One afternoon Momoko and I met eighty-four-year-old Taeko Matsuda, who founded Cosmo Public Relations in 1959 and soon gained the powerful Hitachi as a client. In 1961 she hired Smith to photograph the company.
Matsuda had grown up in a Tokyo orphanage run by her parents, who encouraged her to learn as much English as she could. In 1951, she moved to Los Angeles to attend college at the University of Southern California, one of the first Japanese students to do so. Then she spent six years working for NBC in Los Angeles. When we met her in Tokyo in 2011, she retained a glamorous touch. She brought out photographs of her and Gene in Tokyo in 1961–62, and she looked gorgeous and charming. I could see her fitting in well in Los Angeles, sporting sunglasses, driving a convertible in Santa Monica. Her English was broken when we met her; she said she’d lost much of it from lack of use over the years.
Matsuda arrived in Los Angeles the same year that Life published Smith’s epochal essays “Spanish Village” and “Nurse Midwife.” Smith would never be so famous as he was in the early 1950s, still less than a decade removed from his work covering the Pacific theater in the war.
Matsuda was a fan of Smith’s, first because of the sensitivity with which he’d photographed the war, then enhanced by his portrayals of the two cultures foreign to him in “Spanish Village” and “Nurse Midwife.” Menace and fear were the norms of those times (McCarthyism, the beginning of the Cold War, the space race with its esoteric paranoia), but none of that was found in Smith’s visual reports on traditional Spain and rural black America. If anything, he found menace and fear when he focused his lenses on industry and urban life in Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s. You could say that Smith’s Pittsburgh was a study of mainstream America, a study of Life’s readership, and the mirror he held up was troubling. Using different styles and techniques and subjects, Smith and Robert Frank were operating on the same plane at the same time.
Matsuda told us Cosmo put up Smith and Carole in an apartment owned by a man who ran a stationery store in Roppongi Station. The apartment was above a flower shop, Matsuda said, and when Gene and Carole got here Gene said, “Wow, we travel halfway around the world and we’re still living with flower shops, that’s great.”
Matsuda said that Smith’s efforts on the Hitachi project lasted four times longer than expected. When Hitachi would complain about Smith’s belabored operation, she would say to them, “He can’t help it; it’s what he does; just wait.”
Hitachi had to wait almost two full years to reap dividends on their investment. Life, welcoming Smith’s return to its pages after an eight-year absence with a celebratory op-ed, published a layout of his Hitachi photographs under the title “Colossus of the Orient” on August 30, 1963.
The publicity Hitachi received from the Life spread redeemed everything for Matsuda and her client. The degree of warmth she expressed toward Smith was notable. She missed him. Perhaps that was just her style, being in the business of marketing and publicity, but that’s not the feeling I received from her.
* * *
A few days later, Momoko and I went back to meet with Taeko Matsuda again. This time, she had with her a former employee of Cosmo who ran errands for Smith, Hiroshi Shimakawa, who went on to become a novelist. His father had been killed during the war when Shimakawa was three years old and he, like many Japanese, considered Smith’s photographs from the war to be sensitive and sympathetic, not American propaganda. His memories of Smith contained revealing details that I hadn’t heard from anyone else:
I spent a lot of time cleaning up empty liquor, beer, and wine bottles and going to the store to get Gene and Carole their everyday necessities, including whiskey and beer for Gene. One thing I remember the most is that Gene actually broke his leg somehow but he didn’t realize he’d broken it and he couldn’t remember how. He didn’t feel much pain because of the alcohol. Then he finally went to the hospital and there was a fracture. It wasn’t a bad fracture, but still, he just worked right through it. Another thing I remember is that Gene brought with him all these old novels that were yellow on the side, faded yellow pages.
Shimakawa then changed his tone, musing on Smith:
There’s a mysterious, sublime, divine force present in people like Gene. But there were two sides to him. One side had the felt beauty of a true professional artist. The other side was lazy and indulgent. The good side usually came out when he had a camera in his hands. Carole really took care of him. He couldn’t have made it through a day without her. Basically, I was helping her help him.
You could say that Gene saw these two sides to everything in everything he did, including his Hitachi and Minamata work. Postwar Japan was going through tumultuous times. Large companies like Hitachi and Chisso (the company that dumped mercury into the bay in Minamata) were growing and small ones were trying to survive. Gene saw sacrifices being made by people at lower levels. Smith saw alive things in dead things. That’s a big theme for my novels as well. Living and dying, light and shadow, conscious and unconscious, the subconscious floating around.
There’s a Japanese word—reikon—that has two parts, two meanings. One meaning is that it means something like ghost, or spirit, a divine outside presence. The other meaning is more like soul or interior or being inside the individual. Is there an English word that contains both of those things? In Japanese, it’s one word, both elements contained in one word. But sometimes there’s tension between them. I think Gene had problems with this tension. He had trouble reconciling light and dark. Over the years he gradually fell further and further into the dark side. He had a generous soul that made him a bigger person than a cameraman, but he couldn’t nurture that side.
* * *
While Smith was in Tokyo with Carole Thomas he used reel-to-reel equipment that he brought with him from the loft (there are tapes from the lead-up to his trip in which he can be heard telling Carole he wants to take a recorder) to make tape recordings at a rapid rate in their apartment in the Roppongi section of the city. He also picked up new equipment from Hitachi. In Smith’s archive, there are approximately 175 hours of sound recorded during his one year in Tokyo. These tapes suggest that Smith would have made obsessive tapes inside 821 Sixth Avenue even if there weren’t an important after-hours jazz scene there.
The Tokyo tapes contain a similar variety of sounds found on the New York loft tapes: random recordings of local Japanese radio broadcasts as well as American radio captured through the Far East Network and Armed Forces Radio. There’s a lot of Japanese folk and classical music and Japanese deejays playing American music like that of Nat Cole, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington, primarily African Americans. There are many American radio news reports on JFK’s presidency; the activities of George Wallace; the Andy Griffith and Bob Hope shows; CBS Radio Workshops featuring the work of writers like Mark Twain and Noël Coward. And there are many tapes that Smith labeled “Roppongi window,” in which he put the microphones in the window and recorded ambient street sounds, during which Smith can be heard puttering around, he and/or Carole typing letters, him working in the darkroom with Jun Morinaga and/or Masato Nishiyama, or just Smith and Carole talking, often about The Big Book.
* * *
Momoko and I met seventy-six-year-old Nishiyama in Roppongi on Saturday, February 26, 2011. He showed us around the neighborhood. The building where Smith lived and had a darkroom no longer exists, but the Chinese restaurant where Smith often ate, Kohien, remains, owned by the same family, but in a different, more modern location. Nishiyama took us there and he ordered the same noodle soup that he said Smith ordered every time. He described the neighborhood as it stood in 1961 and 1962:
The tallest buildings were four to five floors and they were walk-ups, he said, made of wood planks and bricks. Now, look at them all, skyscrapers that must be forty or fifty stories. There’s no evidence of old Japan here now. Back then, there would have been more old and modest buildings. The real estate boom of the 1980s and 1990s destroyed everything.
Nishiyama was born in Tokyo in 1935, and he grew up balancing interests in audio and visual elements. I used to build my own radios, he said, so I really hit it off with Gene because of his interest in radio and obviously photography. He first learned of Smith’s work from Life. Life was my greatest teacher, he said. Then, in the late 1950s, Edward Steichen’s vast exhibition, The Family of Man, for the Museum of Modern Art, which contained a number of images by Smith, traveled to a Tokyo department store and Nishiyama went to see it several times.
Both Nishiyama and Morinaga met Smith through Taeko Matsuda and Cosmo. Shimakawa told us, Nishiyama and Morinaga treated Gene like he was a god.
* * *
Later during our Tokyo stay, Matsuda called Momoko and asked if we had time to come see her again. The day before we left Tokyo for Minamata, we paid her a third visit, during which she handed me an envelope. Don’t open now, she said to me in English, don’t open now. Outside on the sidewalk, I opened it to find 200,000 Japanese yen (about $1,500). I used the money to buy two of Kazuhiko Motomura’s books, the one by Morinaga and one by Robert Frank. Motomura gave me a discount.