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Japan

Japan, landscape, people, street

The figure of the tourist

January 19, 2025

The cultural frame I had of Japan when I visited as a tourist was that of 1990s Japan layered over a vague history of 1960s street photography. In the Australian imagination Tokyo was a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, a postmodern culture, and a reputation for deferential hospitality. A fantasy land of good old fashioned Orientalism.

I was aware that Japan’s economy had never regained the growth of the pre-l980s boom years, and that after the asset bubble burst in the 1980s, there was the three “lost decades”. The images of Japan that spring to mind are of the bustling, neon-splashed streets of Tokyo and Osaka, towering walls of steel and glass, teeming pedestrians on the footpath along with green mountains and cherry blossoms and Zen temples and tea houses. Oh, and the Japan of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sony A7 R111
Nachi Waterfall

I didn’t know about Japan’s image factory: the post-1995 otaku culture and the gaming subculture of the 1990s. I wasn’t aware of Japan’s embrace of peak tourism with the low yen; an emerging unease amongst Japanese of the over- tourism with their rolling suitcases (36 million in 2024); the demographic collapse, the disappearing, somewhat unsustainable, countryside villages, traditionalism as a culture industry, the izakaya bars, and the multitude of the guest workers looking after the tourists. Japan grows poorer and more existentially uneasy whilst China is the new hegemon.

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Japan, urban, walking

The Basho walk: starting

June 23, 2024

In late 2023 Suzanne and I spent 3-4 weeks in Japan during their autumn. Autumn is an inbetween time: summer is over and winter near. We had time in Tokyo, Morioka and Osaka as well as doing 2 walks: a Basho walk from Sendai to Yamadera and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walk from Yuasa to Shingu. The Bashō walking tour,which started in Sendai, took place after we’d spent 5 days in Shinjuku, Tokyo and 3 days in Morioka.

The Bashō walking tour followed part of Matsuo Bashō’s third major journey to the north of Honshu. He sold his house in Fukagawa, Edo (now Tokyo) before he started travelling in 1689 with Kawai Sora, his travel companion for the most part, who also wrote a diary. Bashō and Sora travelled on foot about ten miles a day for about 5 months. The journey was approximately 720 miles and there were some 40 stations and stops on the journey through northern and central Honshu. Bashō returned to Edo in the winter of 1681 to a new house that was built for him. His travel sketch of that journey, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a blend of prose and haiku.

Rolleiflex SL66
Sendai, Honshu

Bashō and Sora entered the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu after walking 200 miles and they entered the city of Sendai in May 1689. This was Station 18. They stayed for several days before going to the scenic pine covered Matsushima islands via the town of Shiogama. Whilst in Sendai they were taken on a sightseeing tour of the area by a wood block artist and owner of a bookstore whom Basho identifies as Kaemon.Whereas Basho saw fields of bush clover, hills covered in blooming white rhododendrons, and dark pine woods I saw a large industrial city, the biggest in the Tōhoku region.

It was an overnight stay in Sendai as we arrived in the late afternoon and left the following morning for Matsushima. As my time for any exploratory urban photography was in the late afternoon before the tour briefing and dinner and early in the morning before breakfast I was limited to walking around the area near the hotel.

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film, Japan, street, Tokyo

photographing on the streets in Japan

April 11, 2024

Prior to going on the Basho and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walks I decided to spend some time in the early morning walking the streets in Japan (initially the lively lanes in Shinjuku, Tokyo, then Morioka and Sendai) to make photographs. This was one way to cross the cultural barriers. A photographic layer of this photographic walking was using an old Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film (Kodak Tmax 400) to supplement the much more versatile digital Sony A7R 111 camera. This connection to modernity’s technologically archaic past helped me to feel at “home” in the global mega city whilst avoiding being the free-floating, postmodern tourist.

Leica M4
NPC, Shinjuku, Tokyo

I wanted to connect to, or link up with, the postwar Japanese black and white film street photography in the late twentieth century: — eg., Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira — with its candid, spontaneous sunappu images that was broadened by Ishiuchi Miyako and Takeda Hana, and continued with Yasuhisa Toyohara and Ohnishi Mitsugu in the 1980s. My images are a very marginal relationship to this tradition. The classic practitioners, such as Daido Moriyama, and Shōmei Tōmatsu lived in Shinjuku, viewed photography as a way of life, saw themselves either as vagabonds wandering the city streets aimlessly or as stray dogs hunting in the dark alleys of Shinjuku,and produced the short-lived left-wing magazine Provoke (1968–1969).

Though photography has a long historical connection to the city I was only a tourist staying in Shinjuku for 5 days aimlessly wandering amongst its  maze of obscure lanes, bars and eating places.  

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