World War II. His famous black-and-white picture
from this series of the Japanese flag, lying on the
ground, seeming soaked and wrinkled, is a symbol
of an essential part of Japanese history.
The general devastation caused by World War II
as well as the economic reality of a bankrupt coun-
try also devastated the Japanese photographic
equipment industry. Many manufacturers, having
had their resources diverted to the war effort,
found it difficult to rebuild in the bleak postwar
years. The Nikkor lenses, however, after having
been introduced to eminent war photographer
David Duncan Douglas, who was then in Japan,
became the lenses of choice for international war
correspondents and photojournalists, one step
towards the preeminence of Japanese photo equip-
ment in the postwar era.
Photographers tried to report the terrible events
of the war while looking to the reconstruction of the
mental and physical landscape of the country. Ken
Domon, who with Shigeru Tamura and Hiroshi
Hamaya had formedSeinen Hodo Shashin Kenkyu-
kai(Young Documentary Photo Research Club) in
1938 to practice a socially aware documentary style,
published his powerful seriesHiroshimain 1958. A
work about memory and the inability to completely
bury the past, this series was unique in post-war
Japanese photography as the country modernized
and looked to a future shaped by science and tech-
nology. This accession to modernity is evident in
two events: the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and
the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. As part of reflection
about modernization, Japan discovered, in the 1950s
and 1960s, such Western photographers, as Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Brassaı ̈,Robert
Frank, and W. Eugene Smith, who realized one of
the most heartrending photographs of Japan,
Tomoko Kamimura in Her Bath,1971froma
photo-series that chronicled the disastrous mercury
poisoning caused by a manufacturing plant in the
fishing village of Minamata.
In 1950, Ken Domon founded theShudangroup,
which exhibited such leading international photo-
journalists as Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene
Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Bill Brandt. Fol-
lowing the tenets of the German movement ‘‘Sub-
jektive Fotografie,’’ the first signs of a revival of
photographic subjectivity appear while the popu-
larity of the practical applications of photography
greatly increases. Post-war Japanese photographers
generally were unconcerned by technical issues;
American-born Yasuhiro Ishimoto, trained by
Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago
Institute of Design, visited Japan in 1953 for a five-
year stay and brought with him the lessons of the
New Bauhaus, greatly influencing the emerging
post-war generation. He permanently relocated to
Japan in 1961 and became a Japanese citizen. Ishi-
moto was the only Japanese to be included in the
massiveThe Family of Manexhibition organized in
1955 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York
and which circulated in Japan in 1956 to an audi-
ence of over a million people.
Post-war Japanese photography largely developed
around three axes: documentary photography, per-
sonal photography, and commercial photography.
Ken Domon led the movement for documentary
forms with an influential essay in which he defined
‘‘realism’’ photography, published as instructions
for potential entrants to the monthly contests held
by the international magazineCamera,forwhichhe
served as a juror. Another important practitioner
was Shomei Tomatsu, who with his seriesNagasaki,
11:02(the time the atomic bomb was dropped) pays
tribute to the survivors of Nagasaki. Ihee Kimura
and Hiroshi Hamaya, professional photographers
before the war, increasingly considered photography
as a medium to discover, capture, and transmit a
social reality. Hamaya documented folklore, tradi-
tions, and rituals that were threatened with being
swept away in the rush to modernization. Hamaya
developed his photographic thinking through two
major publications:Yukiguni (Snow Country) of
1956 andUrah Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast), 1957.
Ihee Kimura, inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s philoso-
phy of ‘‘the decisive moment,’’ continued his snap-
shot aesthetic in documenting the average Japanese
citizen in the street, at work, or engaging in other
aspects of everyday life. Kimura’s importance to
Japanese postwar photographic history is reflected
by the naming of a prestigious prize awarded
annually byAsahi Cameramagazine.
Relationships to history, the history of a place,
religious experience, and the construction of bonds
which unite people and their divinities are also
found in the photography of Yoshio Watanabe. A
leading architectural photographer, in 1953 he was
authorized to take pictures of the ritual of razing
and rebuilding the Ise Jingu Shrine, an ancient
Shinto temple in the Mie Prefecture made of
wood, which takes place every 20 years. The doc-
umenting of this reconstruction was a milestone
both for Watanable and Japanese photography.
Personal photography is based on the I-Novel, and
based on the idea that photography can become an
individual expression, a notion that came late to
Japan. These photographers were younger, emerging
as professionals after the War. The most representa-
tives artists in this arena are Daido Moriyama, who
was influenced by William Klein; Nobuyoshi Araki,JAPAN, PHOTOGRAPHY IN