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

Isao and Kazu c.1950

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1. Isao and Kazu c.1950

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Snappy Family
Before cameras were something families could afford to buy and use at home, photographs were composed, taken, and developed by photography studios. Photographers took the photographs in their studios through advanced booking or walk-in trade, and they also travelled to customer’s houses or pre-designated locations. Having your photo taken in a studio was an experience that cost money, generated a story to tell others, and provided evidence which could be displayed at home, carried on one’s body, or kept safe for future viewers.
By the 1930s, the photographic act was an established middle–class family habit, but one which, following the progression of Japan’s war in China, was almost universally interrupted as metal, chemicals, rubber, leather, bodies, and free time were mobilized for the war effort. Following Japanese surrender in August 1945, the postwar households of Japan renewed the practice of family photography with remarkable swiftness, and resumed buying, selling, using, and breaking cameras and associated paraphernalia in a sustained upward trend until 1990.
The particular surge of camera ownership in the late 1950s was heralded as “camera fever” (kamera netsu), and was buoyed by increased international export and a growing international reputation for the “Japanese Camera.” At the centre of this fever were male amateur photographers, a substantial portion of whom were otōsan kameraman (camera man fathers). Anecdotally, these new cultural figures were said to only emerge on Sundays, and were found with their cameras, capturing their families at leisure in parks and popular picnic spots rather than documenting the domestic spaces and labours of house and home. The photographs these Sunday photographers were taking were mainly posed portraits, or kinen shashin. However, starting in the early 1950s, the kinen shashin was criticised for its old-fashioned feel, as commentators lamented that the stiff expressions in photographs came from forced poses that were produced by the familiar refrain to stop and pose. Instead, the zeitgeist called on amateurs to “snap” (snappu).
The “snap” was initially more defined by its opposition to the posed photograph than by any prescriptive coordinates of style. In contrast to kinen shashin, for example, it was not expected to be taken as part of an institutionally-sanctioned record. Snaps were resolutely personal, informal, and designed to be taken quickly and instinctively. Lauded in postwar amateur photography discourse, the “snap” was described as the only way the amateur photographer could really catch reality and the best way to ensure photographs were more emotionally accurate. The development of the happy snapper and the photos they took had two influences. The first was the postwar artistic turn toward realism, or rearizmu, taken by Japanese art photographers, a thorough account of which has been made by Julia Thomas (2008). The second influence was the profit ambitions of the national camera industry. The encouragement to snap away was aimed at both reducing the skills barrier holding people back from having a camera and at getting people to use and buy more exposures. Snap advocacy was specifically geared at getting women behind the lens and getting everyday family life in the frame. The assumed daily, physical contact women had with their children was seen as the optimum condition for “snapping,” whereas photographs that benefitted from physical distance, such as outings or school sports’ days (undō kai), were suggested as more appropriate subjects for fathers to capture.
There are two threads concerning how the snap folds into Isao's story. The first is in the development of his style of photography. While he did experiment with the snappu he largely preferred posed photographs. Second, the scarcity of snaps in the family albums reflects how he spent his time and the time-space constraints of the snap. The snappish turn that professionals advocated were unrealistic for many otōsan kameraman; capturing your child napping, fighting, or lost in play was therefore handed to the emergent figure of the snappy mother.
Paternal invisibility
Tackling paternal invisibility after 1945 involves a reversal of the structural, aesthetic, and linguistic processes through which men and labour have been methodically removed from the home, and a discussion of how this removal has expressed itself as men’s social power in both “lived experience and fantasy” (Tosh & Roper, 1991). This removal occurred in multiple ways, reaching back, as Sawayama Mikako has shown, to the 1800s. Sawayama’s work with childcare diaries (ikuji nikki) published in parenting magazines from the late Meiji period observed that, as mothers uniformly came to replace fathers as the authors of these diaries, “paternal contributions to child rearing” were soon no longer recorded at all, and the fathers themselves came to be less archivally readable (Sawayama 1991).
Christopher Gerteis has observed a similar process in the stories of railway workers or makkuro papa (soot-covered fathers) in the 1950s (Gerteis 2011, 141). These sooty men – categorized by their profession and their status as “papa” - were gradually replaced by middle-class, aspirational blue-collar workers, for whom the visible grime of labour was not something they were expected to bring home. Instead, they carried nice clean wage packets into the home, which promised, although rarely delivered, the spoils of middle-class consumer life. In the 1970s, the steady, postwar progress of tanshin funin contracts fuelled the cultural resonance and status surrounding paternal absence as company workers moved to distant company outposts in order to compete for promotion. Meanwhile, itinerant manual labourers working outside the security of monthly salaries, went wherever there was work, at times far away from home. The retreat of labour was also part of the reduction of the home “to its most basic function in an industrial society: a space of rest” (Sand 2005). This was an inherently problematic idea that gave the home the unachievable status of a “utopian retreat,” which only existed, as Tamara Hareven argues, “in the imagination of social reformers and social scientists,” most of whom were men (Hareven, 1977). However, there is a distinct gender imbalance in the idea of the home as rest, where men were imagined as the returning workers in need of rest, while the unsalaried work of women enabled their relaxation.
The only systematic removal of women’s labour appears in the rapid decline of homebirths. This was part of a wider global trend towards more medicalised childbirth: in 1950, Japanese women laboured in the baby boom and 95 percent of all recorded births took place at home, by 1960 this had dropped to 50 percent, plummeting to just 4 percent in 1970 (JICA 2004). At the same time, as Kathleen Uno writes, this period fostered “the ascendance of motherhood,” which constructed and idealised mothering as a particular and all-consuming occupation; the term sengyō shufu (professional housewife) became emblematic of this “ascendance” (Uno 19##). Yet, according to Uno, the image of the professional housewife, and the bright, convenient, and peaceful home her image came to represent, relied on “the high and late postwar image of the Japanese male – a man in a dark blue suit commuting by train to a company, an actor in the public world, rather than a father or husband in the private world of the home" (Ibid). This reliance was more than financial dependence, it was a visual gendering of productive spaces, framed as the natural order of things. Unsurprisingly, many of the recent studies of men outside the workplace have focused on threats to employment. Tom Gill’s work on homelessness is emblematic of this. Developing Gill’s work is Emma Cook’s work on freeters in contemporary Japan, which interrogates the masculine identity work done by having, or not having, a permanent salaried job.
Jordan Sand has explored the genealogy of a natural-seeming division between home and work through nineteenth-century changes in academic and popular conceptions of where family life happened. He recounts the political projects of Meiji Era (1868-1912) thinkers, architects, and oligarchs and their “modern imagining[s] of domestic space,” in particular, the ways in which “the milieu of the dwelling” and the “flourishing of discourse around the home” was integral to the production of a bourgeois culture deemed fitting for Japan as a globally competitive, hygienic, and healthy nation. Sand narrates how the home in its architecture, space, spatial relations, rituals, and daily life coalesced into a prescription of what a modern and successful home was, feeding into the myth that there was something singular, something “Japanese,” about a certain kind of home and a certain kind of family. For Sand, men are the slogan writers, the town planners, and the historians; they do not experience or embody home. So where are the fathers? Sand clearly sees the home as a point of architectural and emotional connection between people, sex, and space, but he does not complicate “gender” beyond its consignment to a women’s issue and, important for this project, fails to explore how, as Gorman Murray argues, home “is also a key site for masculine identity work" (Gorman Murray 2008).