Euro-American modernity arrived in Japan during a precarious time. World War II had just ended, atomic bombs had devastated two major cities, land was barren following destruction by fire-storms, famine was widespread, and, for the first time in the country’s history, foreign soldiers occupied its land. Suddenly modern America, with its Coca-Cola, playing cards, and t-shirts, was everywhere, awkwardly overlying prewar Japanese aesthetics. Shomei Tomatsu, born in 1930, came of age during the occupation era and was keenly aware of the tension surrounding the transition from prewar aesthetics to American-style modernism. The photographs and essays collected for his first U.S. retrospective, Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, follow this uneasiness with its own ambiguity: Time here loses all authority while remaining the theme of the exhibition. Tomatsu uses the camera, with its connotations of truth and immediacy, in a way that simultaneously recalls and rejects the photojournalistic style popular in the 1950s and 1960s. More than that, however, Skin of the Nation creates its own postmodern understanding of time—images are direct, astute, and current while still fixed inside the shell of the past. They reflect genkokei, an odd Japanese word that appears in the opening of the catalogue: “a spectacle that is at once a real place and a mental image” (12). Tomatsu’s blurring of time betrays the falsity of the photograph. As Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, the camera is a soothing machine, one that makes us believe in “reality.” Tomatsu’s images probe this notion of truth.

Most retrospectives rely on a chronological arrangement of an artist’s oeuvre; this one does not. Rather, the scholars and curators John Dower, Sandra Phillips, and Leo Rubinfien arrange the photographs with a postmodern rationale, placing victims of atomic bombs next to anti-Vietnam War protesters, images of crass Americanization next to classic Japanese beauty, color next to black and white. This arrangement further underscores Tomatsu’s own layering of time: Moments overlap in his images like double-exposed prints. Tomatsu does not simply muse over the vestiges of atomic obliteration; he looks at how Japan’s abrupt postwar transition and forced Americanization was destructive as well. There was no gentle transition, but an abrupt, ugly superimposition of disparate cultures.

In the catalogue’s forward, Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, explains the exhibition’s division according to theme rather than chronology; this arrangement, he claims, will intrigue Western audiences. However, Benezra does not state why the exhibition as a whole is of interest—in fact, the reason for the exhibition is never properly addressed in the catalogue. Sixty years after the end of World War II, Tomatsu’s photographs might finally force Americans to understand the aftermath of the war from a Japanese point of view.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put together Skin of the Nation for American eyes. Americans are generally aware of the devastation that occurred in Japan in 1945. Yet the images that have haunted American memory are poles apart from Tomatsu’s images. Americans saw the atomic bomb as a mushroom cloud, something distant, otherworldly, and even symbolic of American power. The Japanese, on the other hand, saw the bomb on the faces and bodies of survivors. To understand something visually, especially war, is an inescapable modern and postmodern fact. The way we see is the way we understand—news cameras, papers, internet, all flooded with pictures, make images of devastation and death available to us now more than ever. To bring Tomatsu’s personalized images of a past war to the American public now—to a new generation of Americans, one with pointedly disparate notions of war—is to bring more than just pictures. It is to bring a new understanding of destruction, a new visual reality of warfare.

In 1960 the Japan Council Against Hydrogen and Atomic Bombs commissioned Tomatsu to photograph the devastation in Nagasaki. The council expected a straightforward, photojournalistic portfolio of images, like those in Life and other such magazines. What they got was something entirely different: Photographs infused with surreal elements, images of overlapped time, doubt, and flattened progress. Tomatsu found relics of 1945 worthy of his camera’s eye, rather than the flattened crop fields or craters left from the bomb. He took portraits of hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic blast. These photographs are not a cloying call for tears; they are images of what happened, recorded on the bodies and objects of a lost world. His photographs are unsweetened by sympathy or, worse, by pity. The portrait of Hibakusha Tsuyo Kataoka, from 1961, for example, is a powerful image. The woman looks directly at the camera. Her scars are unavoidable facts. Yet, through them, we can also see how beautiful she was before the bomb. Her pose and her delicate features define ideal female beauty in prewar Japan. Thus, through Tomatsu’s gaze we see Japan’s past and present embodied in one person—her prewar body has, in a gruesome sense, been “Americanized.” As Tomatsu himself has previously stated: “The bomb victims have bridged the two phases.”

Rubinfien’s essay, the first in the catalogue, called “The Skin of the Nation,” looks in depth at the photographs themselves and at Tomatsu’s personal history. Rubinfien focuses on the issues of time and change in postwar Japan, specifically in terms of Americanization. In a profound passage, Rubinfien states, “Everything in [Tomatsu’s] pictures is passing on” (36). This “passing on” is short for Tomatsu’s focus on the divide between pre- and postwar and the loss of a traditional Japanese aesthetic. Rubinfien makes a case for dual vantage points, American and Japanese, albeit gently. The dyad of perspectives as he sees them, however, are both located within the borders of Japan. His essay addresses Tomatsu’s entire oeuvre by focusing on time and the concept of genkokei, what he calls Tomatsu’s “quintessentially Japanese . . . photographic vision” (7).

Each essay in the catalogue builds upon the last, and Phillips’s essay, “Currents in Photography in Postwar Japan,” puts Rubinfien’s arguments into context. Phillips, as curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has written on various photographers, including Diane Arbus and John Szarkowski. In this essay, she, too, focuses on Tomatsu’s interest in time, stating, “Tomatsu has made the sea a personal metaphor for the effects of time—the cycles of life and death, change and stasis, destruction and rebirth” (42). Phillips makes sure that her essay does not focus on the images of the atomic blasts that so many critics and scholars understand as Tomatsu’s only work. She discusses the many diverse angles through which Tomatsu addresses time, either blatantly or subtly. She sees Tomatsu’s book of photographs, The Sea Around Us, as the cornerstone of this theme. The identity of Japan, an island nation, has always been tied to the water. Tomatsu challenges what this means by focusing on the “devastating effects of typhoons or examining the debris washed up onto the shore” (42). Images such as Untitled [Nagoya], from the 1959 series Floods and the Japanese, represent aspects of postwar Japan and allegorize Japan’s wartime and post-wartime experience.

Phillips also makes a broad connection between East Asian and Euro-American photography, which Rubinfien does not. Yet her discussion is limited to the understanding of Western ideas entering the East and never vice-versa: “Japan experienced a significant opening up to, and dialogue with, various kinds of Western photography during this period” (43). Phillips points out the chronological connection between the images in the Family of Man exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and Tomatsu’s photographs. The American exhibition, organized by Edward Steichen, aimed to show the similarities of people throughout the world, humanity’s shared values of life and community; however, in reality the exhibition focused on how the rest of the world shares America’s values. In addition, as Phillips states, the photographs in the Family of Man ignored all conflict within and between societies: war, occupation, oppression, and devastation are censored. Tomatsu’s photographs reveal what has been hidden from Americans.

The final and most compelling essay in the catalogue is Dower’s “Contested Ground: Shomei Tomatsu and the Search for Identity in Postwar Japan.” This essay calls attention to the parallels between Tomatsu’s vision and Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Lecture upon winning the 1994 Prize in Literature, entitled “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.” In the years between the end of World War II and Oe’s speech, the ambivalence brought on by the quick stamping of Euro-American modernity had infused the nation. According to Dower, the Japanese were torn between past and future and found themselves doubting their own heritage and challenged by the increasing Americanization of Japanese society. Despite writing the strongest essay in the catalogue, Dower seems to find a certain sadness in the loss of tradition, which Tomatsu rejects. Tomatsu does not smudge his prints with nostalgia; he simply shows what he sees.

At the same time, Tomatsu’s pictures are more than straightforward documents. Genkokei requires both firsthand experience of a place as well as a conception of that place. A mixture of shin (the essential reality) and kei (the actual place) reside together in Tomatsu’s images. His photographs reflect this anachronistic visual reality. He saw the kei of ground zero, of the heart of his country, and he found its shin in other things: a helmet with a piece of scalp welded into it by the heat of the bomb; the human victims themselves, with their scars and personalities; a broken watch stopped at the exact moment of the explosion; jovial American soldiers; the sea; the workers in the fields; prostitutes; and the shunned children born of miscegenation. The mixing of time and space—Tomatsu’s visual reality—is strikingly premodern Japanese. He shows postmodern Japan as an ensemble of genkokei images. This mix of premodern and postmodern makes the catalogue not only beautiful, but also part of an important mission to stamp out American ignorance. In this sense, the catalogue is as much a necessary document as the photographs.