Fuchikami Hakuyō and the ‘Manchukuo Pastoral’ in 1930s Japanese Art Photography

Abstract

The art photography of Fuchikami Hakuyō and his circle in Japanese Manchuria is commonly and benignly treated as hybridized modernism, a product of the bending of conventional 1930s Japanese styles (pictorialist, constructivist, realist) through contact with the unfamiliar and the exotic. As such it is deemed reflexive in relation to the stimuli of a new land and peoples, but disconnected from the political, economic, and social processes of imperialism and colonialism in Northeast China. The following article uses both structuralist and post-structuralist theoretical approaches to challenge this interpretation, arguing that through the skilful erasure of colonial violence and disruption, the lyrical images of villages, agriculturalists, and factories produced by Fuchikami and his Manshū Shashin Sakka Kyōkai (Manchuria Photographic Artists Association) participate directly in processes of state construction in Manchukuo. The development of a quasi-documentary pastoral aesthetic by Fuchikami and the Manchuria photographers is given close attention in the analysis, particularly as it relates to the influence of French Barbizon school painting on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese art.