Tokyo in passing

It was this tension between local and global culture that is so well captured in the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers” curated by Hiromi Nakamura. The exhibition, covering one large space in the museum, is divided into six parts each covering one decade from 1945-2006. The photographs move from the Buddhistic calm of Werner Bischof’s work in Kyoto to a frenzied portrait of modern Tokyo seen, for example, in the recent work of Chris Steele-Perkins or Antoine D’Agata.

Japan. 2004. Antoine D'Agata/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Much has changed for Tokyo and for Magnum over the past 60 years. We are more, for one. Tokyo’s core populations in 1945 was 3.6 million; today it’s 12.5 million. That’s just the Metropolitan district. The population of Greater Tokyo’s whole sprawl is 32 million. Magnum also has grown from four founders in 1947 to sixty members today.

Tokyo’s growth began with post-war reconstruction and then massive development led by innovation. Magnum’s growth and sustainability has also been led by innovation: both through the early digitization of its archive and through wonderfully fresh approaches to documentary photography that are on display in our collective portrayal of Tokyo. But is this a portrayal of outsiders looking in?

Tokyo, Japan. 1980. Police headquarter. Central electronic map with TV intersection monitors. Rene Burri/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Tokyo, Japan. 1951. Sumo fighters. Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

I was asked many questions by journalists, but one that got me thinking was posed by The Japan Times. Were the photographs influenced by our preconceptions of Tokyo or by what we found when we arrived? Shades of Edward Said’s Orientalism, I thought. Is there some kind of cultural stereotyping – or worse, prejudice at work here? Were we outsiders documenting an alien culture that we didn’t understand?

Much has been said and seen of the experience of alienation in Tokyo, in films such as Wim Wenders' film "Tokyo-Ga" (1985) or the more recent Sophia Coppola film "Lost in Translation" (2003). There is enough evidence to show that the experience we have of Tokyo comprises parodies of its exotic strangeness. However, after reviewing a wide range of contemporary Japanese images of Tokyo, I realise that Magnum’s view is not an example of outsiders looking in since the work conforms, in many ways, to Japanese photography’s own view of its capital city. Influences, of course, go both ways. More than this I recognized in Magnum’s collective portrayal of Tokyo, a comment on the modern city – or the urban experience - with its fragmented social and architectural spaces, less about anything inherently Japanese. As the writer Jonathan Raban wrote in his 1988 book about living in London – Soft City:

“To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers of each other. . . . The city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams , interpretations. But the very plastic qualities which make the city the great liberator of human identity also cause it to be especially vulnerable to psychosis and totalitarian nightmare."

Tokyo, Japan. 1987. The search for work. Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Cities, then – all cities, are about a search for identity and opportunity, for the passing photographer as much as any other resident. The photographs of modern Tokyo in the Magnum exhibition show simply this. Two acts of exploration in collision: the Magnum photographer following curiosity collides with the Tokyo citizens exploring their identity and opportunities that all cities have to offer the young at heart.

My thanks to Hiromi Nakamura for curating this exhibition and to Junko Ogawa in Magnum’s Tokyo office.