JAPAN. Asakusa. 1998. Two members of the Yakuza, Japan’s mafia. The Yakuza’s 23 gangs are Japan’s top corporate earners. They model themselves on American gangster fashion from the 1950s. © Bruce Gilden.
Daido Moriyama, Kikiuji Kawada, and Eikoh Hosoe: these are just a few of the Japanese photographers born in the 1930s, mere children when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on their country. Growing up in the shadows of war, these men took to photography to mediate this brave new world. Caught between the strong traditions of the past, the vestiges of trauma and carnage, and the push towards modernization that had begun under the Meiji period, each of these artists pictured Japan as it had never been seen before—a raw, radical place of free thought that comes from the avant garde.
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In 1974, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented New Japanese Photography, the first major survey of work outside the island nation. Curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, the exhibition presented 187 photographs made between 1940 and 1973 by 15 photographers that traced the evolution of Japanese life through the war to the then-present day.
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Brooklyn-native Bruce Gilden went to see the show. The hours he spent as a child looking out of the second-story window of his home, watching the local toughs so their thing shaped his attraction to the characters he would come to photograph. In 1968, while studying sociology at Penn State, he saw Michelangelo Antonini’s film Blow-Up. The die was cast, so to speak.
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JAPAN. Tokyo. Kaeda. Business man at lunchtime outside JR station. 1996. © Bruce Gilden.