In our next and last module four I'd like to take a look at the literary photograph once again. How it develops from the late 19th century into the 20th century in Japan. Japan at this point having succeeded in industrializing, expanding throughout the world, becoming part and parcel of the global capitalist economy. How the image and the word, the way that that sort of melding or, or integration of both, the the sort of, two-way, sort of support system that upheld the, especially the image of the human being and the written word, how that becomes modified, the things that aren't modified, the things that remained the same. I'd like it to take a look then at what is perhaps the last generation of authors and illustrators, photographers, but also consumers, readers, who conceive of the word and the image as intertwined, especially in terms of the human countenance, or depictions of human beings themselves. Anyway, the first image I want you to take a look at is something that I found a couple of years ago in an antiquarian bookstore in Tokyo. It's a photograph, a small photograph again, a calling card-size photograph, it looks bigger here on the screen. It's of a young man with three children. The first time that I saw this photograph in the old bookstore I tried to imagine what the scene was. There's no woman sitting there, so these children perhaps are traveling with their father. Perhaps this young man is their father and is about to travel away himself to go on business, to study abroad. Perhaps it's right before the Russo-Japanese War, that's possible, as well it's not dated, we don't know exactly when it's from. I would imagine from their hairstyles and from the clothing that it's perhaps the 1890s, or the early 20th century. Anyway, looking at the obverse, or the front side of the photograph, tells us where in Sapporo, in Hokkaido, the photographic studio was, but we don't really know anything else beyond that. Again, turned it over and was able to discover that the man who was photographed in this scene here composed and wrote this prose passage onto the photograph itself. As we've seen, a lot of photographs from the 1860s, 1870s have poetic words or very, very well-crafted, finely-crafted prose pieces written directly onto the front of the photograph and then more, and more onto the back of the photograph. But this was the first time that I'd ever seen a photograph with so many words actually scribbled onto it. I purchased the photograph, brought it home, and then deciphered the characters, and then I've attempted a translation for us, so that we can see what's actually going on, the relationship between this young man and the three children who are in the photograph. He says, "Oh my innocent children, how much do I love you! My wish is to become your friend. Your natural exuberance, your expressions, together with the fact there is not a single fleck of impurity within your hearts bring great joy to me. 27 years have passed since I was born. With little to attract the opposite sex, I have found no partner and hence lack the means to find peaceful joy in family life. Still, I possess cherished friends like yourselves. Why should I mourn the absence of wife or child? My sole regret is that I was not born shortly before or after you, so that we could all play together. Inscribed by Sakagami Tōru. Sakagami Toru, I don't know who he is. This photograph was part of a collection of a samurai noble family from the Edo period who became made the new major nobility. He doesn't seem to be a member of their family. Perhaps I imagine that he could have visited them as an instructor for the young children, was a distant relative. Someone who is part of the domain, I don't really know why this one photograph was part of this larger collection of old photographs from the 19th century. All we know is what he's written on the back, and obviously he's taken a good deal of time, probably wrote this out on paper. Thought about it, edited, before he actually inscribed the words on the photograph. Whether he had little to attract the opposite sex is not something I can judge. We're in a different century entirely, but, and he may be being modest and so forth, but we do know that he's single and that he hasn't had children. He doesn't have children himself. He's very attracted, he really, really just loves this sort of natural childlike qualities in these kids. He must have spent a good deal of time with them. That's why I imagine that he's either a distant relative who lives nearby or perhaps an instructor who visits the house regularly and spends time. Obviously, he spends a lot of quality time with these children even though he's not related to them, or he's not their parent, at least. As we've seen in the earlier photographs, the older photographs, the men and women who write on the backs or on the fronts of their own photographs, or often state their age, they stop for a moment, reflect on themselves. But first of all they tell us how old they are and what the years that have sort of accreted their life experiences, what these experiences have meant to them. He doesn't know family joy, the joys and the comforts of a family life, but he has cherished friends, and he describes these young children as friends. If we imagine, the youngest child is probably about three years or four years old. So him writing like this to them, as if they were friends, seems a little perhaps strange, off key to us, in a way. But, again, we need to recall that often these words were meant to be testimony to the feelings and the thoughts of the person in the photograph at that time, and they were meant to travel or to cross over the ages, maybe five or ten years on. These children would have these photographs and then look back, perhaps in their teens or their early 20s, their early adulthoods they'd look back at how much this older man, really cherish them in the time, and the meaning that their existence, what they meant to him in his life. So I think that he's imagining as he's writing this, how they will look back on what he's writing in five or ten years, or so. Anyway, he says at the end, in a playful sort of way, his only regret, is that he wasn't born at the same time as them, so that they can also play together in the same way, [LAUGH] I mean if he were he wouldn't be able to write this wonderful prose passage. But anyway, it's a message to these children for when they reach adolescence or young adulthood as well. We see that the custom of writing on the back of a photograph, of one's photograph, is becoming more and more inclusive. There are group photographs. Sometimes we'll find photographs of several people, and each of them will have one or two lines that they write in, a sort of collaboration sort of work that they will write on them. All kinds of different variations and, as I said, the writings, the scribblings on the backs of these images become more and more elaborate, and from, perhaps, 10 or 15 years before this photograph was taken, we often see them turning into, becoming this sparks, so to say, of a short story or a novel. This is an actual photograph that Mr. Sakagami had taken of himself and his young friends, and he wrote on the back of it. But we often see prose passages, or works of prose in magazines at this time, or before this time, which were written posing as writing on the back of a photograph, and it will often be, for example, 1,000 letters or 2,000 letters, in other words, impossible to write on the back of a simple photograph. But the frame, these photograph inscriptions, provide a sort of fictional frame in order to create stories as well at this time, and we can see threads of this throughout early Japanese modern literature.
