The Journal of Japanese Studies

The point of departure for this well-executed study is the claim that Japan in the early twentieth century had become a nation of photo hobbyists. The author nicely evokes this understanding at the outset by citing a 1920 comment by the founder of Eastman Kodak, George Eastman, that the Japanese were “almost as addicted to the Kodak habit as ourselves” (p. 1). As she explains in the preface, Kerry Ross began this project intending to study modernist photography as an artistic practice in Japan of the early twentieth century through the 1930s. But her dive into the archives revealed that the preponderance of the historical record was “directed toward amateur photographers. Instructional writing, amateur photographs, and advertisements fill page after page of how-to books and photography magazines from the time” (p. xiii). Ross accordingly—and for me happily—shifted her focus and sought to understand the “photographic practices” of the “typical middle-class consumer,” most often a man. She aimed to “resituate the historical [End Page 210] discussion of photography in Japan … to reveal the everyday meaning of photography for ordinary Japanese people” (p. xiii). Ross largely succeeds in this endeavor.

The book begins with a chapter on men as consumers of cameras and as photographers, effectively showing the high seriousness ascribed to the acts of buying and using the camera by marketers and the writers of howto books. Ross finds that stress on rationality and careful decision making were hallmarks of the appeal to male consumers. This chapter goes on to describe the physical space of camera counters in department stores and of used camera shops as part of a burgeoning urban landscape of both gorgeous retail emporiums and modest side-street shops. The exposition is clear, but there is more to be said about how the “ordinary” middle-class buyer was able to afford this item. Ross tells us that the price of a “new lowend camera” in 1926, at ¥25, represented a considerable amount, about one-third his monthly wage, for an average white-collar (male) office worker. This explains the popularity of used camera shops (p. 39). But one also finds evidence that installment-plan sales of cameras, among other goods, flourished in the late 1920s and 1930s, as noted for example in a pioneering 1935 study undertaken by the city of Tokyo.¹ The interest of this chapter would have been increased by exploration of the way buying on credit was pitched to male consumers.

The second chapter effectively defines and examines two types of consumer-photographers: mostly male hobbyists and amateurs, positioned as “would-be expert photographers” who both took pictures and developed them, and casual photographers, understood to be mainly women or even children, who took photos but never considered developing them on their own (p. 41). Ross is careful to note that some women did enter the ranks of serious amateur photography (p. 57), but the presentation of a gender divide in the cultural construction of photographers is convincing. Similarly convincing is the link Ross describes between the spread of family photography and the spread of an idealized image of a new middle-class, nuclear family, although it is hardly surprising that such images obscured a more complicated social reality of tensions within families (p. 63).

Photography for Everyone hits its stride in the three following chapters, the most intriguing portion of the work. The in-depth study in chapter 3 of a “how to” literature aimed at photographers fully develops the point that men were taught to be photographers in the fullest sense of the term, from camera purchase, to taking photographs, to developing them. With rare exceptions, women were taught simply how to take pictures.

The institution of the camera club is the topic of the fascinating discussion [End Page 211] in chapter 4 of the associational life of...