Capturing Japan: Australian Photography of the Postwar Military Occupation

Abstract

Official Australian photography of the military occupation of postwar Japan provides a significant modern case study of photography as a medium of neo-colonial and Orientalist representation. Asserting its dominance of the combined British Commonwealth Occupation Force supporting the Americans, the Australian military revelled in the role of occupier of a wartime enemy who was still widely loathed. Sometimes compared with the British Raj in Imperial India, the Occupation became a historically familiar exercise of the white man’s power and privilege over the conquered and colonised Asiatic. It was marked by the rituals and practices of tourism, including the taking of photographic images. Photography was the main medium by which the event was recorded and circulated to the public back in Australia. Keen to convey images of a force enjoying the privileges of victory while in firm control of a still distrusted people, official photographers affiliated with the Australian military sought to capture a picturesque, feminised and ‘traditional’ Japan. This was a Japan that the war had made obsolete and which the Occupation was intended to modernise. The photographic appropriation of Japan reveals the ambiguity of the Occupation project, and the shallowness of Orientalist representation more generally.