History of Photography

ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20

Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed:

Wartime Memory, Performativity and the
Documentary in Contemporary Japanese
Photograph and Video Art Edited by Ayelet
Zohar. Tel Aviv University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv,
2015. 288 pages, with illustrations throughout.
Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-9-657-16041-1Ishiuchi
Miyako: Postwar Shadows Amanda Maddox with
contributions by Ito Hiromi and Miryam Sas. The J.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2015. 192 pages,
with 140 colour illustrations. Hardcover $49.95,
ISBN 978-1-606-06455-9

Yoshiaki Kai

To cite this article: Yoshiaki Kai (2017) Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed:
Wartime Memory, Performativity and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photograph
and Video Art Edited by Ayelet Zohar. Tel Aviv University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2015. 288 pages,
with illustrations throughout. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-9-657-16041-1Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar
Shadows Amanda Maddox with contributions by Ito Hiromi and Miryam Sas. The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles, 2015. 192 pages, with 140 colour illustrations. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN
978-1-606-06455-9, History of Photography, 41:1, 90-92, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2017.1286769

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1286769

Published online: 10 Apr 2017.

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 Reviews

Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed: Wartime Memory, Performativity and
the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photograph and Video Art
Edited by Ayelet Zohar. Tel Aviv University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2015. 288 pages, with
illustrations throughout. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-9-657-16041-1
Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows
Amanda Maddox with contributions by Ito Hiromi and Miryam Sas. The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles, 2015. 192 pages, with 140 colour illustrations. Hardcover $49.95,
ISBN 978-1-606-06455-9

Similar to many other books on Japanese photography, Beyond Hiroshima and Ishiuchi
Miyako were published in conjunction with exhibitions at art galleries (the former was
held at the Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery in Tel Aviv University from 24 April to
15 August 2015 and the latter at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 6 October 2015 to
21 February 2016). Since Moriyama Daidos retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art in 1999, a significant number of exhibitions devoted to Japanese photography
have been organised outside Japan, making the subject accessible to audiences who are not
familiar with the country and its visual culture. These exhibitions were often accompanied by
publications that have contributed to the international scholarship on the history of Japanese
photography, to which Beyond Hiroshima and Ishiuchi Miyako are the latest welcome
additions. As this reviewer was unable to visit the exhibitions, the present review discusses
only their accompanying publications, both of which have been edited as stand-alone books.
Beyond Hiroshima, edited by Ayelet Zohar, an Israel-based scholar of Japanese photo-
graphy and visual culture, is printed in English, Hebrew, and Japanese and features works by
ten artists and photographers: Bubu de la Madeleine, Hamaya Hiroshi, Ishiuchi Miyako,
Koizumi Meiro, Morimura Yasumasa, Shitamichi Motoyuki, Shimada Yoshiko, Suzuki
Norio, Tsukada Mamoru, and Yamashiro Chikako. In addition to reproductions of photo-
graphs and screen shots from video works, the book consists of an introduction by Zohar and
essays by Narita Ryichi, Julia Adeney Thomas, Takenaka Akiko, Lena Fritsch, and Justin
Jesty. While Fritsch and Jesty focus on works by individual photographers (on Ishiuchi and
Hamaya respectively), both Narita and Takenaka discuss the general political and cultural
contexts in which the works were produced, noting how difficult it has been for Japanese
citizens to cope with the memory of the Asia-Pacific War.
Zohar selected a range of practices, from established documentary photographers
(Hamaya) to emerging artists using photography (Shitamichi) or video (Yamashiro), as their
primary medium. Zohar also included photographs by an adventurer who did not identify as an
artist or a professional photographer, namely Suzuki Norio, who searched for and eventually
found Onoda Hiroo, a former army soldier who hid in a jungle in the Philippines until 1974,
believing that the Asia-Pacific War had not ended. Suzukis photographs documenting Onoda
are difficult to categorise as works of art, providing a marked contrast with videos by Morimura,
Koizumi, and Yamashiro that were presented in the form of a projected moving image.
With this heterogeneous selection of participants, Zohar explains, Beyond Hiroshima
attempts to present works that represent images and situations that reflect on memory and
trauma associated with the Asia-Pacific War. Despite its title, none of the works, except for
Ishiuchis /Hiroshima, directly address the atomic bomb dropped by the United
States on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The exhibition neither included photographs nor
videos that documented the city of Hiroshima in its recovery (or lack thereof) from the war.
Rather than the name of a specific city, the word Hiroshima in the context of this book thus
signifies Japans catastrophic end to the Asia-Pacific War (indeed, Beyond Hiroshima and
Nagasaki would work as an exhibition title as well). Although such usage of Hiroshima is
not uncommon, it is worth mentioning that a number of photographers, such as Ishiguro
Kenji, Tsuchida Hiromi, and Sasaoka Keiko, attempted to problematise the distance between
Hiroshima as a symbol and Hiroshima as an actual local city.
According to Zohars classification, the works collected in the exhibition employed two
different strategies, namely the performative act and the documentary recording of places
and events (original emphases). The performative projects, including works by Morimura,
Koizumi, and Yamashiro, involved fictional theatrical performances, often by the artist
himself or herself, that also pointed to specific historical events or locations. The documen-
tary projects were more conventional in their use of the photographic medium, but con-
temporary works, such as Ishiuchis /Hiroshima and Shitamichis Torii series,
employed photography self-reflexively, questioning the mediums capacity to represent the
atrocity of war by focusing the camera on relics that appear to hover between the past and
the present.

History of Photography, Volume 41, Number 1, February 2017

 Reviews

Drawing on concepts derived from Holocaust Studies, Zohar points out the generational
differences in relating to the traumatic memory of the war. The Third Generation is already
in a position in which the past does not dominate the present, and the future holds much
promise. Together with the distinction between performative and documentary strategies,
this concept of the Third Generation is useful for analysing not only the works shown in
Beyond Hiroshima but also those by many other Japanese artists and photographers.
However, as Zohar and other contributors to the book are aware, an attempt to understand
the trauma of the Asia-Pacific War for the Japanese, with reference to the Holocaust, is not
without limitations or danger, simply because the Japanese were not only victims but also
aggressors.
Indeed, the significance of three works in particular namely the video featuring a
former kamikaze pilot by Koizumi, the project by Shitamichi that documents remnants of
Shinto shrines in the former colonies of Japan, and a collaborative work by Shimada and
Bubu on sex slavery in Korea under Japanese administration lies in their emphasis on the
double-sidedness of victim/aggressor in the Japanese experience of the War. By contrast, such
awareness is difficult to find in Ishiuchis /Hiroshima, which documented the
clothes worn by the A-Bomb victims, mostly women, kept in the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum. Born in 1947, Ishiuchi belongs to the Second Generation of survivors.
One might wonder whether the books focus might have become clearer, especially for
Japanese readers, had it limited itself to works by Third Generation artists. But it is also
easy to imagine that for Israeli readers the inclusion of 1960s photographs (Hamaya) and
1970s photographs (Suzuki) becomes a helpful guide for understanding the context from
which Third Generation artists emerged. The editors aim to address both Israelis and
Japanese, two groups of readers with considerably different backgrounds, should be duly
recognised.
Whereas Beyond Hiroshima is trilingual, the monolingual Ishiuchi Miyako, edited by J.
Paul Getty assistant curator Amanda Maddox and published in conjunction with Ishiuchis
first retrospective exhibition in the United States, introduces the photographer to US (and
international) audiences. The books format, including size, plate layout, and column setting,
strongly resembles Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog (1999) and Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the
Nation (2004), both of which were published on the occasion of retrospectives at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The book design not only juxtaposes Ishiuchi with two
giants of Japanese photography but also situates the Getty exhibition within the lineage of
substantial US exhibitions that contributed to the international recognition of Japanese
photographers. In addition to reproductions of Ishiuchis photographs, ranging from her
early work in the mid-1970s to her most recent, the book includes both an introduction and
an essay by Maddox about Ishiuchis work until the early 1980s, an essay by Miryam Sas
about Ishiuchis more recent series including Mothers and /Hiroshima, and a text
by poet It Hiromi on her experience of collaborating with Ishiuchi as a subject.
Ishiuchi has been one of the leading female photographers in the male-dominated
Japanese photographic community. How women have been marginalised in Japanese
photography until recently is evidenced, for example, by the fact that in its first twenty
years, the prestigious annual Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award, established in
1975 for emerging photographers, has been conferred on no more than three women,
including Ishiuchi who won in 1979. When John Szarkowski, the renowned photography
curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Yamagishi Shji, editor at
Camera Mainichi, co-curated New Japanese Photography in 1974, they showcased contem-
porary trends in Japanese photography with fifteen photographers, none of whom were
female. Yamagishis subsequent New York exhibition of contemporary Japanese photogra-
phy at the International Center of Photography in 1979 included only one female photo-
grapher, Ishiuchi, among nineteen participants. In Japan, she is considered one of the most
important living photographers, especially after solo exhibitions at public museums con-
solidated her reputation, such as Ishiuchi Miyako: Mothers at the Tokyo Metropolitan
Museum of Photography in 2006 and Hiroshima/Yokosuka: Ishiuchi Miyako at the Meguro
Museum of Art in 2008.
Ishiuchi does not simply happen to be one of the few female photographers who rank
with their male counterparts in the Japanese photographic community. Importantly, her
work addresses female experiences. Her 1981 book Endless Night documents details of
buildings once used as brothels. Her series 1947, produced between 1988 and 1989, consists
of close-up shots of hands and feet of women born in the same year as she was, while
Mothers, a series that brought her international attention, is a photographic inventory of
personal effects, such as lipsticks and underwear, left by her late mother.
Well-researched essays by Maddox and Sas in Ishiuchi Miyako provide useful informa-
tion for understanding Ishiuchis work and its context. Referring to texts by Ishiuchi, who has
published three books of selected essays, and critical writings by Japanese curators and
scholars, Maddox and Sas rightly emphasise Ishiuchis pioneering position as a female
Japanese photographer and point out other Japanese photographers works that influenced
or resemble Ishiuchi. Ishiuchi Miyako will be consulted as one of the basic English-language
books on Japanese photography.

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Reviews

The subtitle Postwar Shadows, as Maddox explains, comes from a speech Ishiuchi
delivered in 2013 at a symposium co-hosted by the Japan Foundation and the Izu Photo
Museum. Although Ishiuchi did not emphasise this phrase, for Maddox it seemed to
encapsulate a theme addressed by Ishiuchi at multiple stages in her career. As she asserts,
the tension caused by occupation has remained a constant in Ishiuchis forty-year evolution
as a photographer, most prominently in the current series /hiroshima. One can
certainly perceive postwar shadows in her early series Yokosuka Story, consisting of black-
and-white photographs that documented the seaside town Yokosuka where the US Navy
took over the base of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1945. It may also be the case with
Mothers, given that Ishiuchis mother worked for a US Army base near Yokosuka as a driver.
However, it is difficult to find the same postwar shadows in other series, such as 1947,
if the phrase alludes to the tension caused by occupation. This absence does not mean that
Ishiuchis oeuvre cannot be examined in relation to the trauma that postwar Japan experi-
enced as a result of the countrys defeat in the Asia-Pacific War and its subsequent
Americanisation; before this new book, Ishiuchis 2008 retrospective at Japans Meguro
Museum of Art already proposed a similar perspective on her work with the title
Hiroshima/Yokosuka. Connecting Ishiuchis work to Japanese history, however, inevitably
obscures work that had nothing to do with the country, especially her 2013 book Frida, a
commissioned work of photographs depicting belongings of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo
stylistically similar to /Hiroshima. Ishiuchi Miyako mentions Frida only in its
chronology with one thumbnail image of the project, but Frida highlights that the female
subjects with whom Ishiuchi empathises are not limited to those who share her Japanese
identity. For Ishiuchi, Kahlo was a distant subject both historically and psychologically, just
as A-Bomb victims in Hiroshima were (Ishiuchi had never been to Hiroshima before she
visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to shoot /Hiroshima), but this
distance was the very condition from which she interpreted her subjects. That Ishiuchis
creative imagination extends beyond the boundary of nationality is obscured by the thematic
framework of postwar shadows.
Both Beyond Hiroshima and Ishiuchi Miyako choose to examine contemporary Japanese
photography through the lens of a postwar Japanese society defined by trauma or conflict.
While for Zohar war trauma is a subject that we must continue to confront, for Maddox the
shadows of the war will fade, her essay in Ishiuchi Miyako concluding with the following:

Historically [] extraterritoriality was granted to the United States in certain situa-

tions involving members of the U.S. Armed Forces. But in the 1995 rape case the
Okinawans protested and asserted their authority against the American government.
The people of Okinawa, who have long cited the presence of American bases as a reason
they feel like second-class citizens within Japan, were finally heard. Japanese authorities
obtained the right to prosecute the three soldiers. In 1996 the American government
also promised to return land and agreed to other concessions.

The course of events Maddox mentions is factual, but I wonder whether she still would claim
that the people of Okinawa [] were finally heard if she knew that in 2016 a civilian
employee of the US Armed Forces in Okinawa was charged with the rape and murder of a
twenty-year-old woman. Conflicts caused by US bases in Okinawa are far from resolved: the
Japanese government, ignoring protests from the people, started constructing a new base in
Henoko to relocate Futenma Air Base.
Japan certainly remains in its postwar shadows but this does not mean that this is the
only appropriate conceptual framework with which to discuss the work of Japanese photo-
graphers. Indeed, New Japanese Photography, the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1974, proposed a similar reading. In his catalogue introduction, Szarkowski pointed
out as one of the three possible factors that shaped Japanese photography the stunning speed
with which the character of Japanese life itself has been transformed (New Japanese
Photography, ed. John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, 1974). He did not specify that this
transformation was caused by the American presence in postwar Japan, but in reviewing the
exhibition Max Kozloff perceived an American intrusion in postwar Japan (Yoshiaki Kai,
Distinctiveness and Universality: Reconsidering New Japanese Photography, Trans Asia
Photography Review, 2013). Sandra Phillips, the curator at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, acknowledged her debt to Szarkowski when she organised Daido Moriyama and
Shomei Tomatsu (the artistic foci of New Japanese Photography). Although Ishiuchi Miyako
does not make a special reference to New Japanese Photography, the catalogue indirectly
inherits the views on Japanese photography that originated in the 1974 exhibition by paying a
tribute to Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu. That is to say, US exhibitions of Japanese
photography remain under the shadow of New Japanese Photography.

Yoshiaki Kai
# 2017 Yoshiaki Kai
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1286769

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