ABSTRACT
If modern imperial formations have made themselves effective by producing the forms of nation and native culture that then locally codify the transnational flow of capital, postwar Japanese progressive intellectuals including many New Left critics have not always been able to interrogate this collusive relation between imperial power and cultural nationalism. By closely analyzing the photographic and textual works by two well-known postwar mainland Japanese photographers Tomatsu Shomei and Nakahira Takuma, this chapter investigates their intrepid departure from the dominant imagery associated with Japanese culture and their often uncritical replication of orientalist tropes associated with Okinawa. Their efforts to excavate the authentic images of “Okinawa” comprise a part of their larger projects to discover spaces exterior to the dominant grip of the culture of Pax Americana in East Asia after 1945. Co-written by a photographer and a critic, this chapter examines the degree to which their frequently uncritical investigation of and investment in such images of space outside and prior to the operation of imperial power in fact exacerbates the U.S. imperial formation of its own non-American others. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ notions of studium and punctum, this chapter offers a close analysis of both the promises and limits of Tomatsu's and Nakahira's photographic works as they often oscillate between radical images of postwar Japan and orientalist figurations of postwar Okinawa.
