Wartime Manchukuo’s Photography Registration System: Mutō Tomio’s Bureaucratic Approach to Photography

Abstract

This article examines Manchukuo’s photography registration system (1940) that the bureaucrat Mutō Tomio introduced. Conceived to utilize photography for propaganda purposes, the registration system significantly changed the production of photographs in Manchuria, ushering in a bureaucrat-led artistic climate that embraced reform bureaucrats’ vision of state planning. I begin by examining how Mutō’s perspectives on bureaucracy, state-building, and corporatism embodied the core principles of reform bureaucrats. Then, I investigate how the ideals of these civil servants were articulated by the photography registration system, organizing the discussion into three sections that focus on ideology, organization, and technology; these focuses correspond to content, institutional structures, and form in art, respectively. In sum, imperial Japan’s war with China necessitated a justification for mobilization, which was expressed in the war ideology hakkō ichiu (“the eight corners of the world under one roof”). This ideology was conveyed by photographs of loyal-spirit towers (chūreitō). To solidify the state’s control over cultural production, the government organized and established a leader-based system for the photography world. The importance of technology for the war effort ended the existing photographic propaganda model guided by Fuchikami Hakuyō. His “dark” aesthetic was considered undesirable; instead, a modernist aesthetic was favored for registered pictures.