Review: Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture, by Jonathan M. Reynolds

Abstract

Jonathan M. Reynolds Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015, 360 pp., 23 color and 60 b/w illus. $45, ISBN 9780824839246 Debate over the nature of Japanese cultural identity has been a central focus of intellectual and artistic inquiry in the modern age. Questions about the role and value of Japanese tradition and its relationship to the Westernization and urbanization ubiquitous to modern Japan have shaped the work of many artists. In his recent book Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture , Jonathan M. Reynolds considers a broad array of visual material to explore how artists, architects, and critics engaged with these issues in the second half of the twentieth century as they negotiated the effects of World War II and the American-led Allied occupation of Japan. While photography and architecture are highlighted in the subtitle, a broad range of material is discussed, including pottery, advertising posters, book design, and art criticism. Central to each of the five case studies considered is a longing to locate the authentic roots of Japanese cultural identity at a spatial and/or temporal remove from the nation's contemporary urban realities. Reynolds argues that these distances served allegorically to help artists negotiate the complexities of their rapidly changing society while often also endowing their work with a cultural authenticity that they felt distinguished it from Western forms of modernism. Reynolds begins by framing his study in relation to literary criticism of the 1930s, a period in which multiple Japanese authors attempted to articulate a sense of alienation and a crisis of identity in response to cultural changes encouraged by Westernization and urbanization. Writing in 1933, Hideo Kobayashi (1902–83) implied that stories set in distant locations or earlier time periods were easier to comprehend than life in contemporary Tokyo (xv), while Sukutarō Hagiwara (1886–1942) suggested in 1938 that protecting the country from decline necessitated a “return to Japan” ( Nihon e no kaiki ) through …