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Doomsday look
Tokyo X needs no translation
BY CLIF GARBODEN

TOKYO X
By Shunji Ohkura. Kodansha International; 251 black-and-white photographs; $29.95.


Over the past year, critics and patrons have been basking in a vogue for rediscovered street photography. But the key word here is rediscovery. Street photography as it’s currently appreciated seems locked in the post-war era, typified by nostalgia-tinged images as distant as they are familiar, like so many scenes from old movies. And we can’t imagine contemporary counterparts. Today’s streets do seem inappropriate shooting ground by comparison, lacking the noir atmospherics of the ’40s, the cultural transitions of the ’50s, the icon clashes of the ’60s, or the grit of the decaying ’70s.

Not so, apparently, in Tokyo, where now 65-year-old photographer Shunji Ohkura, who’s more famous for insects and kabuki fashion than for social realism, took the 251 photos that make up Tokyo X. To call Ohkura’s vision of urban Japan post-apocalyptic would be as much an understatement as a cliché. His streets are a tawdry combination of litter and glitz, a jumble of conflicting geometries, and an exploration of stark despair. The prints — grainy but not gross, high-contrast but not high-key, and exquisitely detailed — are themselves a product of detachment, a mirror of the alienation that underlies Ohkura’s stated theme.

For American viewers, the scenes — shot primarily in Tokyo in the 1990s — are uncompromisingly foreign and terrifyingly exciting. Surveillance cameras are propped everywhere amid Tokyo’s disjointed bric-a-brac. Each view is a sensory assault, distilling the clout of loud sound and frantic motion into static abstractions — high energy frozen on a matte surface, but nonetheless powerful.

Ohkura didn’t have to haunt the demi-monde to make the point that Tokyo is hurtling beyond control through some sort of Big Brotherish/pop-icon cultural nightmare. A few shots are lit by the red lights of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho, but streets, squares, and parks in safer neighborhoods provide the setting for most of the photos. The book is informally subdivided by themes, the most memorable being a look at Japanese teendom — shot in young Japan’s weekend hangouts in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Jingubashi — that is itself themed: platform shoes, clusters of uniformed schoolgirls, sci-fi-meets-kabuki make-up, facial piercings. Nobody smiles in these posturing portraits — it’s just one enigmatic stare after another.

Of course, much of what we perceive as enigma is based in our ignorance and lack of cultural context. The book’s numbered photos are presented without captions; the index generally provides only shooting locations. But there are some descriptive clues. An ominous shot of a dozen men, each jealously reading a newspaper, scattered across a sidewalk turns out to have been taken outside an off-track betting shop. There’s alienation, but no threat. And if we recognized the sources of their ornamentation — obsessively embraced bands and other aggressively marketed pop-culture icons — we might be less intimidated by the street teens.

For that matter, we have no context for comprehending the artist’s own prejudices. Does Ohkura know for a fact that those street punks are disaffected, or is he just a cultural conservative who doesn’t dig the music and doesn’t get the joke? But in the end the question is moot. He clearly sought out the cruel and the peculiar, which come in many forms, to create a portrait of Tokyo that is sad and ominous. We see a city of tragic-edged frivolity, alienating conformity, and detached authority populated by an often dronish society preoccupied by a self-defining culture of . . . well, preoccupation.

How the details of that portrait are interpreted depends on the audience. Westerners can’t expect to understand the scenes of Tokyo X in the context in which the essay was created any more than a Japanese person can expect to comprehend a picture of crowd of shirtless Packers fans wearing cheese hats. Japan is, after all, the culture that gave us such oblique fads as Hello Kitty and T-shirts emblazoned with " Golf Punk Girl. " Many things — and not just nuances — don’t translate. But Ohkura’s thrust is unmistakable, and Tokyo X is destined, in true Japanese-obsessive tradition, to become a cult classic.

Issue Date: August 22 - 29, 2002
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