Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xxix, 316 pp., [12] pp. of plates (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3924-6.
This volume occupies an unusual niche in academic publishing, somewhere between coffee-table book and scholarly monograph. Rather than choose a single artist or medium to analyze, sketching in the supporting details around it, Reynolds deftly weaves together strands of art history, intellectual history, and visual culture. Each chapter narrates a distinct “allegory” constructed in response to the unique anxieties of its particular historical moment. This rich mixture contributes to a deeper understanding of how photography and architecture participated in (rather than merely illustrated) the construction of Japanese identity. Over its five chapters, Reynolds’ narrative traces a chronological progression of Japanese identity discourse from just prior to WWII to approximately 1990. Although each chapter could easily stand alone as a self-contained analysis of how the artist embodies a particular moment of identity construction, the broader arc of the five pieces together makes a more ambitious comment on the process of interplay between self and other, center and periphery, tradition and modernity in the making of contemporary Japanese selves.
Reynolds lays out his plan in the introduction, where he limits his ambit to the five different “case studies” which form the focus of each of the chapters. He takes as the starting point the moment of “historical free-fall” following WWII, when Japan’s artists and intellectuals sought new bases for Japanese identity in the relationship between past and present, between tradition and modernity. This moment foregrounds the first chapter, “Hamaya Hiroshi’s ‘Return to Japan,’ Documenting the Folk in Snow Country.” Hamaya’s disillusionment with the wartime efforts of the Japanese military to utilize his photography as a mode of imperialist discourse drove him from urban Tokyo to the rural periphery of the “Snow Country.” There he combined his experience in journalistic photography with a newfound interest in ethnography to document one of Japan’s disappearing rural cultures, finding an “ur-Japan” untainted by the more recent modern-Western-imperialist past. His dramatic black-and-white images of Snow Country people worked to re-enchant a culture at Japan’s periphery, finding in it an indigenous source of authentic Japaneseness.
In chapter two, “Okamoto Taro and the Search for Prehistoric Modernism,” the search for authentic Japaneseness shifts from folk culture to ancient objects: Jomon and Yayoi ceramics. In contrast to Hamaya’s search for cultural authenticity at the periphery, Taro’s dissatisfaction with Japan’s modern present drove his search for a new aesthetic into Japan’s ancient, pre-imperial past. Informed by his art training and interactions with Primitivists in 1930s Europe, Taro contrasted the bold ceramic forms of the hunter-gatherer Jomon (5000 BCE) peoples with the “aristocratic” and refined ones of early wet-rice cultivators of the Yayoi period (800 BCE), finding in them an “uncanny hyper-Japaneseness.” The Jomon “prehistoric modernism” resisted the elite aesthetic he traced to the Yayoi, which was to him implicated in Japan’s imperialist pathway to war. To Taro, this dynamism—which aligned with the precocious modernism of Europe’s recently discovered Lascaux Cave paintings—represented an authentic way forward for modern Japanese artists.
The Jomon-Yayoi thread continues in chapter three, “Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction of Japanese Identity,” provides the first explicit linkage in the book thus far between architecture and photography in its analysis of Ise’s postwar rehabilitation as a symbol of Japaneseness. In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of Japanese artists and historians re-characterized Ise’s architectural aesthetic as a fusion of “dynamic, plebian” Jomon and “passive, aristocratic” Yayoi elements, a “prototype” of Japan’s precociously modern style. In tandem with Watanabe Yoshio’s photographs, this narrative of rehabilitated “traditional” style addressed a new, global audience for Japanese art and design, including both western occupation forces within Japan as well as consumers of international art and exhibitions around the world.
Occupiers and the international audience form a critical element of chapter four, “Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographic Engagement with Okinawa.” At once “…a repository of tradition and…a site of decay and of foreign exploitation” (143), Okinawa—another geographically peripheral locale—became emblematic of America’s military presence in Japan in the 1950s-60s. Tomatsu’s “Chewing Gum and Chocolate” series (1960) and Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa (1969) in particular reflected the oppressive and exploitive aspects of occupation military bases, and their deleterious effects upon local communities. Tomatsu’s second Okinawan effort, Pencil of the Sun (1975), reveals a later softening of this view, utilizing saturated color and natural landscapes to depict Okinawa as a “paradise regained” where an authentically Japanese experience of time and landscape could be recovered.
The search for identity takes another geographic turn in chapter five, “Young Female Nomads of Tokyo,” which aligns less clearly with the trajectory traced by prior chapters. Here the search for contemporary urban identity in 1970s-80s Tokyo is effectively off-shored, as urban Japanese struggled to define identity in an era of global cosmopolitan consumption. During this era popular museum exhibitions and television miniseries romanticized the Silk Road as a conduit of free movement and productive cultural exchange, and designers, advertisers, and cultural critics tapped into Deleuze and Guattari’s views of the nomad as liberated by capitalism from the constraints of the state. Advertising utilized images of Berber and Masai tribal women to encourage female consumers to “find their roots” as they traversed the “urban desert” of Tokyo. With the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in 1990, however, the fantasy of unlimited mobility came crashing down.
Photographic images play a major role here, providing a strong thread of visual narrative and underlining the visual expression of the discourses under examination in Reynolds’ text. While the text cannot be read as a comprehensive account of any one of the media or intellectual discourses it touches upon, it makes a unique argument about the interrelatedness of visual and spatial explorations of cultural identity in the decades following Japan’s devastating defeat in WWII. As such, this text provides readers with an ambitious examination of the interwoven threads of visual, architectural, photographic, and intellectual history. It makes a valuable contribution to the field, and a must for scholars and students of Japan’s visual culture and history.
Leslie A. Woodhouse
University of San Francisco, San Francisco, USA
pp. 363-365