Allegories of time and space : Japanese identity in photography and architecture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Allegories of time and space : Japanese identity in photography and architecture
University of Hawaiʻi Press, c2015
- : cloth
Available at 20 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-303) and index
Contents of Works
- Hamaya Hiroshi's "return to Japan" : documenting the folk in snow country
- "Uncanny, hypermodern Japaneseness" : Okamoto Tarō and the search for prehistoric modernism
- Ise Shrine and a modernist construction of Japanese tradition
- Paradise lost, paradise regained : Tōmatsu Shōmei's photographic engagement with Okinawa
- "Young female nomads of Tokyo" : imagined migration through Tokyo in the days before the bubble burst
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Allegories of Time and Space explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identityduring the turbulent years between the Asia Pacifi c War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a cultural home was a matter of broad public concern, and each of the artists under consideration engaged a wide audience through mass media. The artists under study had in common the necessity to establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan’s rapidly changing society. They shared what Jonathan Reynolds calls an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan’s geographical periphery.
The book commences with an examination of the work of Hamaya Hiroshi. A Tokyo native, Hamaya began to photograph the isolated “snow country” ofnortheastern Japan in the midst of the war. His empathetic images of village life expressed an aching nostalgia for the rural past widely shared by urban Japanese. Following a similar strategy in his search for authentic Japan was the photographer T?matsu Sh?mei. Although T?matsu originally traveled to Okinawa Prefecture in 1969 to document the destructive impact of U.S. military bases in the region in his characteristically edgy style, he came to believe that Okinawa was still in some sense more truly Japanese than the Japanese main islands. The self-styled iconoclast artist Okamoto Tar? emphatically rejected the delicacy and refinement conventionally associated with Japanese art in favor of the hyper-modern qualities of the dynamic and brutal aesthetics that he saw expressed on the ceramics of the prehistoric J?mon period. One who quickly recognized the potential in Okamoto’s embrace of Japan’s ancient past was the architect Tange Kenz?. As a point of comparison, Reynolds looks at the portrayal of theancient Shint? shrine complex at Ise in a volume produced in collaboration with the photographer Watanabe Yoshio. Reynolds shows how this landmark book contributed significantly to a transformation in the meaning of Ise Shrine by suppressing the shrine’s status as an ultranationalist symbol and re-presenting the shrine architecture as design consistent with rigorous modernist aesthetics.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there circulated widely through advertising posters of the designer Ishioka Eiko, the ephemeral “nomadic” architecture of It? Toyo’o, TV documentaries, and other media, a fantasy that imagined Tokyo’s young female office workers as urban nomads. These cosmopolitan dreams may seem untethered from their Japanese cultural context, but Reynolds reveals that there were threads linking the urban nomad with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity in time and space.
In its fresh and nuanced re-reading of the multiplicities of Japanese tradition during a tumultuous and transformative period, Allegories of Time and Space offers a compelling argument that the work of these artists enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.
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