds an emotional layer to the fictional character of Paru. But there were still more gaps in the research than Benton was comfortable with. To move forward, Benton began stitching together fragments from museum collections, folklore and historical postcards. He also drew from the archives of Toba Sea Folk Museum and Northwestern University's Humphrey Winterton Collection. Benton used the materials in a method he calls 'pastmaking' – blending archival research with speculation, storytelling, and artistic invention. AI was a powerful tool for this pastmaking and for filling the archival slips. Benton used AI diffusion – a form of generative imaging technology – to animate the postcards, colonial photos, and personal collections, bringing to life the story of Mabrook and Paru. 'It would've been impossible to do this project even six months ago,' he says. However, as expected with the use of AI, the results were not rendered with a documentary-level realism. The archival images were animated into film with dreamlike imperfections and a subtle glitches that have become idiosyncratic of the technology. In the earlier part of Mabrook's story, which shows how he was captured into slavery after being lured by dates, Benton turned to colonial-era photographs for visual references. 'It's weird because it's not an imagined Africa. It is Africa, but it's a colonial vision of the most exotic version of it,' he says. 'For the most part, we have no clue who the people are in the images. And so for me, a big question is like, well, in that gap, what's plausible?' One of the AI imperfections that Benton points out is how the model changes the protagonist as the story continues. The Mabrook in one segment is replaced by another child in a subsequent one. Benton leaned into these flaws, seeing them resonate with the nature of the fragmented story the artist was telling. 'There's a way to make it to where the protagonists are always the same, but for me, the protagonist switches because I want to maybe drive home this idea that Mabrook's story could have happened to any child,' Benton says. Counterbalancing his time in Japan, Benton's visits to Ras Al Khaimah brought the Gulf's own pearling past into sharper focus, serving as a foundation to the other half of the project. 'In Ras Al Khaimah, I did two trips,' he says. 'One was to this place called Suwaidi Pearls. They maintain a pearl farm and have great educational material. I also went to Al Jazeera Al Hamra village and filmed a bit. The architecture is beautiful.' Those visits allowed him to immerse himself in the physical remnants of the region's diving culture, from traditional boats and tools to the architecture of long-abandoned coastal villages. Benton hopes to bring From Toba with Love to the Gulf after the work concludes showing in Japan in August. He also aims to expand the project. 'I would love to bring it to the UAE, Saudi, or Oman or Qatar,' he says. 'But also I really want to add more stories to it. It's more than Mabrook and Paru. There's other people who could be featured.'