by Kelly Midori McCormick
This essay by historian Kelly Midori McCormick is the result of her research supported by the inaugural Eidolon Grant, awarded in 2024. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, McCormick illuminates the overlooked role of amateur women photographers in 1930s and 1940s Japan. Her work reveals how these women found in photography the potential for creative expression and community-building, but also were confronted with the mandate to cohere with nationalist policies during wartime.
1940 was a significant year for mass media interest in Japanese women photographers. The Photographic Weekly Report (Shashin Shūhō), a propaganda pictorial published by the Japanese Ministry of Information, published Sasamoto Tsuneko’s (1914—2022) image of three young women singing national songs, making her the first woman to have their photograph printed on the cover of a major magazine (Fig. 1). The photography magazine Photo Times (Foto taimusu) published a special issue dedicated to “jōryū sakka” (women artists), introducing the public to women who worked in a range of fields of photography internationally and within Japan (Fig. 2). Among the magazine’s profiles of women photographers the voices of the members of the Ladies Camera Club (L.C.C.) stood out: in a featured essay the chair of the club, Murai (Kuroda) Yoneko wrote that since the club’s founding in 1937 major publishers in the Tokyo photography world supported its activities and she declared that the club would continue its events even in the face of the wartime shortage of photography materials.1
Figure 1:
Sasamoto Tsuneko, cover image for June 1940 issue of Shashin Shūhō [Photographic Weekly].
The public visibility of women photographers at the heart of the Japanese empire challenges the widespread belief that amateur photography was largely halted from the late 1930s to 1945 due to censorship and material shortages. To the contrary, these years were a time when amateur photographers and women’s camera clubs were active. The recent discovery by Biyue Kong of the Ladies Camera Club’s correspondences, agendas, and ephemera preserved in the private collection of Murai (Kuroda) Yoneko at the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature, makes it possible to reconstruct how women sustained photographic practice and community as total war raged across East Asia.2 Recognizing the significance of popular photography in this context reveals how women found creative and social meaning in photography. But it also demands that we acknowledge the ways the community they built was tied to mass media production of war propaganda.
Recent scholarly attention to vernacular photography has identified the importance of acknowledging the ways that everyday photographs – including family snapshots, state mandated photo identification, photo contests, architectural documentation and so on – make up the majority of the way photography was historically used.3 Yet despite their profusion, photographs which Clément Chéroux describes as “utilitarian, domestic, or popular” have until recent decades existed “outside of what is officially deemed worthy of interest by the powers that be. It grows in the margins of the legitimate, established tastes and is decidedly popular, tied to mass culture rather than elite.”4
Figure 2:
Foto Taimusu [Photo Times] Women Artists Special Issue, April 1940.
I use the term “popular photography” to reflect the ways that the Japanese camera clubs of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s gave people the possibility to connect with one another and create photographs in a wide range of genres.5 Popular photography was a space where photographers made portraits to send to loved ones in the battlefield and also beautiful mountain scenes – it allowed people to feel they were putting their cameras to good use for the war effort and to find spaces to escape the war. In the context of a photo club like the L.C.C. club members, photography was more than a hobby, it was a way to build skills, share experiences, and support one another. Some of their photographs remained private, shared only within the group, while others were submitted to contests or featured in exhibitions. Photography gave these women a sense of purpose and connection during a national crisis and for the club’s leader, Murai Yoneko, it also led to making wartime propaganda.
One major challenge to writing this history of everyday photography and of early women photographers in Japan is the scarcity of preserved materials. Family photo albums, photographers’ letters, club records, and items like lists of club members or club regulations are often thrown away by those who owned them. With the loss of these materials, we lose valuable glimpses into how people in the past made photographs. Even though many people organized photography clubs, held exhibitions, or made their own publications to send to friends and like-minded photographers museums and libraries have seldom preserved their materials.6 In Japan limited funding for archives and museums means that efforts to collect, preserve, and make historical photo materials accessible to the public have focused on fine art photography. Since the 1990s, major institutions like the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography have largely only collected art prints, and do not include everyday items like family photo albums, police mugshots, or camera club memorabilia. As a result, the history of photography that we often see in museums only reflects a small window into how photography was practiced.
Giving equal weight to L.C.C. administrative records and newspaper and magazine accounts of their activities, historians can analyze the collaborative processes of social organizing, networking, and skill sharing by members of the club. The L.C.C. records offer photo historians the opportunity to analyze photographs and textual administrative records to see the records themselves as “interpretive work” crafted by the people who purposefully made them.7 Critical intervention into the lack of photographic archival materials, club records and media representations of these photographers tells us that everyday photography was not just about the images, it was a space for building community and collaboration.
The Founding of the Ladies Camera Club (L.C.C.) and Popular Photography at War
Figure 3:
“Women’s Photography Exhibition” (Fujin shashin tenrankai)
Asahi Shimbun (January 9, 1925), 2.
As early as 1925, exhibitions like the “Women’s photography exhibition” (Fujin shashin tenrankai) held at Matsuzakaya Department Store highlighted women’s participation in photography, a trend that expanded into the 1930s. Organized by the photography magazine Asahi Graph the exhibition was advertised in the Asahi Shimbun followed by a photograph of attendees at the exhibition (Fig. 3–4).8 Over a decade later, this earlier model of public display of “women’s photography” evolved in a new political climate with the founding of the Ladies Camera Club (L.C.C.) in 1937. Active through at least 1941, the L.C.C. followed the organizational structure of many wartime women’s patriotic associations which offered new avenues for women to organize publicly if they aligned with the war effort.9 Founded by Murai Yoneko and Mizoguchi Utako in 1937, the L.C.C. created a space for women to choose photography as means to be publicly visible. As historians Biyue Kong and Kerry Ross have shown, clubs like these allowed women greater agency than they were granted in other areas of public life such as equal voting powers and the right to “criticize, and exercise governance that they enjoyed [which] was much more liberal than what they were permitted as citizens.”10 Yet, as Sandra Wilson and Narita Ryūichi argue, this agency was embedded within a broader system that sought to align individual behavior with the needs of the wartime state. Women’s associations gave women new freedoms to “induce total identification between the individual and the state.”11 Feminists like Oku Mumeo played a significant role in transforming everyday life into the sphere where wartime policies were socialized and normalized.12 The L.C.C.’s founding during this political shift shows that women’s photography clubs could not operate outside state ideology. Their very existence depended on participating in it.
Figure 4:
“The popular ”Women’s photography exhibition” held by our office” (Ninki o atsumeta honsha no ‘fujin shashinten)
Asahi Shimbun (January 11, 1925), 2.
In July of 1937 Asahi Camera printed an announcement proclaiming the establishment of the Ladies Camera Club (Fujin kamera kurabu), or the L.C.C. The announcement began, “It is regretful that though there are so many women camera fans there are few women’s only camera clubs and so the mountain climber Kuroda Yoneko and Mizoguchi Hakurei Utako have become founding members and the L.C.C. was born.”13 The ad directed those interested in participating to contact the L.C.C. through the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun office. Published from 1926 to 2020, Asahi Camera has always been a point of convergence for amateur and professional photographers and photography critics and many amateurs saw its content as an aspirational model that would allow them to transition into becoming professionals.14 So, an announcement of a photo club was no surprise, however, the club’s focus on women was unique. This was the second major public announcement of the club: the month prior, the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun published a short article with a photograph of the inaugural meeting of the members gathered at the Matsuzakaya department store. Despite the high contrast of the photograph, it is possible to make out eighteen or nineteen women in hats seated in high-backed chairs around a long white, stately table (Fig. 6). Both announcements named that there were growing numbers of women photographers and a need for space to learn from and collaborate with one another. The Asahi Shimbun article pointed out that in addition to women’s interest in photography becoming more publicly visible, enthusiasm for photography had long been silently growing right under everyone’s noses as housewives secretly studied the craft.
Figure 5:
“L.C.C. no sōritsu: Gofujin bakari de kamera no kenkyūkai” [The establishment of the L.C.C.: Photography Study Group for Women Only]
Asahi Shimbun (June 16. 1937), 4.
The Asahi Shimbun’s attention to the rise of amateur women photographers culminated in hosting a photography contest from July to August of 1937. It announced a call for photographs made by amateur women photographers on the theme of “Mountains, ocean, and water that encouraged women.”15 The winning photographs featured images of women at leisure in natural landscapes, subtly weaving patriotic and class-based messaging into depictions of appropriate femininity during wartime. Drumming up enthusiasm and expectation, it announced on July 24 that the Asahi Shimbun offices had received more entries than expected and that readers could expect to see the winning photographs, selected by the newspaper photography department, in the evening paper of the next day. On July 25, the paper printed the first winning photograph and poem: Ikegami Takeko of Yokohama’s portrait of a woman in a gingham dress crouching on a dock at lake Yamanaka (Fig. 6). Due to the degradation of the image quality through its translation onto the newspaper’s pages it is difficult to tell what the woman focuses on – perhaps a tackle box or even a lunch box – but as she perches on the edge of a roughhewn dock over a lake near Mount Fuji, the simple joy of summer comes through the image to the viewer.16 The accompanying poem by Koyama Asako evokes images of the mountain air in the summertime creating an intermedia dialogue between the two. Two days later the paper printed a photograph by L.C.C. member Miyamoto Mitsue of a woman in a white skirt gleefully dangling her legs off the edge of a sailboat (Fig. 7). The woman on the boat in “Kaisō” (Fast sailing) smiles into the sun as the wind blows back her permed hair: she is the picture of upper middle class summer leisure, untouched by the full-scale Japanese invasion of China.17 The accompanying poem by Takei Itsuko captures the breathless glee of a woman flinging herself forward across the sea.
Figure 6:
Ikegami Takeko, “Yamanaka kohan” [Lake Yamanaka] and Koyama Asako “Asa no hitotoki”
Fujin kamera kyōgi [Women's Camera Contest] Asahi Shimbun (July 25. 1937), 4.
Under close examination, it is possible to see in this picturesque photograph and poem references to the ongoing war and the way these images functioned ideologically: the woman on the boat exercises a freedom of movement and visualization that will soon be controlled by the government if it isn’t in fact already limited by restrictions on luxury goods and appearing too “Western”. The poem makes subtle references to having hopes and expectations of “those who cross the seas”, possibly alluding to the men who have left to fight in China and Manchuria. During this period the Japanese Home Ministry forbade amateurs and professionals alike from photographing in most ports as they were considered sensitive strategic areas and classified as “restricted photography zones”.18 To cohere with government restrictions and censorship, the photographer carefully framed the scene in a way that made their location unidentifiable.
Figure 7:
Miyamoto Mitsue, “Kaisō” [Fast sailing] and Takei Itsuko “Umi no Kanata” [Beyond the ocean]
Fujin kamera kyōgi [Women's Camera Contest] Asahi Shimbun (July 27. 1937), 4.
On July 31, the newspaper printed another ocean scene, this time a woman and child in matching dresses, hats, and black leather shoes with bobby socks stand on the quay, pointing out to a large ship (Fig. 8). Though perhaps mundane at first glance, the photograph is striking for the way its photographer, Mōri Yūshi of Nakano, Tokyo, has captured both the commonplaceness of the continuation of Japanese shipping lines during the war and also an idealized image of upper middle class women on a trip to the seaside.19 The woman and girl’s clothes clearly mark them as affluent in the moment before escalation of wartime policies that cautioned conservative spending and promoted thriftiness as a means to winning the war with the slogan “luxury is the enemy” (zeitaku wa teki da).20 If during the war, as art historian Hagiwara Hiroko argues, “the image of women was something to be manipulated and consistently regarded as being essential for social control,” the photographers and newspapers played a role in suggesting the possibilities for how women could be represented in ways that though subtle, aligned with patriotic ideals for their behavior.21
Figure 8:
Mōri Yūshi “Hatoba” [Wharf] and Nakao Sadako “Shiroki fune” [White ship]
Fujin kamera kyōgi [Women's Camera Contest] Asahi Shimbun (July 31, 1937), 4.
Toward the end of the contest, the newspaper printed Murai Yoneko’s photograph of Kurobe Gorge in Toyama Prefecture (Fig. 9). Kurobe Gorge, in the Northern Japanese Alps is to this day a notoriously dangerous place to access by narrow trails built into the cliffs 500 meters above the roaring river. Murai’s photograph is heavily distorted by the newspaper pages, necessitating hand-touching that is evident in the hat of one of the figures, but still the overall scene of two mountaineers standing on the rocks in front of a rushing river comes through. The figure on the left is perhaps Murai in her signature hat and hiking skirt. Though on its surface, it is photograph documenting a climbing feat and those with the time and resources to focus on this pursuit, a few years later Murai returned to the significance of mountain photography, giving context to its meaning during the time of war.
Figure 9:
Murai Yoneko “Kurobe kyoko-ku” [Kurobe gorge] and Gotō Shizue “Taki” [Waterfall]
Asahi Shimbun (August 7, 1937), 6.
Through photographs submitted and selected, this showing of amateur women’s photographs in the pages of newspapers and magazines presents an idea of how wartime Japan could be represented in a way that on their surface seem to evade hardship and the difficult realities that people faced every day. Yet when scrutinized they reveal that even a mundane mountain scene was way to resist wartime restrictions while also making images that cohered with restrictions on photographable content.
Between Self-Expression and State Propaganda: The L.C.C. in the Late 1930s and Early 1940s
From 1937 to 1939 the L.C.C. continued to hold events, expanded its membership, and found public validation by organizing exhibitions and having their member’s photographs featured in major photography magazines. Access to drafts of their invitations to events, public commentary on their work, and their own published words provides insight into how they navigated participation in a photography club as a crucial part of engaging with the war they were called on to fight. In June of 1938 the L.C.C. held their first exhibition in Hibiya, Tokyo to celebrate their first year as a club.22 They also held at least three shooting sessions to celebrate the club’s anniversary and a party at the Asahi Shimbun offices featuring the publishing editor of the newspaper. Murai Yoneko’s administrative records for the club includes examples of invitations that were sent out to members to join a shooting session and the RSVP cards that members sent in (Fig. 10–11). These cards, might be considered as part of the dull everyday paperwork of a social group, are important documents that show that the L.C.C. continued to use the Asahi Shimbun offices for their administrative purposes in addition to holding meetings and utilizing their darkroom facilities. These postcards are not included in “histories of art” but are as valuable as any photographic print for what they tell us about the effort it took to make a club function and the care that members had in communicating with one another.
Figure 10-11:
RSVP cards where invitees hand-wrote “L.C.C. office” next to the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun address.
April and May 1938
Papers of Murai Yoneko, Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature. Reprinted with the permission of Yoshida Yoshiko.
Following the first-year anniversary of the L.C.C.’s founding in July 1938, high quality reproductions of L.C.C. members’ photographs were published for the first time in the mass press. The magazine Asahi Camera published a feature on women’s camera clubs, giving each photograph a full page of space (Fig. 13). Many of the selected photographs differ significantly from those published in the earlier Asahi Shimbun contest: gone are archetypes of gendered experience and instead an emphasis on making images that break out of expected norms and categories. Miyamoto Matsue photographed from behind one of two doctors in full scrubs operating on patient. (Fig. 13.) Though the patient’s body is out of view, the tools held by the two doctors and blood on their gloves are visible in the light of the large overhead lamp. It is not known how the photographer had access to such a scene, but through her image the message is clear that she is pressing on the boundaries of what was thought of as appropriate content for a hobby photographer. A photograph by Sato Takue, the former assistant to Nojima Yasuzō (1889-1964), took a different though resonant approach.23 On its surface, this photograph may seem merely like an image of the front of a sushi restaurant with rice cooling in sushi-oke (wooden barrels for cooling and mixing sushi rice) in the recently reconstructed Tsukiji market. Taken from a low angle on the street in front of the restaurant that one might view it from if sitting in a squatting position to wait for one’s turn to be given a seat, the photograph insists on a perspective that goes beyond normative expectations of a middle-class woman’s experience. A striking study of line and form, it is not a scene that can be typecast as part of a being a woman in a particular moment.
Figure 12: Asahi Camera, July 1938 (cover)
In April of 1940 the photography magazine Photo Times (Foto Taimusu) dedicated an entire issue to women photographers, the largest amount of publication space focused on amateur, professional, Japanese and international women photographers to date (Fig. 2). The magazine took a multi-pronged approach that was largely textual: it printed testimonies from a range of women to represent photography “From a woman’s perspective” (“Josei no tachiba kara”) alongside biographies of women photographers. Murai Yoneko expressed how difficult it was for women to find time for themselves (jibun no jikan) in a society where men expect women to take care of the entire household. Fukunaga Sumiko described her work to provide identification photographs to satisfy the new border patrol law that residency certificates and entry permission certificates should have photographs affixed them, which applied to all colonial subjects. Through the range of experiences shared by the women represented one gets the sense that there were many women making a living operating photography business, training in the technical skills of running a studio, thinking critically about the ways that women were pigeon-holed as only able to produce work on feminized themes. These women were eager to participate in photography despite limitations placed on them through shortages of materials, economic hardship, and gendered ideas about who a photographer should be.
Figure 13:
Miyamoto Mitsue “Operation” (Operachion) and Sato Takue “Tsukiji sightseeing” (Tsukiji shoken)
Asahi camera (July 1938), 14-15.
Within months of its publication Japan invaded French Indochina and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Despite the rapidly escalating war, photography magazines continued to be produced for and feature amateur photographers.26 Photography was increasingly controlled by the state: in December 1940 the Cabinet of Information ordered a consolidation of the eleven major photography magazines into just four.27 In 1943 amateur photography groups were all merged to form the Dai Nihon shashin-hō kokkai (Great Japan Photo Patriotic Association) which operated as a part of the Cultural Department of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and photographers were forced to cooperate with national policy. Yet, this state control over photography publications and organizations meant that photographers understood that their work must be framed in explicitly patriotic terms.
Bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japan declared war on the U.S. and the British Empire, triggering Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States. Amidst the intensification of attacks and aggressive expansionist policies that urged Japanese citizens to organize themselves to support the war through every aspect of their lives, women’s associations organized calls for photographs of women’s patriotic activities. Until as late as 1943 women’s patriotic organizations called for its members to make photographs of their efforts. For instance, the All Kantō Photography Association requested members to send in photographs of women and children to be gathered and sent to the frontlines to cheer up soldiers. The Asahi Shimbun reported on May 18, 1940, that Murai Yoneko would visit China to personally bring these photographs to the frontlines.28 As the war intensified, Murai’s transition into photographer explicitly supporting the interests of the state is likely representative of the many women who, when faced with collaborating with repressive state power to secure their own status, chose to do so.
In Murai Yoneko’s papers, the latest printed information of member names, addresses, and club regulations dates from 1941 when there were still thirty-three members (Fig. 14). One way Murai hoped that their work would be taken seriously at this point was through the club’s patriotic visit to the Tokyo Temporary Third Hospital to take photographs of injured and sick soldiers. The members were in high demand as they “snapped pictures without even thinking about poses and compositions”, so taken were they with the mission of photographing the patients.29 Most have assumed that this is the last year the club operated, but reports on calls from the Dai Nippon Fujinkai (Greater Japan Women’s Association) for women to submit their photographs on the theme of “This is how we fight” in 1943 suggests that until a very late stage in the war women were able to take and print photographs of how they were contributing to the war effort by “fighting bravely in their homes, factories, companies, farms, fishing grounds, and mountains.”30 Women of the L.C.C. might even have submitted their photographs to the association knowing that 168 selected images would be featured in an exhibition sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun in March of that year.
Figure 14:
Fujin Kamera Kurabu L.C.C. Kaiin meibo [L.C.C. Member directory] 1941.
Papers of Murai Yoneko, Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature. Reprinted with the permission of Yoshida Yoshiko.
Japanese wartime print media represented women as responsible for the spiritual mobilization of the home front through their efforts writing encouraging “comfort letters” (imonbun) and assembling comfort packages (imonbukuro) for soldiers.32 With male heads of the household gone, women also were responsible for making the family photographs to be sent to the battlefront to cheer on their husbands, sons, and friends. An Asahi Shimbun article from 1937 cheerfully reported on the patriotic women and young female students who gathered to pack dozens of these comfort packages (Fig. 15). The young students gather around piles of the white packages, which often contained “thousand stich belts” (senninbari) made by young women and worn by soldiers as protective amulets. In addition to necessities like soaps, toothbrushes, and matches, comfort photographs (imon shashin) were nestled inside these care packages. Soldiers were meant to carry them in their pockets, each image taken in and out of the soldier’s pocket becoming a material reminder of the “peaceful hometown scene” (nagoyakana jūgo fūkei) that brought him back to the reason why he was fighting.32
Figure 15:
“A group of patriotic women and maids went to Meiji Shrine this morning to pray for lasting military fortunes. The Fifth Girls' High School made comfort bags with devotion.” (Buun chōkyū no kigan ni kesa Meiji Jingū e aifu to jochū-san ikkō. Sekisei o komete Dai-go Takajōtei imon-bukuro-zukuri)
Asahi Shimbun (July 1937), 3.
Murai Yoneko, added her voice in support of creating imon shashin to send to the battlefront. After her visit to China in 1940 Murai impassioned, “It was beyond my imagination the ways the atmosphere is soothed if a single photograph of the mainland was hung up in the drab barracks and oppressive stone houses of China. If I can comfort the brave men like this…I really felt that I wanted to send as many as possible.”33 To help readers visualize their loved ones engaging with photographs on the frontlines, the pictorial magazine Photographic Weekly (Shashin Shūhō) staged photographs of soldiers looking happily on at the comfort photographs on the pages of the magazine itself (Fig. 16). The soldiers grin as they flip through images of people working industriously to support them in factories, or of pastoral country scenes.34 The soldiers held photographs taken by women back at home in their hands and though the actual photographs may have been lost the media representations encouraging women to perform this role remained.
Figure 16:
Soldiers depicted looking at photographs of scenes from home in the photo magazine Shashin Shūhō (Photographic Weekly) sent to them in comfort bags. “Shashin Shūhō in comfort bags” (Imon bukuro ni Shashin Shūhō)
Shashin Shūhō (January 1940), 43.
The story of the Ladies Camera Club reveals how in wartime Japanese women used photography to navigate and negotiate with the social barriers around photography. By contributing to patriotic messaging these women were able to develop their photographic practices in public spaces in ways that were not possible in the years prior. For the women of the L.C.C. photography was not merely a pastime, and they were not merely housewives or women dabbling with the craft; they made photographs that were published and written about because they were significant pieces of wartime strategy. Their photographs and club documents, both intimate and ideological give a sense of the reality of the limits on their everyday lives as the war escalated.
This research was supported by the Eidolon Grant 2024 programme of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography.
Acknowledgments:
My sincere thanks to Bianca Chui for assistance with initial archival research on this article and Kitamura Yoko at the Kanagawa Museum of Modern literature for facilitating access to Murai Yoneko’s archival collection.
Footnotes:
(1) From 1923 when Murai married Kuroda Shizuo she went by her married name, Kuroda Yoneko, but from the late 1940s she used her maiden name, Murai Yoneko. I follow photo scholar Biyue Kong’s decision to refer to her by her maiden name, after her husband’s passing, though all public references to her in the period I write about used her married name. See Biyue Kong, “Documenting Mountains in Interwar Japan: The Landscape Photography of Murai Yoneko and a new History of the Lady’s Camera Club” Windows on Comparative Literature 16–19 (April 2023), 40–49.
(2) Most scholarship on the L.C.C. focuses on the work of Nojima Yasuzō and presents him as a patron and guide for the club. Biyue Kong was the first to point out the historical inaccuracy in putting so much emphasis on Nojima as the leader of the women’s group. Turning to Murai Yoneko’s archive, Biyue Kong created an alternative narrative of their history demonstrating the leadership roles that the women of the club held. I follow Kong’s in using Murai’s maiden name, which she returned to using after her husband’s passing. Biyue Kong, 45; Kerry Ross, Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). For previous scholarship on the L.C.C., see Mitsuda Yuri and Shiina Setsu, Nojima Yasuzō sakuhin to shiryōshu: Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan shozō [Yasuzo Nojima 1889-1964 Works and Archives Collection of The Shoto Museum of Art] (Tokyo: Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan, 2009); Mitsuda Yuri, “Redeizu kamera kurabu to Nojima no sakufū no tenkai” [The Ladies Camera Club and Nojima’s development of style] in Nojima Yasuzo to redeizu kamera kurabu/Yasuzo Nojima and Lady’s Camera Club in 1930’s (Tokyo: Shibuya Shoto Museum of Art, 1993).
(3) Geoffrey Batchen further develops an argument for the role of vernacular photography in Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Japan: Izu PhotoMuseum, 2010).
(4) Clément Chéroux, “Introducing Werner Kühler,” in Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, eds. Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis (Steidel, 2020), 22.
(5) On the history of early twentieth century camera clubs, see Kerry Ross, “Democratizing Leisure: Camera Clubs and the Popularization of Photography,” in Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early-Twentieth Century Japan (Stanford: Sanford University Press, 2015), 99–127.
(6) A notable exception is the exhibition A Century of Japanese Photography (1968). The curators of this exhibition collected 220 anonymous photographs from Japanese magazine and newspaper archives which they displayed under the title “The Document”. The goal was to divorce the image from its author and argue for the mechanical power of the photograph to document a historical event. See Kelly Midori McCormick, “Inventing a Photographic Past for Japan: From A Century of Japanese Photography (1968) to the Construction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography,” History of Photography 46 (4) (2022), 243–65.
(7) Barbara Brookes and James Dunk, “Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge,” Rethinking History, 22:3 (2018), 282.
(8) An announcement for a “Fujin shashin tenrankai” (Women’s photography exhibition) held at Matsuzakaya Department Store and organized by Asahi Graphu in January 1925 was published on January 6 and a dally designed advertisement for the exhibition was printed on January 9, 1925, in the Asahi Shimbun. The newspaper also printed announcements for the exhibition on January 10, 11, 15, and 16.
(9) Japanese women did not win the right to vote until 1945, and so before this patriotic associations were a significant way to participate in the public sphere. On the role of patriotic women’s associations in wartime Japan, see Sujin Lee, “‘Fertile Womb Battalion’: The Gender and Racial Politics of Motherhood,” in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 133-157; Sandra Wilson, “Mobilizing Women in Inter-War Japan: The National Defense Women’s Association and the Manchurian Crisis,” in Gender & History Vol. 7 Issue 2, (August 1995), 295–314.
(10) Biyue Kong, Ibid., 45; Kerry Ross, Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
(11) Sandra, Wilson, “Family or State?: Nation, War, and Gender in Japan, 1937–45,” Critical Asian Studies 38 (2) (2006), 210.
(12) Narita Ryūichi, “Women in the Motherland: Oku Mumeo Through Wartime and Postwar,” in Total War and “Modernization,” ed. Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita. (Ithaca, New York: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), 145–147.
(13) October 23, 1936, the Asahi Shimbun reported on the start of a different women’s camera club, which also involved Mizoguchi Utako. Interestingly, many members did not show up to the first meeting because they were against having a male journalist photograph their inaugural meeting. “Onna kamera gyangu eiga sutā ya fujinkisha-tachi ga otoko ni chōsen nanori agu” [Women's camera gang: Movie stars and women journalists challenge men] Asahi Shimbun October 10, 1936, p. 3.
(14) Magazines like Asahi Camera actively courted amateur photographers by hosting hugely popular contests where amateurs submitted their photographs and winning submissions were printed in the magazine. On the history of Japanese photography magazines see: Saeki Kakugorō, Yokota Hiroshi, Tanino Kei, and Shirayama Mari. Shashin zasshi no kiseki [The Trajectory of Photography Magazines] (Tokyo: JCII Library, 2001).
(15) The paper phrased it as “josei o okoshita yama, umi, mizu” which can be translated as “mountains, ocean, and water that awakened” or “encouraged” women. I have gone with the latter, less literal translation. “Go fujin bakari de shijō kamera kyōgi” [Newspaper Photography Contest for Women Only] Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, July 4, 1937, p. 5.
(16) When asked if members went to Ginza to photograph street scenes, a woman quoted in another article on the founding of women’s photography clubs in Tokyo replied that only people from the country would choose that location and that members with Leica’s would travel further afield from Tokyo to take pictures. This overt reference to being able to afford the most expensive imported camera on the market and trips to the countryside illustrates existing class divisions in the amateur photography world: “Onna kamera gyangu eiga sutā ya fujinkisha-tachi ga otoko ni chōsen nanori agu” [Women's camera gang: Movie stars and women journalists challenge men] Asahi Shimbun October 10, 1936, p. 3.
(17) Catherine Bae discusses how many girls’ magazines published from 1937 to 1945 depicted women’s permed hair being cut off in support of wartime restrictions on luxury spending. “War on the Domestic Front: Changing ideals of Girlhood in Girls’ Magazines, 1937–1945,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal No. 42 (2012), 107-135.
(18) The Home Ministry issued restrictions on leisure photography after the beginning of armed conflict on mainland Asia in 1931. In addition to not being able to photograph areas within fortified zones, it was forbidden to fly over them or publish geographic guidebooks that included them. Within the city of Tokyo, it was also forbidden to photograph bird’s eye views from tall buildings and to take pictures of or from double-decker bridges. See “Chūi subeki satsuei kinshi kuiki” [Restricted Photography Zones to Be Careful of] in Saishin shashin jutsu dai kōza dai 2 kan [The latest photographic skill lecture course vol. 2] (Tokyo: Tokyo shashin tsūshin gakkō [Tokyo Photographic Communication School], 1934); “Satsuei kinshi kuiki shōkai” [Detailed explanation of restricted photography zones] in Shashin jitsugi dai kōza da 5 kan: fūkei satsuei no jissai [The practical skills of photography, Volume 5: The practice of taking scenery photographs] (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1938), 257; Naimushō (Home Ministry), Bōchō Kōen Shiryō [Lecture Materials on the Prevention of Espionage] (Tokyo: Naimushō, 1941), 23.
(19) On the continuation of wartime shipping routes see Justin Corfield, “Japan Mail Line,” in The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History, Volume 3 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 484–485.
(20) On state policies aimed at reducing consumption see Sheldon Garon, “Luxury Is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (2000), 41–78.
(21) Hagiwara Hiroko, “Comfort women: women of conformity: the work of Shimada Yoshiko” in Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts, Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollack (London: Routledge, 1996), 254.
(22) “Fujin Shashin ten,” Asahi Shimbun June 1, 1938, p. 6.
(23) Nojima Yasuzō was a photographer well-known for his work with the photography publication Kōga and organizer of the Nonomiya club. He has often been given credit as the driving force behind and advisor to the L.C.C. See Mitsuda Yuri, “Redeisu kamera kurabu to Nojima no sakufū no tenkai” [The Ladies Camera Club and Nojima’s development of style] in Yasuzō Nojima and Lady’s Camera Club in 1930’s/Nojima Yasuzō to Redisu Kamera Kurabu: Tokubetsu chinretsu (Tokyo: Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan, 1993). On Nojima Yasuzō see Philip Charrier, “Nojima Yasuzō's primitivist eye: ‘Nude’ and ‘Natural’ in early Japanese art photography,” Japanese Studies, 26:1 (2006), 47–68.
(24) “Josei no tachiba kara” [From a woman’s perspective] Foto Taimusu, April 1940, 1–5.
(25) That year Murai Yoneko also published a short piece on her approach to photography as, “Onna rashī kakudo wo motomete” [Seeking a feminine perspective] Asahi Camera 30 (5), November 1940.
(26) For an overview of the Fifteen Year war Japan waged, see Werner Gruhl, Imperial Japan’s World War Two (Routledge, 2017).
(27) Shashin Bunka was formed from Camera, Shashin saron [Photography Salon], Kamera kurabu [Camera Club]/Shashin Kagaku [Photo Science]: Asahi Camera was formed from Asahi Camera, Geijutsu Shashin kenkyū [Art photography research], and Shōzō shashin kenkyū [Portrait Photography Research]; Shashin Nippon was formed from Kogata kamera [Small Camera], Amachua kamera [Amateur Camera], and Kōga gekkan [Photo Monthly]: and Hōdō Shashin was formed from Foto Taimusu [Photo Times] and Kamera Āto [Camera Art]. See Shirayama Mari ‘Hōdō shashin’ to sensō 1930–1960 [Photojournalism and War 1930-1960] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa, 2014).
(28) “Yūshi imon ni” [Visiting brave soldiers] Asahi Shimbun May 18, 1940.
(29) Kuroda Yoneko, “Shashin no jōzuheta o koeta kyōchi” [Beyond the good and the bad of photograph] in “Fujin shashinka toshite no taiken wo kataru” [Speaking with women photographers about their experiences] Asahi Camera 31 (6) (183) June 1941.
(30) “Watashi tachi wa kaku tatakau boshū” [Call for photographs for This is How we Fight] Asahi Shimbun January 19, 1943, p. 3
(31) On media depictions of women contributing to the war, see David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media (Armonk, New York and London, England: An East Gate Book, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2008).
(32) Kin Toyoko, “Watashi no shashin hōkoku kiroku: dare ka kokyō wo omowazaru” [My photographic record of patriotism: How could someone not think of their hometown] Nippon Shashin [Japanese Photography] (May 1944), 52-53.
(33) Yoneko Kuroda, “Shashin no jōzuheta o koeta kyōchi” [Beyond the good and the bad of photograph] in “Fujin shashinka toshite no taiken wo kataru” [Speaking with women photographers about their experiences] Asahi Camera 31(6) (183) June 1941.
(34) “Imon bukuro ni Shashin Shūho,” [Shashin Shūhō in comfort bags] Shashin Shūhō January 1940, 43.
