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

Making myself: Yajima Isao as subject

We know that Isao is largely behind the camera when his young family is in the frame in the course of Album 1. However, in the full body of photographs which make up Album 1, Isao still had plenty of room to experiment with and refine his personal style of pose. As he moved more concretely behind the camera, those images in which he featured or was the focus begin to demonstrate a particular style of self-presentation that we can call “disengazed.” With the exception of formal group photographs or portraits, Isao largely avoided the “eye” of the camera. Alongside caption tone and word choice, it is this refusal to surrender to the subject-making of his own camera which marks Isao out as the primary photo taker of the Yajima albums, and the most likely creator.

So what did this disengazed pose involve? Largely it affected Isao when he was taking self-portraits. In these cases he often retreated alone to the garden and used the timer. He rarely looked directly at the camera, thus differentiating these self-styled photographs from the style of studio pose he was used to. Instead, he developed a style of pose where he looked at a point beyond the camera, usually to his right. This reminds viewers, one of whom was of course Isao, that there is much the camera cannot see. It is also possible that Isao’s middle-distance stare was the result of his own discomfort as a photographic subject and he found himself able to dislodge this awkwardness by not looking directly at the camera.

Why does it matter how Isao presented himself in his photographs? It matters because Isao's visual behaviours of gaze and crop demonstrate that he was keenly aware of the transformation work the camera did in making a version of someone, rather than a replica. He consciously used the camera, final prints and album format to produce a particular and particularly cohesive version of his many selves: dentist, father, partner, traveller and empowered consumer. His goal in the albums was not–it seems–documentation, but self-elevation to the status of a desirable and interesting subject.

Desire seems to have been immensely important to the Isao that is made visible through these albums. This Isao not only wanted to look good himself, but appears to have delighted in Eiko as she posed for him. This desire is alluded to on the last page of Album 1 in a scrapbook style collation of portrait photos of Eiko taken before she married Isao:

This page displays Eiko's visual life before Isao and children. It may also display her involvement in the album's construction. If so, she would have been doing what amateur photography discourse suggested women could, and should, do to pull their weight in the labour of photographing the family. As one guide, Twelve Months of Family Photographs (Masuda 1953), suggested, since fathers were often unwilling to make albums, and given they had already taken the photos in their role as otōsan kameraman, “wouldn’t it be good if this task was something mother took charge of?” As Kerry Ross has shown in her survey of early twentieth century how-to literature, in the hopes of transforming photography from the father’s great escape to a family pursuit, various elements of the photographic process were apportioned to other family members. This was, as Ross argues, a strategy to soothe new tensions whereby photography, as a largely solitary pursuit, threatened how time and space were used at home (Ross 2015 p.66). Then again, a less enticing and more practical explanation might also be behind this lone page; with the album housing so many of Isao's pre-parenthood photographs, perhaps on sorting through boxes one day, Isao or Eiko discovered these old portraits and quite practically decided that the album was a good place to store them. Whether practical or devotional we will never know. However, what is affirmed by this page of portraits is that Eiko's likeness and her visual history was as much a part of this album project as was Isao's.

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"Mama no kamera kyōshitsu"
In July 1962, the magazine Yoiko printed the first segment in a new series, “mama no kamera kyōshitsu” (mothers’ camera classroom). The famous photographer Yoshioka Senzō (1916–2005) penned the early instalments. He reassured tentative mothers that “even if it is out of focus, it doesn’t matter” (pinboke de mo kamawanai). Yoshioka’s manifesto, outlined in this first instalment, centred on building mothers’ confidence and competence. The stated motivation for mothers to pick up the family camera was not personal interest, but the spectre of an imagined future moment of sitting around the family album.
Reading with Yoshioka’s treatise of technical improvement, the column outlined the ways in which better photos could make a better mother—closer, more present, and more observant. Like most family photos, this self-improvement was also filtered through a male gaze, first that of Yoshioka, and later in the series, other professional male photographers. For Yoshioka, a better picture was not stage-directed, with children corralled into department store studios or corners of parks and gardens to get the perfect pose, instead it was an everyday affair and a constant awareness of possible photographic moments. Eager to dispel any anxiety over having to always be camera-ready, Yoshioka explained, in light but nonetheless technical language, how cameras are easier than ever to use. These images, he argued, enter the child’s world: “your children’s world is not just outside the home, but inside as well. Make-believe with dolls, parties, splashing around with water and so on are your children’s oasis.” Intentional or otherwise, Yoshioka’s argument was to let the camera in to the very private moments of toddler tantrums, afternoon naps, and free–form play in order to expand the concept of which domestic spaces should be visible and, as Yoshioka’s list of photographable activities shows, to keep women’s photography within the walls of the home, thus making it into an act of childcare and housework.
Yoshioka also asked readers to send in their images against which he positioned himself as the classroom teacher. Each month he, and eventually other well-known, male photographers, would judge the submissions and then select a final few which would be printed and perhaps critiqued, with instructions for improvement. The images sent in by readers were compared to each other, as well as to the imagined content of families’ albums. For example, to encourage readers to try close-ups in August 1962, Yoshioka instructed them to first “look at the photos you’ve taken to date in your albums. Probably you’ll find there are very few close-ups.” He suggests that good moments for catching a close-up he suggests are while your children are watching cartoons on television, while they are eating a sweet treat, while they are reading you (mother) a book, and while they are playing with their friends. Although outwardly simply guiding the taking of better family photographs, Yoshioka and his peers were engaged in the reimagining of everyday family life as a never-ending flow of potential—and potentially lost—photographic moments.
Over the series’ run, Yoshioka and his peers campaigned for a shift from valuing the perfect setting, to using the camera without your subjects’ knowledge. The familiar refrain was that children should be the main characters (kodomo san wo shūyaku shite) in the images. In the short-term, this involved getting more engrossed in your child’s world when seeking to capture their world-view (and therefore sacrificing your own). The reward for mothers and others was that, years later, when you look at these images in the albums, your memories will be all the richer for having captured the moment and the vitality (iki iki) of your child.
Yoshioka’s snap evangelism, using the family photograph as its call to arms, dovetailed with manufacturers’ efforts to increase adult women’s camera ownership. The case for more and better photos was not that mothers would find pleasure in photography, but that they were rendering their family a service. Without mothers, as well as fathers, picking up the camera, vital elements of the family record (kiroku) would be lost. The mass predilection for posed photos was already ignoring what really mattered—the act and activity (iki iki) of family life and childhood. “Use a camera like any other type of electrical appliance in your life” encouraged Yoshioka in his attempt normalise camera ownership and use. Lurking within Yoshioka’s association of the camera with domestic appliances was the concept of a newly formalised kind of domestic work—the work of memory keeping. This also implied a more sinister requirement, to account for one’s time.
The attempt to insert the camera into the category of domestic appliance was made on multiple fronts. In 1959, seasoning giant Ajinomoto included savings stamps on four of its popular products which, if collected in the hundreds, could be put towards a special something for mothers or children. Listed under the “prizes” for mothers were a television set, a refrigerator, an electric washing machine, and a Canon camera. For shoppers familiar with the supposed “three treasures” of a successful middle–class life (a television, refrigerator, and washing machine) the message was clear, you also needed a camera. This was a stark contrast to the prevailing masculine discourses of hobby photography which Kerry Ross has documented, where the camera was something lingered over, lavished with expense, and used carefully (Ross 2015).
Source: Yoshioka, Senzō. “Mama No Kamera Kyōshitsu (1): Pinboke De Mo Kamawanai.” Yoiko, July 1962, 74-75.
Conclusion: Absence, Image and Place in the Yajima Family Albums
The three Yajima family photo albums were ostensibly a private record, but the photograph album was and is a curated narrative made to be consumed by a wider group. As Isao took most of the pictures outside the home, the albums brought the experiences of outside back into the home as artefacts posed for, printed, and kept safe. As Elizabeth Edwards writes, “albums structure time and place, retemporalize and guide narratives,” and they are an “active element in the replaying of those histories” (Edwards 2006, 34). For amateur photographers in postwar Japan, the social practice of taking and collating photos of your family was also intensely gendered. Men were the public presence of the happy snapper, but when the camera was turned inward towards the house and home, it was mothers who were encouraged by manufacturers and how–to discourses to turn their daily life into something public and consumable while productively filling the little free time they had. For fathers, or those fabled as “Sunday photographers,” when out and about, the photographic act turned the family into a public spectacle that created an extended public frame in which men were visible as fathers, even if invisible in the final private prints. Taking the photographs outside the home was integral to this public performance of fathering and makes some of the time Isao spent as "father," visible, while simultaneously reinforcing the home as a place from which he was absent.
Through photographs, and the albums which weave them into narratives, viewers of the Yajima photographs glimpse how Isao—husband, father, driver, and breadwinner—wanted an, imagined or known, audience to see his family. How-to discourses reminded happy snappers that assembling an album was in the service of future nostalgia where, in a moment of family togetherness, old photos could be looked at, talked about, and family bonds reinforced. It is not possible to know if or how often the Yajimas looked back at their albums, but the removal of images and signs of wear suggest the albums did come off the shelves from time to time and extended the photographic moment, which for fathers like Isao was one of the ways he spent time with his growing children. Yet, at some point the Yajima photos were sold, thrown away, misplaced, or forgotten about. This is at odds with the evidence of care and delight read in the images, their arrangements, and preservation. Beyond the temptation to service sentiment, what is most interesting is that the images were not destroyed, but repurposed as something to buy. Edwards talks briefly on how the destruction of images “points to a breakdown or a secession of social relations,” which suggests that keeping the Yajima albums largely intact, and trading them for money or freed-up-space, were acts which preserved the images themselves, and the shadows of the social relations that surrounded both their creation and their guardianship (Edwards 2006, 36). The capacity for material images to allow access to these networks of social relations is at the centre of how the Yajima photographs work as a way to historicise this father’s place in and outside the home, as well as enable us to witness his visual voice.
It was in this voice that Isao built his family aesthetic, which included his own personal style of posing, but also, as the albums show, a growing sense of what mattered enough to photograph, develop, save, and stick. Isao guided his camera and arranged his subjects across the spaces of home and work, occasionally catching his movement in between these spaces and his roles. In turn, the camera worked as a way to manage and reconcile his various selves through these spaces.

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