Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan

The Impossible Avant-Garde

Jelena Stojkovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

Despite the censorship of dissident material during the decade between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, a number of photographers across Japan produced a versatile body of Surrealist work. In a pioneering study of their practice, Jelena Stojkovic draws on primary sources and extensive archival research and maps out art historical and critical contexts relevant to the apprehension of this rich photographic output, most of which is previously unseen outside of its country of origin. The volume is an essential resource in the fields of Surrealism and Japanese history of art, for researchers and students of historical avant-gardes and photography, as well as forreaders interested in visual culture.

PART ONE 'NEW' PHOTOGRAPHY

(shinkō shashin)

1 EMERGENCE

The beginning of the Shōwa era, or the reign of Emperor Hirohito, appropriately restarted the clock in 1926 for an atmosphere in which novelty was embraced in Japan in nearly every respect. After the Great Kantō Earthquake almost wiped it from the map in 1923, Tokyo was completely rebuilt and was fostering a fresh urban culture fascinated with ‘modern life’ (modan raifu). Cafes and bars mushroomed around the city, which had recently been connected by its first subway system, catering to ‘modern girls’ (moga) and ‘modern boys’ (mobo) who were eager to show off their Western clothes and hairstyles around the newly opened department stores in such burgeoning parts of the city as Ginza.¹ A catchphrase that summarized this liberal energy of the 1920s was ‘erotic, grotesque, nonsense’ (ero guro nansensu), which was fuelled not only by the new forms of urban habitation but also by the new forms of labour and social organization, quickly expanding to other major cities. The times seemed altogether new, and the word for it in Japanese – shinkō – was in frequent use: as early as in 1922 the Shinkō bungaku magazine established it as a synonym for progressive literary styles in culture that was undergoing a period of financial prosperity, urbanization and modernization during the liberal years of the ‘Taishō democracy’ (1912–1926).² Shinkō bijutsu, on the other hand, labelled in a similar manner the simultaneous proliferation of innovative artistic forms developing through the ties with European and Russian avant-garde arts – Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and Dada included.³

The new everyday reality also entailed new sensations, an important topic to a literary circle known as the New Sensibilities School (Shinkankakuha) that was interested in the sensory experience of modernist city culture. It was a progressive group of writers diverging from the orthodox programme of the Communist Party and opting for a closer association with the European avant-garde movements, including Surrealism, enlisting among other members Yokomitsu Riichi, Kataoka Teppei and Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930), for instance, is a record of the city’s colourful area known for its theatres, nightclubs and particularly mixed demographics. The group was interested in the type of urban practice exercised by Surrealists, who deliberately scouted the streets, cafes, flea markets and shopping arcades for chance encounters with unexpected occurrences in the everyday. It experimented with ‘free associations’ only months after the publication of the Manifeste and identified with those Surrealist painters in Japan who were attuned to modern life such as Koga.⁴

This sensitivity manifested in Koga’s continuous reliance on the Japanese illustrated press for source material in his collage-based work. However, although Koga was closely associated with other Surrealist painters in Japan and drew inspiration from de Chirico and Ernst, this interest also attests at least to his fascination with Dadaist photomontage. In such a manner, Koga engaged the ‘modern life’ through combined interests in Surrealism as well as the so-called machine aesthetics, a quintessential modernist expression of the new age of technological culture that was informing much of the cultural discourse in Japan of the late 1920s and early 1930s.⁵ This wide range of references resulted in a particular approach to Surrealism on Koga’s part: in the January 1930 issue of Atorie he claims that Surrealism is ‘pure’ art, similar to Suprematism in its search for aesthetically ‘pure’ beauty.⁶ This identification with a Russian avant-garde movement primarily concerned with geometrical abstraction, as defined by Kazimir Malevich in the 1910s, ascertains Koga’s distancing from socially engaged, proletarian art. Similar to Suprematism, he understands Surrealism to be offering a means to primarily revolutionize everyday life through art, and this inability to divorce it from the vernacular artistic and political contexts rendered Koga’s work as greatly referential to photographers. Their interest in the movement, developing at the turn of the 1930s outside of a single Surrealist group, was also enmeshed in the vernacular culture and politics of the day.

Photographic practice that was entwined with the modernist city culture in Japan at the turn of the decade was ‘new’ as well and flourished in the wake of the Doitsu Kokusai Idō Shashin ten (German International Travelling Photography Exhibition), the photographic part of the Film und Foto that toured Tokyo and Osaka in 1931. The exhibition was originally mounted in Stuttgart in 1928, and it included works by photographers from Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. It travelled to Zurich, Berlin, Danzig, Vienna, Agram, Munich, Tokyo and Osaka and consisted of historical and contemporary sections, encompassing medical, commercial, photojournalistic, Bauhaus and Surrealist photography with around 1,000 photographs on display. In Japan, the exhibition was organized by artists Murayama Tomoyoshi and Okada Sōzō, who saw the original show while studying in Berlin, and was sponsored by the Asahi shinbun daily.⁷ Offering an opportunity to view original prints of modernist photography on a large scale for the first time, its overall effect in the country was that of a shock that triggered a whole new approach to practising photography.⁸ It was a major photographic event, one that marked the moment of before and after or, as one of the best-established photographers of the time, Kimura Ihei, defined it, ‘the border between the old and the new’ in Japanese photography.⁹

The new approach was termed shinkō shashin, which translates as ‘new’ photography and references ‘modern life’ in Japan together with such quintessentially modernist movements as the New Vision. Murayama and Nakada Sadanosuke, modernist artists who maintained strong links with European and Russian avant-gardes, first articulated this approach to photography in Japan in the late 1920s in a series of articles written for the newly launched Asahi Camera on the work of El Lissitzky and Man Ray. The term also resonated with the activities of the New Photography Study Group (Shinkō Shashin Kenkyūkai), founded in 1930 by the chief editor of Photo Times, Kimura Senichi, after interviewing László Moholy-Nagy on his visit to Europe in 1929.¹⁰ The founding of the group coincided with the launch of a monthly column titled ‘Modern Photo’, running in the same magazine and promoting ‘new’ photography that was mostly becoming recognizable not only for the experiments with original angles and framing but also with such techniques as photomontage and photogram or the placing of objects directly on photosensitive paper so as to produce photographic images without the use of a camera.11

As Iizawa Kōtarō points out, shinkō shashin was firmly embedded in the practices of modern life, which was cultivated in the everyday urban culture flourishing around the city’s cafes, dance halls and revue theatres. It was precisely by the means of increasingly accessible photographic technology that this culture was made visible and legible.¹² Such integration of photography with everyday life was enabled by the proliferation of photographic magazines, which coincided with the urbanization of the capital Tokyo. They catered to an entirely new public, that of amateur photographers, also expanding during this period to include new city dwellers such as office workers and public servants.¹³ However, ‘new’ photography was also fascinated by the machine aesthetics and this fascination was reified in several, by now iconic, projects.¹⁴ A year after the Film und Foto travelled around Japan, in a highly acclaimed manifesto-like article ‘Return to Photography’ (1932) a photography critic, Ina Nobuo, praised photography as liberated from the weight of history, tradition and past and insisted that ‘it is a child of the machine culture’, bound to its machine-made properties.¹⁵ The radicalism of this practice was primarily based on severing ties between photography and painting, as the main role Ina ascribes to photography is to provide a document of lived reality.

Ina’s manifesto was published in Kōga, a Tokyo-based magazine that served as a platform for pushing the possibilities of ‘new’ photography forward. Launched by Nakayama Iwata together with Akiba Kei, Kimura and Nojima Yasuzō, the magazine evidences the modernist fascination of the camera’s eye with both modern life and machine aesthetics.¹⁶ In the short course of its running over eighteen issues published during 1932 and 1933, it helped establish Japanese photography historians and critics in their own right, outside of any foreign references, and affirmed shinkō shashin as a commercial activity.¹⁷ However, the magazine also reveals a division that started to open up within this practice: regardless of Ina’s call for severing ties with other art forms, shinkō shashin established photography not only as socially relevant but also as prone to artistic experiment. Vanguard attitudes, reaching beyond the understanding of the medium as a reliable record of reality, began crystallizing simultaneously to its acceptance as a mainstream practice within activities of the photography clubs based in the Kansai region, with its urban zone encompassing Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto often perceived as a countercultural opposite to the capital Tokyo, located in the Kantō region. These included the Ashiya Camera Club (Ashiya Kamera Kurabu) that was formed in the city of the same name near Kobe and the Tanpei Photography Club (Tanpei Shashin Kurabu) in Osaka that was set up as a branch of the Naniwa Photography Club (Naniwa Shashin Kurabu, 1904), both established in 1930. As these attitudes were mostly drawing on a hybrid mixture of contemporary artistic references, primarily the New Sensibilities and Surrealist painting, this split within ‘new’ photography engendered a prominent channel through which Surrealist photography started to emerge in Japan. Several strands of this split and the work of specific photographers that may be considered as representative of them will be discussed in detail in what follows in this chapter, outlining some of the main issues of concern to Surrealist photography in Japan within the specific context of shinkō shashin.

Artistic intentions

The activities of the Ashiya club foresaw the impact of ‘new’ photography in such a manner that their first Tokyo exhibition in April 1931, held at the Asahi shinbun’s headquarters, received higher praise than the simultaneously running Film und Foto.¹⁸ Nakayama, a successful commercial photographer with experience of studio work in New York and Paris, founded the club that enlisted Hanaya Kanbei, Benitani Kichinosuke and Matsubara Jūzō, who were all active in the later Kōga. As early as in January 1928, Nakayama defined his interest in ‘pure’ art photography in an article published in Asahi Camera, a personal manifesto that sets the tone of his work upon returning to Japan after ten years abroad.19 Accompanying the text with two untitled photograms, Nakayama explains how his practice runs in parallel to Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, whom he identifies as artists of kindred orientation.20 Man Ray in particular seems to have been very important to Nakayama, as he brought a number of his photographs back with him from Paris. Simultaneously to the club’s show in Tokyo, Ashiya mounted another exhibition in their hometown in 1931 and for the occasion Nakayama also displayed four of those photographs, the first time Man Ray’s work was seen publicly in Japan.21

In Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Breton placed the value of Man Ray’s photographs in the suggestive power of the medium, which they managed to harness, rather than in the emotional charge attached to photography’s seeming possibility of recording a passing moment.²² The text, in its 1928 book version, also includes two photograms by Man Ray, which are reproduced in Takiguchi’s translation to Japanese.²³ Takiguchi wrote a separate article on Man Ray for the August 1931 issue of Photo Times where he tells the famous story of the artist’s allegedly accidental discovery of the photogram technique after he turned the lights on while having several random objects left on a wetted sheet of undeveloped photo paper in his hotel room in 1921.24 Man Ray published these ‘accidents’ the following August under a title Les Champs délicieux (1922), evoking Breton’s and Soupault’s book Les Champs magnétiques (1920). In the same manner as thei...