Missing Photographs Speak Loudly of My Family Legacy.
In her recently published book Shadow Traces, Elena Tajima Creef examines the archival photographs of Japanese/American and Ainu women in the first half of the 20th century. In the last chapter on “war brides,” Japanese women who married U.S. service men during the Allied Occupation, she uses her family album in her visual analysis, which her mother – a war bride herself – put together. Her parents as newlyweds in Japan, her mother taking classes on American-style domestic management, her father as a soldier during Korean War, and the author and her siblings growing up in the military community – these poignant images, along with the author’s own memories triggered by them, offer a novel perspective on how her parents’ lives and the interracial family they raised were shaped by greater forces of history.
Creef’s analysis of the family album made me wonder: what can I learn about my own family’s history if I look at our family albums as Creef did hers? My father, an avid amateur photographer, apparently found his daughters to be fascinating subjects and produced, literally, hundreds of photographs. This voluminous photographic collection would, I thought, surely give interesting insights into my family history. What I learned was quite different than what I anticipated: the photographs that I did not find in these albums spoke more loudly about my family history than any photographs that were present.
My mother and father grew up in Tokyo and Yokohama respectively, and their family homes, along with much of their earthly possessions, were destroyed in the fire-bombing toward the end of World War II. Preoccupied with day-to-day need to survive, their families did not have time or money to keep photographic records of their children’s growth. Aside from a handful of photographs from their young adulthood, mostly taken at school or the workplace, there is practically no visual traces of their earlier lives. The pictures that capture my parents as a couple are equally scarce. There is a set of formal portraits at their wedding, and a handful of pictures of my mother taken during their courtship and the first year of marriage. But I found no pictures from their honeymoon or any other outings in which they were captured together. Even for the 1960s, when people didn’t take nearly as many pictures as we would today, the scarcity of the representation of their relationship was startling.
I also found no portraits in which four of us were pictured together, and in fact, my parents had very little photographic presence at all. My mother appears sometimes as a peripheral figure; in most cases, only parts of her body are visible – hands that support a baby, feet following behind a toddler, a skirt to which a child clings. My father is even harder to find. Sure, he was behind the camera, but did it never occur to him to set the timer so we can all be in the same frame together?
Another glaring lack was the absence of a “family album.” All the albums my parents have kept bear either my name or my sister’s name on their covers. When the prints came back from the camera store, my sister and I would sit down and divide them into my pile and her pile. Whichever of us captured at the center was supposed get the picture. It was clear that these were our individual albums, and photographs in them were our own possessions, rather than the shared property of the Kurotani family.
These photographic omissions embody my own experience of family life, in which my father was a dominant and absent figure, who watched over us and protected us but, for the most part, too busy to be present in the day-to-day home life. Dissected images of my mother capture her years of discontent at the fragmentation of herself into a host of domestic functions, also reflecting perhaps my father’s part in keeping her in that fragmented state. Their relationship as a couple was always through their children, without whom their liaison had no purpose. As in the ways of old-fashioned Japanese ie, or a household as a corporate unit, my mother, my sister and I all played our expected roles, under the gaze of my father, the head of his household unit.
The void left by incomplete photographic representation also tells the story of the scars that history left on my family more than seven decades ago. Both of my parents experienced traumatic losses and experienced the stigma as children of a single-parent household during and after World War II. In their adulthood, they were determined to shield their own children from the precarity of life and chose their prescribed gender roles of a salaryman and his stay-home wife as the surest way to achieve necessary financial stability and social respectability. Yet, the absent family portraits tell me that, despite their lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, they were never able to fully recover the comfort of family that they lost in the
yakeato (burnt ruins) of their childhood. That is the legacy of war that continues to haunt my family, through the empty pages of the family album that never came into being.
(Earlier version of this article appeared in Japan News, 8/18/2022.)
Comments