On Thursday, February 24, 2011, Momoko and I met Kazuhiko Motomura, who was seventy-eight years old at the time, a retired employee of local governments in Japan, a career civil servant who looked the part: simple, conservative, and fastidious in his attire, understated and polite in his countenance. He was born in 1933 and grew up in a rural area called Saga, near Nagasaki, then he and his family moved to Tokyo in the 1960s after he got a job in the city’s department of tax and revenue.
In his spare time, over two decades, Motomura set up his own publishing company, Yugensha, and published five monumental photography books, each a carefully refined masterpiece. Three are by Robert Frank (The Lines of My Hand, 1972; Flower Is…, 1987; and 81 Contact Sheets, 2009), the most intimate and personal and arguably the best books of Frank’s career. Another is by Jun Morinaga (River: Its Shadow of Shadows, 1978), who was Smith’s assistant on the Hitachi project in Tokyo in 1961–62. The fifth is Television: 1975–1976 by Masao Mochizuki, 2001.
Each Yugensha book came in an edition of fewer than one thousand copies and was priced at what amounts to more than one thousand dollars apiece. Today, a seller of rare photography books in Santa Fe, New Mexico, lists a complete set of all five Yugensha books for $15,000, which might be a bargain. In 2008, Christie’s auctioned a copy of Flower Is … for $6,250. Motomura’s books were published in impeccably crafted boxes, and each page displays stunning reproduction values that make evident his utter lack of concern for commerce. This modest, practical tax officer made landmarks from his hobby.
Motomura met Smith through Morinaga, and then he met Frank through Smith. He built a trust with Frank that American curators and editors couldn’t, which allowed Frank to reveal earnest, intimate emotions in a manner not seen anywhere else, not even in The Americans, which is more calculated and positioned. Motomura’s innocence, his lack of striving on the world’s art stage, must have allowed that to happen. In that way, he reminded me of Hall Overton.
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The day before our meeting with Motomura, Momoko had spoken with him on her cell phone. He told her that we should meet him at 11:00 a.m. the next day on the sidewalk outside a bookstore in Shinjuku. When we arrived, Motomura was already there. An average-looking man around five foot five, standing on the sidewalk in the most megadeveloped strip in Tokyo—Times Square squared—he toted an enormous backpack, carrying, we learned a few minutes later, copies of each of his oversized books, plus notebooks and archival materials.
I assumed that Motomura had selected this meeting place because of proximity to this bookstore, but that wasn’t the case. No movement or curiosity was expressed toward the store, which sold mass-market books and magazines. Instead, Motomura led us down a nearby stairwell into Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, where we walked a maze of tunnels for fifteen or twenty minutes, taking several ninety-degree turns in both directions, before hiking up another stairwell and out onto the sidewalk in front of a department store several blocks away. We walked inside and took an indistinct elevator up eight floors where the doors opened into a nearly empty coffee shop.
My first question was part introduction, letting Motomura know that I was deeply moved by his books, by his extraordinary efforts that seemed so impractical. I told him I was curious how he came to be so deeply interested in photography and then act on it in such a sophisticated manner.
He listened to Momoko’s translation. Then he paused for several seconds. Finally, he chuckled and said, I wonder. I don’t really know myself.
All three of us laughed. I asked him about his childhood and youth in Saga.
It isn’t the sort of place that stands out, he said, chuckling again. He didn’t seem quick to elaborate, so I asked what were his passions as a young boy.
Since I was small, I liked to collect things.
Were your parents collectors? I asked.
No, not at all. He laughed.
What did you collect as a kid?
I collected books, Motomura said, warming up. Around the time Japan lost the war in 1945, I was in my first year in middle school. I wanted to make a bit of money, so I bought a lot of manga comic books and started a little book-rental store. That’s how I earned my allowance. I used most of the money to see films. I think maybe I became interested in photography because I watched films. The more films I watched, the more I began to choose movies by filmmakers. Akira Kurosawa, all of his films, especially Seven Samurai. I watched any film. I was living in a rural area in Saga, where there weren’t many movie theaters, so not all the foreign movies imported to Tokyo were shown there. Japanese movies all got played, but not so much the foreign ones.
He went on to explain that after he moved to Tokyo, the photography world opened up for him. He even enrolled in the Tokyo College of Photography and, among others, he met Jun Morinaga and the two became friends.
Morinaga was born in Nagasaki [in 1937], but his parents were from Saga, as well. And during the war with America, when it was beginning to look like Japan was going to lose, Morinaga’s mother moved out of Nagasaki and back to Saga with her children, including Morinaga. Morinaga’s father and older sister, who was about twelve years old, stayed behind in Nagasaki, where his father had work. His sister was there to take care of their father. Both of them were killed by the bomb.
Later that year of 1945, the eight-year-old Morinaga returned to Nagasaki with his family to see the devastation. Fifteen years later, in 1960, when he was twenty-two, Morinaga began making abstract photographs documenting extreme pollution and decay along Tokyo’s muddy rivers, dead plants and animals covered in oil and muck. These are the images published by Motomura in River: Its Shadow of Shadows, within which Morinaga wrote these words (translated from the Japanese by Momoko), “At first I felt it was a world of death. Later in my work photographing the ugliness, I realized that there were microorganisms living there. As I got closer, I realized there were thousands of little insects moving around. The world I had presumed to be a world of death was in fact a world of life. Neither way of looking at the river is wrong.”
Motomura told me, Morinaga took photos of dead dogs and cats floating in the river, things like that. I think his memories of his father and sister killed in the Nagasaki bombings are reflected in those photos.
In 1961, in the middle of his three years making those photographs of the polluted rivers, Morinaga began a one-year assistantship with Smith on the latter’s Hitachi project in Tokyo. Smith was two decades older than Morinaga at the time, but the two men’s interests in humanity and the contradictions of industry couldn’t have been more overlapping.
When he showed those photos to Smith, said Motomura, Smith was in tears. Smith wanted to see Nagasaki and they went there together.
Morinaga’s work in Tokyo foreshadowed Smith’s decision to document the fallout from polluted waters in Minamata. I asked Motomura how it came to be that he helped fund Smith’s early work in Minamata. His roundabout answer went like this:
Well, I’d seen Robert Frank’s photos, his book—The Americans. I was very interested in that. Then I thought that there must be more great photos of Frank’s out there, that he must have more great photos that weren’t published. I myself wanted it. I wanted to see more of Frank’s photos—not just The Americans. So if more books had come out after The Americans, I would have just bought those books instead of making them myself.
So, Smith was the one who introduced me to Frank. When Smith expressed his interest in taking photos in Minamata, I told Smith I would pay for his living expenses in Japan if he introduced me to Robert Frank. I only helped him out in the beginning. Then he got support from other sources.
Minamata is a rural area. The cost of living isn’t very expensive. So I got locals to look for a room for him to rent. At that time there was a girl named Aileen—a half Japanese, half foreigner—who came with Smith as an assistant. Once they were situated in Minamata, she took care of a lot of things and I wasn’t so much involved. I had a flat in Harajuku at that time, which Gene and Aileen used as a base when they were in Tokyo. I received many prints from Eugene as payment.
I asked Motomura how his relationship with Frank was established.
I have almost all of Frank’s, if not all of the different versions of The Americans. It was published many times in different countries. I have all versions. The very first one was in France and I think it was the best one. The title was Les Something. Les America? Something like that. At first, American publishers didn’t make the book because they thought there was prejudice against America. And then I happened to have the connection with Smith, who was friends with Frank. So I was introduced to him by Smith in 1971.
When I first went to New York to meet him, Frank had stopped making photo books. He was working on movies. He said to me, “What on earth are you doing here?” And I told him I wanted to make a new book of his work. He just kept shaking his head. Finally, I asked, “Is that okay?” and he said, “It’s okay. Let’s make it a good book, and I’ll send you a dummy.” And he did.
A few weeks after our trip around Japan, Momoko wrote me an e-mail from Bali in which she remembered Motomura:
“He was clearly committed to making these books available to the world. What remained unclear, however, even after your persistent quizzing, were his motivations—what made those particular books special to him. He resisted a clear answer, or he didn’t have one. All these things combined with his constant efforts to divert attention from himself—he thought it was a cheerful joke when you told him you wanted to write an article about him—made me see him as a man whose actions were guided by real passions, rather than by expectations, egotism, fears, or anything like that. I will always admire him for that.”