Masters of the silver age (3)

Concluded: Japan's post-war mountain photographers gain an international reputation

Inconveniently for historians, the effect of the second world war on the arts is hard to sum up neatly. As we’ve seen, some mountain photographers just picked up where they’d left off. For others, the war marked a turning point. One such was Tabuchi Yukio (1905-1989). Up to March 1945, he’d spent more than a decade teaching science at middle schools, and studying butterflies in his spare time. Nobody in the photographic world had heard of him.

Tabuchi Yukio at work

Having lost his home in the fire-bombing of Tokyo that month, Tabuchi moved to the village of Azumino in central Nagano Prefecture, at the foot of the Japan Alps. Henceforth, he’d make his living as a freelance writer of teaching materials. He established himself on the mountain photography scene with his first collection, published in 1951. Its title can be taken as a manifesto: Tabuchi Yukio – masterpieces of mountain photography (田淵行男- 山岳写真傑作集). His emphatic style of deep shadows and dramatic skies drew in part on the use of high-contrast copy film combined with red filters.

Mt Asama at sunrise, by Tabuchi Yukio

Pursuing his twin passions of butterfly and mountain photography – Tabuchi liked to jest that no weather could stop him taking pictures, as clouds suited the butterflies and blue skies the mountains – he followed in the tradition of the Japan Alpine Club’s naturalist photographers such as Takeda Hisayoshi and Takano Takazō (see first post in this series). Indeed, he is one of the few photographers who gets a mention in Fukada Kyūya’s One Hundred Mountains of Japan:

Butterfly sketches
by Tabuchi Yukio

Every mountain has its special benisons to grant. Jōnen offers bold young climbers no crags or challenging gullies but for those of an artistic temperament its elegant form is an invitation, yielding limitless subject matter to the photographer and painter. Ridgeways (尾根路, 1958), a collection by the photographer Tabuchi Yukio is a case in point. Living as he does in a farming village close by its foot of the mountain, Tabuchi has come to know the mountain as closely as if it were in his back garden. "Jōnen and Ōtaki-yama are the mountains I visit most often. I must have climbed them more than a hundred times," he says. From this extraordinary devotion spring masterly photographs that illuminate the mountain's every mood.

By going freelance, Tabuchi was ahead of the curve. In December 1960, Prime Minister Ikeda set out to double Japan’s national income. And before the decade was out, the plan had so far succeeded that a growing number of mountain photographers could think of pursuing their art on a full-time basis. As this naturally called for a representative body, the Japan Mountain Photography Group (日本山岳写真集団) was established in 1967 by nine professional photographers.

Shirahata Shiro

One of the group’s founders, and its leading light, was Shirahata Shirō. Nothing if not dedicated to his profession, Shirahata had a few years previously postponed his wedding three times in favour of spending the necessary funds on a Linhof Super Technica M3. To acquire technical mastery, he had started out in photography by apprenticing himself to Okada Kōyō (see previous post), on occasion porting the master’s gear all the way up Mt Fuji.

A traditional discipleship did not mean that Shirahata would slavishly imitate his mentor’s style. While Okada and his peers worked primarily in black and white, Shirahata made his name in colour. Selling his first colour picture to the Yama to Keikoku magazine as early as 1961, he went on to compile colour albums of the Nepal Himalaya, the Karakorum, the Rockies and both the European and the Japanese Alps. All of these volumes were also published in foreign languages, winning Shirahata an international reputation – except for the Japan Alps collection, which – ironically – contains some of his best images.

From Himalaya, by Shirahata Shiro

Large-format avalanche, from Himalaya by Shirahata Shiro

The Japan Mountain Photography Group remained prominent well into the Heisei era. In the tenth year of the reign (1998), 14 members of the group published the collection “Mountain voice” (the English-language title is spelled out in katakana), to which Iwahashi Takashi was a major contributor. Yet mountain photography is far from a monoculture. Outside the group, Fujita Hirokichi is known for his large-format Himalayan pictures, and Ōmori Kyōichirō for his aerial surveys of the Japan Alps and the Himalaya.

Then there is Shirakawa Yoshikazu who started out with collections on the Alps and the Himalaya, diversified into travel photography and forests, and then documented “one hundred famous mountains of the world” (世界百名山) – a project that paid homage to a magazine series left unfinished by the original Hyakumeizan author at his death in 1971.*

Shirakawa’s global Hyakumeizan was published in 2007. By coincidence, this was the year that Nikon introduced its “second generation” digital cameras. For many mountain photographers, even serious ones, the days of film were numbered. But this is another story. Like Zhou Enlai’s famous comment on the French Revolution, it may even now be too early to say what effect the digital takeover will have on Japan’s mountain photographers. Only one thing is certain: theirs will continue to be one of the most happening mountain photography scenes on the planet.

References

Joe Bensen, Souvenirs from High Places: a visual record of mountaineering, Mitchell Beazley, 1998

Sugimoto Makoto, "Yama to shashin" in Ohmori Hisao (ed), Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, Autumn 1998

Tateyama Museum of Toyama, Yama wo toru: yama e katamuketa hitotachi, exhibition publication, 1998

*Although, unlike Fukada Kyūya, who consulted only his own taste in selecting his candidate mountains, Shirakawa delegated the task to an international committee of mountain illuminati, including Chris Bonington, Kurt Diemberger, Wang Fuzhou, Maurice Herzog, Edmund Hillary, Harish Kapadia, Edouard Myslovski, AI Read, Nazir Sabir and Pertemba Sherpa. See Wikipedia for the complete list of Shirakawa’s 100 mountains of the world.

Masters of the silver age (2)

Continued: How Japan's mountain photographers ventured into the Himalaya 

Ishizaki Koyo

Meanwhile, Japan’s mountain photographers were venturing abroad. Two, indeed, reached the Himalaya more than a decade before the country’s alpinists did.

Ishizaki Kōyō (1884-1947) is remembered today mainly for his delicate paintings in a traditional style, but his photography too was accomplished.
He started climbing mountains when he went up to Kyoto to study art, joining the Japanese Alpine Club in 1908.

It was Ishizaki who took the summit photo when, the following year, JAC members made the second ascent of Tsurugi in modern times, following in the footsteps of the Army surveyors two years before.

Summiting Tsurugi in 1909: photo by Ishizaki Koyo

In 1916, Ishizaki travelled to India with the aim of visiting sites associated with the Buddha. In Kashmir, he climbed Mahadev Peak (3,966 metres). Some of the resulting prints are hand-tinted, colour film being in its infancy.

Scene on Mahadev Peak, hand-tinted print by Ishizaki Koyo

Another Himalayan traveller, Hasegawa Denjirō (1894-1976), earned his living as a furniture designer, numbering the Imperial court among his clients.

Hasegawa Denjiro

He was successful enough to take what would now be called a long sabbatical. In 1927, he traversed the Himalaya into Tibet and photographed the holy mountain of Kailash. Returning via Kashmir, he did the same for Nanga Parbat. A collection of these photos was published in 1932 as A Himalayan journey.

The holy mountain of Kailash, by Hasegawa Denjiro

At home, the promulgation of the national parks from 1931 onwards opened up a new market for travel and scenic photography. Two noted landscape photographers of this era were Okada Kōyō and Yamada Ōsui.

Okada Koyo at work

In later life, Okada earned himself the nickname of “Fuji no Kōyō” for his devotion to the iconic volcano. One of his images provided the basis for the elegant engraving of Mt Fuji on the old 500 yen note (you can visit the mountain where the photo was taken over on Ridgeline Images) . Illustrations were also in demand from the new magazines starting to spring up from the late Taishō years. Asahi Camera appeared in 1926, followed by Japan’s first mountaineering monthly, Yama-to-Keikoku, in 1930.

Two views of Mt Fuji, by Okada Koyo

By now, photography had a mass following, thanks to light and convenient 4 x 6.5 format cameras with eight frames on a roll of film. In 1936, a “Camera Hiking Club” or CHC was founded in the Tokyo Shitamachi quarter. Photographers associated with this organisation included Funakoshi Yoshibumi, Miura Keizō, known for his skiing photography, and Kazami Takehide (1914-2003), who joined the CHC in 1936.

In 1939, Kazami, Funakoshi and other CHC members founded the Tokyo Mountain Photography Association, which morphed into the Japan Mountain Photography Association (日本山岳写真協会) in 1947 to reflect its increasingly national membership. Kazami’s career spanned a remarkable sixty years. He served in the Imperial Navy during the war, as a photographer. After being repatriated from New Guinea in 1946, he set up a photographic supplies shop in the Ginza. Etude of Alps, his first photo collection, was published in 1953, followed by Going to the mountains (山を行く) in 1957.

Pages from Kazami Takehide's "Going to the mountains"

The Alps, whether Japanese or European, were not enough for Kazami. In 1958, he accompanied Fukada Kyūya, the soon-to-be Hyakameizan author, and two other mountaineers on an expedition to the Jugal Himal. Their objective was the Big White Peak (7,083m), so-called by three Scottish lady climbers. They didn’t get up it, but Kazami achieved the expedition’s high point on the east ridge by taking turns to break trail with a Sherpa companion. There the brown plains of Tibet were glimpsed through the clouds.

The Big White Peak expedition team:
Kazami Takehide (on the right), next to Fukada Kyuya

Kazami’s first visit to the Himalaya resulted in two books, the expedition journal, for which Fukada wrote the text, and a photo collection on the Jugal Himal. Nepal must have appealed to Kazami; he went back there in 1960, the year he closed his shop and went fully professional as a photographer. His photo collection on Nepal’s mountains and its people was translated into English. After half a century, Japan’s Himalayan photographers had started to gain an international reputation.

Senjogahara, by Hasegawa Denjiro

Next: into the age of colour. 

Masters of the silver age (1)

A snapshot history of mountain photography in Japan

Conveniently for historians, mountain photography in Japan sprang into being at the same moment as modern mountaineering. A photo of the Great Snow Valley on Shirouma, the White Horse Mountain, graced the very first issue of the new Japanese Alpine Club’s journal, published in April 1906.

Shirouma by Shimura Urei: as published in the Alpine Journal

The photographer, Shimura Urei (1874-1961), was the club’s 18th member, joining immediately after it was launched in the previous October, and remained closely associated all his life – after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, the club’s office was moved temporarily into his house.

Shimura Urei

Before retiring to Tokyo, Shimura was a teacher at the Nagano middle school. He started out using the school’s camera to record the alpine flowers and landscapes of that mountainous province until, tiring of this mediocre kit, he invested ¥110 – equivalent to two months’ salary or more – to buy himself a top-of-the-line Goertz Dagor lens. He also had to pay porters to carry his camera and tentage up into the mountains. More than one image was lost when the porters, impatient to see a real photograph, ripped open undeveloped plates.

Overcoming such tribulations, Shimura built up a valuable collection of pressed alpine plants that is still preserved, discovering in the process a new kind of flower on Shirouma. A photo of the same mountain was sent to the ubiquitous Walter Weston, now back in England, who used it to accompany an article that the mountaineering missionary published in the Alpine Journal edition of February 1906. Another of Shimura’s photos appeared in Weston’s second book about the Japanese mountains.

Snow valley by Shimura Urei

Shimura’s lengthy explorations of the Japan Alps get him a paragraph in Fukada Kyūya’s One Hundred Mountains of Japan, although more as a pioneer than as a photographer:

The first mountaineer to pass this way was Shimura Urei in the summer of 1907, approaching from Eboshi. As he stood on the summit, he wrote, "I saw a small pond below and to the south, for all the world like an eruption crater … this crater on Washiba is probably a surprise for the world." In that pioneering era, such unexpected discoveries were not uncommon in the Northern Alps. Today, mountaineering is much more convenient but it has lost this element of surprise and wonder. (Washiba-dake)

Many other members of the early Japanese Alpine Club, notably the scientists, took their cameras into the mountains. Glass slides were favoured, presumably for their scientific precision, by Tsujimoto Mitsumaru (1877-1940), who had won an international reputation for his discovery of squalene.

Rock shelter in the Northern Alps, by Tsujimoto Mitsumaru

Takeda Hisayoshi (1883-1972), a founder member who later authored the first guide to Japan’s alpine plants, took photos to document his botanical forays. As for his kit, a Goerz Roll-Tenax and a favourite Piccolette accompanied him on his second trip to the Oze marshes, in 1924, as well as three lenses, twenty-odd films and photographic plates.

Another JAC founder, Takano Takazō, the entomologist, collated eight collections of mountain photography under the series title of “High mountains, deep valleys” (高山深渓) between 1910 and 1917, assisted by a group of about 15 fellow enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Tanaka Kaoru (1898-1982) used his camera on his geological excursions, and Kanmuri Matsujirō (1883-1970) extensively photographed the Kurobe Valley, often using new-fangled film cameras for their lightness and convenience in that rugged terrain.

Hokari Misuo

One who stuck with traditional glass plates, for their artistic properties, was Hokari Misuo (1891-1966). An uomo universale of the Japan Northern Alps, Hokari’s life centred around Yari-ga-take, the so-called Matterhorn of Japan.

As mass mountaineering arrived in Japan, he opened the mountain’s first hut, in Yarisawa, in 1917 (Taishō 6) and a decade later, built another, on the col below the peak, which is still owned and operated by his descendants. He also wrote a biography of Banryū, the monk who first climbed Yari, a book that Fukada Kyūya later acclaimed as “masterly”.

Hokkari's original hut in Yarisawa

Although his equipment may have been old-style, there was nothing traditional about Hokari’s marketing. In 1921, he opened a gallery, the Hokari Shashinkan, in a decisive step away from the gentlemanly amateurism of the Japan Alpine Club. For Hokari looked to his photos for at least part of his living, like those other grand masters of black-and-white alpine photography, the Abraham brothers of Keswick, the Tairraz père et fils of Chamonix, Bradford Washburn and Jürgen Winkler.

The Taisho eruption of Yake-dake, by Hokkari Misuo

Particularly memorable are the prints showing the volcano of Yake-dake, both during and after the Taishō eruption of 1915 that created the eponymous pond. Many since Hokari’s day have photographed the mountain and its lakelet, but few to such effect.

Yake-dake after the eruption, by Hokari Misuo

Mountaineers on Yari-ga-take, by Hokari Misuo

Next: How Japan's mountain photographers headed for the Himalaya

Images and ink (37)

Image: Mt Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Ink: Translating Mt Fuji, from Sanshirō by Natsume Soseki

Sanshirō had completely forgotten about Mount Fuji. When he recalled the Mount Fuji he had first seen from the train window, having had his attention called to it by Professor Hirota, it had indeed looked noble. There was no way to compare it with the chaotic jumble of the world inside his head now, and he was ashamed of himself for having let that first impression slip away. Just then Hirota flung a rather strange question at him.

"Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?"

"To translate it... ?"

"It's fascinating how, whenever you translate nature, it's always transformed into something human. Noble, great or heroic.”

Sanshirō now understood what he meant by translate.

"You always get a word related to human character. For those poor souls who can't translate into such words, nature hasn't the slightest influence on them when it comes to character.”

Thinking there was more to come, Sanshirō listened quietly. But Hirota cut himself off at that point.

Somewhat related post: Mountains of character