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  • Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture by Jonathan M. Reynolds
  • Yoshiaki Kai
Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture. By Jonathan M. Reynolds. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 360pages. Hardcover $45.00.

Tradition has been both a constraint and a source of inspiration for artists, including Japanese photographers and architects, since World War II. Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture, by Jonathan M. Reynolds, focuses on several established artists and how they tackled questions of tradition and national identity in their works; with its extensive research into Japanese materials and interviews with several artists, the study offers a good introduction to the art and culture of postwar Japan. Reynolds begins by pointing out “the longing for a cultural home” (p. xiv) expressed in the writings of Kobayashi Hideo and Hagiwara Sakutarō in the 1930s. During the Asia-Pacific War, this longing was closely associated with nationalism and utilized by the Japanese government to fuel hatred of Western enemies. Although its wartime association with imperialism made the idea of Japanese tradition problematic for the generation that came into maturity after 1945, artists nevertheless did not abandon it, instead seeking to pursue its potential in postwar society.

What unites the selection of seemingly unrelated artists in this book is their use of photography as an integral part of their creative work: Tange Kenzō’s views on Ise shrine were expressed through his collaboration with the photographer Watanabe Yoshio, and the success of Ishioka Eiko’s advertising campaigns for the department store Parco depended on photographic presentations of exoticism. In that sense, the book is also a reflection on the roles played by the photographic medium in the visualization of national identity. Citing Roland Barthes, Reynolds suggests that photography is a privileged medium when it comes to presenting tradition visually, because it is believed to have “an evidential force” (p. xx). However, he also argues that the photographic images he discusses “functioned as allegories” (p. xxi). To explain allegory—the key word for this study—Reynolds draws on writings by Angus Fletcher, Walter Benjamin, and James Clifford, whose usages of the concept, as he acknowledges, vary from one another. Since Reynolds does not offer his own definition of the [End Page 483] word, an uninitiated reader might be left confused, wondering how useful it really is to read his chosen images as allegories; I will come back to this issue below.

The five chapters of the book constitute what the author calls “case studies” of allegorical works (p. xxv). Chapter 1 discusses the work of Hamaya Hiroshi, one of the most important photojournalists in Japan, who was active for almost sixty years from the early 1930s and whose subjects ranged widely from student movements to aerial photographs of the Japanese land. The analysis focuses on Hamaya’s 1956 Yukiguni (Snow Country), a collection of photographs taken between 1940 and 1956 documenting traditional rituals and rural everyday life in the snowy region of Niigata prefecture. This work was famously inspired by Watsuji Tetsurō’s 1935 book Fūdo (Climate), which basically proposed that the distinctive geography and climate of a place shape inhabitants’ character and way of life. Reynolds convincingly shows how Hamaya’s sequencing of photographs conveys nuanced messages that would not have been possible with a single image, endowing “a timeless quality” on the subjects (p. 41). The idealization of Japanese rural lives and cultural heritages, not only by Hamaya but also by others in Reynolds’s study, was a reaction to the awareness that the traditional way of life was perishing in a postwar Japan where recovery from the war was synonymous with drastic Americanization.

Chapter 2 examines Okamoto Tarō’s writings on prehistoric Jōmon culture. In a 1952 essay, Okamoto hailed Jōmon ceramics for their rough and dynamic formal qualities, claiming them to embody a Japanese tradition that was overshadowed by the subsequent Yayoi culture. The dichotomy of Jōmon and Yayoi articulated by Okamoto had repercussions in debates in the architectural community, of which Tange Kenzō was a participant. Reynolds interprets Okamoto’s much-noted views on Jōmon not...

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