Framing Former Japanese Colonies in Ruins: Swaying between Imperial Gaze, Cosmopolitanism, and Ruin Memories in Shitamichi Motoyuki’s “Torii”

• In Event: Post/colonial Horizons in Japan: Imperial Gaze, Neoliberal Vision, and Cosmopolitan Hope

Abstract

In his photography series “Torii”, Shitamichi Motuyuki takes shot of multiple torii gates, the traditional Shinto shrine gates, which Imperial Japan had built across its transpacific outposts in places such as Korea, Taiwan, and Northeast China. As curator Shinya Watanabe observes, Shitamichi opts not to present these symbols of the empire in a monumental fashion and, instead, frames the former colonial sites in ruins. Therefore, Shimomichi’s self-critical revelation of the forgotten war memories and the “meaningless[ness]” of nationalism (Watanabe 2008) still needs to be examined within the context provided by the recent movement of “ruin photography.”

In this paper, the author first argues that, despite Shimomichi’s self-reflexive methodology, the danger of “imperial gaze” still persists in Shimomichi’s series because the “frame of war” (Butler 2010) foregrounds primarily the Japanese subjective view of “Greater East Asia” and “Daitōa sensō.” The author then looks at the recent debate over the ethics and values of ruin photography within the North American context, especially in industrial Detroit, wherein the scholars discussed whether it amounted to sensationalist exploitation or aesthetic critique of capitalist deindustrialization. By transposing some key observations from this debate into the East Asian context, the paper ultimately argues that the main critical power of “torii” does not come from its criticism of war or nationalism, but from its “archaeology of the contemporary past” (Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014) that helps preserve the materiality of the remnants of (colonial) modernity through visual experience.

Author

• Shen Kun Xian, National Taiwan University