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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Around Gaien

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Snappy Family
Before cameras were something families could afford to buy and use at home, photographs were composed, taken, and developed by photography studios. Photographers took the photographs in their studios through advanced booking or walk-in trade, and they also travelled to customer’s houses or pre-designated locations. Having your photo taken in a studio was an experience that cost money, generated a story to tell others, and provided evidence which could be displayed at home, carried on one’s body, or kept safe for future viewers.
By the 1930s, the photographic act was an established middle–class family habit, but one which, following the progression of Japan’s war in China, was almost universally interrupted as metal, chemicals, rubber, leather, bodies, and free time were mobilized for the war effort. Following Japanese surrender in August 1945, the postwar households of Japan renewed the practice of family photography with remarkable swiftness, and resumed buying, selling, using, and breaking cameras and associated paraphernalia in a sustained upward trend until 1990.
The particular surge of camera ownership in the late 1950s was heralded as “camera fever” (kamera netsu), and was buoyed by increased international export and a growing international reputation for the “Japanese Camera.” At the centre of this fever were male amateur photographers, a substantial portion of whom were otōsan kameraman (camera man fathers). Anecdotally, these new cultural figures were said to only emerge on Sundays, and were found with their cameras, capturing their families at leisure in parks and popular picnic spots rather than documenting the domestic spaces and labours of house and home. The photographs these Sunday photographers were taking were mainly posed portraits, or kinen shashin. However, starting in the early 1950s, the kinen shashin was criticised for its old-fashioned feel, as commentators lamented that the stiff expressions in photographs came from forced poses that were produced by the familiar refrain to stop and pose. Instead, the zeitgeist called on amateurs to “snap” (snappu).
The “snap” was initially more defined by its opposition to the posed photograph than by any prescriptive coordinates of style. In contrast to kinen shashin, for example, it was not expected to be taken as part of an institutionally-sanctioned record. Snaps were resolutely personal, informal, and designed to be taken quickly and instinctively. Lauded in postwar amateur photography discourse, the “snap” was described as the only way the amateur photographer could really catch reality and the best way to ensure photographs were more emotionally accurate. The development of the happy snapper and the photos they took had two influences. The first was the postwar artistic turn toward realism, or rearizmu, taken by Japanese art photographers, a thorough account of which has been made by Julia Thomas (2008). The second influence was the profit ambitions of the national camera industry. The encouragement to snap away was aimed at both reducing the skills barrier holding people back from having a camera and at getting people to use and buy more exposures. Snap advocacy was specifically geared at getting women behind the lens and getting everyday family life in the frame. The assumed daily, physical contact women had with their children was seen as the optimum condition for “snapping,” whereas photographs that benefitted from physical distance, such as outings or school sports’ days (undō kai), were suggested as more appropriate subjects for fathers to capture.
There are two threads concerning how the snap folds into Isao's story. The first is in the development of his style of photography. While he did experiment with the snappu he largely preferred posed photographs. Second, the scarcity of snaps in the family albums reflects how he spent his time and the time-space constraints of the snap. The snappish turn that professionals advocated were unrealistic for many otōsan kameraman; capturing your child napping, fighting, or lost in play was therefore handed to the emergent figure of the snappy mother.
Otōsan kameraman
In 1964, 44 percent of households owned a camera, and the primary user of these millions of cameras was, in nearly all cases, a man (Economic and Social Research Institute). This moment in history was also marked by the spread of the moniker "cameraman father" (otōsan kameraman). The gendering of the person behind the camera piggybacked on the already gendered patterns of consumption of stuff and information in amateur photography; photography magazines habitually appeared to address the male reader and snapper. Beyond consumption, the label also divided family space time by whether it was suitable for a father or mother photographer. While the "Mama no kamera kyōshitsu" column in Yoiko magazine (running from 1962-1970) called on women to snap away at the tea table, when the family camera was outside the home at school sports days and formal ceremonies, experts and satirists expected it to be wielded by a father. Isao is an excellent example of this imaginary man in action as the following page from Album 1 shows.
One winter’s day around 1948, Isao and Haruki visited the grounds of the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. The trip would have taken between thirty minutes to an hour from the eastern suburbs they called home. As the family did not own a car until 1952, they probably took public transport. Haruki packed a small duffle bag, wore the hat from his school uniform pulled low around his brow, and fastened his coat all the way to the top button to stop the cold from getting in. The only thing we know that Isao packed was his camera. Isao devoted one full page of the album to eight photographs from this day trip. Additional photographs appear later in the album and extend the narrative to include a visit to Hibiya Park, with its trees bare, and a trip through Ginza Crossing to gawk at the traffic controllers stranded on their concrete islands.
What is clear from this example is how the photographic moment carved out time together for fathers and their children and emphatically did so outside the home—the otōsan kameraman was an outdoor apparition. The photographs may show where they went and what they saw, but they also create a new point of access into a way fathers participated in childrearing. For Isao, the photograph was a way to experience and perform his identity as father, and the photograph album was one of the ways he labelled himself as such. Across the album captions, Isao refers to himself as “Isao,” “Yajima,” “father" (otōsan), and “papa” (papa); photography was perhaps the only way to reconcile each of these identities with the identity of a working man. For Isao, and perhaps many other postwar men, photography was instrumental in providing a sanctioned space in which to blend family with his world beyond the doorstep.
As Isao’s day trip with Haruki begins to show, the practice of family photography also turned fathering and the family unit into a transportable public spectacle. In contrast, it was mothers who, when the camera was turned inward towards the home, were targeted by manufacturers and experts to turn their daily life into something aesthetic, public, consumable, and productive. Although the single album page “Around Gaien” radically suggested that the Yajima family was not always somewhere Eiko was present, it still preserved the home as a space marked by Isao’s absence.
Source: Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office. "Percentage of Households Possessing Major Durable Goods—All Japan (1959-2004)."
Mapping Album 2
The images that make up the Yajima albums were nearly all taken outside the home, on its threshold or at a distance. The map below shows the geographic spread of Isao's movement across Album 2. It is included here to emphasise the huge debt of bodily movement which underpins the static materiality of the finished albums. The movement within Album 2 is characterised by the absence of Isao and Eiko's two older children (Haruki and Satuski) and the inclusion of the car in a large number of images.
Clicking on each map pin will show a photo twinned with each place. This might be the only photo taken there such as the newlywed portrait that begins this module, or part of a series such as the day Isao and Haruki went to Meiji Gaien.
Compare with Album 1 | Album 3
Mapping Album 1
The images that make up the Yajima albums were nearly all taken outside the home, on its threshold or at a distance. The map below shows the geographic spread of Isao's movement across Album 1. It is included here to emphasise the huge debt of bodily movement which underpins the static materiality of the final album.
Clicking on each map pin will show a photo twinned with each place. This might be the only photo taken there such as the newlywed portrait that begins this module, or part of a series such as the day Isao and Haruki went to Meiji Gaien.
Compare with Album 2 | Album 3
Mapping Album 3 10 plain 2021-06-11T22:16:13-04:00 Emily Chapman
The images that make up the Yajima albums were nearly all taken outside the home, on its threshold or at a distance. The map below shows the geographic spread of Isao's movement across Album 3. It is included here to emphasise the huge debt of bodily movement which underpins the static materiality of the final album. The most significant movement which occurred and is archived by Album 3 is the family's move to a new home. The pins in this map are noticeably fewer than Album 1 or 2 for two reasons:
1. there are a large number of photographs which document posing at home alongside the cars;
2. the album is only partly completed.
Clicking on each map pin will show a photo twinned with each place. This might be the only photo taken there such as the newlywed portrait that begins this module, or part of a series such as the day Isao and Haruki went to Meiji Gaien.
Compare with Album 1 | Album 2