The Weight of Snow: The Transition in Snowscape Pictures Toward Documentary Photography in Japan

Yumi Kim Takenaka

《The Journal of Asian Arts & Aesthetics》 6期 (2020/05) Pp. 21-32

https://doi.org/10.6280/JAAA.202005_(6).0003

摘要

Snow has been an important subject of Japanese arts for a long time, as well as in other East Asian countries. Japan has a rich diversity in the climate of each region, and the most obvious difference from the others is the heavy winter snowfalls in mainly the northern regions by the Sea of Japan. However, images of heavy snowfall seem to be uncommon in Japanese landscape paintings until the 19th century, since when snowy scenes in Ukiyo-e prints also began to attract the people. And after a while the new photographic representation of regions with heavy snowfall flourish in the mid-20th century. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on a feature of landscape representation in Japan by focusing on snowscapes and to trace their transition in the three types of pictures. I assume that the uniqueness of Japanese snowscape pictures is noticed in sensitivity to the weight of snow rather than to the coldness. First, to start with an overview of snowscapes from an ink painting attributed to Sesshū in the Muromachi period to Modern Japanese paintings, we observe that a group of Japanese paintings gradually achieved their own atmosphere in the moist quality of snow and was headed toward the heavy snowfall peculiar to Japan, while more or less deviating from the Chinese origin or the standard style of each school. Second, I draw attention to Ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige that depict the hardships of travelers walking through heavy snow. During the Edo period, pilgrimages became popular among the people, and travelogues and topographical books including the heaviest snow region sprang up. Ukiyo-e illustrations on these books contributed not only to convey visual information but also to arouse the new interest to snow. Third, we investigate Hamaya's Yukiguni (Snow Land) in 1956, which is the groundbreaking photobook that many photographers followed suit featuring cold local regions as their subjects, along with scenes of natural disaster. Under the influence of Watsuji, Hamaya successfully unified snowscape and human document, and his work marked a turning point from the photographic description of ＂landscape (fukei)＂ to the representation of a ＂climate (fudo).＂ It is concluded that tracing the transition in the Japanese snowscapes focusing on the weight of snow reveals not only the artistic sensitivity to a feature of nature in Japan, but also its direction toward the unique experience that appears in the relationship between human and nature.

關鍵字

Mountain-Water painting ； Ukiyo-e landscape print ； Hamaya Hiroshi ； Watsuji Tetsuro ； theory of fūdo