Katsumi Watanabe - Gangs of Kabukicho
Dans le magnifique recueil consacré au travail de Katsumi Watanabe à Kabukicho (PPP Editions, 2006), on trouve cette très belle préface de lizawa Kotaro qui éclaire sur l'étrange profession de "photographe de rue" mais aussi sur l'histoire de Shinjuku et de son quartier des plaisirs.
Shinjuku's Photographer -
Watanabe Katsumi by lizawa Kotaro
Watanabe
Katsumi's workplace during the 1960s and 70s was the living streets of
Kabukicho in Shinjuku. Each night he went out into the neighborhood, working as
a photographer, taking portraits and selling them, "three pictures for 200
yen." These pictures, in staggering volume, cast an overwhelming spell on
the viewer; they embody miraculous power.
Watanabe
Katsumi was born in 1941, in Morioka City of Iwate Prefecture, some 600
kilometers north of Tokyo. His family was poor, and after graduating middie
school, he helped support them by working as an assistant at the Morioka City
bureau of the Mainichi Shimbun, a national newspaper. The duties of such
assistants, dubbed children were varied; sometimes Watanabe developed and
printed photographs. Gradually, he became fascinated with the medium.
Watanabe
moved to Tokyo in 1962 and joined Tojo Kaikan, the legendary portrait
photography studio near the Imperial Palace. At the time, vestiges of the apprenticeship
System persisted at photo studios and Watanabe had to survive a grueling
training regimen, which began with rinsing photo paper, before they allowed him
to actually make prints himself. Once he mastered the technique, he began to
feel restless with the mechanical part of the production process.
Around that
time, he became attracted by the work of Mr. S., an acquaintance who worked as
a street photographer in Kabukicho. Visiting S.'s room, Watanabe saw rows of
photographic prints from the previous day's work lined up on tatami mats:
"They looked like money to me." Besides S., there were three or four
other street photographers who were regulars in Shinjuku, they had worked there
since World War II, when it was hosting black markets in its ruins.
Watanabe
learned the basics of the trade from S., and, borrowing a camera and strobe
light, he began working as a street photographer in the entertainment districts
of Shibuya, Shinbashi and Ueno. Soliciting bar hostesses and cabaret busboys
before working hours, he would photograph them and sell them the prints. As his
customers increased, he could no longer keep his position at Tojo Kaikan, and
in 1967, he quit his job and began working exclusively as a street
photographer.
With S.'s
permission, Watanabe began to photograph in lucrative Shinjuku. Through 1968,
he commuted to Kabukicho nearly every night. Watanabe said his peak years of
success, when he produced some of his best portraits, were between 1968 and
1970. In those days, cameras with strobe lights were still rare and Watanabe's
beautiful photographs were popular. Some subjects wanted to send them to their
families back home, others wanted to mount them on wooden panels and hang them
in their establishments. His customers were picky about how they posed, but
Watanabe was accommodating and formed warm ties with them, as if they were
family.
In the
1970s, the atmosphere of the Shinjuku streets changed; the predominantly one or
two story buildings were demolished and replaced with taller buildings. The
rich human connections that occurred in easily accessible ground floor
establishments became strained when they moved to the upper floors. Compact
cameras with built-in strobes became increasingly popular and street
photographers' customers dwindled. Watanabe's work entered a
transitional period.
Shoji, the editor of Camera
Mainichi, and applied to Album 73, a Camera Mainichi, project that solicited
photographs from the general public. His acceptance leads to a significant
shift in his status as a photographer. Watanabe's seven-page spread Shinjuku
Kabukicho," in the June, 1973 issue, received the Album Prize, awarded for
the best photographs of the year, and his name became widely known.
1973 was also
the year that Watanabe's first photographic book, Shinjuku Guntoden 66/73,
[Shinjuku; The Story of a Band of thieves 66/73] published by Camera Mainichi
(in association with Barakei Gahosha) and edited by Nishii Kazuo, was realized.
In January 1974 his solo show, "Hatsunozoki Yoru no Daifukumaden"
[First Peek at the Nocturnal Demon’s Lair] dazzled visitors to the Shimizu
Gallery, where innumerable photos were pasted on every surface, including the
floor and ceiling.
And yet,
although his photographs were critically acclaimed, his commercial prospects in
Shinjuku did not recover. As a consequence Watanabe temporarily stopped working
as a street photographer and sold roasted sweet potatoes in the streets. In
1976, he picked up where he had left off and opened a small studio in Higashi
Nakano, two stations away from Shinjuku. He managed his studio for five years
but continued to visit Kabukicho at night.
After
folding his studio in the early 80s, Watanabe made ends meet with magazine
assignments and successfully published tree books: Discology, a selection of
photographs he made in discotheques along with text he wrote about h's
experiences, and a revised edition of his first book Shinjuku: The Story of a
Band of Thieves, also accompanied by his own recollections and series. They
were both published in 1982 as part of a series by Bansei-sha. And later on, in
1997, Shinchosha published a hefty, 500-page retrospective monograph titled
simply: Shinjuku 1965-97.
Anyone who
sees Watanabe's photographs of Shinjuku - especially those taken between the
late 60s and throughout the 70s - will feel powerfully drawn into that world.
To help understand the energy they radiate, the source of their charm, we
cannot overlook the history of Shinjuku.
In 1698 a
new station was established along the Koshukaido Road, one of five major
arteries leading from Edo (now Tokyo) to the provinces. This is how Shinjuku
was born; it flourished as a way station for travelers, where inns jostled or
space and eating and drinking establishments. During the Meiji Era [1868-1912],
railroad stations (on what are now the Yamanote and Chuo lines) were built in
Shinjuku. Later, as the private rail lines of Odakyu, Keio and Seibu linked the
city center with Tokyo suburbs, Shinjuku developed into a leading entertainment
hub. Department stores, movie theatres, cafes, and bookstores all thrived there
; during the 1920s, Shinjuku became the center of modernist culture in Japan.
But there
was another face to Shinjuku. Before World War II, in contrast to the
celebrated world of glamorous consumer culture the reclaimed swampland on the
north side of the station had given rise to specialty eating and drinking
establishments that also provided sexual services. Shinjuku was devastated by
the war but its resurrection from the ruins was swift. Off the main boulevards
in a warren of bars, illegal prostitutes entertained their clients on second
floors, and the area came to be known as the Blue Light district (in contrast
to a Red Light district where prostitution was legal). So, the two faces of
Shinjuku, the front and the back, the light and the dark, the commercial
district and the sexual entertainment district co-existed.
Immediately
after the war, there was talk of creating a Kabuki Theater in Shinjuku, like
the original in Ginza. Although the project never materialized the area was
then dubbed Kabukicho. The idea of situating Kabuki, already solidly
established as Japanese classical entertainment near the Blue Light district,
was preposterous. Nevertheless, Kabukicho continued to develop as a gigantic
nightlife district centered on the sex trade. Along the way, Kabukicho began to
be known as Nihon no kahanshin [Japan from the waist-down].
The
Kabukicho area of Shinjuku was Watanabe's stomping ground. He felt an affection
for the hard-bitten survivors that inhabited its streets, surviving on violence
and Eros; with the sympathies of an insider Watanabe went about his business
with ease.
The
subjects of Watanabe's photographs are always clearly aware they're being
photographed; their poses present their innate body language. Watanabe was fond
of saying "All Shinjuku is a stage." His strobe managed to illuminate
the essential vulnerability that lurked beneath his subjects' blustery
performance.
In the
mid-1970s, as Watanabe's Shinjuku clients began to dwindle, one of his resident
models exhorted him, "Nabe-chan (his nickname) take our pictures, save
them as mementos!" Kabukicho today is hardly recognizable as the area
where Watanabe once worked as a street photographer. Since the 1990s, as
Chinese and Koreans have made their way into the neighborhood, its population
has grown increasingly heterogeneous: in some areas forests of signs are posted
in languages other than Japanese. The young people's carefree looks, as they
chatter on their cell phones and walk down the streets, betray no trace of the
past.
But step
into the back alleys and there is a distinct sense that marginal characters are
still lurking about. Although significantly reduced in scale, nightlife areas
such as Golden Gai still retain vestiges of the postwar black markets and Blue
Light districts. No doubt Shinjuku will continue to transform itself like a
giant creature perpetually in flux, a fate shared by many cultural centers of
great cities.
Watanabe
Katsumi died on January 29, 2006 at the age of 64.
This essay is based on the
last interview he made in his office in Roppongi, Tokyo, on December 13, 2005.
Parmi les gangs de Kabukicho, on croise l'un des rois de Shinjuku : Terayama Shuji !
