who was the first to use and popularize the term ‘‘I-
photography’’; and Masahisa Fukase, who completed
series about solitude and madness, such as theYoko
series, 1964–1975. Other postwar figures, such as
Eikoh Hosoe and Ikko Narahara (known also as
simply ‘‘Ikko’’), explored other personal paths.
In his 1956 seriesMan and His Land, Ikko draws
a parallel between two communities, the small vil-
lage of Kurogami on the island of Kyushu, des-
troyed by an erupting volcano; and the artificial
island of Hajima, which was built around a coal
mine. The photographs presented a pessimistic
view wherein man is subject to both nature’s hosti-
lity and social oppression. Ikko continued working
with the photoessay form but expanded his practice
to other experimental art mediums in the 1970s and
1980s. Eikoh Hosoe dramatized a relationship
between himself and a young American girl he
met in a base as he was looking to improve his
English in a photo narrationAn American Girl in
Tokyo(1956), using a photojournalistic technique
to create a work of fiction. Hosoe was hardly the
only Japanese photographer to dwell on implica-
tions of the U.S. occupation of Japan, which offi-
cially ended in 1952 but saw U.S. troops stationed
on Japanese soil to the end of the century. Shomei
Tomatsu, who has established himself as one of
Japan’s leading postwar figures with his 1958 series
Chewing Gum and Chocolate, documented the pre-
occupation of Japanese people wishing to save their
traditions and culture from Americanization.
From 1957 to 1959, critic Tatsuo Fukushima
organized seminal exhibitions calledJu ̈nin no me,
which means ‘‘The Eyes of Ten People.’’ The 10 ex-
hibitors were Eikoh Hosoe, Yashuhiro Ishimoto,
Kikuji Kawada, Shun Kawahara, Ikko Narahara,
Masaya Nakamura, Akiro Sato, Akira Tanno, Sho-
mei Tomatsu, and Toyoko Tokiwa. Six of these col-
leagues, Hosoe, Kawada, Narahara, Sato, Tanno,
and Tomatsu, created the important agency VIVO
to support and distribute their style of photojourn-
alism while pursuing their personal work.
Significant advances in photographic technology
continued as Japanese manufacturers innovated
and improved their products. By 1962, Japan had
displaced West Germany as the world’s top produ-
cer of cameras. In the early 1960s, the Nikonos
camera, the first underwater camera not requiring
a bulky housing, was introduced. The Pentax SP
was introduced in 1964 as the first single-lens-
reflex camera featuring a through-the-lens expo-
sure system, which was soon to become standard
in SLR cameras. The next year, the first Japanese
cameras incorporating electronic shutters were
introduced, and Canon created the world’s first
camera with a quick-loading feature for 35-mm
film, also to become a standard feature.
In the second half of the 1960s, a new generation
of artists, including Daido Moriyama, Hiromi Tsu-
chida, Yutaka Takanashi, Masahisa Fukase, and
Issei Suda questioned the conception of modern
art based on the creation of an original world
inspired by the personality and the aesthetic sense
of the artist. In November of 1968, Yutaka Taka-
nashi, Takuma Nakahira, Koji Taki, and Takahiho
Okada published the magazineProvoke. The pic-
tures of these photographers are characterized by a
fragmentation without any aesthetic order and by
violently contrasted images. Although very short-
lived, publishing only three issues, with runs never
exceeding 1,000 copies,Provokebecame a seminal
opus of post-war Japanese photography. Indeed,
Provokecarried radical photographic theory and
unpolished images described as are-bure-boke
(rough, blurred, out-of-focus) as described by pho-
tohistorian Anne Wilkes Tucker.
Nobuyoshi Araki first emerged as a major force
in Japanese photography when he was awarded the
first ever and now prestigious Taiyo-sho Award in- A photo essay calledSatchinthat followed
children out on the street in Tokyo was the first in
an almost continuous documentation of everything
that comes before Araki’s lens, including subject
matter many consider goes beyond the erotic to
pornographic, making him a prototypical figure
of Japanese photography in the West.
During most of the postwar period, the nude in
photographs was considered objectionable, and the
government banned the depiction of pubic hair, to
the point that officials impounded nude photo-
graphs of Edward Weston scheduled for a 1976
exhibition. Kishin Shinoyama was one of the few
Japanese to explore this genre fully, with his 1969
seriesDeath Valley, Twin, andBrown Lily. The
Death Valleynudes are striking abstractions of
the body arranged against the dramatic landscape
of the famous California desert. Shinoyama also
made his mark with a collection of photographs of
Yukio Mishima. In September 1970, before his
suicide by hara-kiri, which became an international
event, the novelist posed for Shinoyama, acting out
for the camera his ideas for his own death. Two
pictures in particular became very famous: the first
one shows the transformation of Mishima into a
Saint Sebastian motif, his wrists tied to the branch
of a tree while arrows pierce his side and armpit. In
the second one, Mishima is lying on the ground, a
short saber stuck in his abdomen, while the photo-
grapher stands behind him, brandishing a longer
saber, waiting for a signal to behead Mishima.
JAPAN, PHOTOGRAPHY IN