Sexual Politics: Photobooks by Japanese Women, 1976–79

Abstract

Every year the World Economic Forum publishes the Global Gender Gap Report measuring and comparing the gap in gender parity in each country around the world. In 2022, Japan's overall ranking was 116th out of 146 countries. Among so-called developed countries, Japan is by far the lowest. In Asia, India is 135th and Pakistan is 145th, ranking lower than Japan due to the impact of social, political, and economic factors.

Does this mean that Japanese women have not changed at all? No, Japanese women's consciousness has completely changed in the last thirty years. They have transformed from daughters, wives, mothers, and grandmothers who are dependent on their families to individuals who make their own decisions about their lives. In Japan, however, what remains relatively unchanged is the social system and those who enforce it. Before change became widespread and publicly accepted, its signs appeared in forms of visual expression. In this article, I introduce work of women photographers in the late 1970s who left outstanding marks on the medium of photobooks and on the social environment to which their works responded.

In the 1970s, the economy of the industrialized world began to stagnate after years of steady growth following the Second World War. Oil crises caused by political instability in the Middle East incited widespread economic anxiety in 1973 and then again in 1979. Environmental concerns that stemmed from issues caused by specific industries in 1960s Japan became increasingly serious, causing air, water, land, and noise pollution, as well as vibration hazards and resulted in Minamata disease and itai-itai disease among other illnesses (caused by mercury and cadmium poisoning, respectively). Nuclear accidents such as the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in the United States also added to global anxiety about energy and environmental issues. With the quagmire of the Vietnam War as a backdrop, this decade was an era when the holes in capitalism became conspicuous from many social, political, and environmental angles.

In Japan, the ūman ribu (women's liberation) movement gained momentum in the 1970s as an outgrowth of and response to the antiwar, leftist, and radical student movements of the previous twenty years. One of the goals of the movement was to oppose the conservative government's proposed revisions to the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948.¹ Built on the wartime National Eugenic Law (1940) which sought to produce racial purity, in 1948 it legalized abortion for reasons of eugenics, rape, hereditary illness, and considerations of the health of the mother. In 1949 it made Japan one of the first countries to legally allow abortion based on a consideration of a woman's economic circumstances, but at the same time it had a goal of preventing the birth of children with disabilities or mixed-race heritage to preserve a right-wing vision of a pure Japanese race. When in 1972 the government proposed removing the clause that allowed the consideration of abortion for economic purposes, the ūman ribu movement allied with disability rights activists to oppose this and remove the eugenicist emphasis. The influential power of the ūman ribu, “which from the beginning . . . cast doubt on the established intellectual framework that was never questioned in a male-centered society,” ² was felt from the 1970s onward as it established women's studies programs at universities that then developed to include gender theory and gender studies programs.

The combination of the expansion of women's consumer power and the increasing numbers of women seeking full-time employment outside the home shifted media interest toward new depictions of women's changing roles in society. The latter half of the 1970s witnessed an expansion of Japanese consumer culture, with advertisements promoting a new lifestyle for women. In 1977, two magazines were launched: Croissant, for “new families,” and MORE, a publication with “women's independence” as its tagline. These publications were encouraged by an environment where “average” women began to talk about their own sexuality, fostered in part by the Japanese translations of Shere Hite's Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976) and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973).

It was in this period that Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) gained recognition in the Japanese photography world. Interestingly, in 1976, the year before her solo debut, Ishiuchi organized an exhibition of ten women artists called Hyakka Ryōran (A Profusion of Blooming Flowers) at the Shimizu Gallery in Tokyo.³ The show emerged from a confluence of the ūman ribu movement with Bikyōtō (short for Bijutsuka Kyōtō Kaigi, Artists’ Joint-Struggle Council), a nationwide student arts movement that Ishiuchi participated in as a college student. One of the earliest examples of an exhibition focused solely on women artists, it stood out at a time when Japanese women often quit work once they married. The works of ten artists were displayed anonymously under the theme of “men” in an act of a reversal of the social acceptance and expectation that men create art about women. Alas, except for Ishiuchi, all of the women participants in the exhibition did not continue their careers as artists due to the expectation that they become full-time homemakers. In 1977 at the Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo, Ishiuchi had her first solo exhibition, Zessho, Yokosuka sutōrī (Yokosuka Story), a body of work that explored her dark childhood in Yokosuka, a military base town where she endured poverty and obscene comments from American soldiers (figs. 1–2). Two years later, Ishiuchi became the first woman to win the Kimura Ihei Award for her series Apātomento (Apartment) (1978), which took as its focus the apartment buildings containing six-tatami-mat rooms similar to those where her family of four had also lived (figs. 3–4). Ren'ya no machi (Endless Night) (1981), the third book in this early trilogy, traces the spaces where women on the fringes of society sold their bodies, such as in the red-light district (figs. 5–6). This work forms the third part of this early trilogy, each part of which was realized as an individual photobook.

While Japanese photography during the 1970s received international attention in several museum exhibitions in New York and Germany, most of these shows did not include women, including New Japanese Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, organized by John Szarkowski and Yamagishi Shōji. The only show to present photography by a woman—Ishiuchi Miyako—was Japan: A Self-Portrait at the International Center of Photography in 1979. At this time, unlike in other countries, Japanese art museums did not see photography as a medium worth collecting or exhibiting, which is why the printed medium of photobooks became the central focus for photographic expression rather than art museum and gallery exhibitions. In 1979, however, the Japan Professional Photographers Society played a central role in founding the Japanese Photography Museum Establishment Promotion Committee (which did not include a single woman).⁴ The committee appealed to national and regional governments to create new museums specializing in photography or with photography departments. Their efforts resulted in the building of the Yokohama Museum of Art (1989) and the Kawasaki City Museum (1988), each with photography departments. Almost twenty years later, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography first opened in 1990 and had a more comprehensive opening in 1995. It continues to be a major center for preserving and presenting the history of Japanese photography alongside new talent.⁵

During this period of limited outlets for women in Japan to present and publish work, Yoshida Ruiko, Matsumoto Michiko, Watanabe Hitomi, and Imai Hisae pursued unique careers that brought them in contact with other cultures. Yoshida Ruiko (b. 1938) traveled to the United States as a Fulbright student in 1961, where she studied photojournalism at Columbia University and lived in Harlem for the next ten years during a time of great activity in the civil rights movement. In 1972, upon her return to Japan, she published Hāremu no atsui hibi (Black Is Beautiful), comprising a selection of the over thirty thousand photographs that she took during the ten years she lived in Harlem (figs. 7–8). It became a bestseller that went into multiple printings. She also published photographs of an amphitheater filled with over five thousand people who came to see a “Witch Concert” organized by the Women's Liberation Movement at the Hibiya Park Concert Hall, envisioning the energy of women coming together to sing and celebrate.⁶ Two years later, she published Hāremu (Harlem: Black Angels) (1974), depicting street life and civil rights marches in Harlem in addition to photographs of notable activists such as Angela Davis and images of Malcom X's funeral (figs. 9–10). Her photographs offered a fresh take on social issues and the theme of discrimination because they were taken from the perspective of a person who identified with her subjects as one who was also a minority in American society.⁷

Matsumoto Michiko (b. 1950), who later became well-known for her portraits of women artists, published Nobiyakana onna tachi/Women Come Alive (1978), a celebration of women activists and the women's liberation movement in Japan and in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London, which she documented over a seven-year period and which determined her later artistic direction (figs. 11–15). From the beginning of her career, Matsumoto worked with an awareness that she was a “woman” photographer and consciously created alternative images to the way women, and especially activists, artists, and public figures, were depicted in the mass media. After documenting the training camps and major conferences of the Japanese women's liberation movement, she turned to portraiture as a means to inscribe the evolving acts of women in activism and the arts. Women Come Alive is thus a study of what it meant for a woman photographer to document the process of women in Japan and around the world as they critiqued patriarchal society. As Matsumoto put it, “To photograph free women you yourself have to become a free woman.”⁸

In 1968, during the Zenkyōtō (short for Zengaku kyōtō kaigi, All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) occupation of Tokyo University's Yasuda Auditorium, Watanabe Hitomi (b. 1939) embedded herself in the movement and took photographs from behind the barricades.⁹ Having recently graduated from the Tokyo Sōgō Shashin Senmon Gakkō (Tokyo College of Photography), she was the only women photographer to document the everyday life of the student activists occupying the university and the street clashes between students and the police.¹⁰ Building on her experience photographing the counterculture that culminated around Shinjuku in the late 1960s, Watanabe demonstrated a unique ability to photograph from within communities to depict scenes that were not widely accessible.¹¹ A decade later, she turned her camera to other parts of Asia and exhibited her photographs of India and Nepal as Tenjiku kō (Going to Tenjiku) in 1976 at Tokyo Minolta Photo Space.¹² The series was published as the book Tenjiku (An Invisible Landscape) in 1983 (fig. 16).

Imai Hisae (1931–2009) was a distinctive photographer who defied social expectations of women and photographers to work as a fine art photographer, commercial photographer, and portrait photographer from the 1950s to 1970s.¹³ The daughter of a portrait photographer who operated a studio at the Matsuya Ginza department store, Imai got her start exhibiting her work in the 1950s at department stores, which were one of the primary venues for photography exhibitions at this time.¹⁴ Her exhibition Hippolatry: Enchanted by Horses (fig. 17) traveled around Japan from 1975–76 and was notable for allowing visitors to order prints on view, a controversial approach at the time.¹⁵ While her earlier work experimented with abstraction and still life, Imai focused on horses later in her career, publishing Tōri sugiru toki: Uma no sekai wo utau (Time That Passes By: Ode to the World of Horses) (1977) and, in the following year, Ten pointo (Ten Point), a book documenting a famous thoroughbred racehorse. Tōri sugiru toki (1977) won the Photographic Society of Japan Annual Award (figs. 18–19).

Though the work of women photographers of this period was eventually compiled into photobooks, for which they became well known, they mainly worked for magazines like many male photographers in the 1970s. Their work should be considered a document of the time made through text and image. Among these women, Ishiuchi stands out for emphasizing photobooks as a medium of expression while at the same time focusing on prints and installations, eventually shifting her focus to galleries and museums as venues for presenting her photographs. While Japanese women artists nowadays are doing comparatively well, their success could not have taken place had it not been for the influence of Ishiuchi and her women peers. All of these women became role models for a younger generation of Japanese women photographers, who would emerge as powerful voices in the mid-1990s onward.

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