In 1986, the Cuban curator Ricardo Viera planned a group show at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on experimental Japanese photographers. His vision included works by both men and women, but the execution proved challenging. Collecting the men’s work, he was told, would be “politically difficult” due to cultural sensitivities. In other words, if Viera sought to include women, the men would withdraw.
Viera chose the women. He rescheduled the exhibition for the following year and titled it “Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to the 1980s.” Viera assembled prints by little-known pioneers such as Miyako Ishiuchi, Sachiko Kuru, and Mizuha Fukushima, and took inspiration from Ishiuchi herself, who had organized an all-women photography show 10 years earlier in Yokohama. (“I was 29 at the time,” Ishiuchi later said, “and felt I hadn’t been involved enough in the fight for equality.... To me, the exhibition was the stance I needed to take in order to become an artist.”)
These moments of glory for Japanese women photographers were rare, and, as a result, the literature is sparse. But they were there. In the 1950s, during the American occupation, gender-based violence proliferated around military bases in Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Okinawa. Tsuneko Sasamoto captured it. In a striking photograph from the early 50s, a spirited woman casts a feral sideways glance at a young U.S. soldier.
In the late 1960s, Hitomi Watanabe documented University of Tokyo students protesting the Vietnam War—fists in the air, mouths ajar—during some of the largest and bloodiest uprisings in Japan’s modern history. And in the 1970s, Mao Ishikawa photographed seductive bar hostesses in Okinawa as they entertained foreign men. In recent years, photographers such as Kim Insook have tackled thorny issues around ethnicity and tolerance.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, which includes portfolios by 25 photographers—among them Ishikawa, Ishiuchi, and Watanabe—ambitiously seeks to do what has seldom been done. The images within its pages are powerful and possess a muted beauty, a distinctly female perspective.
“I liked these bar girls who lived open and free in narrow, cramped Okinawa,” Ishikawa said of her time shooting there. “I had never cared much about what others thought of me, but their ethos of ‘Let’s live free, do what we want, and trust ourselves’ made me care even less.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail
