Dear Japanese: A genuine struggle with the past

J. M’s mother was never willing to tell her who her father was. She only knows the name of her Japanese father, who worked at a petro company in Java.

I like Dear Japanese by Miyuki Okuyama for several reasons, Most of all I like it for its earnestness, for its desire to do good, for its attempt to understand the impact Japanese imperialism had on the people of Southeast Asia.

If you don't know it, in East and Southeast Asia, the Japanese have the kind of reputation the Nazis have in Europe. The difference is that Germany has addressed (if not quite coped with) its past, Japan has barely recognised what it did in the name of the emperor.

J. S. as an infant, lived in Japan with her parents. The life together did not last, since her mother could not adopt to the life in Japan.

This attempt to understand one's own national atrocities and failures doesn't happen much in photography (very few British people are willing to address or challenge their own deeply held certainties for example), especially where Japan is concerned. It doesn't happen even when other nationalities are dealing with Japanese photography. In the West at least (and correct me if I'm wrong), there is one Japanese photo-narrative and it goes unchallenged; it runs along the lines of atomic bombs, American bombs, Japanese suffering, American suffering. Which is all true, but (atomic bombs aside), it's even more true of Germany. The traditional photo-narrative misses a few things out.

A massive bugbear of mine this year was the Time, Conflict exhibition at Tate Modern. There were four works (off the top of my head) concerning the aftermath and horrific suffeing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet there was nothing concerning the actions of the Japanese Imperial Army in 'The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'.

I found this astounding, especially considering 1) Japan has never truly recognised its disgraceful war record and 2) there is great work out there that addresses Japanese rule in Asia, and this work has been shown in Japan; Reminders Stronghold, the documentary hotbed in Tokyo, showed Jan Banning's Comfort Women earlier this year for example.

Okuyama is trying to address this imbalance in other words, and in so doing she has produced a really nice book with the Eriskay Connection. And it's not easy, you can feel how difficult it is for her.

It starts with a sincere introduction in which she describes who she is photographing. These are the descendants of Dutch-Indonesian and Japanese parents, people who returned to the Netherlands after the Japanese occupation ended and Indonesia gained independence. Despite the Japaneseness of the features Okuyama found in the people she photographed, many grew up not realising their Japanese backgrounds. So for Okuyama, the act of photography is a form of personal understanding of her own past (as manifested in the Japanese occupation of Indonesia/The Dutch East Indies) and a reconnection of her subjects to the Japanese culture that she believes in so passionately.

Claudine has been searching for her father since the early 70’s.

The pictures are quite straightforward and they are uncaptioned (go to her website to see the captions - I like the captions. I am not sure why they are not in the book. This is not a poetic story, this is a concrete story. And the captions help fix that.).

Max M. was born in Bandung. He is one of a few fortunate cases to have good contact with his Japanese family.

The pictures are a mix of darkly printed portraits of these descendants, mixed with landscapes from the Dutch countryside. There is a sliding scale of Japaneseness in the portraits. Some look more Japanese, some less so, as though they are gradually becoming part of a new landscape. In addition to these elements there are a few interiors and a page from a map of Indonesia (of the island of Sumba curiously, a very particular place).

In 2007, Max confronted his mother for the truth. For the first time, she confirmed that he has a Japanese father.

But that landscape doesn't look quite as Dutch as you would expect.There are skies, and flowers and snow-covered forest floors. There seems to be something very Japanese about these places, as though the legacy may become diluted in genetic terms, but it stays in other ways, especially through the photographic filter that Okuyama overlays onto the Netherlands.

The book is printed on thin, almost translucent paper. It feels good to handle, and the darkness of the images is accentuated by the mass of blank pages. There is a lot of white in there to temper the blacks and the greys, but also to bring them out. It's a dark history and you get the feeling there are stories beneath the surface that Okuyama is not telling. There's an understated side to it, but the book gives us a feeling of these stories for us. Everything is suggested in a book that was a lot more difficult than it appears on the surface. There is a struggle in here, and that makes a huge difference.

Buy the book here.

And see more of the project here with captions. 

Conflict, Time, Photography and The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"I so much wanted to be ugly. They ugly girls they quickly sent away. I had to stay." Emah (83)
 picture from Comfort Women by Jan Banning

I saw the Conflict, Time, Photography exhibition at Tate Modern last month. The exhibition is organised on a timeline that starts at just after a conflict event (an exploding IED in Afghanistan, the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima) and then got more and more distant, ending up with Chloe Dewe Matthews' Shot at Dawn series - pictures of sites where British soldiers had been shot for desertion in the First World War. I liked these. They were dirty dawn pictures and had a poignancy to them, a human poignancy that was absent in most of the rest of the show.

Perhaps this was due to the imbalance in the type of photography used in the exhibition. 'Photojournalism' (a very broad genre I know) was deliberately avoided and, with a few exceptions, the photography on offer was quite distant from the human elements of conflict. The work focussed more on land, buildings  and artefacts than people and often featured more conceptual works that are more to do with the photography of war than war itself. And in being more about the photography, they end up being more about the photographer so you end up in this closed circle.

So most of the work was photography about the photography of conflict, or photography about the photography of the photography of conflict. These works were strong in themselves but there wasn't really enough of a focus on the why or the how of photography that was needed to punch things through. And even if there had been, it would only have been a show about the photography of conflict.

Photography is not really that interesting. What is interesting are the worlds, the places, the people that it relates to. The world outside our window is what invigorates photography and keeps it going. The more photography looks at itself, the less interesting it becomes. It's a bit like inbreeding. If you keep on breeding only within your own circle, eventually you become diseased, freakish and stupid. You might wonder at your own power and glory in your self-importance, but unless you get some new blood in you will die.

Photography is a tool that helps us understand our place in the world and how we make that place; and the way we see the world is not a given, it changes with time. So of course examining how photography works can be interesting. But Conflict, Time, Photography was trying to do so much that it didn't really attach to this or anything else.

It remained unattached. It didn't commit, it didn't make a statement, it was anaemic. It revolved around this concept of time (which I'm guessing, with the 100 years of the start of the First World War happening in 2014, was what sold the show in the first place), a concept that was limited to after. After what? A bomb, a conflict, we don't really know what the pictures came after. What is conflict? I'd be really interested to know. And if there's an after, why not a before and during too? I'm sure all this was considered and there are great reasons for having only the after, but for such a landmark show, I'm not sure that it was a wise choice.

The interesting thing is the hostility (which is not reflected online) that it has received. It's a hostility that is frustrated at both the insularity and incestuousness of what is on offer, but also regards the exhibition as a missed opportunity. And that makes the show a success in a perverse way; there is enough going on for people to latch onto and wonder what might have been. It is the kind of exhibition that everyone should see, not because it's terrible, but because there are so many good ideas in there that have someone not found the fullest possible expression; they run into incestuous dead ends, they look inwards into a small world of photography rather than outwards into the greater world of the human experience of conflict.

The selection of pictures was odd too, with at least five references (and three complete walls - maybe more, I don't know. I have probably got this all wrong because I am writing this after the fact. So forgive me if I have missed something that I shouldn't have missed.) to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I love Domon, Tomatsu and Kawada and I know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific events, but giving us one perspective of Japan's role in the war does rather conform to the view that Japan was a victim of the Second World War and only a victim, that it only sought to help its colonized neighbours and that people like Emah (in the picture above - not in the show) were necessary victims of the need for discipline and esprit des corps in the Japanese army. There are plenty of people who still think that.

The horrors of Japanese rule in Asia are not well-recognised in Japan (though there are people who are struggling to change this attitude - Michiko in this post for example), and in fact are denied by many - in a similar way to which the horrors of Nazi rule were not recognised in Germany for some time. I know we all have a fetish for Japanese photography and photobooks, but some balance is urgently needed otherwise we're just taking part in a deceit.

But then again, maybe it doesn't matter and I'm just being picky. Or maybe I missed something. I don't know.

In the weeks after seeing the show I saw at least three references to Japan and the Second World War, all with asides that Japan hasn't really recognised at a government level the acts it committed in Asia; one mention was in a film review in a manga magazine, another was in an article on T.S. Eliot, and the final one was in Richard Flanagan's novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a fantastic book that, like Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz: Before and After or Art Spiegelman's Maus, looks at the whole sequence of events that led up to and beyond the experiences of the main character, Dorigo Evans, on the Thai-Burma Railway in the Second World War. It's a book that wouldn't be welcome in the Yasukuni Shrine. And that's a good thing.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North doesn't only look at the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army and the suffering of the soldiers who died (even the ones who lived died in some ways) who worked on the line. It also looks at the Japanese soldiers who also worked on the line, and tries to get into their way of thinking, their way of being, how they were before, during and after this life-defining event.

Flanagan's father was brutalised by the Japanese on the Thai-Burma Railway, that's why Flanagan wrote the book. It's a book for his father. But in the book, he recognises that many more Asians suffered and died at the hands of the Japanese, were exploited in every way that could be imagined; for labour, for sex, for medical experimentation. Their fate is just not recognised.

Flanagan makes the effort to recognise these fates, to recognise and try to understand the complexities not just of suffering, but of making people suffer. And the result is a superbly crafted book that extended my understanding of what life was like for his father on the railway, and why people abused him so dreadfully. The book touched me, it educated me, and it was a great read. It was written to be a great read, to be beautiful or entertaining or whatever terms you want to use to describe what a gripping book can be.

It hits all those spots that the Tate show doesn't. That's disappointing in itself. What's even more disappointing is that the Tate show doesn't even try to. It shows the kind of photography where telling a story well, engaging people in a very direct, emotional way, a beautiful way that goes straight to the heart does not even apply because it's seen as a bad thing. Ultimately, Conflict, Time, Photography is an anaemic show about an idea of photography for people who are interested in that idea of photography. For a show on that scale, can't it do better than that?

Who is Innocent and Who is Guilty?

The censorship row over Yunghi Kim's pictures of Hutu refugees had me spluttering my cornflakes over the breakfast table this morning.

In 1994, Kim was in Goma photographing the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were stuck on the volcanic wastelands around the Congoese town with little food, water or shelter. Cholera was rife and they were dying in their thousands.

Amidst all these refugees were those who had been responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda two years earlier. In fact they were refugees as well; not all refugees are nice.

But still, they were people, as were the babies, the women, the children and the men who had played no part in the massacres. Kim didn't consider the crimes of the assassins, she looked at the human suffering those hundreds of thousands of suffering people were going through. She didn't think of who had done the killing, who done the encouraging, who had made the propaganda, or who had played a passive role in the massacres (which would have meant just about everybody over the age of ?). She simply photographed the suffering.

And this month her pictures appeared at Visa Pour L'Image at Perpignan, Kim was accused of 'revisionism' and the pictures were taken down.

This is part of what she said on the Contact Images Facebook page.

With respect to my Rwanda work, I have always been consistent and clear, in my floor talk at my exhibition and in the intro panel and wall captions, I indicated that I was not present for the barbaric and murderous rampage of the genocide that took place. I was responding to cover the humanitarian crisis -- the mass movements of people -- as they fled Rwanda for Goma. As photojournalist, I responded instinctually documenting life on the run, people frightened, burdened with possessions thirsty, hungry and fatigued. Later, along the roads and in the camps when disease took hold, it did so indiscriminately.

Some people thought it was terrible, some thought it justified. Jan Banning ( who knows a thing or two about revisionism and denial of history) thought it was justified. This is what he said on his website.

Yunghi Kim went to Goma to photograph these Hutu refugees. But she treated the evolving crisis as if it has started as a ‘deus ex machina’, a phenomenon without a history. And I tend to consider it even more naïve to see the captions that now – 20 years (and a lot of reports, books etc.) later – accompany her photos in the NY Times Lens and in the Visa pour l’Image exhibition. To give just one example: she talks of “residents who had fled the fighting” or “fled the civil war.” That is absurd: a great many of them fled to avoid the consequences of killing Tutsi’s.

In her captions, she also talks muscularly about ‘the deadliest crisis in modern history’; we are left in the dark about when ‘modern history’ begins but surely, the refugee crisis at the end (and in the aftermath) of WW2 in Central and Eastern Europe was deadlier. And now that I come to talk about WW2: it would shed light on Kim’s captions, if we consider an exhibition of photos of Germans having fled East Prussia or Sudetenland in 1944-46 with captions that would not mention their fate being related to the Second World War and, certainly in the case of the Sudeten Germans, without touching upon their massive support for the nazis just a few years earlier?

I don't know. I think I'm a bit with Kim and bit with Banning on this one, but ultimately the question is who is guilty and who is innocent? And historically where does innocence end and guilt begin? Even in times as seemingly clear cut as Nazi Germany or genocidal Rwanda, shouldn't compassion and a non-comparative morality be used, however difficult that may be. If we don't do that then we end up in a place where all that exists is vengeance and hatred, where everything is black and white and there is simply right and wrong and no in-between. And considering that pretty much everybody is collectively guilty of something, that is an ugly place to be in. 

So, perhaps Kim was naive or clumsy in her wording, but does that mean that the hundreds of thousands of innocent people (including a great many who were not directly involved in the killing) who were stuck on those Goma rocks didn't deserve some compassion and caring? Or is to show that just to show emotion and somehow be incompatible with informing the audience as Banning suggests (strangely, I've always felt that what made Banning's comfort women so powerful is the anger,grief and sorrow they convey as well as the dignity). Where does innocence end and guilt begin?

More on continuing campaigns for justice by Indonesian Comfort Women here.

...and by Filipino Comfort Women here.

...and this from Jan Banning on continued Japanese denial of war crimes.