After the bomb: photographs show Japan’s rebirth from the rubble

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/23/photographs-japan-rebirth-hiroshima-modernity

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On midday on 15 August 1945, a radio broadcast announced the surrender of Japan to allied forces in the second world war.

For many Japanese people, it was as if time itself had been stilled and the unthinkable had occurred. On hearing the news, the photographer Hiroshi Hamaya ran out into the street and pointed his camera at the midday sun high in the sky above Niigata.

As symbolic gestures go, it was an instinctive and impulsive one. The ensuing photograph, called The Sun on the Day of Defeat, is a record of the moment the traumatic postwar era began – with chaos and confusion, but also relief. Hamaya’s blurred sun is the starting point for an intriguing historical show at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool entitled Metamorphosis of Japan After the War.

In a way, it is the least interesting image on display. But it stands as a statement of intent for this show that spans the years from the mid-40s to the early 60s, the period in which Japan recovered from defeat and began to redefine itself as a technologically driven economic global player.

The exhibition features work by photographers such as Ken Domon and Tadahiko Hayashi, who were already established when Japan’s immediate postwar publishing renaissance began with a proliferation of magazines featuring photojournalism devoted to the country’s reconstruction. It also traces the emergence of a new breed of younger photojournalists such as Shomei Tomatsu and Takeyoshi Tanuma, whose work highlighted the tensions of a nation caught between the ultra-traditional and the modern.

If one series reverberates most powerfully here – and throughout postwar Japanese photography right up to young iconoclasts of the Provoke era – it is Kikuji Kawada’s The Map, a physical and psychological evocation of Japan’s collective wartime experience and its lingering trauma.

Kawada photographed fragments, ruins, scars and traces: the jacket of a dead high-school boy; the handwritten last will and testament of a soldier in the Special Attack Corps; the blood-like stains on the ceiling of the Hiroshima peace memorial. His image of the sun shining though the glass dome echoes Hamaya’s midday sun, but seems even more bleakly symbolic.

At the back of the main gallery, a grid of street photographs by Ken Domon, Tadahiko Hayashi and Ihee Kimura evokes Tokyo as a beleaguered city of shell-shocked survivors. Hayashi’s extraordinary night-time shot, Bar on a Garbage Dump, Omori, Tokyo, 1950, is straight out of JG Ballard’s darkest imaginings: a lone woman tends a pot on a fire by a makeshift shed that stands on a hill of rags and rubbish. The street urchins and strippers, orphaned children and exhausted pensioners that Tanuma and Domon home in on seem to belong to a Victorian city – which is precisely what parts of postwar Tokyo resembled. This is an urban landscape with no likeness whatsoever to the futuristic Tokyo that sprang up a few decades later, as if to erase all trace of the recent past.

The show is divided into three eras: The Aftermath of War (mid-40s to mid-50s), Between Tradition and Modernity (mostly the late 50s) and Towards a New Japan (roughly 1960-65). The second section is where the dynamic between the traditional and modern is most palpable. Tanuma’s street portraits are particularly illuminating: two smart young women eyeing with curiosity two women in traditional dress, who seem composed and utterly unselfconscious in their beautiful robes and elaborate hairdos. Tanuma’s keen eye also frames some modern young men who seem to be reading rather ostentatiously in a coffee bar. The title is Cafe for Singing, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1957, but the song title goes uncredited, alas. Like many pictures here, it is a tantalising vignette of a capital in transition, moving inexorably towards the seismic social upheavals of the 1960s.

And they begin dramatically on the streets of Tokyo in the first year of that new decade, with student and worker protests against the Japan-US Security Treaty, when the wounds of the war years were still raw. Hiroshi Hamaya chronicled many such protests, and here a diptych by him shows the defiant beginning and bloody end of one demo: marchers in traditional garb carrying banners, beside a dark tableau of a tattered banner on a street with some abandoned shoes. Shigeichi Nagano’s ominous image of a bunch of flowers lying in a wet city square opposite a line of heavily armed police is titled Bouquet for the Dead of Co-ed in the Demonstrations Against the Security Treaty. If Japan was fleetingly at war with itself in the 60s – much like the US and Europe – Takeyoshi Tanuma’s pictures of young hipsters in the Ginza district of Tokyo are proof that modernism arrived there surprisingly early. In their sharp suits, crisp shirts and hats, these men look like prototype Mods.

The exhibition culminates with another kind of modernism – the heavily symbolic mannerism of Eikoh Hosoe’s series Ordeal By Roses, which summons up all manner of Japanese ritual from Noh theatre to the dark stories of Yukio Mishima.

Just ahead lay the iconoclasm of the Provoke generation, which included Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, whose work first appeared in the experimental magazine of the same name. They would announce a new wave of Japanese photography characterised by blur, graininess and movement. Metamorphosis sheds light on the postwar years that led to the Provoke revolution and is a compelling – and long-overdue – reappraisal of a most turbulent time.