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

Newlyweds at the Atami Ocean Hotel

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One family’s photographs (1941-66) 66 Emily Chapman image_header 5385 2021-01-12T09:31:50-05:00 Emily Chapman
This module begins at the moment a photograph was taken in January 1941. It is in this image that we are introduced to Yajima Isao and his new bride, Eiko. They are sitting in the grounds of what was, probably, their honeymoon hotel, the Atami Ocean Hotel (Atami taiyō hoteru). The pair pose in view of the grand entrance despite the bubbling activity behind them where another photograph is taking place and a bathing towel dries on the bushes.
Isao almost certainly took the picture himself. After having chosen a suitable spot, with favourable lighting and the backdrop of the hotel’s entrance, he probably mounted the camera on its tripod, set the timer, and then ran back to his seat. While the honeymoon was the start of their family life—Eiko was either pregnant or soon would be—this photograph commenced their visual life together in which Isao would soon assume the new role of father-photographer (otōsan kameraman) and make a shift in physical and emotional geography to a place behind the camera. By happenstance or overwhelming ordinariness, the role of father-photographer is previewed behind the posing couple. Look closely and you'll see that a man—a father perhaps—sits with his camera in hand while another supervises the child-subject of the photograph attempt to climb the steps of a slide ready for her photographic moment.
This image is the foundation stone for the this module. It gives us a date, a place and two faces, and it begins our story that orbits around Yajima Isao. Born in 1913, Isao was a proud dentist, regular smoker, amateur golfer, keen traveller, car enthusiast, and occasional dancer. Starting in the 1940s and coinciding with the start of his own family, he began work on the first of three photograph albums. Over the sixteen years that followed he assembled hundreds of photographs across three photograph albums. The albums blend the many Isaos and the spaces he moved through to create the appearance of a coherent self, complete with family, possessions and freedom of movement. Much like the photo above, Isao appears to have taken most of the photos himself and after sticking them carefully into the pages, he narrated them with occasional and succinct captions.
Despite this module and the albums orbiting around Isao, he is often absent from the final photographs, especially those which feature his family. This is simply because he was taking the photograph. Perhaps Eiko and the children were not avid, interested or able photographers, but within a historical context where men’s absence from the home (and presence at work) is widely accepted to have been expected if not lauded, Isao’s images connect to a wider scholarly and cultural narrative—which still plays out in households around the world today—in which male absence from the home is connected to his success (DasGupta 2012).
With access to an astonishing selection of photographs from nearly three decades of family life, this module tracks the movements Isao made in and around his camera to produce a visual archive of where he was, and where he was not always visible.
How this module works
This module is based on three consecutive family albums. Here we will call them Album 1, 2 and 3. As historical sources they are made for touching and gazing, suspended between what Kathleen Canning describes as “narrativity and materiality” (Canning 2006). The albums themselves are made of cardboard, velvet, and cardstock—they are heavy to hold, and smell of dust and damp. They are well-kept, and in flaking paper and faded faces, bear traces of time, as well as bodily traces of their maker in his handwriting, nicknames, even the whirling sepia fingerprints on pressed-down corners.
This module cuts four pathways through the albums.
1. Snappy Family is the first and it introduces the wider historical context on how photography was not only cultivated as an "ideal family pastime" (Ross 2015) but how its practice became gendered through the spaces in which taking photos happened. The remaining three pathways take each album in turn.
2. Album 1 follows Isao's transition from dental student and newlywed, to father and tracks his movement to a place behind the camera.
3. Album 2 while ostensibly a story of the places the Yajimas went on holiday, tracks the disappearance of his teenage children from his photographs and asks what, exactly, is worth taking pictures of.
4. Album 3 is all about Isao's extensive car collection and this pathway explores how the photograph enabled him to enjoy and document his "car fever" and his financial success. The car also worked to summon Isao back in front of the camera. The swapping of bouncing baby for a gleaming car bonnet is significant because while Isao is visually absent as a father when photos are taken of the children because he is behind the camera, in his status as a car owner he readily moves in front of the lens.
Source material
The images in this module are part of a personal collection. Please read the Note on Ethics before continuing.
Leisure, pleasure and showing off
Isao travelled a lot. Accompanied by family and friends he travelled across Tokyo and Japan by bus, train, and eventually using in his own car. Domestic travel was the space through which Isao claimed—and used the albums to visually articulate—his family’s place in Japan’s postwar middle class. It was also the main forging ground for his photographs. This was partly practical; when travelling he had the camera on his body and much more time to take photos. It was also, as it was for the tens of thousands of fellow camera–wielding domestic tourists, an instrumental part of what Anne McClintock describes as the “theatrical performance of leisure”(McClintock 1995, 162).
Album 2 is all about the spectacle of free time that played out in this classed and coded “theatre.” Look at the image to the left. As a spectacle itself, this volume’s cover is by far the most ostentatious in design. Velveteen and opulent, it hints at wealth, humour, and fittingly for the contents, carries embroidered overtones of transport and journey with the approaching ship and greeting penguin. The real-life mobility of the Yajima family seen in the mapping pages across this module (Mapping Album 1 | Mapping Album 2 | Mapping Album 3) did not just hint at wealth, it shouted it. Friends, neighbours, and family back home were, however, out of earshot, so the photograph, alongside inevitable souvenirs and gifts, was therefore needed as proof of this classed pursuit. It is no surprise then, that aside from the names of family and friends, the word which appears the most in captions across all volumes is tabi, or “trip” and across the life–span of this album, 1959-1961, Isao used photographs to catalogue seventeen separate trips.
Since its invention in 1839, photography and the photograph have developed as forces explaining and accounting for time. Travel, although appearing to all the senses as a suspension of time, was laden with a constellation of institutions which gave meaning to the way free time was spent and dispensed. The family, local government, and the Japan Travel Bureau were just some of these institutions at work, while amateur photography acted as a foil for preserving the pretence of private, rather than institutionally-sponsored, leisure (Leheney 2000).

Let’s look again at the image with which this module started in which two “private” photographic moments are happening at once–Isao’s and the family behind him. The privacy of this moment is fictitious, but the existence of a final owned print transforms what was a public moment into something material and intimate. The public/private blur of the travel photograph means that scenes ordinarily banished from family snaps - such as eating and shopping - are permitted entry while not transgressing the spatial code Isao had established for photographs near home. When travelling, the family is snapped slouching at a kitchen table, Eiko is pictured shopping, proudly displaying her purchase for the camera and Isao appears slurping noodles at a standing noodle bar during a trip away with colleagues. When travelling, the Yajimas—like all tourists—were not just tourists in new places, but tourists in their own lives, and the photographs survives as companions to these novelties. The photograph was also the proof that the Yajima family had successfully travelled from their urban home to “the wild” and back again—albeit a heavily managed and well–catered wild. This success was multi–layered. First, it was a testament to financial success and the attainment of a high-standard of living—in this case, the success of Isao’s Dental Practice. Second, it heralded the success of the Japanese countryside as a tourist destination.
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 3 9 plain 2021-03-19T16:13:59-04:00
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
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