Month of Photography, Sendai 2021
Interview
Professor Norio Akasaka
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the Photographer NATSOMI
-Part 2-
“I am leaving this place. It is meanness, jealousy, indifference and violence that rule here.”
From the film ”The White Ribbon” (directed by Michael Haneke).
This is an unforgettable black and white film Natsoumi saw at a cinema in Paris towards the end of her time there. The story takes place in a very conservative little village in Germany, where the first rumblings of the First World War can be felt. Mysterious incidents occur one after the other. In one scene where we see a baroness bid her husband farewell, the atmosphere is very tense. This tension seems to represent the emotions of the 'secondary' villagers: the women, the children, the disabled, all those who do not have the right to express themselves. Men from the upper classes, barons, doctors and ministers wear black clothes, which indicate their superior status. In contrast, women and children wear white clothes. The men dress in black but tie a white ribbon round their children's arms to remind them of their innocence. Some children get tied to their beds with a white ribbon at bedtime. The white ribbon also represents physical pain and psychological suffering. By wearing black, the men make the ribbons stand out even more.
First and foremost, is there a gender difference in gazes?
N: (Nods): When I was little, my grandfather always reminded me I was a girl. I would find it very unfair, but for him it was a legitimate point of view.
Prof.A.: Even in my book «Sexual Diet», a man says to his wife, whom he adores, “You’re so cute, I could eat you up.” Why is that? I think that speaking from a male perspective is probably different from speaking from a female perspective. In a love letter to the woman he was in a relationship with, Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote, “I think you’re so pretty that if I could, I would eat sweets right off your face.” Yet, what does a woman feel when she hears that? The invisible violence of these phrases is disguised somehow, but it also implies power. When I was doing my research (I included this detail in my book), I read Helen MacCloy’s «Surprise, Surprise!», which had been recommended to me by one of my students. I then became aware of my thoughts and changed everything, period! I came to the conclusion that “so cute I’ll eat you” is a far from ideal expression and that it conjures up a relationship of power and violence, which could lead to controlling the other person and subjecting them to your wishes. Initially, in my case, I did not make any hasty decisions, I gradually came to my own conclusions in the course of my research. That is why I wrote, “I want to interrupt the fact of being a man.” If there were more women researchers and we could look at history and the world from a different angle, I think we might present a completely different perspective.
N: There is an English saying, “Knowing is one thing, doing is another”
Your early writings were mainly about knowledge gained from books (‘knowing’). However, as time goes by, it is clear from your writing style that teaching has been superseded by action. By now, it seems that knowledge and action are interchangeable.
Prof. A.: My first writing style was difficult to read. I was big-headed. While I was away doing fieldwork in Tohoku, I visited an elderly couple in order to take some notes. I was able to communicate with the gentleman but didn’t have the words to make myself understood by his wife. So I wanted to use language that she would appreciate. After that, my vocabulary changed and became more accessible. This is what I have been doing for 20 years now. I learned how by ‘walking around’ in Tohoku.
1. Burial Jar (Enatsubo 胞衣壺)
This earthenware vessel was buried with its mouth facing downward. This is a burial jar and could be a child’s grave. Photograph was taken at Jomon No Mori Park, City of Sendai.
N: Regarding the ‘gaze’ you mentioned earlier, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (*2) declared that a person who adopts one single viewpoint becomes alienated. Jean-Paul Sartre had a theory about alienation. He states that a person who adopts one single viewpoint makes himself a slave to others. In other words, the person exposed to someone else’s gaze becomes the property of that other person, the one focusing their gaze on him. A photograph that obtains a one-sided view of its subject through the viewfinder is ‘alienated’. In 2010, when I decided to leave my apartment in Paris to come and live in Fukushima with the man who would later become my husband, none of my French friends knew either the name of the city or where it was. «Fukushima? Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it». Not many people were interested. That totally changed on March 11, 2011, after the major earthquake in the East of Japan. Fukushima, the district I lived in, suddenly attracted the attention of the world’s media. Several reporters from various Japanese and foreign networks descended on the Koriyama railway station, and I felt as though our town had been ‘alienated.’
*2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). French philosopher, novelist, playwright and literary critic. He was an atheist and advocated existentialism.
Prof.A.: It was a real battlefield at the time.
N: I come from Tohoku. After leaving Paris, where I had lived for seven years, I found myself in Fukushima. We were on our own, ‘away from it all’, and there was an atmosphere in which we couldn’t express ourselves. First, there were the hasty conclusions drawn by the media, and I had the impression that our plight as residents had been established on this basis. That’s when I started asking myself, “Is it not possible to speak as a woman and a member of the community, not as an outsider, but as someone directly involved here?” Consequently, from the point of view of a resident who is viewed from just one angle, it is impossible to establish a relationship of equals because the gaze belongs to another person. That’s when I decided to organise an exhibition of my photographs in my second country – France – and not in Japan. Following the massive earthquake in the East of Japan, I continued to work on my photography and travel to Paris on business. Then in 2014, the day after my daughter was born, I received a call and was asked: “Why don’t you put on a show in Paris?” It was a proposal to hold a special exhibition at the Hayasaki Gallery in that city. Then, I was convinced it was a ‘sign’, and so I decided to tell our story and how our daughter was born bonny and healthy from the point of view of a woman living in Tohoku.
Prof.A.: (nods his head)
N: This project, «TOKϴYO», is a series of photographs that I began after the experience of my two miscarriages when I was living in Fukushima. These are photos which I worked on with great care. While shooting in Okuaizu, Fukushima, I made friends with a woman the same age as my grandmother in Kaneyama, Aizu. If I didn’t give her a sign of life for a while, she would telephone me or come over and give me ‘Taku an’ pickles. She took care of me as if I were her granddaughter.
When I arrived there, her husband was still alive and in good health, and we would often drink a cup of delicious tea together. A few years later, her husband died, and the woman found herself living in her big house all alone. One day, when the two of us were drinking tea, I revealed my true motives to her, “Every time I come to you, Aïzu, I feel the presence of my two lost babies intimately. Their souls are very close to me».
Thereupon, she told me (as mentioned above) that there was an old custom in the region to put the “Mizuko”, as well as the placenta and the umbilical cord, in a jar and to bury them at the threshold of the house, under the earthen floor. In this way, a certain closeness was still maintained, even after death. I learned that the border between life and death was very vague in Tohoku, with this emblem of death buried at the home entrance, through which the living came and went. She did not tell me directly, but I sensed that she had experienced what I had. Thanks to my meeting with Aïzu, I realised that what had happened to me was not an unusual event and that the numerous women in Tohoku, who had had similar experiences, felt frustrated*. Still, I did not have the means to express themselves.
* Any conditioning objectively imposed on the individual by the current workings of society, the mass media, the alienation of women treated as objects (Pol.1969): The illiterate, relegated to the lowest stratum of society, are exposed to frustration, to what is now called “alienation”. L’Afrique actuelle, Dec. 1968 (Vie Lang., nﾟ207, 1969, p 330).
Prof.A.: The women of Tohoku certainly didn’t have the opportunity to express themselves. Mrs Yamada, as you are a woman, I have been able to hear the true version of events from a woman who, it seems, has gone through the tragic experience of having a miscarriage. Even if I had gone to her house, I would not have understood her story in this way. As I said earlier, education, like archaeology and folklore, has been monopolised by men. But does it actually include women’s perspectives? Can we have a proper understanding of history without considering women’s perspectives?
-Were cave paintings the work of men? -
•Prof. A.: You mentioned ruins in France earlier, but there were works consisting of a ‘negative’ hand (*3).
3. Human handprints on the wall of a cave.
N: There were, indeed.
Prof.A.: So there are. There is a well-established theory that the cave art remains were painted by shamans. But do you not think that the shamans were men? That the dynamics of these drawings was the work of men?
N: Certainly, there is a belief and an assumption that they were the work of men. I also saw a video on the site that explained the negative-hand method and the model was, of course, a man.
Prof.A.: Mr Dean Snow, an archaeologist from Pennsylvania State University, studied negative hands in cave paintings in France and Spain and specifically compared the lengths of the fingers in the handprints. He discovered that three quarters of the handprints belonged to women. Most researchers had assumed that ancient artists had been predominantly men. But this hypothesis is erroneous. Women tend to have a ring finger and index finger of about the same length, while the male ring finger is thought to be longer than the index finger. When all the hand shapes had been examined and the data processed, it was reported that 75% of the negative hands were female. For a long time, it was thought that the handprints were the work of men, and no-one ever imagined that they could have been made by women. I wonder if it really was a male shaman who did all that by himself - entered a dark cave, created an image there and left his ‘signature’ in this way.
N: What I saw was a sculpture and animals which were made in a dynamic way utilising the uneven nature of the rock. A conservator at Roc-aux-Sorciers said, «I think that for humans at that time, it was the equivalent of making a film, or video nowadays. » You carve out the image by the light of a lamp or torch but, when you look at the whole thing, the light source varies, unlike with electric lighting. When I look at the image in the dark, it looks as if it's actually moving. Dynamism is born. But if the artist was a woman, well...
Prof.A.: What can I say? The meaning would be turned upside down. In "Eroticism" by Georges Bataille (*4) (assuming that death and eroticism are marginal experiences of life), in a scene he created, the shaman dressed in animal fur is a man. There is a scene where there is a phallic statue. Here, everyone accepts that the shaman is a man, without any reservations. If you were given a piece of work supposedly made by a man without any clear evidence, and you were told that it was made by a woman, you might be disappointed. Art has long been monopolised by men, but if women did create those works of art 15,000 years ago, their meaning would be turned upside down.
4. Georges Bataille (1897-1962) French thinker, writer and novelist. He lived his life as an atheist, seeking to follow the path of an ideal represented by the human being.
N: « Why do we believe that men tell stories of universal importance, but that women’s stories are only about women? » (Jude Kelly) Do you think this is true? I remember watching the TED talk by the British stage director, Jude Kelly. She created a festival called: « Women of the World (WOW) », as well as organising educational activities with the support of women artists in twenty countries from five continents. She was visiting the Laas Geel rock shelter in Somaliland, Africa, to see the prehistoric wall paintings there, when she asked the local conservator: "Tell me about the men and women who drew these. Then the curator, a man, scowled in disgust as he replied, "They were not drawn by women. "That was 11,000 years ago. How do you know that?" He pointed out: "Women don't do such things. They were drawn by men. Not women. It's not possible." He was adamant.
Prof.A.: It’s true. As for the caves, humans believed in the ‘belly of the earth’ and decided to paint in the sacred darkness. They felt part of it. You could say that it is not only men’s gender, but also their beliefs and prejudices, which colour our perception of the world.
Conclusion
According to Signs & Symbols (*5), guitars, firearms, sports cars and rockets are symbols of virility. Phallus-shaped objects are often associated with power, particularly rockets, which are of a classic phallic shape and have sexual connotations for related terms such as 'jet'. This can be interpreted as a manifestation of man’s desire to conquer the universe.
At the centre of the city of Kakuda, in the Miyagi prefecture, where Natsoumi now lives, there is the mausoleum of the Ishikawa family, which lived there from the 3rd year of the Keicho period (1598) to the Meiji Restoration (1868). The family established the city through their religious and political influence. Adjacent to the mausoleum is a life-size H2 rocket model (total length: 49m, diam: 4m). It is situated on a plateau on a hill, designed to be surrounded by sacred mountains on all sides – a tomb in the very heart of the city. Is this continuity merely a coincidence? It is probably the legacy of the Jomon, which the people of Tohoku have unconsciously re-created.
photo: rocket in the city of Kakuda
5. Cf. Miranda Bruce-Mitford, Signs & Symbols: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings, DK, 2008
Professor Norio AKASAKA (赤坂憲雄)
Born in 1953. A graduate of the Literature Faculty of the University of Tokyo. Folklorist and Professor at Gakushuin University for 17 years. Until March 2020, he served as the director of the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art. He championed Tohoku studies there and founded the Tohoku Culture Research Centre at the Tohoku University of Art and Design, in 1999. He has travelled all over Tohoku and explored the cultural landscape of the region while continuing his research in the field, listening to the local people and writing. His works include «Taro Okamoto's Japan» (Iwanami Shoten, 2007), «Sexual Diet» (Iwanami Shoten, 2017), and «Nausicaä Koku: Apocalypse of the Valley of the Wind» (Iwanami Shoten, 2019).