Gendering Cultures of Japanese Photography, 1931-1970

This dissertation analyzes the cultural, economic, and gendered landscape in which the camera played a central role in making Japanese culture during and after World War II. Connecting the rise of women photographers and the domestically produced camera (two figures excluded from many traditional histories of Japan and photography) demonstrates the points of overlap where both have operated within and defined the same structures of power and visual economies which sought to construct cameras as powerful tools of war and nationalism, and women as subjects of its desire. By drawing on histories of technology, photography, design, and consumer culture, this dissertation revises the male-centered narratives of optical technologies and photographic practice and shows why the history of technology and consumer culture had radical effects on both the history of images and image making. Thus this study answers the following questions: What does a history of photographs taken during wartime and its aftermath look like seen from the perspective of its sites of mass production and consumption? And if the mass culture of photography was a defining element during this period, how does photographic culture bring into focus different angles on the history of Japan? In answering these questions I historicize the construction of the categories of masculinity, femininity, weapon, and producer of art and protest.The first chapter, “Weaponizing Vision in Wartime Japan, 1931-1945” examines depictions of the gendered Japanese photographer and optical technologies used at war. This chapter analyzes the state’s vision of appropriate uses of photography during wartime and its attempt to control and regulate it through the picture press. I show how even as the wartime Ministry of Information published treatises likening cameras to guns, photographs to bullets, and photographers to the male soldiers who wielded these weapons, the first female photojournalists in Japan began working in the war offices and women replaced their husbands off at war as home front photographers. The second chapter, “Finding a Language for Early Postwar Japanese Photography” addresses how the transformation of wartime technologies into consumer goods created a postwar camera boom that opened new spaces for negotiating what photographic language was best suited to processing the themes of foreign occupation and the transition to the Cold War political system and economy. Investigating a moment of global connection between American and Japanese photographers and publishers, this chapter demonstrates how the interactions between professional photography organizations, camera corporations, international photojournalists, and the American Occupation set the parameters for who could be considered a photographer and the commercial market for photographic content. The third chapter, “The Japanese Camera and the Aesthetics of Postwar National Design,” argues that designers such as Kamekura Yūsaku (1915-1997), national policies to promote Japanese design, and great support from corporations such as Nippon Kōgaku (Nikon) and the Canon Co. recast the Japanese camera as an object that promoted modernist discourse and helped reshape Japan from the world’s source of cheaply produced knock-offs to the center of modern design. In doing so, the camera industry also constructed an image of women as incapable of using optical technology; female photographers resisted this image and found ways to show their proficiency with the technology. Finally, this chapter shows how it was Kamekura’s sustained work designing cameras that informed his total design concept for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.Chapter Four, “The Photography Boom in Postwar Japan: Tokiwa Toyoko and the Nude Shooting Session,” critically examines the nude shooting session craze, events wherein naked women were photographed in public parks by groups of amateur photographers, as symbolic of the tensions surrounding a changing postwar culture in Japan. I address the ways in which photographer Tokiwa Toyoko commented upon this dynamic through her own representations of the event which were published widely in magazines, newspapers, and displayed on gallery walls. This chapter introduces the ways in which women photographers such as Tokiwa sought to depict themselves and the male photography culture in which they worked. Where Chapter Four addresses the rise of the female photographer in 1950s Japan, the fifth and final chapter, “Through Young Eyes: The Female Student Photography Revolution 1950s-1970s” investigates the work of members of photography clubs at women’s colleges in Tokyo and Nagoya, to show how female students quickly seized upon new photographic technologies to use the camera as a weapon to participate in mass national protests. I analyze how the students produced a theoretically informed method of collective and anonymous photo-making to place the image, rather than a photographer’s identity, at the center of meaning making. These student photographers used their new theory of photography as a powerful tool of dissent against gendered social norms and environmental pollution. Finally, this dissertation concludes with an analysis of the key exhibition spaces for the history of photography and cameras in Japan to address institutional absences of the history of technology and gender in photography exhibitions