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Japan’s uyoku trucks

uyoku.jpg

An interesting story at the New York Times about the various right-wing (or uyoku in Japanese) sound trucks that ply their message at near-deafening levels in the streets of Tokyo (and I’m assuming, in other major Japanese cities as well). The article puts forth the suspicion on the
part of some that the groups that these trucks belong to, which appear so fringe and dismissed, actually enjoy quite cozy relations with the police, and perhaps with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party as well.

Former far-rightists, retired policemen and historians say […] that they are not just noisy pressure groups. These observers contend that many of the nationalists disturb the peace and intimidate people freely because of their deep ties to the country’s conservative political elite.

Those who have studied them say that they are useful in bullying opponents of the long-governing, and conservative, Liberal Democratic Party and that many of them are actually members of criminal gangs that use their influence and protection to practice extortion.

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War Relocation Authority archive

Yesterday in the Japan Times there was a story about Japan’s Geographical Survey Institute obtaining over 100 aerial photographs of Hiroshima both before and after the atomic bombing of the city by the US in August of 1945. In a wild goose chase to see if I could find any of these photos online, I ended up somewhere not quite completely unrelated: a massive archive from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library of the War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945.

Via the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) — the US governmental agency that is giving Japan the Hiroshima photos — I found these two remarkable photographs by Dorothea Lange: the Mochida family, and a crowd of onlookers, which led me to further inquire about Lange’s stint as a photographer for the War Relocation Authority, which was set up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942 through his signing of the infamous Executive Order No. 9066 and which authorized the forcible relocation and internment of those people of Japanese ancestry living on the Pacific Coast. I’ve never been too taken with the Depression-era cadre of photographers like Lange or Lewis Hines and so was unaware about Lange’s work for the WRA. My interest was piqued by these photos.

Investigating further I found these four photographs Lange made at San Francisco’s Raphael Weill School, again under the auspices of the WRA. On that same page (from the Museum of the City of San Francisco) you can view PowerPoint slideshows of Lange’s and fellow WRA photographer Clem Albers’ photographs of the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno (a sort of temporary processing/detention center until bigger camps could be built). Clearly what I was looking at had to be the tip of the iceberg. How many more WRA photos were out there?

Quite by accident (as is typical of web searching), I found my answer: over 7000 photographs, online via the extraordinary digital archive created in 1997-98 by the Bancroft Library. Included among the 7000 are 691 photographs by Lange.

Unfortunately, site navigation is in a word horrible, and so supreme patience is required not to give up on the site in frustration. However, if one sticks at it, I think the rewards of this archive are eminently worth it. Here’s a tip: starting from the link above, progress through the various introductory pages by clicking the blue right arrow in the top left of each page, until you come to the “Container Listing” page. Here, click the bottom blue right arrow, and you’ll now be within the actual collection. When you come to a blank page with a series title only, once again click on the bottom right arrow to view various “group” pages within that section. Unfortunately, there’s no way to view the archive other than linearally as it was created, and you might find yourself taking a few steps backward before being able to proceed forward again.

Each photo thumbnail has both a medium and high resolution larger image, and each is accompanied by the original WRA captions, which in and of themselves are a telling illustration of the public relations campaign the WRA was attempting to wage with the photographs. As is written in the archive’s introduction, “It is important to note that the photograph collection, as the official documentation of the WRA, reflects the point of view that the WRA wanted to present to the citizens of the United States during World War II.” The Bancroft Library archive includes as well 318 Kodachrome slides (Series 18), but sadly and curiously these have not been digitized. Of particular interest to me are 145 slides created to accompany a WRA lecture entitled ominously enough “The Wrong Ancestors.”

According to NARA, their records of the War Relocation Authority include a whopping 17,178 photographs. It is unclear whether the Bancroft’s 7000 photos are part of this larger figure, or in addition to. Suffice it to say, there’s more where these 7000 came from.

UPDATE: You can also search NARA’s site for War Relocation Authority photos. Using the keywords “war relocation authority”, I found 3976 items. However, these don’t seem to be presented in any order, and navigation is also quite frustrating.

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Ruined Japan?

According to a survey of Japanese citizens conducted by the Asahi Shimbun for their Japan Almanac 2002, when asked to pick which of the two feelings, hope or misgivings, were more dominant when they thought about the future, 73% of those surveyed chose misgivings. And when asked to choose one word to describe their feelings about current times, 30% chose konmei, or confusion. (By contrast, stability and freedom came in at 6% and 5% respectively). Down on the list, but significant I think, 6% of respondents chose collapse to describe current times in Japan.

That 36% should see either confusion or collapse when they took a look at their current situation or that of their country should hardly be surprising given a country whose economy has yet to come to terms with the bubble that burst and is floundering in a decade long recession, or where revelations of a new goverment or corporate scandal are daily occurrences, to say nothing of the gradual aging of the population due to its declining birth rate. (According to the Japan Almanac 2002 referenced above, Japan’s birthrate as of 2000 was 1.35. To maintain its current population, the birthrate needs to be 2.1.)

I proffer this information in light of what I and others have noticed as a trend in the photography (or should I say “photo collecting”) among certain Japanese, that is the proliferation of sites documenting the abandoned ruins of hotels, factories, hospitals, etc. that dot the modern Japanese landscape. (To wit, gmtPlus9 linked to a few just the other day — see entries for July 16th. Further exploration can start at the links page of Ruin-Japan.). And it’s not just web sites either; photographer Shinichirou Kobayashi has practically built his oeuvre on the subject, with at least two books (Deathtopia and Ruins) and even a recently-issued DVD from Daiei.

It’d be convenient to say that all this dwelling in abandoned buildings (pardon the pun) has gotten me bitten by the same bug, but frankly I was bitten quite a while ago. I still remember the thrill of happening quite by accident upon the remnants of the turn-of-the-century utopian colony Llano in hinterland Los Angeles (and realizing I had been there before via the writings of Mike Davis), or discovering again seemingly by accident the recreational detritus of Salton Sea (and too recognizing it as being the previous photo stomping grounds of Richard Misrach).

There’s a telling pattern here, and one I’ve mentioned before: if you think you’re on to something new and unchartered, chances are it has not already been discovered, but documented ad nauseum. All of which brings me to my own “ruins” discovery this past weekend when Naoko and I ostensibly went on a little onsen (hot spring) getaway to Tochigi Prefecture a couple of hours north of Tokyo. I say “ostensibly” because I admit that while the thought of a relaxing in an onsen in a smallish mountain town was uppermost in my thoughts, I did have an ulterior motive for going, and that motive was the tantalizing possibility that I too might be able to catch the Japanese ruin-hopping bandwagon and see some of my very own ruins.

So imagine my glee (and my wife’s concomitant disappointment!) when not 5 minutes after leaving the Tohoku Expressway to head into the mountains we should come upon an abandoned pachinko parlor named “Parlor Pateo”. Huge unlit neon sign, an expansive parking lot with weeds starting to sprout up through the asphalt, holes in the glass wall big enough to allow entry — ah, this was the mother lode I’d been looking for to claim my spot amongst the “ruin” maniacs. So dutifully I made my way in and snapped as many photos as I felt comfortable doing (I was less hampered by the thought of tresspassing than I was by the need to preserve some space on my memory cards to document the rest of our onsen getaway). The next day I went back, this time with a tripod and video camera.

In the end I think I’d have to conclude that satisfying and fruitful as my discovery was, a pachinko parlor was frankly almost too good a discovery. If I had my choice, I would have picked something a little more downmarket in the postmodern cliche department. Given the choc-a-bloc saturation of bright, neon-lit, smoke-filled, cacophonous pachinko parlors within the Japanese landscape (first time visitors to this place can be forgiven if they think that Japan’s physical landscape — to say nothing of it’s emotional one — is defined by pachinko parlors, karaoke joints, and vending machines), it felt a little too pat to gingerly maneuver through silent and cracked open machines with tiny silver balls still lodged in their feeders or scattered all over the floor among the glass and adult manga (comic) books and cigarette butts, or the entrance door which had recently been on the receiving end of someone’s target shooting practice. Same thing with Love Hotels: as much as I’d love to stumble onto a ruined one, such as this one that gmtPlus9 linked to, after the orgasmic thrill of the find, I wonder if I’d respect myself in the morning. Is there anything one can say about a ruined Love Hotel (or the plentiful ones still standing and operating for that matter) that hasn’t already been said and re-said so many times before?

We did come upon other more prosaic ruins during the trip (an abandoned supermarket, several old buses left to rot, an abandoned karaoke pub), though none proved as accessible as the pachinko parlor (and frankly, with each new discovery Naoko’s patience with my little “side-project” kept diminishing). Still, within a 50-square kilometer area, only on main roads, we came across this much abandonment. No wonder this niche area of ruin photography is seemingly endless.

One wonders as well how many people have been before me to the abandoned Parlor Pateo in Tochigi-ken. Normally you’d suspect some kids out for a little smashing fun would have been the first to smash open the glass, but I think it’s an equally safe bet to imagine that some intrepid photographer who probably does nothing on his weekends but drive around looking for these things was the first to break through the glass, thereby allowing himself and countless other followers like myself entry. And I’m sure that there are galleries already uploaded of this ruined pachinko parlor. I’ve done a cursory search, but given the extent of these sites it would require a significant amount of net time to look through all of them for, ahem, my pachinko parlor in Tochigi.

I’m working on making a film out of the video footage I shot at the abandoned pachinko parlor. In the meantime, if you’d like to see my inaugural entry into Japanese ruin photography, I have uploaded a small gallery here.