Business Man 1950 （http://www.flickr.com/photos/brainblame/174608761/）
Fishing Boats Japan 1956 （http://www.flickr.com/photos/brainblame/174608762/）
Naked Woman (http://www.jipango.com/mailservice/87/mailservice87.html)
Tadahiko Hayashi was one of the most celebrated photographers in Japan after Pacific War. His mother was also a photographer and inspired him to be a photographer[i]. He worked in China in 1945 as a new reporter of Pacific War and he returned to Japan in 1946 and started taking photos of changes of life in post-war period.
His photos are always focusing life of Japanese people. His photos represent Japanese culture truly during the post-war period. At that time Japan was occupied by the Allied Powers and so many western cultures and thoughts came to Japan. Thus, Japan was facing mixture of traditional Japanese culture and Western culture. On one hand, buildings, roads, clothing and so on were being westernized, but on the other hand, Japanese people preserve its traditional culture like martial art. Hayashi showed this kind of new culture mixtures in his photos.
Like “Business Man 1950”, we can see that the business man in the middle and his partner were dressing in western suit and walking down the western style which was full of western building. But the woman with two children standing next to this couple was dressing in kimono. “Fishing Boats Japan 1956” are more or less the same that kimono wearing women were standing in front of western house and fishing boats. “Naked Woman” reflects how western thoughts affected Japanese culture: naked in public was immoral in ancient Japan but was becoming generally accepted by public.
The nowadays Japanese cultures are still a mixture of the western and traditional Japanese culture. If we look at the Hayashi’s pictures, we can see this mixed culture is actually rapidly changing from the post-war period since 1946.
Reference:
External link:
Studio Equis - Tadahiko Hayashi: http://www.studioequis.net/showArtist.php?artistID=313
Hey kei. Nice post. I am using the same photographer in this blog too, but I chose different pictures. I like how u used these pics to show how Japan got out of the crisis. My pics is more focused on how it looked during and shortly after the war. check it out.
ReplyDeletepeace.
Nice choice of photographer.
ReplyDeletePlease fix the hotlinks to your reference. Can you fix the big spaces between paragraphs as well?
I think you are mistaken about the "ancient" Japanese attitude towards the naked body. There are some interesting early accounts of foreigners encountering and dealing with nakedness and questions about body parts. When Japan modernized the government tried to change the attitudes about the body, especially about breast feeding and urinating in public because they feared westerners would be insulted by such practices.