This is a trailer for a documentary about the photographer Kikujiro Fukushima, who has a long history of politically-involved photography in Japan’s post-war period. Here is a rough translation of the text in the YouTube description:

Rebellious post-war photographer, Kikuji Fukushima, 90 years old. His career started in 1966, shooting photographs in Hiroshima, and he continued to point his lens towards the upheaval of the post-war period: the atomic bomb aftermath, Sanrizuka, Anpo Protests, Todai Protests, etc. His goal is to communicate the truth through his photographs. He once infiltrated and photographed Japan’s Self-Defense Forces; after the publication of these photos, he was beaten by thugs and his house was set on fire. Still, he continued to photograph. He estimates that he has taken around 250,000 photographs up until now. “The entirety of Japan is basically a lie,” he says. He refuses to accept a government pension, and lives together with his dog. In the middle of this quiet existence, he naturally continues to raise questions about modern Japan. Just at the time he was beginning to relate his “last testament” towards Japanese people (in the form of this documentary), the Tohoku Earthquake broke out. After the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, Kikujiro Fukushima decided to make his last trip to demand the truth…

Here are some of Fukushima’s quotes from the trailer:

“For a photographer, it doesn’t matter if you are against the law” (0:10)

“I want to stir up what’s kept hidden.” (0:38)

“It’s our job to photograph, so, uh, sorry!” (1:26, my favorite)

It should not come as a surprise that the older generation is the leading the way with politically-concerned photographs in the wake of the 3/11 disaster. There are many reasons that the younger generation has avoided making this kind of work, and I can’t begin to tackle them seriously here. (I can’t say I know all the reasons, in any case…) Still, we can now pose the question that I can’t get out of my head: why is it that, after producing a generation of radical photographers in the 1960s, contemporary Japanese photographers have almost completely lost any sense of political responsibility in their work???

© Naoya Hatakeyama

Two shows going up in San Francisco this week are well worth seeing. The first is Naoya Hatakeyama’s “Natural Stories” at SFMOMA ¹. This exhibit was shown in Tokyo last year, and it includes Hatakeyama’s photographs taken after the 3/11 earthquake. I still think these are, without any question, the “best” images to come out of the disaster yet. If you have any interest in photography after 3/11, you must see the show.

Also, Nobuyoshi Araki has a show of old and new photographs ², dated 1979 – 2040. I saw it in Tokyo a few months ago, and if it’s similar to what was exhibited here, the show may include some truly excellent photographs of pizza.

[This was posted to LPV Magazine a few days ago, with a whole bunch of images to illustrate some of the books I’m talking about.]

At the 2010 edition of the Higashikawa Photo Festival, I met a photographer named Iino. We were both getting drunk at the annual barbeque, where everyone gets together and eats a bunch of free food. Iino was a fun guy, and as we talked he showed me a project he was working on, a series of portraits in which he was always shaking hands with his subject. The people in these photographs represented a real cross-section of Japan: there were nerds, punks, disabled people, salarymen, children and foreigners. Some people seemed a little surprised or uncomfortable to be photographed in this way, but the mood was light. With a laugh, he said he wasn’t going to stop until he’d taken a thousand of these portraits–a latter-day, unserious August Sander! He pulled out his cheap SLR, took my picture as we laughed together, and then we talked a little more before wandering on. I want to bring up Iino to introduce my thoughts about 2011 because it seems to me that his project represents a kind of photograph that we’re not seeing so much in Japan anymore. To put it simply, I’m wondering if Japanese photographers are losing interest in people.

The March 11 earthquake and its effects will necessarily loom over any attempt to think about Japan’s 2011. These effects are not going away anytime soon, even if it’s entirely too easy for Tokyoites to forget about what’s happening up North. For their part, photographers have made an effort to show people what’s happening in Tohoku, but I’m not sure that much of the work being produced so far is all that useful to anyone. I think it’s possible that my general disappointment with post-3/11 photographs so far could be linked to a broader turn away from representing people in Japanese photography.

I don’t want to go down the path of “the old days were so much better,” but if you look at photographers like Hiromi Tsuchida and Kazuo Kitai, their primary interest was other people–and I think this was not so much because of something “beautiful” or “interesting” in the people themselves, but because they could produce some kind of effect by showing these people to an audience. Tsuchida’s “Counting Grains of Sand” is an easy example of what I’m talking about. The book examines crowds in 1980s (“bubble”-era) Japan, building up from groups of just a few people to a fairly dramatic conclusion, in which hundreds of faces are packed into the frame. Outside of Hiroh Kikai, it’s hard to think of prominent and contemporary Japanese photographers who are equally interested in people; Kikai himself is probably more respected outside of Japan anyway.

A newer type of photography, represented by Rinko Kawauchi and Masafumi Sanai, favors abstract, object-based explorations. I like this work: I recently found a used copy of Sanai’s “Ikiteru” the other day, and I think it’s very good. But I don’t think this type of photography is well-suited to deal with something like a natural disaster which is affecting hundreds of thousands of people. I haven’t been moved by his recent work, but I really respect Daido Moriyama for saying in this video [skip to the 50 minute mark] that, from the beginning, he decided absolutely to not shoot any earthquake-related photographs, because it wouldn’t make any sense for him personally. What a sensible thing to say! Meanwhile the amateur shooters at ROLLS TOHOKU have been showing up most professionals, for the simple reason that they are able to show us people in a natural way.

Asahi Camera Magazine published a special magazine of post-3/11 photography, and it sums up the weak response. The photographs mostly show objects and houses, to varying degrees of poignancy. I can’t understand why these photographs are all that we’re seeing. I want to know what people are doing!

Hirokawa Taishi’s series of family portraits is the one exception here. His portraits of families living in evacuation centers are the most powerful photographs in this magazine. Perhaps it makes sense that a guy who had thought for years about the ‘craziness’ of nuclear reactors in Japan would come up with a good response.

I am still convinced that the most useful photographs to come out of this disaster will not even be taken for years, because the scale of the destruction is so big. I want to know how relocated families are integrating into their new communities, whether or not people are rebuilding their homes next to the coast, how long people will be living next to rubble. Is photography even the right way to find these things out?

A few months ago, I had a small job shooting some event photos. I got to the place, saw Iino on the other side of the crowd. He was shooting for a newspaper, but I caught up with him later and asked him how the project was going. He said something to the effect of, “after the earthquake, it’s not a good time to be taking those photos, is it?” I told him that, given everything that’s happened, it might actually be the perfect time, but it didn’t look like that was going to change his mind.

I recently found some photographs that I really liked. They can’t be seen online yet, but I will be talking about them more in the future. The concept of the series is, what if Japan’s Showa period had never ended, and continued up until the present day? For background: Japan uses the Western style year system (2011) as well as the imperial system (Heisei 23). The title of the work was “Showa 88,” because Showa was the period before Heisei, but this is really not important, Wikipedia has more info if you are interested. The point is that, at the gallery talk, someone asked the photographer: “well, you’re calling this work Showa 88, but 2011 doesn’t translate to Showa 88. This year would actually be Showa 86, and you have a photo of the earthquake damage in your book, so wouldn’t people know that you took it this year.”

To which I dimly thought, but did not formulate in time to say: “What a short-sighted comment, as if there will not be plenty of areas that still look like that in 2013, or 2023…”

ROLLS TOHOKU has been updated with new photos, taken over five days in August. It’s still the only thing worth looking at besides Hatakeyama’s show. Here are some of the photos that stood out to me from this update.

Anonymous woman in Shizukawa:

Kokoa, a girl in Watanoha:

A couple of weeks ago I saw Naoya Hatakeyama’s latest exhibit, “Natural Stories,” at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Photography Museum. Hatakeyama is from Rikuzen-Takada, one of the villages which was devastated by the tsunami this March. I don’t have the time or space here to explain why these photos were so great, but along with ROLLS TOHOKU, they are the only photographs taken of post-3/11 destruction I’ve seen so far which are “good,” strange as it is to use that word here.

With Hatakeyama’s blessing, I took some cell phone shots of the exhibit, but I don’t think it makes any sense to post them here. If you’re in Tokyo, you should go, the exhibit is up through December 4. I think it’s going to travel after that, first to Amsterdam and then maybe eventually San Francisco. I’ll try to keep an eye on the work and see if a book comes out, though I have a feeling that will not happen anytime soon.

Event after giving a huge recommendation to Taishi Hirokawa’s “Still Crazy: Nuclear Power Plants As Seen In Japanese Landscapes” in my summer exhibit roundup, I completely forgot about the show and missed out. Quite a bummer, especially because I later heard that Hirokawa was there hanging out at the show.

“Still Crazy” is a 1994 book which shows a crisp landscape photograph of each of Japan’s nuclear power plants—obviously a highly relevant work given all that’s happened recently, and the resurgence of anti-nuclear protests. The book is still available in Japan for the original retail price of about 5000 yen, but now it’s been released as a 600 yen iPad app. (The iTunes link is here.)

via Ken Iseki, there are some more pictures of the app on his blog. (Japanese)

This is a video made by the art collective Chim↑Pom, called “100 Kiai” (“100 Cheers”). It was originally shown in May 2011, as part of an exhibit at Mujin-to Productions called “Real Times.” To make the work shown in “Real Times,” the Chim↑Pom members traveled to the area around the Fukushima reactor.

“100 Kiai” was produced with a number of young guys living in Soma, an area about 50km away from the reactor. As I understand it, one or two of the Chim↑Pom members had just met/seduced these guys and made the video with them soon after. As much as it is obviously important to document what happened (and what is still very much a reality) in Fukushima and Tohoku, I can’t help but be skeptical about a lot of the photographs coming out of the region—are they really helping people? But just showing up in person like this and creating a positive interaction out of thin air is powerful on its own. Its quality as “an artwork” is secondary to the outpouring of catharsis at the end of the video, which you couldn’t convince me is faked in any way.

While probably not as daring as Russia’s Voina, Chim↑Pom are still one of the most radical art groups in Japan. Part of “Real Times” was a video documenting how they altered an extremely famous mural by Taro Okamoto which hangs in Shibuya station; they were later arrested for the “defacement.” This full PBS report has a lot more information to offer, including the text of a nice interview and full clips of the other video pieces in “Real Times.”

Recently, this blog has been receiving a little bit less attention than normal, as the pull of Twitter grows stronger. It’s deceptively easy to forget that some people not only read Street Level Japan, but have opinions about what’s written here! Among the different types of responses to this blog, the most satisfying might be to receive a comment that not only disagrees with a post, but shows conclusively that it’s incorrect.

This recently happened with the work of Stephen Vaughan, a British photographer about whom I wrote a couple of posts in March. Stephen was in Japan on March 11, working on a long-term project about, of all things, the possibility of a major earthquake. Based on some second-hand information, I wrote a post expressing some disappointment that he had (allegedly) been discouraged by the earthquake, and effectively stopped shooting the project. This is absolutely not the case.

In reality, Stephen traveled to areas in Iwate to photograph the damage caused by the tsunami, as well as an evacuation center. In his own words:

The work that I made in Iwate was driven by a responsibility to bear witness to what had happened. I was totally committed to recording and documenting what I saw with as much depth and clarity as I was able. I am not a photo-journalist in the classic sense (I work with large-format cameras) and there were many other photographers making those kinds of pictures. Instead, I continued to use the visual language that I had established in the project so far, in which the emphasis is on a stilled and descriptive clarity and simplicity.

Some of Stephen’s photographs from Iwate, as well as earlier photographs from this series, can be seen on his website. In my mind, it’s still too early to consider a large body of work on the earthquake, but with time, “A Catfish Sleeps” certainly has the potential to be one of the definitive photographic documents of this disaster. I just hope that the project hasn’t ended.

Update: Stephen says: “I definitely intend to go back to Iwate and Tokyo at some stage, to continue the project. I don’t yet know what form this will take but I won’t be seeking a simple resolution to what has happened.” Also, he’s kindly allowed me to post this link to a 140-page dummy version of “A Catfish Sleeps” on Issu. Definitely worth a look.

It’s just about three months on from the earthquake and tsunami, which means that the situation in Tohoku is now well outside of the Western news cycle. Things here in Tokyo also appear to be normal, but this is not a city where you can overhear people’s feelings walking down the street. Everyone knows that things won’t be the same again.

There are a couple of new things to report about the ROLLS TOHOKU project, which I still think has provided some of the best images to come out of this disaster. For one thing, there’s an entirely new set of images online, taken about two months after the tsunami hit. The site is also a bit more user-friendly now; images load much faster and you can use the arrow keys to flip through the slideshows.

Finally, there’s some exciting news for people in Europe, which is that the entire ROLLS project will be exhibited this summer at Fotografiska, Stockholm’s photography museum. The dates are July 7 – August 28. The exhibit is coordinated by Marc Feustel, who also wrote an article about ROLLS which you can read in the recent edition of Foam. or on his blog.