In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism: the most holistic, thought-through critique of Western perceptions of the mysterious, otherworldly, inaccessible “East”. To Europeans and Americans, Said claimed, anything further East than Greece was exotic, decadent and incomprehensible; societies were structured on outdated ancient principles that precluded progress (and therefore proved Western superiority). The abiding image of the Middle East – to which the Palestinian Said turned most of his focus – was of men lying around on cushions, smoking shisha and being fanned by scantily clad harems.
Happily, 30 years later, most people have moved away from lazy Eastern stereotypes, or, at the very least, they raise eyebrows when they’re deployed. But for some reason, Japan and Japanese culture remains the one holdout in the popular mindset.
Think through the mainstream films, books, songs and TV shows that depict Japan and you’re almost guaranteed to be fed an image of a rigid, repressed society governed by a sense of duty, nobility and honour. Pearl Harbor, The Last Samurai, Lost In Translation, The Man In The High Castle, the list goes on. Japan is inaccessible and “other”, as homogenous as the hundreds of thousands of white-shirted salarymen passing through Shinjuku Station during rush hour and as difficult to read as, well, the three different Japanese “alphabets”. For better or for worse, we accept that Japan can only be understood through a local’s eye. And that’s where Daido Moriyama comes in.
Long regarded as Japan’s greatest living photographer – and one of the world’s – Moriyama’s work spans an era of change for both his country and his practice. He began in Osaka, Japan’s second city, with a Canon 4SB, in the early Sixties. Taking to the streets, he shot anything that moved: women in kimonos heading to Shinto temples, busboys smoking on their breaks, stray dogs and chubby children on bikes.
Moriyama’s latest book is atypical of most prestigious photography publications. It’s roughly A5, paperback and barely 200 pages long. Simply titled How I Take Photographs, it’s relatively unassuming, in keeping with Moriyama’s quotidian subject matter. Pictures are sorted geographically, divided between four areas of Tokyo – Sunamachi, Ginza, Tsukudajima, Haneda Airport – plus a “Highway” section where Moriyama and his cowriter, Takeshi Nakamoto, take to the road for a three-day trip. As much a how-to guide as a bitesize book of pictures, Moriyama explains his process to Nakamoto as they walk the streets together.
The work itself is varied in aesthetic and mood. Black-and-white photos of lamp-lit alleyways sit alongside raw, saturated pictures of sunbathers lounging on the concrete banks of Tokyo Bay. Many of the pictures almost have a smell to them. Some have obvious “meanings” – in a photo of a woman in a kimono under a plastic umbrella, new and old combine deliberately. It’s an obvious juxtaposition, an I-noticed-this moment that street photography lends itself to best. Others look like they’ve been taken on the spur of the moment, or even by accident, smeared across the silver halide and difficult to interpret. Some are peopled by friends, coworkers or animals, while others manage to make Tokyo, whose wider conurbation is home to 38 million people, look like a ghost town.
In the book’s text, Moriyama seems to address the idea of inaccessibility. “Most people only take snapshots of things immediately around them in their daily life,” he says. “Fundamentally, that means that they’re not going out of their comfort zone. But out on the city streets, everything you encounter is alien and unknown.” Even from the man who single-handedly popularised street photography in Japan, there’s an acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever truly knowing the people you pass in the street.
It’s hard not to wonder who or what Moriyama’s British equivalent would be. Martin Parr? Seagulls stealing ice cream cones or City workers spilling into London streets outside pubs in summer perhaps. To call photographs snapshots obviously risks being a little too literal, but the fragmentary glimpses of life in Japan that they offer are incisive exactly because they are mundane: they’re engaging because they’re often not actually very interesting or stimulating. When you look at a photo of an empty street at night, or a road bridge over an industrial dock area, you see what a Tokyo resident sees every day on their commute. The eye immediately searches for something unusual in each image, but (usually) finds nothing to hold on to. The point is the atmosphere, rather than the subject – when the stage is empty, the mind immediately begins to fill it with its own story.
How I Take Photographs by Daido Moriyama (Laurence King, £14.99) is out on 8 July.
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