This page was created by Emily Chapman.
Otōsan kameraman
One winter’s day, around 1948, Isao and Haruki visited the grounds around the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. The trip would have taken between thirty minutes to an hour, from the eastern suburbs into the heart of Tokyo. 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 prevent 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 increasingly clear from this example is how the photographic moment carved out time together for fathers and their children and did so outside the home. 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 photograph captions, Isao refers to himself as “Isao,” “Yajima,” “otōsan” (father), and “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. Photograph manuals were emphatic on the kind of family events that were best suited for fathers and which...
As Isao’s day trip with Haruki begins to show, the practice of family photography 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 “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.
