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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

The Yajimas as a 'my car' family

Two big things happen to the Yajimas in Album 3:

they move into a larger house;
they increase their car collection.

The privilege of the first page of Album 3 is all about the car (see image on the left). The photos on the pages which follow pre-date the arrival of the Ford, a fact which not only reaffirms the chronological play Isao enjoys in creating “album time” but also the immense importance the Ford had for him. On the page shown above Isao, Eiko and Haruki each took it in turns to pose with the car in three separate car portraits aptly summarised by the caption: “together with the Ford.” This Ford and her siblings enter this album—and possibly the life of the Yajima family—as kin and worthy of great care. In Isao's photographs, the car achieves a level of visual intimacy not afforded to the house, even the new one. This was perhaps because the car was Isao’s space–and it relied almost solely on his presence and skill. We never see Eiko, for example, behind the wheel.

Turn the page of Album 3 and with the sudden splurge of a colour photograph, viewers also learn that the family have also moved to a new larger home that incorporates the dental practice. The house was newly built in a modern housing development known as a danchi and when Isao was taking photographs of it, the house was surrounded by blank, unoccupied garden which the family filled with spiky shrubs and a traditional stone lantern, but mostly Isao used the space to park his cars. There, he developed a new aesthetic and spatial setting for taking family photographs.

As signalled by the curatorial choice behind the first page, Album 3 is dominated by Isao’s pride in owning and using his cars, a choice of subject that also reflects the reduced family milestones and perhaps, teenage unwillingness to pose. Around 1952 in the course of Album 1, the Yajima family bought the Japanese-produced Auto Sandal, which, for around 100,000 yen, faithfully enabled their domestic travels. However, the expanded outside space of their new home in turn allowed Isao expand his car collection and also photograph his cars at rest. Owning more than one car was a loud claim to the privilege of space to park and to travel when and where you pleased and at your own pace. Car parking was a pressing urban issue in 1960s Japan, and a reason many licence-holders gave for not yet owning a car (Asahi Shimbun 1966). In the album pages which follow it was the car rather than the new home which Isao chose to photograph close-up and solo, but also with himself back in front of the camera. This move back in front of the camera signalled a new stage in Isao’s visual and familial identity as he gradually lost his status as otōsan kameraman with his three pubescent children now far beyond the expected and desired infant snaps.

In 1963, the Yajimas would have been among the millions of maikā zoku (my car families) in Japan. In his essay on the rise of the owner driver in Shōwa Japan, David Plath describes how the family car and the car–owning family remapped, not only the Japanese landscape as roads were built and parking spaces competed over, but “the lines of human sociability” (Plath 1990, p. 235). Plath traces the car’s influence as a possession, but as Isao’s photos show, the car also existed as a photographic subject and the idea of the car was woven into the fabric of millions of families’ lives by the time Isao and his family posed with the Ford in 1963. In both Japan, and the Yajima family, the pace of car acquisition stepped up in the 1960s as Japan more widely entered the kokuminsha jidai—the “era of the people’s car.” By 1963 car ownership in Japan exceeded one million. By this point, the Auto Sandal and the Ford were not enough for the Yajimas, and in 1965 they purchased a Volkswagen Kahmann Gia, amusingly named “Sir Kahmann Gia” in Isao’s captions. Just a year later, in 1966, the year the Japanese media heralded as the “my car era,” they purchased a Toyota Corona. The car collection exhibited the family’s accumulating wealth, and the photographs which survive in Album 3 are one material trace of the family’s group performance as wealthy and proud car owners. The photo reel below shows just a few of these images from Album 3. Look closely at:

patterns of pose: notice the physical closeness between the posing person and the car;
the place of Isao in front of the camera;
how the car enabled the family to take up space on the move and mark out landmarks such as Odawara Castle with their own mobile Yajima territory.

The sheer number of images of the cars in this album, particularly the closeness between bodies and the car, show that Isao cared about having a car collection, being seen with one or other of his cars, and making sure the future viewers of his photograph albums knew he owned many cars. The photos in this volume made these emotions material. Histories of post-1945 consumption have understandably focused on rates and patterns of acquisition as these are the acts that have generated archival traces. However, the Yajima family photos begin to make a case for examining the emotions behind and within the acts of consumption; emotions such as desire, pride, caretaking, and envy which all play a role in the experience of displaying something you own and want others to know you own. What is striking between this album and Album 1 and Album 2 is the different visual role that owning a car offered Isao versus that available when he became a parent. Isao’s visual trace of car ownership positions him in full view of any future onlookers. However, his visual traces of fatherhood render him largely invisible in the archive which survives as he stands, crouches or encourages his wife and children from behind the camera, beyond the threshold of historical view.

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Otōsan kameraman
In 1964, 44 percent of households owned a camera, and the primary user of these millions of cameras was, in nearly all cases, a man (Economic and Social Research Institute). This moment in history was also marked by the spread of the moniker “cameraman father” (otōsan kameraman). The gendering of the person behind the camera piggybacked on the already gendered patterns of consumption of stuff and information in amateur photography; photography magazines habitually appeared to address the male reader and snapper. Beyond consumption, the label also divided family space time by whether it was suitable for a father or mother photographer. While the “Mama no kamera kyōshitsu” column in Yoiko magazine (running from 1962-1970) called on women to snap away at the tea table, when the family camera was outside the home at school sports days and formal ceremonies, experts and satirists expected it to be wielded by a father. Isao is an excellent example of this imaginary man in action as the following page from Album 1 shows.
One winter’s day around 1948, Isao and Haruki visited the grounds of the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. The trip would have taken between thirty minutes to an hour from the eastern suburbs they called home. As the family did not own a car until 1952, they probably took public transport. Haruki packed a small duffle bag, wore the hat from his school uniform pulled low around his brow, and fastened his coat all the way to the top button to stop the cold from getting in. The only thing we know that Isao packed was his camera. Isao devoted one full page of the album to eight photographs from this day trip. Additional photographs appear later in the album and extend the narrative to include a visit to Hibiya Park, with its trees bare, and a trip through Ginza Crossing to gawk at the traffic controllers stranded on their concrete islands.
What is clear from this example is how the photographic moment carved out time together for fathers and their children and emphatically did so outside the home—the otōsan kameraman was an outdoor apparition. The photographs may show where they went and what they saw, but they also create a new point of access into a way fathers participated in childrearing. For Isao, the photograph was a way to experience and perform his identity as father, and the photograph album was one of the ways he labelled himself as such. Across the album captions, Isao refers to himself as “Isao,” “Yajima,” “father” (otōsan), and “papa” (papa); photography was perhaps the only way to reconcile each of these identities with the identity of a working man. For Isao, and perhaps many other postwar men, photography was instrumental in providing a sanctioned space in which to blend family with his world beyond the doorstep.
As Isao’s day trip with Haruki begins to show, the practice of family photography also turned fathering and the family unit into a transportable public spectacle. In contrast, it was mothers who, when the camera was turned inward towards the home, were targeted by manufacturers and experts to turn their daily life into something aesthetic, public, consumable, and productive. Although the single album page “Around Gaien” radically suggested that the Yajima family was not always somewhere Eiko was present, it still preserved the home as a space marked by Isao’s absence.
Source: Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office. “Percentage of Households Possessing Major Durable Goods—All Japan (1959-2004).”
Leisure, pleasure and showing off
Isao travelled a lot. Accompanied by family and friends he travelled across Tokyo and Japan by bus, train, and eventually using in his own car. Domestic travel was the space through which Isao claimed—and used the albums to visually articulate—his family’s place in Japan’s postwar middle class. It was also the main forging ground for his photographs. This was partly practical; when travelling he had the camera on his body and much more time to take photos. It was also, as it was for the tens of thousands of fellow camera–wielding domestic tourists, an instrumental part of what Anne McClintock describes as the “theatrical performance of leisure”(McClintock 1995, 162).
Album 2 is all about the spectacle of free time that played out in this classed and coded “theatre.” Look at the image to the left. As a spectacle itself, this volume’s cover is by far the most ostentatious in design. Velveteen and opulent, it hints at wealth, humour, and fittingly for the contents, carries embroidered overtones of transport and journey with the approaching ship and greeting penguin. The real-life mobility of the Yajima family seen in the mapping pages across this module (Mapping Album 1 | Mapping Album 2 | Mapping Album 3) did not just hint at wealth, it shouted it. Friends, neighbours, and family back home were, however, out of earshot, so the photograph, alongside inevitable souvenirs and gifts, was therefore needed as proof of this classed pursuit. It is no surprise then, that aside from the names of family and friends, the word which appears the most in captions across all volumes is tabi, or “trip” and across the life–span of this album, 1959-1961, Isao used photographs to catalogue seventeen separate trips.
Since its invention in 1839, photography and the photograph have developed as forces explaining and accounting for time. Travel, although appearing to all the senses as a suspension of time, was laden with a constellation of institutions which gave meaning to the way free time was spent and dispensed. The family, local government, and the Japan Travel Bureau were just some of these institutions at work, while amateur photography acted as a foil for preserving the pretence of private, rather than institutionally-sponsored, leisure (Leheney 2000).

Let’s look again at the image with which this module started in which two “private” photographic moments are happening at once–Isao’s and the family behind him. The privacy of this moment is fictitious, but the existence of a final owned print transforms what was a public moment into something material and intimate. The public/private blur of the travel photograph means that scenes ordinarily banished from family snaps - such as eating and shopping - are permitted entry while not transgressing the spatial code Isao had established for photographs near home. When travelling, the family is snapped slouching at a kitchen table, Eiko is pictured shopping, proudly displaying her purchase for the camera and Isao appears slurping noodles at a standing noodle bar during a trip away with colleagues. When travelling, the Yajimas—like all tourists—were not just tourists in new places, but tourists in their own lives, and the photographs survives as companions to these novelties. The photograph was also the proof that the Yajima family had successfully travelled from their urban home to “the wild” and back again—albeit a heavily managed and well–catered wild. This success was multi–layered. First, it was a testament to financial success and the attainment of a high-standard of living—in this case, the success of Isao’s Dental Practice. Second, it heralded the success of the Japanese countryside as a tourist destination.

This page references:

The albums
Otōsan kameraman
Album 2: 1959 - 61
Album 1: 1941 - 56
Yajima family home after 1963
Car and Castle pose at Odawara Castle, circa 1960
Isao poses with the Corona, 1966
Together with the Ford
The Auto Sandal
Sir Kahmann Gia arrives In this image, Isao crouches in the shadows near the bonnet of the car and inspects his newest acquisition. The caption “karumangya sama no o–tsuki” gives the family’s newest arrival the honorific form of “sama.” This linguistic choice perhaps hints that the family nicknamed the car, but almost certainly shows that Isao was aware of the status of being able to own this car – as well as the others – and wanted to communicate this to his memory.