I first 'discovered' the photography of Hamaya Hiroshi in a newspaper article published in the late 1980s in Japan. It was published in either of the two English language newspapers The Japan Times or the Yomiuri Shimbun... The article talked about Hamaya being a 'lensman of principle' and that he had won the Hasselblad prize in 1987. The photos in the article showed children making their way through the snow protected by straw and an onsen deep in the mountains where the bath was lit by candles. These images conjured up a romantic image of Japan that foreigners like myself longed to see. Coupled with the fascination I had with Japanese animation like Akira and Astro Boy (Atomu) and the fast life of a city like Tokyo, I had an equally strong longing for what the Japanese refer to as the furusato. This is a term that means 'hometown' and it has come to refer to the Japanese nostalgia for the past during a period of intense globalisation and kokusaika (internationalisation). Homely images of the countryside have come to represent the true essence of the culture (and the self)... These images reassure the Japanese people and give them a touchstone with which to keep faith when everywhere esle their sense of identiy is bing threatneed... Hence the popularity of actors like Atsuki Kiyoshi in the long running Otoko wa Tsurai series or Sugawara Bunta in the Toraku Yaro series. These archetypal characters belong to the furusato, the Japanese homeland of the mind, and hence, their relevance or significance can't be measured by the usual standards.
At about this time there was another article in the newspaper that was about how a Japanese company was the first firm in the world to lease land in China. All land technically belonged to the state but foreign investment was needed to speed up urban development. So the National People's Congress eliminated the prohibition against leasing land. Whilst this was done, it was also stressed that public ownership would remain dominant in China and that its socialist character would not be lost.
So the world was changing and changing rapidly. Miyazaki Hayao had made his first animated feature in 1984, Nausicaa, which evidenced the shift in concern from nuclear to environmental catastrophe. In 1988, at the time I was reading about Hamaya Hiroshi, Miyazaki had made Tottoro, a quintessential anime about the furusato. The lush greenery of summer in the countryside and the old house where two young girls and their father wait for their mother to recover in hospital is filled with magical creatures like the tottoro which counteracts the sterility of modern life. A few years later, in 1997, Murakami Haruki was to end his years of disengagement and challenge what he described as the 'black magic' of gurus like Asahara Shoryu who, had ordered the members of his cult group Aum Shinrikyo to attack the Tokyo subway system with Sarin gas. Murakami descrribed the novelist's art as 'white magic' and he intended to use this to address the same issues of sterility and spiritual vaccum but in order to heal people rather than exploit them for personal gain.
Hamaya Hiroshi preceded these developments by several decades. In the post-war period, his aim was to capture on film images of a Japan that were fast disappearing. Over the years I collected a number of his books which I discovered in a great second hand photography book shop in Kanda, Tokyo, called Book Brothers. I bought a copy of the 1959 book Kodomo Fudoki which looked at a variety of games played by children. These are taken around the country and feature children dressed up as Kamen Rider or else in traditional costume and in one photograph crossing a stream by ropeway to get to school. These are images that would not be out of place in the Kaneto Shindo film The Island. Another book I bought was Shi no Furusato published in I958. This book captured images of the countryside, the sea, the city, traditional clothing not to mention workers in busy city streets. Hamaya Hiroshi didn't restrict his activity to Japan, however. In 1958, he also published Mitekitta Chugoku about his travels in China. There were lots of images of places and people at a time when China was being left behind by Japan in the race for modernity and economic development. In 1967 Hamaya Hiroshi published American America, which I suppose was an attempt to document the blueprint Japan and then China would adopt to bring their economies into the future. The images I like best are of the hippies in California. There are a lot of images, however, that focus on decay and the passage of time. If this is the future it hasn't escaped from the clutches of time. The fleeting nature of the future is perhaps due to the the futility of trying to evade time. A shortcoming in the future that the invention of the furasato would try to address. The old and the new appear side by side in all of these collections but it is the people who are really the subject of these photographs. They straddle both worlds neither of which appear to have any permanency. The future appearing to age more quickly than the past... The 1982 collection Tabi is the culmination of his work since the 1950s recording images of the Japanese people from strip clubs to shrines, the streets to the family home, the office to the factory and the environment itself from the mountains to the fields and the rivers and the coastline. I kept buying them until I came across a copy of Nippon no Retto and asked the price, at 150,000 yen (about $1,500 Australian, the price of a return air fare) I lost interest. I was given a pair of white gloves for an inspection but I felt too pressured with my backpack by my side to peruse it with any sense of leisure.
In 1997, when I went back to Japan to teach on the JET program, I took one of the Hamaya Hiroshi books I had bought in Tokyo, to the classroom. These junior high school students looked at the photographs and asked if they were taken in China. The poverty was something with which they couldn't identify. Hannan City, in southern Osaka, was itself going through major development at this time. The new international airport had just been built on reclaimed land in the bay and a new fifty floor tower had been built in Izumi Sano. The local economy, however, was debt stricken and it would emerge later that there had been corruption (dango) in the tendering process for some local developments and some of these developments had subsequently stalled. Houses stood empty and brand new schools had only a handful of students. The cabbage patches which had dotted the landscape were starting to disappear and be replaced by apartment blocks. The fishermen were still fishing in some of the towns closer towards Wakayama and many of the local festivals were still talking place, but the population was changing and even here the old ways were being lost. Blinded by the prosperity of the 1980s, the past was receding and the furusato was becoming the stuff of fiction rather than fact. Hamaya Hirsohi had preserved images of the past but the children of the future were unsure how to read them.
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