Chiran, now part of the municipality of Minamikyushu on the Japanese archipelago’s southern tip, is one of the more storied bases from which young pilots departed for ‘special attack’ sorties in the last, desperate days of World War Two. Now a suburban sportsground, the site is the subject of one of the first photographs taken by Tomoko Yoneda for her celebrated, ongoing series ‘Scene’, begun in 2000. In the foreground of Yoneda’s photograph, puddles gather among stems of verdant grass as clouds loom overhead, still pregnant with unspent precipitation. The image itself is carefully composed in the standard landscape format, with sky and ground forming planes of colour — pale grey and green — divided horizontally by an exquisitely detailed line of neat houses on the edge of the park, the ground’s athletic function marked in the centre right by a scoreboard. If not for the Chinese characters counting out baseball innings and kawara tiles on the large, sloping, deeply-eved roofs of the typically Japanese homes, this scene could have been produced on the peaceful fringes of virtually any city in the developed world.

Yoneda’s ‘Scene’ series consists of large-format, colour landscape images depicting the current state of sites of events of world significance, the unassuming character of which often belies disturbing histories. The locations chosen are remarkable for appearing unremarkable. For various reasons — political sensitivity, deliberate obfuscation, or simply the desire to forget — they are unadorned by the physical monuments and memorials often characterising places of such importance. Baseball Ground – Formerly a Kamikaze base until the end of the Second World War, Chiran 2000 is one of several works directly addressing the specific history of Japanese imperialism, revisiting moments from Japan’s Pacific War that remain controversial to this day. In Railway Track – Overlooking the location where the Japanese army fabricated a bombing to create a reason to invade Manchuria, Shenyang, China 2007, the site of the Manchurian Incident of 1931 appears as a grey railway siding skirting rows of concrete apartment blocks, while Path – Path to the cliff where Japanese committed suicide after the American landings, Saipan 2003, a simple weathered trail leading through coastal scrub set against a bright Pacific sky represents one of the final sights of some 1000 soldiers and civilians who leapt to their deaths in July 1944.

It is possible to consider Yoneda’s practice as a process of monumentalising, of creating memorials by giving abstract historical moments a visible, comprehensible topography. The photographs in ‘Scene’ also interact with the images produced by conflict, from propaganda to reportage — the artist has described Path as being haunted by Tsuguharu Fujita’s 1945 war painting Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End, while Railway Track references photographs taken by the Lytton Commission, the League of Nations’ 1932 report into the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Baseball Ground operates in dialogue with a widely circulated image of a group of high school girls farewelling 23-year-old Second Lieutenant Toshio Anazawa as he took off from Chiran on 12 April 1945 in a fighter plane carrying 250 kilograms of explosives, which he would pilot into an American destroyer off Okinawa shortly after.

Tomoko Yoneda’s ‘Scene’ series proposes a deeper scarification of place, where horror is exacerbated by the banality of its vestiges. Awful things, Yoneda’s photographs suggest, can happen anywhere.