Allegories of Time and Space, Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture, by Jonathan Reynolds

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Notes

1. I have mostly positioned Japanese surnames before first names. See Hamaya Hiroshi, Senzô, Sanzô-shashinka no keikenteki kaisô [Latent-image, After-image, Experiential Recollections of a Photographer] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobô, 1971). The book consists of a series of articles originally titled Kyôzô Jitsuzô [False Image, Actual Image] that appeared in Tokyo Shinbum from 14 July 1970 to 12 October 1970. The 1971 book was republished as Senzô zanzô: Shashin taiken 60 nen [Latent-image, After-image, Sixty years of Photographic Experience] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 1991). Extensive translations will be found in my own paper, ‘Photographic Modernism in Japan, Hamaya Hiroshi (1915–1999) and the Japanese “Folk”’, see Trans-Asia Photography Review (Fall 2016), online at http://www.tapreview.org.

2. Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo, Ningenteki kôsatsu [Climate: A Consideration of what is Human] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935, and various reprintings). This text falls into the domain of a kind of Nihonjinron [discourse on the Japanese as a unique type of ethnos] whose restrictions have been widely understood by some later Japanese scholars. For example, Miami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron: Meiji kara konnichi made [Theory of the Japanese, from Meiji until today] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994). For a summary of related intellectual trends in the 1930s, see Tetsuo Najita & H. D. Harootunian, ‘Japan's Revolt Against the West’ in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207–72.

3. Tanikawa had graduated from Kyoto Imperial University in 1922 and was influenced by the philosopher Nishida Kitarô. For biographical material in Japanese, see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/谷川徹三 [Japanese character input required]. See Tanikawa Tetsuzô, Jômonteki Genkei to Yayoiteki Genkei [The Jômon and Yayoi Models] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971). Tanikawa is not unknown in English-language discussion but more as a commentator on tea and ceramics. Some years ago, I briefly discussed both Tanikawa and Kuki, and the Jômon/Yayoi antithesis in the context of understanding Japanese art history, in ‘Some models in Japanese Art History’, The Burlington Magazine 128, no. 1005 (December 1986).

4. See the catalogue by curators Kusumoto Aki and Kataoka Kaoru, Nihon Hakken: Okamoto Tarô to Sengo Shashin [The Discovery of Japan: Okamoto Tarô and Postwar Photography] (Kawasaki: Kawasaki Okamoto Tarô Bijutsukan, 2001).

5. Reynolds generously refers to a previous and more comprehensive study of Tômatsu by Leo Rubinfien, Sandra S. Phillips and John W. Dower, Shômei Tômatsu, Skin of the Nation (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

6. The antecedent is the moga [modern girl] of the 1920s, which is quite widely understood in Australia through earlier exhibitions and symposia including Ajioka Chiaki, John Clark, Jackie Menzies and Mizusawa Tsutomu, Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935 (Kamakura: Museum of Modern Art and Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998), as well as the exhibition symposium published as Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Sydney: Australian Humanities Research Foundation and Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000).

7. A classic appeal to consumerist small-mindedness, this advertising slogan even attracts academic mention in English. See Koji Akiyama, ‘A Study of Japanese TV Commercials from Socio-Cultural Perspectives: Special Attributes of Nonverbal Features and their Effects’, Intercultural Communication Studies 3, no. 2 (1993), 104; also found at http://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/08-Koji-Akiyama.pdf. The suicide of the copywriter was well-known hearsay among observers in the 1970s and 1980s of the advertising copywriting scene.