tokyo library, well, one of em…

In establishing a context for his clarification of Travel Photography as a solution and a problem, Peter Osborne comments upon the appearance of boredom and novelty during the Victorian period:

“Victorian society promulgated revolutionary social and technological processes but feared the disorder it expected it their wake. Consequently it imposed on itself a regime of conformity and prudence. On one hand it could promote both social and global mobility as its central myth (Gay 1985:65). On the other it could represent itself as a hierarchical social order fixed by tradition and by moral and even biological laws. It was a culture torn between the retentive values of work, savings and self-restraint and the sensuous prospects and fantasies of spending and consuming which wealth made increasingly possible. In the realm of travel Victorian society could generate both the most fearless and remorseless adventurers and the most timid stop-at-home daydreamers. Each was equally representative of their world.
Many of these oppositions are condensed in two singularly modern conditions which became common in the Victorian period and were immediately catered for by the new culture of travel and its imagery. They were boredom and the yearning for novelty.
Boredom was a word almost unknown in English speech until the eighteenth century (Spacks 1995). It became ubiquitous as the routines of mass society became widespread. While boredom was normally seen as a listless and uncreative state of mind, in some instances it could be regarded as a form of psychic opposition to modern life’s repetition and conformity or as a defiance of the bourgeois enthusiasm for work and productivity. Boredom  could also be seen as a creative expression of dissatisfaction which might drive the individual towards change, as in Baudelaire’s 1859 poem Le Voyage (see Petro in Petro 1995).
The pursuit of novelty was in part the solution to the problem of boredom; in part it was the product of the commodification of the idea of progress. Moral and social evolution were replaced by the illusory transformations accompanying consumption. This created an existence passed in a state of both permanent curiosity and managed dissatisfaction. Boredom and novelty each became a function of the other.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP57-58.

As ‘The man needed the home to put himself back together’ (Osborne, P.D. 2000) Osborne continues to cite the Victorian home as the conduit of an opposition based in patriarchy whereby:

“This space, the home, was as much a part of the institution of photography as the studio or the camera. In the process of receiving photographic images into the home the two modes of repression and denial- the domestic and the colonial- were brought together. They spiralled inseparably around each other like the two helices in the structure of DNA one transmitting the principle of the integrated male subject, the other that of social dominance. In a very particular manner, the outside world was being domesticated.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP66-67.

What Osborne describes as a feature of the Victorian Home could also be applied to the modern day perspective of the commutational car. Osborne himself refers to other ‘vessels’ when talking of Jules Verne:

“Rather than indices of adventurousness, Verne’s fictional vessels- the ships, submarines and rockets- embodied for the reader an inclination to be enclosed and, as Barthes writes, ‘of having at hand the greatest possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal and absolutely infinite space’ (Barthes 1972:66). ‘A ship’, he adds, ‘is a habitat before being a means of transport’ (Barthes 1972:66). […] Yet, for those who did embark, travelling might still be undertaken in a variety of enclosures, in vehicles such as the coach, the steamer, the railway car, each extensions of the house, mobile homes from which the world could be observed by the lonely and untouchable consciousness in detached and leisurely mastery through the frame of a window.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. P61.

With regards to the act of tourism, Osborne looks to the photographs of Martin Parr and refers specifically to the image of two tourist groups in front of the Acropolis in Greece. One group is Japanese, the other European or Western. To me the Japanese group of tourists are most significant here. As Osborne notes:

“The Westerners, abstracted in tourism’s word, have their backs to the camera as they attend to the discourse of the tour-guide. The Japanese, given up to tourism’s optic, face forward, arrange themselves for the group photograph under the monument. Perhaps by means of this global and yet so Western setting they wish to demonstrate their desire to conform to the practices of the world system to which their wealth admits them, and at the same time display their difference within it. They too are being seen seeing; their presence on the world stage is also being confirmed, legitimated, by the all seeing global subject, the imaginary eye of world culture through which tourism peers. Perhaps they look towards an absent Japan, their families, their future selves in a domestic posterity recalling the moment back home.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. P71.

This comment is particularly interesting because it suggests that the Japanese have a different relationship with the medium of photography and inevitably tourism:

“As tourists, we seek authenticity, an object, a truth somehow precedent to all representation- and then take photographs, lapsing back into the realm of image.
This modulation between the hope for the encounter with singular authenticity and the actual immersion in a plurality of representations is a constant in tourism. In the accidental Classicism into which they have assembled themselves, in which they come to resemble and thereby identify themselves, in which they come to visit, Parr’s Japanese on the Acropolis seem to express a desire to come to rest in something beyond tourism’s unstable representations. […] Like all tourist, his tourists are caught up in, and revel in, a global entertainment of ever-shifting bodies and iconolatry- and yet appear to yearn for stasis and fixity, for meaning, for certainty. In this the tourist system iterates the old Romantic promise of authenticity, of the rediscovery of the unity between subject and object, of an intimacy between the object and it representation. Its historical roots lie primarily in that promise.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP72-73.

The word tourist could arguably be synonymous with the word photographer:

“Tourists use the photographic images of tourism, including their own photographs, as both proofs, records and mementos of tourist actualities while accepting these same actualities as set-up performances, idealisations or romanticisations- fictions. Photography uses actuality- a view, a national type- to produce fictions for tourism; tourism uses these fictions to produce its own actualities which lie beyond truth and representation. They are akin to Kermode’s ‘necessary fictions’, fictions that permit actual events to take place. The fiction zero, for example, permits us to begin counting. They might also be likened to Pierce’s ‘performative metaphor’, a sign which makes something happen.
As with the enjoyment of all types of fiction, much of the pleasure of tourism lies in its text- in the symbolic forms that construct its worlds which are at once actual and virtual. Tourists read the images, play with the signs, disdain them or are seduced by them, and add a few of their own to the system. All over the world, as Jonathan Culler writes, tourists are ‘engaged in reading cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems’ (Culler 1989:155). Playful sign-surfing and casual textual analysis now form one of the apparent freedoms of our reflexive cultures. Like the right to reverie of the nineteenth century’s post-Romantic culture, it represents the apparent triumph of individual subjectivity, that is freedom. Here, perhaps, we can locate the clearly ‘postmodern’ character of the tourist’s activity.
But tourism if not entirely the preserve of the consumer-flaneurs, chilled ironists content to drift in the wakes of the Situationists or Baudrillard’s fan club. And the ‘pleasure of the tourist text’ is not without a certain desperation. Once again, as with the viewer of the photograph, the desire for he authentic eternally returns, unrenounceable. Some will be seeking in tourism the reassurance of a world re-ordered by the cliché, hoping to pass through the fluidity of fiction to the solidity of myth.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP77-78.

Iwata Nakayama’s photographs from the 1930’s haunt me and seem out of place within my world. They remind me of old photographs of famous Hollywood stars during that time and it is for this reason that they disturb me. The lighting and posing of the sitters are typically western in my mind and I find it difficult to view them in any other way as appropriation of the western style. Much of the style might have been towards the practicalities of the medium at the time but yet, it feels like that mirrored world which William Gibson spoke of. The technology was available everywhere at the time and so similarly styled images give that sense of familiarity with unfamiliarity, particularly if the style was not appropriated or influenced in some way by the west.

Some interesting points on the cherry blossom:

“The soul is objectified as a mirror, a pebble, a rock, or even an empty space. However, Yanagita states that there is no definite historical or ethnographic evidence to claim that the Japanese conceptualize the soul as having a definite shape (Yanagita, ed. 1951:677-78). Although not formless, the soul is extremely fluid in its mobility- it departs the body, of humans and deities, and the Japanese soul may even be given to non-Japanese…”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. PP27-28.

Ohnuki-Tierney reflects greatly upon the symbolic equivocation of Rice and Cherry blossom. With rice in particular, she identifies its first recordings in the Kojiki (712AD) and the Nihonshiki (720AD).

“These ‘chronicles’ were commissioned by the Tenmu emperor (r.672-86) in order to establish a Japanese identity distinct from the Chinese, whose ‘Great Civilization’ was engulfing Japan at the time. He did so by adopting folk oral traditions in which rice, introduced from the Asian continent, was appropriated as indigenous to Japan. That is, rice was grown in heaven by Japanese deities, whose names all bear references to the ear of rice. Thus, a foreign element, rice, was turned into the marker of Japanese identity. This cosmogony, drawing on folk agrarian cosmologies at the time, established the official agrarian cosmology, which became the symbolic foundation of the political economy for centuries, and in fact even today.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P28.

Interestingly enough, the cherry blossom, known for its temporality bears a distinct association:

“Ultimately, cherry blossoms celebrate love itself- an intense relationship between a man and a woman. If men used the metaphor of cherry blossoms for women, women too used the flower in their expressions of love. The practice of wearing a cherry branch with its blossoms on one’s head or of placing it on top of a bamboo pole in the yard has been recorded from ancient times as an expression of courtship by women.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P33.

Geoffrey Batchen also notes how photography could have been motivated and driven by love. Interesting how both share a common bond in such a temporary character. Daguerre and Fox Talbot’s intentions were to fix the image and yet the Japanese adaptation of it and development of it into digital forms inherently embody the love which so inspired the attempts to capture the image anyway. Perhaps Japanese culture can deal with loss a great deal better than the Europeans.

“Symbols ought never to be understood as floating in the mind of social agents alone. They are always grounded in the day-to-day lives of those who use them. The notion of aware and its symbolic representations developed precisely because the aristocrats were enjoying the grandeur of life and yet sensing that it would not last forever. […] In this context, we appreciate that the emphasis on pathos over the impermanence of life developed precisely because of the grandeur of life. Pathos over evanescence does not take on a significance unless it is predicated upon the grandeur of life, expressed as power, wealth, or the height of love. Only when one loses them does one begin to appreciate their ephemeral nature and feel pathos over the loss. The mutual predication between the two holds the key to the choice of cherry blossoms as the master trope.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P43.

Cherry blossoms are photography:

“The universe represented by cherry blossoms, then, is full of paradoxes. The flowers represent life, predicated on death, and vice versa. Pathos over evanescence derives from the juxtaposition of the height of glory and vigor of life and pomp, on the one hand, with the ephemerality, on the other. The night cherry blossoms of the geisha represent the height of ‘life’, or ‘desire’ in a moiré fashionable parlance today, underscored by its emphemerality both in the temporal sense and in the sense that it is divorced from ‘real’ life. By representing both the temple boys and the geisha, cherry blossoms stand both for the intensely heterosexual (geisha) and the non-heterosexual (temple boys). Yet, the intensely heterosexual world of the geisha represented in Kabuki is in fact performed by all-male actors. We see multiple layers of subversion of the norm- all symbolized by cherry blossoms.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P51.

What is the Japanese identity? Ohnuki-Tierney bases her theory on the significant other:

“A social group’s sense of the self-identity is almost always formulated and reformulated by the presence of, or a threat from, another social group. In the case of the Japanese, the Chinese became the dominant Other, and their presence prompted the Japanese to eagerly adopt and absorb the Han and Tang ‘High civilization’, which in turn compelled them to come to terms with their own sense of identity as distinct from that of the Chinese (Kawasoe [1978] 1980:253-54; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993a).

The temporal nature of the cherry blossom even takes root in the land that Tokyo is built on:

“During the Edo period, there were a number of shoguns, including Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), Hidetada (1579-1632), Iemitsu (1604-51), and Yoshimune (1864-1751), who ordered the planting of cherry trees in various locations in Edo, whose fertile soil of volcanic ash was idea for the tree. […] The Edo capital, representing Japan, was transformed into the land of cherry blossoms, which in turn led to the construction of ‘Japan as the land of cherry blossoms,’ since Edo represented Japan.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P55.

“Most importantly, the Japanese sought their uniqueness in cherry blossoms, as the episode involving Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714), an esteemed Confucian scholar-botanist, testifies. He declared in 1698 that according to a Chinese he questioned in Nagasaki there were no cherry trees in China. In his celebrated Yamato honzo, a book on botanical species of Japan, published in 1709, the Chinese, the source of this information, was identified as Kaseiho. Since Kaibara Ekken was the most revered botanist, his proclamation excited warriors and merchants at the time, who transformed this report unto ‘cherry blossoms are unique to Japan’ (Saito 1982: 28-29).”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. PP55-56.

“Together with a few other ‘symbols of Japan,’ such as the fan and sumo wrestlers, cherry blossoms, rice paddies, and Mount Fuji became the powerful symbols with which the Japanese represented themselves to Westerners who in turn saw Japan through these symbols, as in the well-known 1887 painting of Le Pere Tanguy by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) at Musee Rodin in Paris. Here the subject of the portrait is surrounded by cherry blossoms, rice paddies in winter, Mount Fuji, two geisha figures (to the left and right of the subject), and morning glories. Through these symbols, especially the cherry blossom, the Japanese wished to construct their own identity as a time when the threats of Western civilization and of modernization were encroaching upon their culture.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P56.

Again, like photography, the same rings true:

“What cherry blossom shows us is that we must get out of our vision of a grid classifying symbols and meanings in isolation- the dog means A in one context and B in another in culture X. The rich and complex meanings of cherry blossoms constitue a matrix of interrelated concepts- not life alone, but predicated by death and rebirth; woman in relation to man; the self underscored by the destabilized self. In other words, a symbol stands for processes and relationships, not isolated concepts. Furthermore, at the ontological level the flower also represents forces that challenge, undermine, and destabilize the normative world, thereby offering new possibilities.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P57.