Temples and Social Realism

I stand breathless before the beautifully developed photographs of the temples of Kyoto and Nara—poster-size photos of eighth-, ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century structures and sculptures. The warmth of the wood, whether in pillars or overhanging roof beams, makes me shiver, taking me back to when I was sixteen and first visiting those temples myself.

As for Buddhist sculptures, I have often wanted but failed to be moved by them in museums. But that's probably the case with other religious art (oxymoron of modernity!) as well. It's the contact of toe with centuries-old wooden floor, cool in summer and piercing in fall and winter, the soft dimness of in-

terior, and the stillness of garden, gravel, and earthen wall that seize and quiet us. Or the mute trace of long use by fellow humans on the worn faces of anonymous wayside buddhas.

But in these photographs by Domon Ken (1909–90), I am startled by the dazzle he found in the swirling robe patterns of the slender eighth-century Kannon ("goddess of mercy" a simplified rendition given this bodhisattva's shifting gender). I've seen this statue several times and known what to admire about it, but it was always dark, graceful, and aloof. I know that in getting these shots Domon had all kinds of contraptions and assistants as well as the privilege of being a renowned photographer, but I am still grateful for the brilliance he found in the wood. Take a bodhisattva figure with a thousand hands. These were always curiosities to me, the idea of the work of a thousand hands momentarily arresting, but no more. Domon's camera thrusts the forest of hands at the viewer, the sharp angle producing a dizzying confrontation. Then there's the shot of the hundred Kannon with eleven heads and a thousand hands. Again, where I had been politely wearied, I am now—terrified.

In other words, I'm being taught to see anew. This is one thing art is supposed to do, of course. It isn't what I thought I was seeking in the exhibit, however.

Domon's work is being exhibited and published in a multi-volume edition in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. It is a vast oeuvre, extending from the 1930s through the 1970s. I want to say it suggests an omnivorous but focused appetite. He was an ardent exponent of the unposed snapshot ("absolutely unstaged realism," he called it) in which

the photographer seized the essence of the subject. Domon also took memorable portraits and landscapes—to which he insisted the principle of unstaged realism applied as well—but I am most drawn to his documentary photography. One shot in his Hiroshima series teaches the expressivity of the human back: the back of a father huddled against a windowsill while a priest, whose dark, massive back fills half the foreground, prays over the body of his son, dead at fourteen after in utero exposure to radiation. The focal point might have been the child's face, but it is covered with a white cloth according to custom. In his Chikuho coal mine series, the documentarist's eye alights upon a girl intent on reading, or rather pretending to read, a comic book while more fortunate classmates eat their lunches. The national policy shift from coal to oil in the mid-1950s devastated mining communities in southern Japan. Domon had his collection of children and their families living in the shadow of slagheaps printed in a rough, hundred-yen edition to benefit the community.

After he suffered a stroke Domon gave up his 35mm camera and opted for a large 4×5 camera with tripod. This is when he resumed his pilgrimage to old temples, which he had begun in the 1940s and broken off in the later war years. I went to the exhibit of the temple photos because I wanted to know why a man who—from what I could tell from my recent but enthusiastic acquaintance—expended his soul on the great upheavals of the postwar years was so drawn to the world of "classical" Buddhist art. I could not imagine that the familiar narrative of youthful, this-worldly activity ceding naturally (through illness and age) to a quest for religious truth would

be pertinent in his case. What I found was a different but hardly uncommon narrative, one much, much harder for me to come to terms with.

The pamphlet from the Ken Domon Museum of Photography in Sakata City in northern Yamagata Prefecture—apparently the only museum in the world dedicated to the work of a single photographer—announces that Domon's art demonstrates an exhaustive command of Japanese beauty, Japanese spirit. I thought to myself, this is just the predictable rhetoric of the hometown museum proud of the local boy who made good. Other parts of the same pamphlet encouraged me in this view. Domon is quoted describing a transformative moment: he had thought, like everyone else, that Buddhist architecture and sculpture, like mountains and trees, were among the more static of photographic objects. But one twilight, after he had packed up for the day, he turned back to bid farewell to the magnificent Phoenix Hall of the Byodoin Temple, when he saw it racing away at dizzying speed against a backdrop of clouds. "Camera!" he shouted. He managed one shot before the hall disappeared in the dark.

This, I thought, was not a man concerned with Japaneseness.

Domon was a writer of considerable power, and many of the didactic signs in the exhibit quote him directly. Unexpectedly, one seems addressed to me:

It is my view as a photojournalist that today whether one grapples with immediate social reality or with the classical culture and tradition of Nara or Kyoto makes no difference, as long as one pursues the anger, the sorrow, the joy of the Japanese people—in more general terms, that which touches

upon the fate of the people. If there is a difference, it is on the order, so to speak, of the difference between Western medicine, directed at the symptom, and Chinese medicine, with its slow, sustained approach; but I don't think there is a fundamental difference in critical orientation.

But Japan today has too many problems. A doctor would say there are too many emergency patients. Of course, there's Vietnam; then there's Okinawa [then occupied by the U.S.], the antinuclear movement, pollution, inflation. We need antidotes that will work right away; the slow-acting cures might be just too slow. Once the patient dies, there's no medicine to be prescribed. As a photojournalist and witness, I, too, want to grapple with the problems of the day, pronounce indictments, and speak out to light a fire. I want to participate with my camera in the struggle of the people.

In any case, what's in question is the guts of the people. Whatever they think, whatever they do, everything becomes meaningless if the Japanese people cease to be Japanese.... During my difficult journeys of "pilgrimage to ancient temples," I've been driven to ask myself why I persist with something so laborious. In the end, I arrive at the conclusion that, as a Japanese, I am doing this so that I myself can discover Japan, know Japan, and then report on what I've discovered and learned about Japan to everybody.

The word Domon used for "everybody" [minna ] here is intimate, meaning other Japanese. These passages come from an article written in 1968 titled, precisely, "On Covering Demonstrations and Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples" Why am I so disheartened? There is nothing especially reprehensible in these sentiments. Far from it. I had just hoped for something else, a mode of thinking, a logic of motivation, that wouldn't turn into a circle defined by Japaneseness.

Before embarking on his photography career, Domon had taken part in an agrarian movement, been arrested and tortured several times, and, like the overwhelming majority of leftists and other radicals of the early 1930s, recanted. And again like many others, he became impassioned over questions of social justice in the postwar years. He pursued them not as abstractions but as something embodied in every one of his subjects. Of course, the phenomenon of left nationalism is hardly novel. Anti-Americanism as a mobilizing element of postwar Japanese pacifist movements involving labor, teachers, and students lent a tacitly nationalist coloring to many forms of activism into the early 1970s. Call Domon a critical patriot, a champion of the people. And an artist. Isn't that enough? As with any other artist, his work can't be contained by his own programmatic statements. Like all human beings, he's part of a larger history. As an energetic, enormously talented photographer, he delivers that history with extraordinary vividness.

Still, given the history in question, it's hard not to shrink before Domon's choice of word for people, minzoku. Minzoku isn't just people, it's the people. Wherever an assortment of human beings are drawn together as the people , a transformation takes place. Powerfully good things can be brought forth by it, such as the overthrow of colonial regimes. With a people, energy is amassed that's more than the aggregate of individual energy, different from that of a crowd. (Though a crowd can also become a people.)

Whether a people are convoked as chosen ones on the grounds of birth or of social position should make a difference in how joinable they will be. Yet, the production of a people logically seems to entail the production of a nonpeople. This is under-

standable during the actuality of oppression, but all too often it proves difficult to shed exclusivity. Even secular identities can transmogrify into natural or divine endowments and, given the right historical conjuncture, do harm to others. The Japanese People, Nihon minzoku , were convoked in a world organized by imperialism. Beginning with victory over China (1895) and Russia (1905), the annexation of Korea (1910), and the Manchurian Incident (1937), the Japanese People, whose highest expression was the Emperor, were mobilized to seize and occupy expanses of land on the continent and on islands off Southeast Asia. At least in rhetoric, and for some Japanese in belief, the inhabitants of the occupied lands were called to service as children of the same Emperor. If this made the other Asians into siblings, the Japanese People still came first. They alone were fit to lead Asian children out from under the yoke of Western imperialism. The population that became the Japanese People in this discursively complex but in practice plainly discriminatory way were brutalized, and both enabled and compelled to inflict immeasurable suffering on their neighbors and themselves.

I know this is a partial description of modernity and its consequences for Japan, but it can't be edited out when reading in 1995 Domon Ken's recourse to minzoku in 1968. That's why it's disheartening to see Domon's participation in the popular obsession with the uniqueness of Japanese culture.

So there's a politico-historical dimension to my disappointment before the exhibition sign. But viscerally and puerilely, the moment I read his words on the wall next to the spectacular black-and-white photographs of Muroji Temple, I feel left out: these works had never imagined me amongst its view-

ers! (Knowing that Domon won distinguished prizes abroad, that he took pleasure in having his prints published abroad, doesn't change this.)

But there's something else still, issuing from intersection of the historical and the absurdly personal. I realize I had wanted Domon to model for me a way of loving so-called classical Japanese art without participating in a reactionary or naive cultural exceptionalism. The modernist eye directed at beams, pillars, and brackets, the gleam captured in statues, was appealing, especially because, juxtaposed with his passion for social documentary, I had thought or hoped that it wasn't principally an instrument of apolitical aestheticism.

I had fantasied that Domon would show me a way past my guilty and ill-examined abstinence from the artifacts and, yes, aura of premodern Japanese culture because of their deployment by modern Japan.