Inventing a Photographic Past for Japan: From A Century of Japanese Photography (1968) to the Construction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Abstract

In 1968 two generations of Japanese photographers came together to research and curate the most comprehensive exhibition of the history of Japanese photography to date. Examining five hundred thousand photographs from public and private collections across the archipelago, they ultimately presented 1,640 images in a widely attended Tokyo exhibition. Moving beyond photographic nationalism, A Century of Japanese Photography was one of the only instances of public critique of the role of photographers who collaborated with the Japanese state during the Fifteen Year War (1931–45) and the exhibition’s popularity launched the movement to build the largest photography museum in Japan. Through analysis of the exhibition and establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, I illuminate how the process of writing the first major history of Japanese photography and building an institution to house its archive was a practice informed by the changing meanings of the role of photographers and museums within Japanese society.

Keywords:

• Japan
• institutionalisation
• photography exhibitions
• national history
• Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photographic Arts
• photography museums
• A Century of Japanese Photography
• photographers as historians

What should a photographer be? (Watanabe Yoshio)¹

Are there photographers who decided to start taking photographs because they were interested in history? (Imai Hisae)²

Photography more eloquently condenses the essence of history than any other means of expression. (Hamada Hachirō)³

In the early hours of 1 June 1968, a group of photographers carried rare historical photographic prints collected from across the Japanese archipelago to install on the seventh floor of the Seibu Department Store in Tokyo.⁴ Holding these precious historical documents, they reflected on how they felt ‘the weight of their importance’ in more ways than one.⁵ When the exhibition opened later that morning, visitors entered the hall to see thousands of photographs taken in Japan from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries displayed together in their range of formats and sizes. Seeking to create the first comparative nationwide view of the history of Japanese photography, the curators synthesised the work of photographers from throughout the country and across time in relation to one another. Through this history, these photographers created a new visual past for Japan and put forth an argument for the political transformation of the photographer’s role within civil society. Shashin 100 nen –Nihonjin ni yoru shashin hyōgen no rekishiten (A Century of Japanese Photography: a historical exhibition of photographic expression by the Japanese; henceforth A Century of Japanese Photography) has been called one of the most ‘ground-breaking’ historical exhibitions of postwar Japan.⁶ The first to publicly address the role of the photographers who collaborated with the Japanese state during the 1930s and 1940s, A Century of Japanese Photography also sparked nationwide interest in the history of Japanese photography, and contributed to gaining government support for the building of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and a number of regional photography museums and departments.⁷ The exhibition provides an opportunity to address fundamental questions about photography exhibitions as a form of public history and the dialogue between different generations of photographers and curators in the process of questioning old narratives and writing new histories of Japanese photography.

By using photographer Watanabe Yoshio’s (1907–2000) question ‘What should a photographer be?’ to interrogate the exhibition and the movement to establish the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in this article I address the relationships between photography and history; the ways that photographs mediate relationships between the individual and the nation; and the search for ways to understand the construction of archives that seek to circumvent but ultimately are enfolded into national narratives. Through interpretation of the politics of the exhibition and the movement to build Japan’s largest photography museum, I show how historians might approach photographs, their makers and archives as crucial components of historical narrative building. By investigating their efforts, this article explores the place of photographs and photographers in the making of modern Japanese history. There has yet to be a consideration of the process of the institutionalisation of photography in Japan that ties together the many groups invested in writing a history of photography and the process of building a major museum to house its materials. As it turns out, this moment in writing of the history of Japanese photography was the result of the collaborative efforts of professional organisations, radical leftist photographers, camera companies and mass media sponsors. The resulting narrative has been subsequently enshrined in an institution built through the cooperation of national and local governments.

In Japan from the 1950s to the 1990s, the spaces for creating histories of photography shifted from galleries run primarily by camera corporations and department stores to the walls of national and regional museums, reflecting changing attitudes towards photography as an art form. As a key part of this process, A Century of Japanese Photography and the 1975 Nihon gendai shashinshi 1945–1970 (History of Japanese contemporary photography 1945–1970) exhibition were viewed and commented on with great interest by the general public and members of the photography world. The books that accompanied the exhibitions established a narrative for the history of Japanese photography that was translated into English and scaffolded seminal exhibitions of Japanese photography in the USA. Largely due to the public awareness of the history of Japanese photography brought about by the exhibition, in 1991 the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography was built in Ebisu, Tokyo, becoming the first major publicly funded museum dedicated entirely to archiving, preserving and exhibiting Japanese photography. Each of these stages of negotiating how to present and preserve new histories of Japanese history saw photography as a viable language for understanding past relationships of individuals to the collective and ‘as a laboratory for social reconstruction’.⁸

The processes that enshrined this version of the Japanese history of photography help us to see new connections between industry and photography world actors that have not been seen ultimately as part of the same effort and also highlight how even the actors who were at cross-purposes with one another ultimately contributed to the establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.⁹ A focus on this exhibition also shows the way that Japanese photography was brought to international interest and used to bolster nationalist claims for Japan as the centre of the international photography industry and photographic culture. Delving into these issues, I examine a series of decisive exhibitions and show how the movement to define a Japanese photographic heritage began with leftist photographers but led to the establishment of the type of government-sponsored institution they sought to critique. Considering that the archive constructed by these photographers was leveraged for further exhibitions, publications and the founding of a publicly funded museum, what systems of control did this archive seek to circumvent and which did it support in the end? While the original exhibition urged for the political transformation of photographers into socially engaged and aware participants in the spheres they inhabited, it also made concrete the assumptions about who could be a photographer and what the main characteristics of Japanese photographic culture were in the twentieth century.

Photographic history’s extensive consideration of the impact of Beaumont Newhall’s writings in tandem with the activities of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s department of photographs since its establishment in the 1930s has centred the study of the creation of master narratives of photographic history in the Euro-American world.¹⁰ In the 1960s, the social and critical context of the Japanese photographers discussed here, their exhibitions and the institutions they established demonstrates public enthusiasm in different parts of the world for photography’s diffusion across disciplines and the desire to elevate it for consideration alongside other institutionally recognised art forms.¹¹ Attention to this Japanese movement provides the opportunity for a critical analysis of the social role of photographers in a revealing media context: just decades earlier, the Japanese press transitioned from complete state control over the publication of photographs (1934–45), to American Occupation censorship of the mass press (1945–51) and to the creation of a new media landscape that combined the continued dominance of those who had been pivotal in producing wartime visual propaganda with loosened restrictions for depicting new subject matter ranging from political protest to nudity.¹²

A photographic exhibition that illuminated the intellectual lineage of the photographers who researched and designed it also provides an example for how we might think about the catalysts activating people to become historians and activists. Reconstructing more than just their individual histories with photographs, these photographers acting as historians made a visual interpretive framework that was both praised and derided for its obsession with the failures of the photograph as a faithful form of evidence. The exhibition sought to explain and denounce the failure of Japanese photographers not only to mount a significant critique of the atrocities committed by the Japanese state during the Fifteen Year War (1931–45), but also their silence in addressing this failure in the twenty years since the war had ended. Organising the exhibition at a time when there were no photography curators or art museums with photography departments, the organisers mobilised the most extensive archival research on Japanese photography carried out to date. In the process they sought to place photographers of the present and the past within their historical contexts to evaluate how they had risen to the occasion to document and bear witness to history, or failed to do so.

The History of Japanese Photography Before 1968

A Century of Japanese Photography was the culmination of nearly two decades of debate on the ethics and correct approach to photographing ‘the real’.¹³ Throughout the photographic press in the 1950s, the ‘realism photography’ (riarizumu) faction spoken for by Domon Ken, Kimura Ihei and Natori Yōnosuke squared off against the subjective realists, also known as the ‘eizō’ (image) faction represented by Tōmatsu Shōmei and Narahara Ikkō.¹⁴ As Phillip Charrier succinctly summarises the debate, the photographers:

who associated themselves with realism advocated the moral primacy of socially engaged ‘objective’ or ‘transparent window’ documentation, whereas subjective realists, while agreeing that photography should be oppositional and compel an ethical response, insisted on the need for creative or ‘artistic’ interpretation to make photographic representations of reality discursively meaningful and ‘true’.¹⁵

While the realism faction took inspiration from reportage and social documentary work such as that of photographer Yasui Nakaji, subjective realists allied with the postwar European and American avant-garde in cinema and photography and the expressive photography exemplified by the work of Robert Frank.¹⁶ This debate set photographers as objective mediators of the truth against those who saw it necessary to inject their own subjectivity into the image to highlight critical perspectives.

Both sides exchanged ideas with the photojournalists and artists who began to travel to Japan in the 1950s, and viewed the wave of international travelling photography exhibitions that came to Japan with great interest as photography became a means to reflect on the recent experience of world war. From 1953 to 1955, for example, The Photographic Society of America and the Photographic Society of Japan organised the Joint Japanese American Salon of Photography in Commemoration of Commodore Perry’s Visit to Japan. Framed as an exchange between American and Japanese photographers, the exhibition was on display in Tokyo and Osaka, and then toured the East and West Coasts of the USA at camera clubs and local business associations.¹⁷

As Nadya Bair has discussed, Robert Capa made many connections with Japanese photographers, publishers and camera companies during the six weeks in 1954 he spent photographing for the popular Camera Mainichi sponsored by the Mainichi Press.¹⁸ In 1955, Edward Steichen travelled to Japan for the opening of the Family of Man. This record-breaking exhibition was hosted in Tokyo by the Takashimaya Department Store in 1956 and by the end of the year roughly a million Japanese viewers had seen it.¹⁹ The photographer Kanemaru Shigene (1900–77) was quoted in Nihon Keizai Shimbun as saying that the exhibition was ‘a symphony of photographs’, wherein each picture formed ‘a fragment of language’.²⁰ In his view, it was ‘the first and greatest attempt to arrive at what is called a “language of photography”’. Kanemaru saw photography as a universal language cutting across all cultures that was best used by curators, politicians and camera companies alike to promote democratic forms of organisation. In 1959, the Mainichi Press brought photographer Ernest Haas to curate The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, also hosted by the Takashimaya Department Store. Two years later, in 1961, the exhibition Robert Capa – War Photographs went on a travelling circuit of Japan for several months. Finally, just months after A Century of Japanese Photography closed in 1968, The Concerned Photographer opened at Matsuya Department Store, glorifying the image of the heroic war photographer who, in Ina Nobuo’s words, ‘did not lose his humanism even in the midst of war’.²¹ As such, this series of popular exhibitions featuring work associated with international photojournalism not only brought documentary photographs to the masses but gave each side of the photography debate food for thought. The realism faction read ‘concerned’ photojournalism as bolstering their claims of moral correctness through straight photographs; whereas the subjective realism faction interpreted the work of photojournalists who did not produce government-sponsored propaganda during wartime as an indictment of those in Japan who had made propaganda photographs disguised as documentary images, sullying the entire premise of ‘objectivity’.

These exhibitions are also important for understanding the momentum and national stakes of rethinking the history of photography written from a Japanese perspective. Starting in the 1950s, as the photographic profession became a viable career for larger numbers of people and consumption of photographs in magazines and newspapers escalated, exhibitions on the role of photographers in relation to national and international events around the globe sought to seize upon the mass popularity of photography and address the problem of a lack of institutional spaces to exhibit and archive photography’s history in Japan. At the same time, as Japanese camera companies began to successfully innovate upon and invent their own optical technologies and started selling them domestically and internationally at great profit, many saw photography culture itself as having national economic importance with the potential to transform postwar Japan.²²

The earliest centennial exhibition of the history of Japanese photography, Nihon shashin hyakunenshi (One-hundred-year history of Japanese photography), was organised by the Photographic Society of Japan in 1962 and held at the National Museum of Nature and Science. To curate the show, the society put together a committee of forty-five experts in the fields of ‘history, science, arts, sociology, general information, materials and photographic works’ to classify the cameras and photographs collected and categorise them for display.²³ The resulting exhibition held more than six hundred photographic prints in addition to historical cameras, negatives and documents produced by Japanese camera companies. Photographs from the imperial household including eleven images taken by Prince Takamatsu, the younger brother of the Emperor Hirohito, were also on display, while imperial family members Prince and Princess Takamatsu officiated cutting a ribbon at the opening ceremony. The exhibition articulated the significance of the Japanese contribution to the global history of photography and its technology as a celebration of photographic nationalism, enforced by imperial presence.²⁴ Seen from another angle, the exhibition put forth the broadest display of the objects that together contributed to the history of photography and inspired the first major discussions amongst the photography community in Japan around establishing a permanent place to house the material objects related to this broad photographic culture.²⁵

It is significant that at the time, photographers and members of the industry alike envisioned an institution that would be home to not only photographic prints, but also include a wide array of objects such as cameras, negatives and photographic equipment. Enthusiasm for the 1962 exhibition indicated that there was room to expand upon the exhibition’s model and competing desires emerged: a younger generation of photographers who came of age after the end of the Fifteen Year War saw the opportunity to critique photographers active during and immediately after the war, while professional associations and camera companies continued to seize upon photographic history as a diplomatic and economic opportunity.

A Century of Japanese Photography Opens in Tokyo, 1968

A Century of Japanese Photography was sponsored by the Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai (Japan Professional Photographers Society [JPS]) in conjunction with the Nihon Shashinki Kōgyōkai (Japan Camera Industry Association) and the Shashin Kanko Zairyō Kōgyōkai (Photo-sensitised Materials Manufacturer’s Association), and as such was supported by Tokyo’s professional photography establishment as it had developed since the 1930s and 1940s. As noted by the organisers, however, it did not have sponsorship from major newspapers, unlike many photography exhibitions in postwar Japan. This meant the exhibition had less public visibility, yet the organisers thought this gave more freedom to their curatorial strategies to represent issues of interest to the photography community.²⁶ Founded in 1952, the JPS was the primary organisation for connecting those aspiring to make a living through photography and lobbied on behalf of its members for stricter copyright laws to protect the work of photographers. Against the more conventional status that the established photographers in the organisation’s leadership represented, the curatorial team for the exhibition was made up of a generation of photographers who had started their careers after the war and were the leading figures in challenging the parameters of ‘realism’ photography, redefining its capacity for expression in the 1960s and 1970s.²⁷ Led by Tōmatsu Shōmei, it also included Nakahira Takuma, Taki Koji, Naitō Masatoshi, Inoue Seiryu and Imai Hisae, who was the sole female member involved. In its presentation, catalogue and roundtable discussions addressing the exhibition, this younger generation searched for ways to express a critique of the senior figures in their field, many of whom were featured in the sections of the exhibition dedicated to wartime propaganda. The act of criticising their mentors as collaborators with the wartime state had to be executed with great finesse: in the hierarchical world of professional photography there had been no public reflection regarding the role of the photographer in making propaganda for the wartime state, and many of the photographers and photographic editors active during the war such as Natori Yōnosuke and Domon Ken continued in the postwar period to be hugely influential figures in the field. The subtle knife of the younger generation’s critique cut through the photography world in the form of curatorial decisions and between the lines of the texts produced to accompany the exhibition and its subsequent catalogue.

The first stages of research began in the autumn of 1967 as the curators took trips across the country to gather negatives and prints and evaluate public and private collections. They estimated that they collectively inspected around five hundred thousand photographs and returned to Tokyo with more than one hundred thousand original prints and around thirty-five thousand reproductions.²⁸ These materials were collected at the curatorial team’s office in Ginza, Tokyo, where they also assembled thousands of photography books borrowed from the Fuji Film Corporation and Iwanami Shoten photography libraries for reference. All original photographs for the exhibition were on loan from local archives and sent back to their places of origin once reproductions were made. Despite the fact that the remaining exhibition materials were intended to be housed in the archives of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the reproductions were archived at the Nihon University College of Art where Watanabe Yoshio, president of the JPS, and first president of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, taught photography.

Under Tōmatsu’s direction, the team met over a two-day period in April 1968 at an inn in Tsukiji, Tokyo, to painstakingly select 1,640 photographs from those collected and group the images into sections divided by what the curators interpreted as their photographic style or ‘expression’ (shashin hyōgen). The JPS published a diagram to visualise what categories defined the photographic expression of the last century of Japanese photography: these categories illustrate and provide an argument for how the formal qualities of a photograph are historically specific and dependent on their social context (figure 1). The diagram presents the quantity of photographs in each thematic category, moving from the earliest photographs taken in Japan on the left to the ending point of the exhibition in 1945 on the right.²⁹ In this stepping-stone chronology, each form of expression is visualised as connected to one another while at the same time not necessarily dependent upon the other.

Figure 1. Designer unknown, ‘Diagram of the distribution of photographs for each section of A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 18 (1968), 9. 9 × 15 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

When the exhibition opened at Seibu Department store on the morning of 1 June 1968, visitors entered the hall to see photographs presented in all shapes and sizes: reproductions printed in large dimensions on foam board, original daguerreotypes, glass cases with photographs presented in the magazines they were originally printed in, matted albumen prints and more. Reproduction prints did not necessarily retain the format or image quality of the original print, erasing some of the differences between how the photographs would have been seen in their original formats. Photographic documentation of the exhibition shows attendees of all ages standing back to inspect mural-sized reprints and leaning in to scrutinise smaller images, at times seemingly overwhelmed by the size and number of photographs on display (figures 2–6).

Figure 2. Photographer unknown, ‘Photographs on display in “The Document” section of A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 13. 5.5 × 8 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 3. Photographer unknown, ‘Photographs on display in the “Second Flowering” section of A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 21. 7.5 × 10.9 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 4. Photographer unknown, ‘Photographs on display in the “National Propaganda” section of A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. On the far left, Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki’s portrait from the front page of the photography magazine Asahi Camera during World War II. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 22. 6 × 8.2 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 5. Photographer unknown, ‘Photographs on display in A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 24. 5 × 6.8 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 6. Photographer unknown, ‘Photographs on display in A Century of Japanese Photography’, 1968. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 11. 6.5 × 12.2 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

To a current generation of audiences who might be accustomed to the presentation of photography as fine art via the display of isolated, unadorned photographs on a white wall, documentation of the exhibition itself is a reminder of a time when exhibitions of photographs often sought to recreate the cacophony of images that modern viewers experience through the wide range of media they consume.

Structured around thematic categories as opposed to a strictly chronological ordering, the exhibition’s framing defied the impulse to narrate the history of photography through the imperial calendar, which would have involved dividing the exhibition into photographs taken during the imperial reigns of the Meiji, Taisho and Shōwa emperors, as is a common historical classification. It was no accident that the exhibition was held in 1968, the year of the on-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the modern Japanese state. Leading up to the centennial, photographer Hamaya Hiroshi (1915–999) critically viewed the preparations that many organisations were making to celebrate the past century of Japanese history, stating: ‘Our plan’s greatest objective is not a reactionary return to the past, but to confirm the way forward’.³⁰ The anniversary marked 1868 as the beginning of a period when the Japanese state sought to gain recognition in the global ordering of nations by investing in and producing a colonial empire and capitalist economy. These photographers sought to produce an alternative to the imperial time marked that year and the complicity of photography in a century of escalating conflict, war and trauma. The periodisation of the images included ‘The First Flowering’, highlighting the photography of the 1840s and 1890s; ‘The Second Flowering’, giving examples of the rise of straight photography and photojournalism from 1926 to 1935; ‘The Era of the Commercial Photography Studio’, which focused on studios that were active from the 1870s to the 1920s; or ‘The Period of War’. Other sections were more thematically based: ‘Art Photography’, ‘Accidents’, ‘Changes in Advertising for Clothing and Accessories’; ‘National Propaganda’; ‘Manchuria’, or ‘The Document’, for example.³¹

Each section established its own visual lexicon to prove either the existence or lack of what Taki described as ‘the social consciousness [of the photographer] from the Meiji period until the war’.³² Akin to the generations of directors of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen and John Szarkowski, who wrote histories of photography by identifying what they saw as the evolution of photographic style, the editors of A Century of Japanese Photography created a history of Japanese photography explaining its change over time through thematic style, but with one difference: for them the meaning of a photograph was dependent on the photographer’s consciousness – more than the viewer’s – as an active participant in history rather than just a participant in the history of photography. While many of the themes, such as ‘The Document’, were transhistorical in their nature, it was the photographer who was anchored within a historical moment and was responsible for making photographs that commented on the politics of that time. Empowering photographers with the authority to create meaning took to task those who sought to evade culpability for work that supported the Japanese total war project and glossed over violent colonial projects in the 1930s and 1940s.

The largest section, ‘The Document’, comprised 220 anonymous photographs selected from magazine and newspaper archives, and suggested two key approaches to thinking about the connections between photographers and the scenes they sought to capture (see figure 2).³³ First, it established that the most powerful function of the photograph was its capacity to act as a record of a photographer’s presence at a scene. Second, by filling the gallery with works by unknown authors that depicted everything from coal mines and women factory workers to the first flight of an airplane and travel scenes, the curators sought to emphasise the content of an image and its composition as more important than the identity of its maker.³⁴ In the curator’s view, the repeated historical failure of photographers to cultivate a socially and politically activated consciousness meant that they could be cut entirely out of the picture. In a version of this process taken to its logical extremes, the conceptualisation of the camera as a machine that could capture images ‘beyond [the] consciousness’ of the photographer formed the foundation of the photographic theory that curators Taki and Nakahira put forth within months of the exhibition as part of a new periodical, Provoke.³⁵ Synthesising the hundreds of anonymous photographs for this section was foundational to Taki’s ideas on the importance of creating a ‘codeless’ photograph that ‘transmits meaning sublinguistically’ through ‘surrendering creative action to the camera’ as an alternative to dominant ideology.³⁶

The following largest sections of photographs provide clues to how the curators could simultaneously make apparently contradictory claims about the importance of a photographer’s activated subjectivity and seek to erase the photographer entirely. Photographs grouped in ‘The First Flowering’ – eighty-five images from the 1840s to the 1890s – included the early studio portraits of Ueno Hikoma (1838–1904), based in the port city of Nagasaki, and Tamoto Kenzō’s (1832–1912) photographs of the colonial expansion infrastructure projects in what is now known as Hokkaido. Tamoto’s late nineteenth-century photographs stood out to the curators; they read his images as less posed and self-conscious than that of contemporaries such as Ueno, and understood his decision to retain in the photographs the blur caused by the slow shutter speeds of photographic technology at the time as evidence he did not stage the shots. This, therefore, marked the beginning of documentary photography in Japan. For, in Naitō Masatoshi’s words, Tamoto’s slow capture of a Hakodate street scene and refusal to make those included in the frame pose for the camera, as other photographers often did, demonstrated that ‘the cameraman was involved in the events of the history of photography’ by committing to make a faithful record (figure 7).³⁷ Thus, the blur of people walking down the street was, for Itō Tomomi, a record of Tamoto’s conscious decision of how long to leave the shutter open for his camera to record the scene. Knowing that Tamoto would have controlled his exposure time by deliberately removing and replacing a cap over his lens, Naitō and Itō emphasised how photographers of this period could never casually ‘press the shutter’. The phrase they use – ‘pressing the shutter button’ (shattā o kiru), literally ‘to cut the shutter’ – visualises the blades of a more contemporary camera’s shutter as they slice through the light they let in or close off. ‘It is like a battle’, Naitō commented: ‘You overcome your fate through pressing the shutter’. In emphasising how blur makes the viewer aware of the photographer’s decisions, both Naitō and Itō argued for cameras to be seen as the photographer’s weapon, deployed to capture the thought process of the photographer. As photo scholar Phillip Charrier has skilfully shown, the search to find a balance between the ‘individual freedom and social responsibility’ of the photographer ‘in a time of mounting uncertainty about the modernist promise of unfettered progress and material prosperity’ was foundational to theses photographers’, and especially Nakahira’s, intellectual position in relationship to their work.³⁸

Figure 7. Tamoto Kenzō, ‘Kaitaku tōji no Hakodateshi shigai fũkei’ (Hakodate’s urban landscape at the time of colonial development), late nineteenth century albumen print. Reproduced as a photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinshi 1840–1945 (A history of Japanese photography 1840–1945) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971), 31. Although captioned in this publication as an anonymous photograph, the curators of A Century of Japanese Photography discuss this image as certainly by Tamoto Kenzō, demonstrating his desire to capture a street scene while retaining the blur of pedestrians. Albumen print 19 × 24.4 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Seen in this way, the 175 photographs included in ‘The Second Flowering’, dated 1926–35, demonstrated the connection between geijutsu shashin (art photography, or Pictorialism) and straight photography to explain how photographers justified making wartime propaganda.³⁹ Seeking to explain the late 1930s and 1940s wartime propaganda that combined carefully censored photojournalism with collage and montage, photographs produced in the decades prior were read as the failure to prevent photography from being weaponised by the wartime state. As such, the curators interpreted the straight photography of the 1930s as a style of photographic expression that turned making a record into a fetish with little possibility for political intervention against the Japanese state and critiqued the postwar realism faction of photographers. Demonstrating the predominance of art photography and straight photography in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s allowed the curators to claim, as Taki Kōji did, that ‘the photographers of the second flowering did not have the foundation for independent thought based in reality’.⁴⁰ In the curator’s view, this explained why, on the whole, photographers did not question the Japanese state’s incorporation of reportage photography into its propaganda campaigns alongside photographic collages, and continued to shoot for magazines that were the mouthpieces of the Cabinet of Information during the war.

In contrast to the anonymous images of photographs on display in ‘The Document’ section, the forty photographs included in the ‘National Propaganda’ section were works by well-known photographers published in national magazines. Asahi Kamera’s front-page portrait of General Tojo Hideki was an example of the way well-known photography magazines such as Asahi Graph and NIPPON advertised the war effort through photographic glorification of the Japanese troops and government officials. These photographs exemplified the use of the medium to create fictions in support of the war effort and, as photography historian Tsuchiya Seiichi argues, show how ‘records were replaced by stage performances intended to mobilize the population and stimulate martial spirit in support of total war’.⁴¹ In this section, the curators demonstrated the ways Japanese photographers had stopped trying to document the context of everyday life, and instead presented idealised fantasies to advertise the wartime Japanese imperial project (see figure 4). In the critic Itō Tomomi’s words, photographers such as Domon, Hamaya Hiroshi and the many others who made images celebrating nativist Japanese beliefs and the expanding Japanese empire made ‘photographs […] taken from a position of great indifference to history’.⁴²

Reflecting on the exhibition, Tōmatsu and many of the other curators concluded that the pictures on display were evidence of the collective failure of Japanese photographers to make images that analysed and critically participated in historical events. Immediately following Japan’s surrender at the end of the Pacific War, Japanese photographers – unlike painters and writers – did not engage in public self-criticism for colluding with the state and supporting the war effort.⁴³ In fact, those who had been the most active in producing propaganda imagery, such as Domon and the photographer-editor Natori Yōnosuke, continued in the postwar period to act as the gatekeepers of the photography world and as leading voices contributing to photography magazines, contests and publishing.⁴⁴ While Hamaya Hiroshi had sympathetically covered the Anpo protest movement and given voice to student activists’ efforts in his series Ikari to kanashimi no kiroku (Record of rage and grief, 1960), there were few other instances of the wartime generation of photographers who sought to redeem themselves through work that critiqued the right-wing postwar Japanese state.⁴⁵ Hamaya pointed out that more than half of the JPS’s older generation of members were unlikely to ever attend the exhibition as evidence of the reluctance to come face to face with their role as photographers during the wartime period.⁴⁶ It was against these antecedents that Tōmatsu, Nakahira and Taki pushed back: in their view, the generation before them utilised the visual techniques of the documentary photograph to present state lies to the Japanese public, calling the entire premise of the ‘document’ into question. Thus, their ‘Document’ section made up of anonymous photographs taken from newspapers and magazines, supposedly lacking in ideological underpinnings, faced off against the propaganda of the wartime period to show how ‘documentary’ form is not without the capacity to be rendered a tool of state politics. Although the constraints of the professional photography world meant that they could not name Domon and Natori as state collaborators, their curatorial message clearly stood out as one of the only times in the decades since the war that the wartime responsibility of Japanese photographers was publicly discussed.

For these reasons, after the exhibition, Taki and Nakahira became deeply invested in the meaning of the ‘document’ and, as Charrier demonstrates, believed that it was necessary to reconceive a theory and praxis-driven photographic method ‘which could be effectively wielded against the dominant ideology of the capitalist ruling class’.⁴⁷ In their view, images of the colonial development of Japan’s northernmost island in the 1870s and 1880s by Tamoto Kenzō, as well as pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the military photographer Yamahata Yōsuke, were the only examples of a true photographic document in the exhibition. Taki and Nakahira argued that in their historical contexts, both photographers had found ways to be so fully present in the making of their pictures that they connected directly with their subjects and had thus made work that did not contribute to the modernist project of turning photographers into artists. Historian Gyewon Kim has skilfully called Taki and Nakahira to task for their romanticising of Tamoto’s photographs that extended the state’s settler colonial vision into new northern territories seized by the Meiji government,⁴⁸ and Yamahata was not only the author of the arresting photographs of the aftermath of atomic bombing but also the photographer responsible for creating humanising images of Emperor Hirohito, whom many see as responsible for atrocities committed by the Japanese state during the Fifteen Year War.⁴⁹ When published in Life magazine in 1946s, his photographs helped transform the emperor from a figure whom many considered to be a Class A war criminal into a marine biologist who admired Abraham Lincoln.⁵⁰ In both cases, Taki and Nakahira offered no critique of the very photographers who were able to translate the material actions of Japanese imperialism into photographs with affective forces that erased their potential for violence.

Despite the curators’ diagnosis that photographers of the last century had largely failed to use photography critically, the exhibition still worked to create a visual national history of Japan and an accompanying archive to support the state’s inclusions and exclusions. In grouping photographs with thematic relation from across the country or empire, the exhibition put forth the argument that the Japanese nation formed the underlying transhistorical connection between the images on display. Yet while commercial studios in Osaka and Nagoya were connected through subject matter and a sense of national belonging, photographs of Japanese colonies were not so dutifully included as representations of significant aspects of Japanese history. Although the viewer was meant to understand and perhaps question what made a photograph part of ‘Japanese’ history, there were significant omissions: the one hundred images included in ‘Manchuria’, which became a Japanese puppet state in 1931, were the main representation in the exhibition of Japanese colonial imperialism in Asia, although Japan also forcefully colonised Okinawa in 1872, Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. As the Korean photography critic Lee Myeong-dong remarked with surprise upon seeing the exhibition, ‘as a true part of Japanese history’ for more than thirty-six years ‘I thought [Korea’s colonial history] would be frankly situated in this exhibition.’⁵¹ Although the team of curators emphasised their efforts in travelling to each of the main islands of Japan to collect photographs for the exhibition, they did not go to Okinawa, excluding it from their history of ‘Japanese’ photography.⁵² Rather than represent the deep processes of decades of colonial rule, the forty-four photographs of armed conflict in the ‘Records of War’ section are the main references to Japanese colonialism in the exhibition. As in the case of a photograph of the capture of Chinese soldiers in 1937, a few images still bore the fukyoka (not authorised) stamp of the press censors and this may have been the first time they were made publicly visible, marking a concrete moment in which the erasure of photographs through censorship was made materially visible (figure 8).⁵³

Figure 8. Photographer unknown, ‘Nichū sensō chūshi kaigun rikusentai butai ni horyo to natta Chūgoku seikihei. Mainichi Shimbunsha August 23, 1937’ (The Second Sino-Japanese war, central China, Chinese regular soldiers captured by the Imperial Japanese Navy Land Force Takeshita Corps), 1937. Chinese military prisoners and the body of a prisoner on the ground on the far right; the Japanese government censor stamp marks the left of the photograph, indicating that it was not allowed for publication. Reproduced as photomechanical print. In Nihon shashinshi 1840–1945 (A history of Japanese photography) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971), 491. 18.2 × 29.5 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

It is notable that, while not extensive, photographs of the Nanking Massacre were also included. As powerful testimonies to the brutality of war seen by press photojournalists, what did these photographs say about the role of photojournalists working under a regime that censored all photographs of death at the hands of Japanese soldiers? Upon viewing the exhibition, Sakai Torayoshi (1909–69) – employed by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper to photograph the arrival of Japanese troops in Malaysia – testified that he had no memory of the details surrounding the photographs he took of the unconditional surrender negotiation between General Yamashita Tomoyuki and British General Arthur Ernest Percival in Singapore.⁵⁴ Yet he reported that the photograph of the surrender taken by Kageyama Kōyō, his companion photographer, made him ‘shudder with fear’ at the power of the photographic image to stand as a witness. In his telling it was as if it was the photograph that had been there, not the photojournalist, confirming the need for the critical approach of the generation of photographers who began working after World War Two.

Although many viewers could not agree whether the exhibition’s narrative was a stroke of genius or doomed from its ambitious start, there was consensus that the collected photographs made the case that, in the words of one viewer, ‘there is no other way to express the momentary space-time of historical truth in a clearer way than through photographic expression’.⁵⁵ The collective feeling that these photographs must be preserved and made available to future viewers transformed the photographs’ relationship to major institutions in Japan as they shifted from unwanted mass material primarily housed in regional archives to objects of national significance.

The Afterlives of the Exhibition

Building on the slim exhibition catalogue that had accompanied A Century of Japanese Photography, Tōmatsu, Taki and Naitō worked with the JPS to write Nihon shashinshi 1840–1945 (A history of Japanese photography 1840–1945). At the time of its publication, in 1971, it was the most comprehensive history of Japanese photography written to date. It is notable that, like the exhibition, it was written not by professional historians but by practising photographers. As such, their history of photography, and indeed of Japan through photographs, is one that reveals a deep sense of the ways that photographs as images mediate experiences and understandings of the past. In their framing, photographs were treated as historical events in and of themselves rather than as mere reflections of them. Alongside the 696 photographs reprinted from the exhibition, the book’s essays elaborated upon the original critical premise and added additional explanation. Taki Kōji clarified the exhibition’s subtitle, ‘A Historical Exhibition of Photographic Expression by the Japanese’, in the chapter he authored, explaining that expression was the ability to document the world faithfully.⁵⁶

In this, Taki mirrored arguments made by prewar Japanese Kōzaha Marxists that the bourgeois revolution of the Meiji Restoration had never fully ended feudalism and that ‘feudal remnants’ held the Japanese state back from fully modernising, enabling the rise of an emperor-worshipping fascist state.⁵⁷ In Taki’s view, adopted by many historians since, despite the fervour with which people made and consumed photographs in Japan until the wartime period, Japanese photographers and the picture press had not adequately learned to use documentary photography to the extent of its full critical capacity. In this logic, the weak foothold that documentary photography had in mass culture made it susceptible to cooptation by the wartime state. Thus, it was up to the postwar generation of photographers to enact the second part of the photographic revolution, untainted by the wartime ‘paradox of the document’ (kiroku no gyakusetsu) where photographers self-censored and created false photojournalism in the name of the state. This is perhaps what Taki and the other members of Provoke set out to do; the following iteration of the history of Japanese photography project, however, took a different turn.

Where the first exhibition and book saw itself as a knife, cutting into unspoken and unwritten contradictions of the photography world, the ‘sequel’ exhibitions turned into celebrations of recent trends in Japanese photography sponsored by camera companies. Their work in compiling and presenting more recent histories of Japanese photography was still significant for creating a public consciousness and re-enlivening public memory around recent events through photographs. In 1972, the JPS began planning the exhibition Nihon gendai shashinshi 1945–1970 (History of Japanese contemporary photography 1945–1970), held at the Seibu Museum of Art and then touring the Canon Gallery, the Ginza and Shinjuku Nikon Salon, the Fuji Photo Salon, the Pentax Gallery and the Mitsubishi Gekkō Gallery in November–December 1975.⁵⁸ The curators compiled around three hundred thousand photographs that had been printed in magazines, newspapers and other publications in the last twenty-five years. Like the curators of the prior exhibition, they gathered at an inn and stayed up for two nights and three days making the final selection of 1,100 photographs for the exhibition.⁵⁹ A photograph of postcard-sized reproductions of close to two thousand photographs laid out across the tatami-mat floor of the inn shows the challenge that the curators, like those for the 1968 show, faced with editing such a vast volume of photographs into a cohesive visual argument (figure 9).

Figure 9. Photographer unknown, ‘Tefuda purinto kara senbetsu sagyō (yaku 2,000 mai)’ (The work of selecting from postcard prints [of the originals] (about 2,000 sheets)), 1975. Photomechanical print. In Ishibashi Tatsuo, Kinoshita Akira, Sekiya Isao, Hanabusa Shinzo, Matsumoto Norihiko and Watanabe Yoshio, ‘Ōdzume ni kita hensan no sagyō’ (The work of the curators has finally come to an end), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 41 (1975), 23. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Photographic documentation of the exhibition in its locations across Tokyo reveals it to have been a different viewing experience than its 1968 predecessor: tight groupings of photographs styled in associative groups or linearly linked by a Gregorian and Japanese imperial calendar. Reproduction formats varied less and there is little evidence that photographs were displayed in their original format of publication such as magazines and newspapers as they had in the 1968 exhibition. Additionally, in the galleries run by camera corporations such as Canon, one gets a sense of what it looks like when photographs are mobilised to sell the idea of photography itself – and therefore photographic equipment (figures 10, 11). The sleeker, more paired down look of the exhibition spaces also reflected a shift in curatorial practice taking place across Japan as museums and commercial galleries gradually shifted to present photographic prints as art objects.

Figure 10. Photographer unknown, ‘Installation shot of the exhibition Gendai shashinshi 1945–1970 (History of Japanese contemporary photography 1945–1970), Canon Gallery’, 1975. Photomechanical print. In Ishibashi Tatsuo, Kinoshita Akira, Sekiya Isao, Hanabusa Shinzo, Matsumoto Norihiko and Watanabe Yoshio, ‘Oodzume ni kita hensan no sagyō’ (The work of the curators has finally come to an end), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 41 (1975), 23. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 11. Photographer unknown, ‘Installation shot of the exhibition Gendai shashinshi 1945–1970 (History of Japanese contemporary photography 1945–1970), Seibu Art Museum’, 1975. Photomechanical print. In Tatsuo Kinoshita, Akira, Sekiya Isao, Hanabusa Shinzo, Matsumoto Norihiko and Watanabe Yoshio, ‘Oodzume ni kita hensan no sagyō’ (The work of the curators has finally come to an end), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 41 (1975), 23. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

The success of this exhibition also led to a second publication whose design and format mirrored the first book. Published in 1977, this history of more recent Japanese photography was written by specialists in their fields; photography critic Fukushima Tatsuo and Shigemori Koen, historian Fujiwara Akira and the former editor of Camera Mainichi Kishi Tetsuo (1909–2002), among others.⁶⁰ The volume’s emphasis on the mass culture of photography and its proliferation in magazines, commercial formats and technology gave it a different flavour to its predecessor. Divided under the subcategories ‘History’s Witness’, ‘Appeal to Society’ and the ‘World of the Image’, the book sought not to indict photographers for their lack of political participation but to paint a broader picture of the diverse practices of photography since the end of World War Two. This positivist vision of photography in Japan as thriving in all corners of industry confirmed the growing national and international notion that Japan was a leading producer not only of optical technologies but of renowned photographers.

In 1980, Random House published an English translation of A Century of Japanese Photography, with texts by historian John W. Dower, later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book on postwar Japan.⁶¹ Dower reflected that in this first major English-language publication to map out the history of Japanese photography he ‘wanted to make the point that it wasn’t just superb “photography” that we encountered here, but beyond this a brilliant window on the incredibly diversified and complex social and cultural dynamics of modern Japan’.⁶² Seeking to present the photographs as texts that could be used by historians of Japan, Dower added a new section to the book on visual histories of Japan: books that used images to examine Japanese history from a range of perspectives and through their ‘diversity of material contravenes most stereotypes of social or cultural homogenization in Japan’.⁶³

Institutionalising Japanese Photography

Within a few years of the success of the 1968 and 1975 exhibitions and their subsequent publications, a Founding Committee for the Japanese photography museum was formed, launching a campaign to construct Japan’s first government-supported photography museum.⁶⁴ The committee called upon photographers, designers and critics to vouch for the social and historical importance of photography in Japan. Influential photography critic Shigemori Koen remarked that the photographs collected for the exhibitions were the ‘precious ethnic heritage of Japan’ (kichōna minzoku isan) and that this material had the potential to contribute to the world’s photography culture.⁶⁵ In this view, photographs of Japan or those taken by Japanese photographers were the cultural heritage of the Japanese people. Images from the Japanese ‘world of photography’ (shashin kai) connected education, publishing, newspapers and broadcasting, and it was through public access to this image world that Japanese viewers could understand their history and place in the contemporary world.

As industry representatives, critics, designers and photographers argued, a photography museum had the potential to raise the international cultural status of Japan in significant ways that resonated with local and national interests.⁶⁶ The renowned industrial and graphic designer Kamekura Yūsaku, for example, contended that the lack of institutional support for collecting and preserving photographs reflected the backwardness of Japanese art museums, whose dismissal of photographs and posters revealed a lack of awareness of what qualified as modern art.⁶⁷ Akiyama Shotaro, the chairman of the Japan Advertising Photographers’ Association, identified the discrepancy between the international fervour for Japanese cameras with the dearth of domestic support for archiving and preserving a Japanese photographic legacy. ‘It is very strange’, he commented, that ‘there is no photography museum in the world’s number one camera-manufacturing nation’ with ‘a population of 20 million people who love photography’, that might be considered ‘the world’s photography kingdom’.⁶⁸

The various pamphlets that the committee published argued that the purpose of a photography museum was to build an institution that treated photographs as fundamental to Japanese cultural heritage and raised the international status of Japan as a centre of photographic study. These two goals took the premise of the first exhibitions – that socially conscious photographers were crucial to making and recording Japanese history – one step further by arguing that creating social awareness through photographs was not only the role of photographers but a job for curators supported by a dedicated museum with a permanent collection and specialists who knew how to care for the photographs, as Japanese art museums did not have dedicated photography departments. Collecting, preserving and making photographs accessible to the public was essential for utilising photographs as the source material to cultivate a society with connection to its history.⁶⁹ This marked a significant shift in the way photography was made accessible to the public: photography culture in Japan had not been controlled nor guided by art museums, but characterised by support from newspapers, camera companies and small publishers.⁷⁰ From the 1920s to the 1990s, camera corporations, newspaper publishers, small galleries often run by the camera companies, department stores, individual photographers, and photography clubs and collectives were responsible for the majority of exhibitions and publications on photography in Japan.⁷¹ In this period, the magazines, newsletters and cheaply published photographic books produced by these actors were not collected by museums but were held by private individuals, local libraries and professional organisations. The opening of a photography museum thus signalled a shift for the Japanese photography world.

As curator Namba Sachiko has meticulously detailed, both the role of the Japanese modern art museum and the curator have relatively recent, constantly evolving histories.⁷² The term ‘gakugei-in’ (a scholar of the arts and sciences) was first used upon the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura and the Kanagawa Prefectural museum of Art in 1951, the latter the first museum to appoint a gakugei-in to curate exhibitions.⁷³ Until the 1970s, many Japanese art museums functioned as what Morishita Masaaki calls ‘empty museums’ in that they did not have their own collections or employ permanent curators.⁷⁴ Instead, art groups (bijutsu dantai) ranging from medium-specific art associations and schools to avant-garde collectives such as Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) and the Gutai Art Association used them as rental spaces to stage their own exhibitions. From the 1960s through the 1980s, museums began to hire gakugei-in as exhibition planners who used loaned works to present exhibitions based on their original research. As museums and government organisations looked internationally for models of presenting art to the public, the term kyurētā (curator) slowly became the principal way to describe the job of creating and managing an institution’s permanent collection and organising loaned exhibitions.

Seen from the context of the rapidly changing function of art museums and curators in Japan, the movement to establish a photography museum was a call to give new, photography-specific meaning to the role of a kyurētā and a museum. In 1979 the Founding Committee conducted research and developed ideas for what a photography museum should be by surveying the prints and photographs division of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among others. The Committee identified the elements that defined institutions with significant photography holdings and determined that a photography museum should have facilities to safely store original prints, scientific equipment for restoring prints, dedicated spaces for curators to plan exhibitions, advanced cataloguing systems for systematically storing information on the works, and a reference and reading room giving visitors access to secondary literature related to the history of photography. Parallel to the colonial museums of the nineteenth century, both in Japan and elsewhere, photography museums of the twentieth century served as manifestations of international comparison and an aspirational model for training future photographers and curators. Narahara Ikkō, who travelled in Europe during 1972–75, lamented that the National Diet Library in Japan did not host exhibitions like those at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Tōmatsu Shōmei interpreted this as the result of the continuing attitude that historical photographs were ‘records’ and ‘historical materials’ more appropriate for regional libraries; he proposed that the new photography museum could break down this divide between art object and historical document.⁷⁵ Narahara also recalled how he would meet friends at the MoMA cafeteria, experiencing it as a space where artists from across the city could easily rendezvous. In his view, museums in Japan lacked the social element and ease of access he experienced abroad, and he hoped that creating a new gathering space around photographic culture might shift the dominant influence away from photography magazines and into the hands of photographers and scholars.⁷⁶

Historian and curator Kaneko Ryuichi has pointed out that the campaign to found a photography museum was well timed with the economic bubble of the 1980s, when there was financial support for building public museums across Japan.⁷⁷ In the Tokyo area alone, increased public interest in photography’s history combined with generous government funding meant that, in 1980, the Yokohama City Council proposed building the Yokohama Museum of Art with a dedicated photography department, and the Kawasaki City Council proposed the Kawasaki City Museum of Art with a special focus on photographs. Both museums were built by the end of the decade, with permanent exhibition spaces dedicated to photography. Inspired by Jacques Chirac’s efforts to build the Vidéothèque de Paris, a museum dedicated to French video history, mayor Suzuki Shunichi endorsed the idea of a photography museum as a key part of his plan to internationalise Tokyo and draw in tourists with events similar to the ‘Paris Photography Month’ established in 1980.⁷⁸ As early as 1984 Suzuki began to implement elements of Chirac’s city building through photography, and in 1987 committees composed of photographers and photographic industry insiders were formed to advise the Tokyo Metropolitan Government on the building of a photography museum in Tokyo. As Kaneko argues, ‘It was this coming together of interests – the aspirations of the photographic world and the desire to create a museum with distinctive characteristics – that led to the birth of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography’.⁷⁹

When official acquisitions began in 1988, the museum faced the task of forming a new canon for the history of photography through its collecting practices in a context where there was little guidance on the value of photographic prints. Guiding principles for the collections were established in February 1989, outlining a plan for forming a collection around photographic works, reference materials on photography, photographic equipment and materials, and reference materials on images and technology.⁸⁰ At this moment of opportunity, acquisitions reflected many of the categories of the 1968 exhibition and were decided largely by photography industry insiders who had already begun the work of determining which photographers to include as part of the campaign to found the museum and as part of the acquisitions process for building the Yokohama and Kawasaki art museums.⁸¹ Notable photographers and members of the photography world such as Watanabe Yoshio and Eikoh Hosoe made home visits to view vintage prints in the private collections of photographers like Ueda Shoji and Hamaya Hiroshi, and were integral to the process of guiding acquisitions (figures 12, 13).

Figure 12. Matsumoto Norihiko, ‘Sakuhin shūshū, Hamaya Hiroshi taku nite ‘85.8.30’ (Collecting works at the home of Hamaya Hiroshi August 30, 1985), 1985. Showing Watanabe Yoshio, Eikoh Hosoe and Hamaya Hiroshi reviewing photographs. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsurits īnkai (The Committee for Establishing the Japanese Photography Museum)/Watanabe Yoshio. Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu shui undō no sōkatsu 3 (A Summary of the Movement to Establish the Japanese Photography Museum 3) (Tokyo: Nihon shashin kyōkai, 1994), 38. 4.6 × 6.2 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

Figure 13. Matsumoto Norihiko, ‘Sakuhin shūshū chōsa, Ueda Shōji taku nite ‘84.11’ (Collecting works at the home of Ueda Shōji, November, 1984). Showing Ozawa Takeshi, Sawamoto Tokumi, Ueda Shōji and Watanabe Yoshio gathered around prints. Photomechanical print. In Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai (The Committee for Establishing the Japanese Photography Museum)/Watanabe Yoshio. Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu shui undō no sōkatsu 3 (A Summary of the Movement to Establish the Japanese Photography Museum 3) (Tokyo: Nihon shashin kyōkai, 1994), 32. 4.6 × 6.2 cm. With permission of the Japan Professional Photographers Society.

While the purchase of works by non-Japanese photographers was facilitated by specialist galleries abroad, curator Kasahara Michiko explains that because there were few galleries in Japan that sold photographic prints made by Japanese photographers, and thus no market standard for original prints, the museum set a uniform price of ¥70,000 per photograph and the goal of purchasing at least fifteen works per Japanese photographer.⁸² A problem with this policy, in Kasahara’s view, was that many of those in charge of determining which photographers to include were contemporaries of the very photographers they were acquiring works from, resulting in the collection of Japanese photographs being more than seventy per cent photographs taken in the 1950s and 1960s.⁸³ This meant that the canon of the history of Japanese photography enshrined in this novel permanent collection comprised primarily the postwar work of the two generations of photographers who curated the exhibition A Century of Japanese Photography.⁸⁴ Building a history of photography around the recent work of these photographers, the museum’s archive created a space focused on reinforcing the importance of their postwar careers and passed the role of holding and providing access to nineteenth-century photographs back to regional archives such as the Northern Studies Collection at Hokkaido University.⁸⁵

Another significant element of the museum’s collecting practices was that out of the seventeen photographers designated ‘major’ Japanese photographers by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography’s Guiding Principles for Collection in 1989, none were women. Although the museum impressively amassed 15,032 photographs – 10,902 by Japanese photographers – by the time of its full opening in 1995, few of these photographs were by Japanese women. When twenty-one photographers were added to the new collecting guidelines in 2006, Ishiuchi Miyako, Onodera Yuki and Yanagi Miwa were the only women included. The new guidelines also stipulated the photographers selected for the collection be in their forties to sixties at the time of acquisition, curiously eliminating from consideration the generation of women photographers who rose to prominence in the early 1990s when they were teenagers and in their early twenties. It was only in 2006 that Ishiuchi Miyako became the first female Japanese photographer to have a solo exhibition at the museum when it hosted Mother’s after it had shown at the Venice Biennale.⁸⁶ Beyond gender, there was little official consideration of how the museum might make its collection engage with the work of photographers active in Japan’s former colonial empire or immigrant communities. This institutionalisation of absence might be understood as the result of the continued reliance upon the narratives put in place by the 1968 and 1975 exhibitions that turned away from examining the social construction of the photographer and the prominence that the exhibition organisers themselves had risen to by the late 1980s. While these exhibitions sparked public awareness of photography as integral to Japanese history and support for photography museum building, both exhibitions and the new museum reinforced narratives around a canon of significant photographers and important histories worth collecting.

Seen from the perspective of an official collecting policy focused on Japanese male photographers and the all-male committees that contributed to the museum, it is significant that within a year of the museum’s opening, Kasahara Michiko curated Watashi to iu michi he mukatte gendai josei serufu pōtoreito (Exploring the unknown self: self-portraits of contemporary women) in 1991, which is considered the first exhibition at any Japanese art museum to examine issues of gender.⁸⁷ Through photographs primarily by non-Japanese photographers, the exhibition presented a history of photography that was a dramatic departure from the contemporary photography world celebration of male photographers who used women’s bodies in their work and the cultural insistence that women’s self-portraiture did not have political potential.⁸⁸ Working through an institution focused on preserving the legacy of the male photographers who had contributed to its founding, Kasahara’s exhibitions narrated histories of women photographers around the world, opening up space for new approaches to writing a history of photography that critically approached how an artist’s gender might inform their practice and its status.⁸⁹ By bringing these photographers’ work to public attention, Kasahara injected into the art world an argument about ‘how existing art history reflects, reinforces and reproduces the value of homosocial society’ in Japan.⁹⁰ As she asserts, the current gender imbalance among art directors and curators in Japan cannot be remedied by the mere hiring of more women: ‘Change will not happen unless we are women who are aware of the problems that society engraves on individuals and fully understand the history and meaning of asymmetrical gazes’. In Kasahara’s exhibitions and published work on the role of curators she addresses the question of how to best reflect reality through photographs, the issue that had so obsessed photographers in the decades after the war, albeit from a very different angle. She is exemplar of how the generation of art historians and curators active from the 1990s onwards has formed a sophisticated critique of the way photographs and the structures of the photography world have constructed meaning to assert totalising narratives that effaced the histories of Japanese colonialism, war and women photographers.

Returning to the questions first asked by the 1968 exhibition curators, ‘How can we tell history through the photographic object?’ and ‘What should a photographer be?’, each generation of photo-scholars has put forward proposals for writing new narratives of the past. In this series of interconnected photography exhibitions and publications, and the establishment of Japan’s largest photography museum, photographic history was invented, reinterpreted and represented to create a photographic past for Japan that at first promised to redirect the critical capacity of the camera but in the end created a palatable and sellable national narrative around male photographers. Rather than an endpoint, the museum, its collections and activist curators like Kasahara Michiko stand as opportunities to unlearn the archive and build new directions using the momentum of the many actors who have all had investments in narrating a history of Japanese photography.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research would not have been possible without the support of Sandra Phillips and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on earlier versions of the article. My thanks to colleagues and mentors who offered insight on this work: Dan Abbe, Phillip Charrier, Ji Hye (Alice) Han, Nina Horisaki-Christens, Jonathan Reynolds, Aileen Robinson, Vanessa Schwartz and the anonymous reviewers of this journal. My thanks for research support to the Japan Professional Photographers Society, Kasahara Michiko and John Dower. The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 – Watanabe Yoshio, ‘“Shashin 100 nen” Nihonjin ni yoru shashin hyōgen no rekishiten ni suite’ (On ‘A Century of Japanese Photography’ a historical exhibition on photographic expression by the Japanese’ Tokushūgō) (Special Edition Photography Day Lecture), Nihon shashin kyōkai kaihō (PSJ Bulletin), 7/8 (1968), 7–11 (8).

2 – Imai Hisae, ‘Shashin hyōgen no rekishi o kataru – Nihon shashinka kyōkai shashin 100 nenten ni tsuite’ (Narrating a history of photographic expression – on the Professional Photographers Society 100 Years Exhibition), Asahi Kamera, June 1968, 222–29 (223).

3 – Hamada Hachirō, ‘“Shashin 100 nen” o mite kanshita koto’ (What I felt when I saw the A Century of Photography Exhibition), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō (Japan Professional Photographers Society Newsletter), no. 19 (1968), 26–29.

4 – Tōmatsu Shōmei, Taki Kōji, Naito Masatoshi, Imai Hisae and Hirano Hisasahi, ‘Shashin hyōgen no rekishi o kataru – Nihon shashinka kyōkai shashin 100 nenten ni tsuite’ (Narrating a history of photographic expression – on the Professional Photographers Society A Century of Photography Exhibition), Asahi Kamera, June (1968), 222–29.

5 – This is Hamaya Hiroshi’s account of setting up the 784 original prints included in the exhibition; see Itō Tomomi, Murakami Ichiro, Hamaya Hiroshi, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Taki Koji, Naito Masatoshi, Kimura Keiichi, Kumakiri Keisuke and Matsumoto Norihiko, ‘“Shashin 100 nen” ten o oete’ (The end of the ‘100 years of Japanese Photography’ exhibition), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 9–25 (10).

6 – Hamada Hachiro describes the exhibition as ‘kakkiteki’ (ground-breaking or revolutionary). Hamada Hachiro, ‘Shashin to wa nani ka’ o kangae saserareru (Making you think about ‘What is photography’), in ‘“Shashin 100 nen” o mite kanshita koto’, Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 26–29.

7 – The museum changed its name to the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2016 but as I address events prior, I use its former name.

8 – Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 17; there are many parallels between the way people viewed photography’s potentials for building new political subjectivities in Japan and North America.

9 – On thinking critically about the construction of photography’s institutional histories in the USA, see Nadya Bair, ‘The International Origins of “Concerned Photography”: Cornell Capa in the United States, Japan, and Israel’, American Art, 36, no. 2 (2022), 74–101.

10 – See, for example, Allison Bertrand, ‘Beaumont Newhall’s “Photography 1839–1937” Making History’, History of Photography, 21, no. 2 (1997), 137–46; Christine Y. Hahn, ‘Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937, and the Museum of Modern Art’, Visual Resources, 18, no. 2 (2002), 145–52; and Douglas R. Nickel, ‘History of Photography: The State of Research’, Art Bulletin, 83, no. 3 (2001), 548–58. The 2017 College Art Association Panel ‘Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography from 1937 to the Present Day’ chaired by Jason Hill and Nadya Bair approached the endurance of his legacy from multiple productive perspectives. See 〈http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/conference/conference-program-2017.pdf〉.

11 – Anne McCauley identifies a ‘photographic renaissance’ sparked by a similar confluence of public accessibility and interest in photography in the USA in the 1930s. Anne McCauley, ‘Writing Photography’s History Before Newhall’, History of Photography, 21, no. 2 (1997), 87–101.

12 – On the history of the Japanese mass media censorship, see Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). On the popularity of photographing nudes in the 1950s, see Kelly Midori McCormick, ‘Tokiwa Toyoko, the Nude Shooting Session, and the Gendered Optics of Japanese Postwar Photography’, Japan Forum, 43, no. 3 (2021), 383–411.

13 – Philip Charrier, ‘Nakahira Takuma’s “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” (1973) and the Quest for “True” Photographic Realism in Post-war Japan’, Japan Forum, 32, no. 1 (2020), 56–82 (71); Justin Jesty, ‘The Realism Debate and the Politics of Modern Art in Postwar Japan’, Japan Forum, 26, no. 4 (2014), 508–29; Yoshiaki Kai, ‘Sunappu: A Genre of Japanese Photography, 1930–1980’ (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 2012); and Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan’s Elusive Reality’, Journal of Asian Studies, 67, no. 2 (May 2008), 365–94.

14 – Charrier, ‘Nakahira Takuma’s’, 71–73.

15 – Ibid., 71. On Ōtsuji Kiyoji’s critique of Domon’s realism through abstraction and still-life photographs, see Daniel Abbe, ‘Re-staging Postwar Japanese Photography: Ōtsuji Kiyoji, APN and Straight Photography’, Japan Forum, 34, no. 3 (2022), 355–82.

16 – Charrier, ‘Nakahira Takuma’s’, 78.

17 – ‘Nichibei gōdō shashin tenrankai’ (Joint Japanese American salon of photography), Nihon shashin kyōkai kaihō (PSJ Bulletin), 1, no. 1 (October 1954), 24–25, 31–32; and ‘Nihon sakuhin no ashiato’ (Footprints of the Japanese works), Nihon shashin kyōkai kaihō (PSJ Bulletin), 1, no. 2 (1 June 1955), 23.

18 – Bair, ‘International Origins’, 87.

19 – John O’Brian, ‘The Nuclear Family of Man’, Japan Focus: Asia Pacific Journal, July 2008, 〈http://japanfocus.org/-John-O_Brian/2816〉.

20 – Kanemaru Shigene, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 22 March 1956; cited in Kohara Masashi, ‘“Za famirī obu man” ten reisen to “ningen Kazoku”’ (The Cold War and the Family of Man Exhibition), in Sensō to heiwa ‘hōdō shashin’ ga tsutaetakatta nihon (War and peace: the Japan that ‘documentary photography’ sought to transmit), ed. by Shirayama Mari and Kohara Masashi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2015), 178–84 (183).

21 – Ina Nobuo, ‘Robert Capa – A Fearless Man’, folder 31.6 CC-ICP; cited in Bair, ‘International Origins’, 89.

22 – For postwar sources on the role of photography in raising Japan’s international reputation and the increased accessibility and professionalisation of photography, see Ina Nobuo, ‘Keizai katsudō ni okeru shashin no ichi’ (The position of photography in economic activities), in Nenkan Kōkoku bijutsu Annual of Advertising Art in Japan (Tokyo: Bujutsu Shuppan-sha, 1959), 15–18 (18); ‘Democracy to Photocracy’, Nihon shashin kyōkai kaihō (Photographic Society of Japan Bulletin), 1, no. 1 (October 1954), 10; and Japan Professional Photographers Society, eds., Nihon gendai shashinshi (The history of modern Japanese photography 1945–1970) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977); see also Kelly Midori McCormick, ‘Finding a Language for Early Postwar Japanese Photography’ and ‘The Japanese Camera and the Aesthetics of Postwar National Design’, in ‘Gendering Cultures of Japanese Photography, 1931–1970’ (PhD Diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2019), 60–98; 99–138.

23 – Photographic Society of Japan, eds., 1963 nenban Nihon shashin nenkan (Japan photograph almanac) (Tokyo: Photography Society of Japan, 1963), 354.

24 – I build on Stimson’s argument that in the postwar period photography became a way to articulate ‘new relationships to collective identity, new solutions to the old collectivisms’ that was both supranational and at the same time reinforced national identities. See Stimson, Pivot of the World, 26.

25 – For documentation of the exhibition and a full list of items put on display, see Photographic Society of Japan, eds., 1963 nenban Nihon shashin nenkan; see also Michifusa Otagi, ‘Nihon shashin hyakunenten yori’ (From the one hundred years of Japanese photography exhibition), Shashin Kōgyō (November 1962), np; and ‘Nihon shashin Hyakunenshi’ (One hundred years of Japanese photography), Nippon Kamera (November 1962), 141–43.

26 – Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 11–12.

27 – On the revolutionary potential many invested in photography in 1968, see Nihon shashin no 1968: 1966–1974 futtosuru shashin no mure (1968 – Japanese photography: photographs that stirred up debate, 1966–1974), ed. by Ryuichi Kaneko and Hiroko Tasaka (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2013).

28 – Accounts of the number of photographs gathered vary; Watanabe Yoshio, then president of the JPS, claimed it was one hundred thousand, but Shōmei Tōmatsu later cited five hundred thousand; see Watanabe, ‘Shashin 100 nen’, 8; and Tōmatsu Shōmei, Naitō Masatoshi, Taki Kōji, Imai Hisae and Hirano Hisashi, ‘Shashin hyōgen no rekishi o kataru: Nihon shashinka kyōkai shashin 100 nen ten ni tsuite’ (Narrating a history of photographic expression: On the Japan Professional Photographers Society A Century of Japanese Photography Exhibition), Asahi Camera (June 1968), 222–28; see also Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 24.

29 – This is the second diagram of the exhibition produced; the first included different categories and numbers of photographs assigned to each section, and was published in Hamaya Hiroshi, ‘“Nihonjin ni yoru shashin hyōgen 100nenshi ten” chūkan happyō’, Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 17 (1967), 11.

30 – Hamaya Hiroshi, JPS Kaihō, no. 14, 1966, 8–9; cited in Tsuchiya Seiichi, ‘The Whereabout of the “Record” Discovered – Reflections on A Century of Photography’ in Nihon shashin no 1968: 1966–1974 futtosuru shashin no mure (1968 – Japanese photography: photographs that stirred up debate, 1966–1974), ed. by Ryuichi Kaneko and Hiroko Tasaka (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2013), xiv.

31 – Although there is no extensive visual documentation of the exhibition, the catalogue lists the titles of photographs included and the number grouped in each section. Tomomi et al., ‘“Shashin 100 nen” ten o oete’, 10.

32 – Ibid., 24.

33 – I argue in my forthcoming book there was great interest in the 1960s in producing anonymous photographs in group publications and exhibitions to emphasise the content of the image as its primary meaning, as exemplified by the work of the Zen Nihon gakusei shashin renmeikai (All Japan Student Photography League). There are also connections between the display strategies employed in ‘The Document’ section and that of Nakahira’s photographic installation Circulation: Date, Place, Events at the 1971 Paris Biennale. For further discussion of Nakahira’s work, see Franz Prichard, ‘On For a Language to Come, Circulation and Overflow: Takuma Nakahira and the Horizons of Radical Media Criticism in the Early 1970s’, in For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979, ed. by Yasufumi Nakamori and Allison Pappas (Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015), 84–89.

34 – There are many resonances with the curatorial goals put forth by John Szarkowski, Director of MoMA’s Department of Photography in the 1964 exhibition The Photographer’s Eye, which sought to identify the ‘special visual language’ of photography through the display of photographs by more than one hundred photographers, many of them anonymous; see the exhibition press release, 27 May 1964, 〈https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326341.pdf?_ga=2.188719720.1164410875.1618003811-737757628.1615571583〉.

35 – Taki Kōji, ‘What is Possible for Photography?’, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989, ed. by Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya and Fumihiko Sumitomo (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 215–18 (217).

36 – Philip Charrier, ‘Taki Koji, Provoke, and the Structuralist Turn in Japanese Image Theory, 1967–70’, History of Photography, 41, no. 1 (April 2017), 25–43 (26).

37 – Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 19.

38 – Nakahira’s work curating and writing for A Century of Japanese Photography was formative for developing the ideas in his seminal 1973 essay, ‘Naze shokubutsu zukan ka’ (Why an illustrated botanical dictionary), which Philip Charrier describes as invoking the ‘phenomenological notion of consciousness as transcendent, meaning that it accesses reality directly without the mediation of ideas, to challenge the subjective realist tradition and propose a new photographic practice in which the camera functions as an extension of consciousness’; see Charrier, ‘Nakahira Takuma’s’, 59.

39 – For the most complete treatment of photography as propaganda during the wartime period in Japan, see Shirayama Mari, ‘Photojournalism and Propaganda’, in The Japanese Photobook 1912–1990, ed. by Kaneko Ryuichi and Manfred Heiting (Göttingen: Steidl, 2017), 136–43; ‘Hōdō shashin’ to sensō 1930–1960 (‘Photojournalism’ and war 1930–1960) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2014); Andrea Germer, ‘Visual Propaganda in Wartime East Asia: The Case of Natori Yōnosuke’, Asia-Pacific Journal, 9, no. 20 (2011), 〈http://japanfocus.org/-andrea-germer/3530/article.html〉; Gennifer Weisenfeld, ‘Publicity and Propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as Method’, Design Issues, 25, no. 4 (2009), 13–28; and David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media (Armonk, NY: An East Gate Book, M.E. Sharpe, 2008). On the emergence of political documentary photography in the USA, see Ellen Macfarlane, ‘Group f.64, Rocks, and the Limits of the Political Photograph’, American Art, 30, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 26–53.

40 – Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 22.

41 – Seiichi, ‘Shashinshi 68 nen – Shashin 100nen saikō’, 246; for an English translation of the abridged version, see Tsuchiya Seiichi, ‘The Whereabouts of the “Record” Discovered – Reflections on A Century of Photography’, in Nihon shashin no 1968, ed. Ryuichi and Tasaka, xiii–xxii.

42 – Itō et al., ‘“Shashin 100 nen” ten o oete’ (1968), 10.

43 – On debates over war responsibility in literary circles, see J. Victor Koschmann, ‘The Debate on Subjectivity in Postwar Japan: Foundations of Modernism as a Political Critique’, Pacific Affairs, 54, no. 4 (Winter 1981–82), 609–31. On the role of artists in society, see Jesty, ‘Realism Debate’, 508–29, cited in note 13.

44 – In the 1950s Domon made a name for himself as the father of Japanese postwar realism, although he used a similar photojournalistic style to shoot propaganda photographs for Nippon and Shashin Shūhō, state-sponsored periodicals that glorified Japanese imperialism. For more on Domon’s postwar articulations of his photographic theory, see Thomas, ‘Power Made Visible’. On the visual strategies of photographic propaganda in Shashin Shūhō, see Kanō Mikio, ‘Shashin Shūhō ni miru jendā to esunishiti’ (Looking at Shashin Shūhō: gender and ethnicity), Image & Gender, 5 (March 2005), 35–40.

45 – Hamaya, Hiroshi, Ikari to kanashimi no kiroku (Record of rage and grief) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1960).

46 – Tomomi et al., ‘“Shashin 100 nen” ten o oete’, 24.

47 – For a brilliant analysis of Taki’s photographic theory, see Charrier, ‘Taki Koji’, 25–43.

48 – For an insightful critique of Nakahira and Taki’s decontextualised adoration of Tamoto Kenzō, see Gyewon Kim, ‘Reframing ‘Hokkaido Photography’: Style, Politics, and Documentary Photography in 1960s Japan’, History of Photography, 39, no. 4 (December 2015), 348–65.

49 – See Kelly McCormick, ‘Finding a Language’, 60–89.

50 – See ‘Sunday at Hirohito’s: Emperor Poses for First Information Pictures’, Life (4 February 1946), 75–80.

51 – Many thanks to Ji Hye Han for information on Lee Myeong-dong, a war correspondent during the Korean War and photography critic who had personal relationships with the photographers Ina Nobuo and Kimura Ihei, and who supported the Korean photographic realism movement; see Korea Institute of Photography & Culture, Youngsook Song, ‘Oral History of Korean Photography: Korean Photography Oral History Project 2’, The Museum of Photography, Seoul, 〈http://photomuseum.or.kr/front/en/laborataryPhotoProjectDetailView.do?no=5〉; and also Lee Myeong-dong, ‘“Shashin 100nen” o mite kanshita koto’ (What I felt when I saw the Century of Japanese Photography exhibition), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 28.

52 – Thanks to Lucy Fleming-Brown for her insights into the significance of leaving Okinawa out of the exhibition and archive of ‘Japanese’ photographs. It is possible that it was too difficult to travel to Okinawa as movement between mainland Japan and Okinawa was restricted by the US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands until 1972 when governance of Okinawa was ‘returned’ to Japan; see Koichi Kirino, ‘2 Old “passports” Show History of Travel between Mainland Japan, Okinawa under US rule’, Mainichi, 14 May 2022, 〈https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220513/p2a/00m/0na/035000c〉.

53 – Censored wartime images by Mainichi Shimbun photographers were published for the first time in 1977; see Mainichi Shimbun, ed., Fukyoka shashinshi: Ichiokunin no Shōwashi (A history of unauthorised photographs: the Shōwa history of 100 million people) (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1977).

54 – ‘“Shashin 100nen” o mite kanshita koto’, Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 28.

55 – Ibid.

56 – See ‘Sensō no kiroku II’, in Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai (Japan Professional Photographers Society), eds., Nihon shashinshi 1840–1945 (A history of Japanese photography 1840–1945) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971).

57 – See Gavin Walker’s powerful analysis of the ‘debate on Japanese capitalism’ (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō). Gavin Walker, The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 28–74.

58 – Leading up to the exhibition, prominent members of the JPS Ina Nobuo, Kanemaru Shigene, Watanabe Tsutomu and Kimura Ihei held a series of roundtable discussions on the meaning and formation of postwar photography, which Watanabe Yoshio credits as being another launching point for the 1975 exhibition. Watanabe Yoshio, ‘Atogaki’ (Afterword), in Japan Professional Photographers Society, eds. Nihon gendai shashinshi.

59 – The curators describe their process in Ishibashi Tatsuo, Kinoshita Akira, Sekiya Isao, Hanabusa Shinzo, Matsumoto Norihiko and Watanabe Yoshio, ‘Ōdzume ni kita hensan no sagyō’ (The work of the curators has finally come to an end), Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 41 (1975), 22–27.

60 – Japan Professional Photographers Society, eds. Nihon gendai shashinshi. It should also be noted that in 1974 the Museum Modern Art in New York held the exhibition New Japanese Photography, and the accompanying catalogue repeated many of the arguments about the failures of Japanese photographers in the 1930s. Organised by John Szarkowski (1925–2007), the director of MoMA’s Department of Photography, and Shōji Yamagishi (1928–79), the editor of Camera Mainichi, the exhibition focused on contemporary trends in Japanese photography through the works of the postwar generation of photographers, and did not include any women photographers. See Yoshiaki Kai, ‘Distinctiveness versus Universality: Reconsidering New Japanese Photography’, Trans Asia Photography Review, 3, no, 2 (Spring 2013), 〈http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.203〉.

61 – John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

62 – John Dower, interview with the author, 20 November 2018.

63 – John Dower, ‘A Bibliographic Note on the Visual Record for Modern Japan’, in A Century of Japanese Photography (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980), 367–71. On the role of visual history, see Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz, ‘Visual History: The Past in Pictures’, Representations, 145, no. 1 (2019), 1–31.

64 – The Founding Committee publications detail the many stages of the campaign and process of forming the museum: Nihon shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsukai (Japanese Photography Museum Establishment Promotion Committee), eds., Shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsu shui 1 (The purpose of establishing a photography museum 1) (Tokyo: Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai, 10 December 1979). Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Narahara Ikko, Tomatsu Shomei, ‘Shashin no bijutsukan ha dou aru beki ka’ in Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai (The Committee for Establishing the Japanese Photography Museum)/Watanabe Yoshio. Nihon shashin bijutsukan kaigai no shashin bijutsukan 2 (The Japanese Photography Museum and Photography Museums Abroad 2) (Tokyo: Nihon shashin kyōkai, 1980); Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai (The Committee for Establishing the Japanese Photography Museum)/Watanabe Yoshio. Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu shui undō no sōkatsu 3 (A Summary of the Movement to Establish the Japanese Photography Museum 3) (Tokyo: Nihon shashin kyōkai, 1994). Notable members of the Founding Committee, fully listed on page thirty-five (1979), included Domon Ken, Shigemori Koen, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Narahara Ikkō, Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Nagano Shigeichi, Watanabe Yoshio, Miki Jun, Hosoe Eikoh and Matsumoto Norihiko.

65 – Shigemori Koen quoted in ‘“Shashin 100nen” o mite kanshita koto’, Nihon shashinka kyōkai kaihō, no. 19 (1968), 27–28.

66 – A third formative exhibition from this period led to the construction of another crucial photography institution in Tokyo: Nihon kamera hattatsuten (The development of Japanese cameras) was held in 1986 at the National Museum of Nature and Science, in Ueno, Tokyo, displaying five hundred examples of Japanese-made cameras. It led to the establishment in December 1989 of the Japan Camera Museum and Library, whose building houses the offices of the JPS and the Photographic Society of Japan. See Nihon kamera zaidan, eds. Nihon kamera zaidan shōshi 1954–2004 (A short history of the Japan Camera Industry Institute) (Tokyo: Nihon kamera zaidan, 2004), 26–27.

67 – Kamekura Yūsaku, “Besshi no tatakai” (Fighting neglect), in Shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsu shui 1, ed. by Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai, 9.

68 – Akiyama Shōtarō, ‘Sokudan jikkō no toki’ (The time to make a swift decision), in Shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsu shui 1, ed. by Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai, 4.

69 – Nihon shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsukai, eds., Shashin bijūtsukan setsuritsu shui 1, 1–3.

70 – Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Raw Photographs and Cooked History: Photography’s Ambiguous Place in the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’, in East Asian History: The Continuation of Papers on Far Eastern History, ed. Geremie R. Barme (Canberra: Institute of Advanced Studies Australian National University, 1998), 126.

71 – For a detailed list of postwar photography exhibitions and their locations, see Hou Penghui, ‘Nihon ni okeru shashin tenrankai no shiteki kenkyū: sengo kara shashin bijutsukan no seiritsu made (1945–1995) o chūshin ni’ (Historical research on photographic exhibitions in Japan: from the postwar to the establishment of the photography museum (1945–1995)) (Ph.D. diss., Nihon University College of Art, 2015), 138–58.

72 – On the evolving role and significance of curators at modern art museums in Japan, see Namba Sachiko, Gendai bijutsu kyurētā to iu shigoto (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2012); and History of Japanese Art After 1945: Institutions, Discourses, Practice, ed. by Kitazawa Noriaki, Kuresawa Takemi and Mitsuda Yuri (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2023).

73 – Namba Sachiko calls the 1950s the ‘dawn of Japanese contemporary art exhibition making’ with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (in 1951) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (in 1952).

74 – Morishita Masaaki, ‘Struggles between Curators and Artists: The Case of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in Japan in the Early 1980s’, Museum and Society, 5, no. 2 (July 2007), 89.

75 – The introduction of photography into museum contexts is an uneasy process and for some it signals the end of the museum itself; see Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject’, in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 66–83.

76 – Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Narahara Ikkō and Tōmatsu Shōmei, ‘Shashin no bijutsukan ha dō aru beki ka’ (What should a photography museum be), in Nihon shashin bijutsukan kaigai no shashin bijutsukan 2, ed. by Nihon shashin bijutsukan setsuritsu īnkai/Watanabe Yoshio (Tokyo: Nihon shashin kyōkai, 1980), 30–31.

77 – Kaneko Ryuichi, ‘Tōkyōtō shashin bijustukan, sono hajimari kara sōgō kaikan made’, in Tōkyōto shashin bijutsukan sōgō kaikan 20-shūnen-shi ichiji shisetsu kaikan kara 25 nen no ayumi (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography 1990–2015) (Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2016), 56.

78 – On the Vidéothèque de Paris, see Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 215–19.

79 – For a complete detailing of the committees formed in the years preceding the establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of photography, see Kaneko, ‘Tōkyōtō shashin bijustukan’, 57.

80 – See ‘Shūshū no kihon hōshin’ (Guiding principles of our collections), in Tōkyōto shashin bijutsukan sōgō kaikan 20-shūnen-shi ichiji shisetsu kaikan kara 25 nen no ayumi, 36–39.

81 – The categories included ‘Dawn of photography (mid-19th century)’, ‘Commercial portraiture (Meiji period, 1868–1912)’, ‘Documentary photography (Meiji period)’, ‘Yokohama photography’, ‘Art photography (Taisho period, 1912–1926 and prewar-Showa period, 1926–1939)’, ‘Reportage/documentary photography (prewar-Showa period)’, ‘1940s’, ‘1950s’, ‘1960s’, ‘1970s’ and ‘Contemporary photographers’. See Kaneko, ‘Tōkyōtō shashin bijustukan’, 58.

82 – Kasahara Michiko worked as a curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography from 1989 to 2002 and as Chief Curator from 2006 to 2018; see Kasahara Michiko, ‘Tōkyōtō shashin bijustukan no sakuhin shūshū to tenrankai’, in Tōkyōto shashin bijutsukan sōgō kaikan 20-shūnen-shi ichiji shisetsu kaikan kara 25 nen no ayumi, 65. On the role that Ishihara Etsuro and Zeit Foto Salon played in creating an art market for photographic prints in Japan and boosting the international and domestic status of Japanese photographers as artists, see Aota Yumi, Shashin o a¯to ni shita otoko, Ishihara Etsurō to Tsaito Foto Saron = Etsuro Ishihara & Zeit-Foto Salon (The man who turned photography into art, Ishihara Etsuro and the Zeit Foto Salon) (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2016).

83 – Kasahara also points out that, more recently, photographers who gained recognition abroad had an accepted market value for their prints which was much higher and made acquiring their work more difficult. See Kasahara, ‘Tōkyōtō shashin bijustukan no sakuhin shūshū to tenrankai’.

84 –The original seventeen photographers selected for the collection were: Akiyama Shotaro (1920–2003), Fujiwara Shinya (1944–), Hamaya Hiroshi (1915–99), Hayashi Tadahiko (1918–90), Hosoe Eikoh (b. 1933), Ishimoto Yasuhiro (1921–2012), Kawada Kikuji (b. 1933), Kimura Ihee (1901–74), Kuwabara Kineo (1913–2007), Moriyama Daido (b. 1938), Nagano Shigeichi (1925–2019), Narahara Ikko (1931–2020), Shirakawa Yoshikazu (1935–2022), Tōmatsu Shōmei (1930–2012), Tsuchida Hiromi (b. 1939), Ueda Shoji (1913–2000) and Watanabe Yoshio (1907–2000).

85 – Hokkaido University’s Northern Studies Collection and the Hakodate City Central Library house the largest collection of historical photographs of the Japanese colonisation of Hokkaido.

86 – The first woman photographer to have a solo show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography was Berenice Abbott in 1990 (Photographer: A Modern Vision). From 1990 to 2001 there were seven exhibitions including Japanese women photographers. See Tōkyōto shashin bijutsukan sōgō kaikan 20-shūnen-shi ichiji shisetsu kaikan kara 25 nen no ayumi.

87 – Watashi to iu michi he mukatte marked the start of a series of exhibitions organised by Kasahara, Kokatsu Reiko, Kaori Chino and Midori Wakakuwa in the 1990s that focused on gender. They also established the Image & Gender Study Group and accompanying journal. On the exhibitions they organised and Kasahara’s legacy curating exhibitions with a gender focus, see ‘Bijutsukan to jendā o meguru 30-nen no tatakai Kasahara Michiko × Kokatsu Reiko shirīzu: Jendāfurī wa kanō ka?’ (A 30-year battle over museums and gender, Kasahara Michiko × Kokatsu Reiko, Series: Is it possible to be Gender Free?), Bijutsu Techō, 6 June 2019, 〈https://bijutsutecho.com/magazine/series/s21/19921〉; and Kasahara Michiko and Tsuchiya Seiichi, ‘Hyōron jendā’, 22 January 2022, 〈https://www.aicajapan.com/ja/no22kasahara/〉.

88 – On the sexist discourses around Japanese women photographers of the 1990s, see Gabriella Lukacs, Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and Nagashima Yurie, ‘Bokura’ no ‘onna no ko shashin’ kara watashi no gāriifoto he (From ‘their’ ‘girls photography’ to ‘our’ ‘girlie photography’) (Tokyo: Daifuku shorin, 2020).

89 – My thanks to Kasahara for sharing her perspectives on collecting and curating works by women artists via email on 5 December 2022 and in interview on 27 March 2023. On Kasahara’s curation process, see Kasahara Michiko, Jendā shashinron 1991–2017 (Kawasaki: Satoyamasha, 2018).

90 – Kasahara Michiko, ‘Bijutsukan no kanrishoku ni josei ga tsugitsugi to shinshutsu shiteiru. Bijutsukan wa kawaru no ka?’, Zenkoku bijutsukan kaigi kikan-shi zenbi fōramu, 18 (September 2020), 14–16 (15).