Author: Kurt

More from the in-law’s archives, as it were, this time from my father-in-law’s past. The above photo was taken in 1959, when he was 15 years old and on a school trip to Tokyo. He and his classmates (he’s in the foreground, on the right) are looking up at the Tokyo Tower, which had been completed the year before. It was his first trip to the big city, from his home up north in Yamagata prefecture. At the time of its construction, the Tokyo Tower was, at 333 meters, the tallest tower in the world, surpassing Paris’ Eiffel Tower, on which it was modeled, by some 30 meters.

It’s poetically fitting for me that these young and wide-eyed teens are beholding something that in a way originated in Paris, for when I first came across this photo, I was instantly reminded of Eugene Atget’s famous photo (1912) of a Parisian crowd looking up at a solar eclipse, an image the Surrealists later appropriated for the cover of their magazine.

I recently borrowed some photo books from the library, mainly of Tokyo in the 50’s and 60’s, and I wanted to scan some photos from them and present them here. But it was hard to choose, there were so many. And it occurred to me that I had access to photos a bit closer to home, that of my new Japanese family, and with their permission I thought it would be nice to dig into their old photo albums and from time to time present some of them here.

The picture above is of my mother-in-law and some of her classmates, near Hitachi in Ibaraki prefecture where she grew up. The photo was taken in 1956, when she was 10 years old. She is the one in the middle of the first row. The sweater she’s wearing was hand-knit by her mother. I love this picture because of the pained look on the faces of some of the girls, especially my mother-in-law and the girl to her left. One might think they’re reacting to the cold, or that they were expressing displeasure at having to pose for yet another photograph. But the explanation, according to my mother-in-law, is much sweeter, literally. She says they had just been given candy, and that is was too sweet. Now you must know that my mother-in-law can remember the first and last names of each of the girls in this picture taken over 45 years ago, as she can with all of her pictures, so I doubt that the story about the candy is apocryphal.

P.S. It’s not terribly important, but I thought I would add a comment on the size of this photo, since seeing it online it looks huge but in fact it’s a tiny tiny little thing, which adds to the photo’s charm for me, but is something that regretfully can’t be transmitted to its presence online. Putting it up against the ruler, it measures just 4 x 5.5 cm (roughly 1.5 x 2.15 inches).