Category: Japan – Photography

So yesterday as I was emerging from the depths of Shinjuku station, I came up not to fresh air but the formulaic strains of some Japanese pop group and a bunch of craned-neck fans ooh-ing and ah-ing. Based on the audience being 99% female, perhaps it was one of Johnny’s boy bands performing (Johnny Kitagawa is basically the Japanese version of Lou Pearlman), as part of some Nescafe promotion (women were handing out canned coffee drinks). Anyway, a good photo op…or so I thought.

No more than 15 seconds after putting the camera around my neck, I was descended upon by a uniformed man who was clearly not a police officer, but some rent-a-cop for some security company I’ve already forgotten the name of. Putting up the universal (or is it only in Japan?) “X” sign formed by crossing his arms, he was telling me “No Photos”. I was about to point to a couple of women with their cell phone cum cameras in the air when I saw that another security guard was telling them to put away their phones. WTF?!

In ham-fisted Japanese I told the security guard that I wasn’t standing on private property (though it did occur to me that perhaps the land was owned by Japan Railway and that my argument was on shaky ground, pardon the pun) and after a minute or so of me asking him if he owned the land I was standing on, he relented with the arm gesture than means “I give up, you win.” Whether this was because he couldn’t be bothered with a pesky foreigner or because he realized it was he who was on shaky ground, sure enough after that I was left alone by the security force, though they continued to tell other folks to put away their cell phones or digicams (presumably the fact that I was shooting the audience and not the band was noted by the “authorities”).

Tired of the scene I noticed that a crowd was forming across the street in front of one of the department stores and went over there to check it out. The crowd of about 50 had divided themselves leaving an imaginary catwalk between them, leading from the department store door to the street. I presumed that someone famous must be inside and that the crowd was waiting for him or her to exit, and this was confirmed to me by one of the ladies in waiting (apparently a famous comedian was inside, though in the end he never materialized). She also didn’t hesistate to tell me “no photos,” which was said in a way that made it clear she was parroting what someone — no doubt with an authoritative air but lacking any actual authority — had told the crowd before I had arrived.

This was getting ridiculous, like I had just woke up in my very own Twilight Zone episode where talent handlers and their minions ruled the roost, where cameras had been banned unless they were attached to an arm adorned with a “Press” armband, and where I was the last person on this planet to get the message. So I got my cojones in a bunch and positioned myself right at the end of the damn walkway staking my ground — and given that it was the street I sure as hell hope it was public property — and waited for said talent to emerge (sadly as I pointed out, the talent must have been flown by helicopter to safety because he never did produce himself).

In reality I didn’t want another scene of some non-cop telling me I couldn’t take photos, but as I thought about it later it occurred to me that I was probably making a show of it more for the folks in the audience who had been told to put their camera-phones away, and who had obediently relented. I couldn’t get over the fact that they — like the young women cooing over the pop group across the street — had acquiesced so easily in the face of apparent authority.

The scenes taken together were in fact rather pathetic: legions of adoring fans, hoping to capture probably nothing more than a fuzzy, low-resolution, figment of reality snapshot to email to their friends (“Guess who I saw today….?”), getting their enthusiasm dampened by young men with ill-fitting blue shirts and police caps following orders that probably didn’t fit them either.

It may well have been Johnny’s that was behind this production, for his talent agency — the most sucessful talent agency in Japan — is notorious for guarding the public image of his various talents. Indeed, if you visit the company’s site you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single image of any of their talent (I didn’t), and they’ve been known to go after various sites using unauthorized images.

Whomever was behind the concert event yesterday, it’s been clear for a while that talent agencies and related entities have become more agressive in protecting their supposed (though not explicitly codified in Japanese law) rights to their own image. Hence this campaign sponsored by the Japan Association of Music Enterprises which was launched in 2002 and recently updated. I don’t have a translation of the text for the current ad, but the old ad — showing a woman covering her face — featured a tag line along the lines of “Freely using this face is forbidden by law.” with the remainder of the ad going something like:

Of course entertainers and famous people, but also everyone, has a right to their own likeness. Other people can’t use these likenesses without permission. The publication of these photos, or “idol collages” [putting a face from one person onto a body from another] and things like that, is forbidden by law.

No “law” was ever specifically referred to, and it still isn’t. While I’m sure that I’m missing the nuances on this explanatory page the gist goes something like: “Wouldn’t you feel violated if someone took your photo while you were having dinner or out for a walk with your lover? These photos which can cause emotional distress are a violation of your human right to privacy. Not only artists or entertainers are protected, but everyone has these rights. And you can imagine that if common folks feel violated, then artists or entertainers are doubly violated since their portraits have economic value.” All of it is couched in “violation of rights” language, rather than specific laws which are being broken. And all of it cleverly exploits the “human rights” of common folk to garner sympathy for the rights of entertainers to make money.

Now, I can sympathize with artists wanting to control how they’re represented, and how representations of themselves are sold and marketed, but this whole “my face is part of my economic property” seems to go just a bit too far. And to say that a public personality has such a “right to one’s own likeness” (shouzouken in Japanese) beyond the confines of the concert hall or soundstage, in other words, in public is just a bit overboard. Granted, what JAME is concerned about most are probably things like aicora (“idol collage,” eg. ai from the Japanese for “idol” and cora from “collage” — stick that into your J-E dictionaries!), which most right-thinking people would agree is not kosher, but to tell me that I can’t take a photo of a public celebrity coming out of a department store, or even publishing said photo, is well, Twilight Zone stuff.

Ginza, Tokyo, July 2, 2004

On view for three more weeks or so at the Mitaka City Gallery of Art in west Tokyo is a retrospective of the work of Shigeo Gocho, a Tokyo-based photographer who died at the young age of 36 (1946 – 83). Born in Niigata, from the age of four Gocho suffered from caries of his thoracic vertebrae, and he would be a frail person throughout his life. The exhibit is in two parts, in two different locations, one showing his black and white work, which is comprised predominantly of his portraits and photos of children, the other showing his color work from near the end of his life, as well as some ink blots he did at that time. (A 55-minute documentary on Gocho from 2001 is also being shown continuously at the exhibition.)

The black and white prints on display are almost all from original prints Gocho himself made. The heart of this part of the exhibition are the photos from his book “Self and Others” (1977). Now mind you, I’m not a big fan of portraiture, and certainly not of photography involving children (not a priori, but outside of obvious examples like Sally Mann it just seems to tend rather quickly to sentimentality, especially in Japan — think Domon Ken or Ueda Shoji), and for me many of Gocho’s photos of children from this period verge on family snapshots, with nary any meat on them bones.

Better for me were the portraits of the adults, particularly the couples. They tend to date the photos more, on account of their hairstyles and clothing, than do the children, but I found that poignant, not merely for the nostalgic aspects of that, but because in a way you feel the adults were stuck, their futures weren’t limitless, their stares back to the camera were of resignation rather than say the fear or curiosity one finds in the children. In the above-reproduced photo, I find the expression of the man particularly moving, in a sense he seems caught between coming and going, he seems in a state of flux, wanting to bolt yet playing his part, sweater and all. He could be a son to the woman next to him, rather than husband. She’s the rock, her face chiseled with resignation, that he’s holding onto.

But what I really liked was the gorgeous color work he shot near the end of his life, all of it of a “street” nature. I don’t know what precipitated his move to color, nor his return to the streets. Perhaps he felt after the publication of “Self and Others” that his camera had been pointed inwards long enough. Certainly coming to the color — a no doubt unintended but rather nice effect of this exhibition spread over two different locations is that after the black and white work, physically small prints exhibited under rather dim lighting so as to protect them, one has to leave this space and walk one kilometer in the fresh air before getting to the color work, exhibited in a much more open and bright space — this viewer couldn’t help but feel relieved to be back out on the street, a vibrant colorful street, and back to anonymity. The children haven’t exactly been left behind, they are here too, but now they are not children from Gocho’s neighborhood or of his friends, but rather children existing — one is even tempted to say, eking out an existence — amidst a larger social and urban context, blowing open the tension which was unstated but palpable in the earlier portraits.

The above image was perhaps the strongest image of the color work for me, although as a color photo it was rather muted compared to the rest. (Both color images seen here — click for larger versions — were scanned by me from the exhibition catalog). Here we have a family, or perhaps several families, watching a parade or some other event, from the sidelines. Tucked away in the back, almost in their own protective cocoon, are a boy and girl sitting on a ledge, enjoying their ice cream and disinterested in whatever the event is. One might assume from the ice cream cones that the two adults with cones in the center are the childrens’ parents. But while they may be more in the forefront, more present with respect to the event, their posture — he with the blank downward gaze, she with her sunglasses and dangling cone — tells us they are no more interested in the proceedings than the kids are. And what of those kids? They may be playing their version of hide and seek, but the writing is on the wall, their future is in front of them, literally. The boy perhaps has a couple more years of idle play, but as for the girl, she’s got her handbag in her clutches and it’s already packed.

The exhibition will run through October 24 before it heads on to Yamagata. Mitaka is on the JR Chuo Line, about 20 minutes from Shinjuku.