Shomei Tomatsu: Chewing Gum and Chocolate

TIME LightBox

A sardonic homage to America's influence on post-war Japan, Aperture's definitive collection of Tomatsu's defining work is filled with biting irony and subtle sweetness.

The Wall Street Journal

Mary Kate McDevitt

Shomei Tomatsu (1930-2012) was terrified as a youngster during the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1944-45, but he also found the explosions beautiful. The postwar occupation produced a similar ambiguity, and these mixed feelings are explored in “Chewing Gum and Chocolate”. His black and white photographs show a despair at the occupation’s impact on Japan and its people. Many were taken in the red-light districts adjacent to U.S. bases, recording the dives, the prostitutes and their customers. Images of B-52 bombers and other aircraft present them as mythological demons, both magnificent and malevolent, set in turbulent skies. Tomatsu’s photographs have the spontaneity of Zen drawings; many are dark, grainy, blurred, out of focus or taken at radical angles.

The New York Times

Luc Sante

Ambivalence is the keynote struck by Shomei Tomatsu's Chewing Gum and Chocolate, edited by Leo Rubinfien and john Junkerman, an artfully sequenced collectin of his photographs of the American military presence in Japan, 1959-80. Tomatsu, whose grainy, smeared, often wide-anle black-and-white images evoke a spectrum of feelings, from nostalgic reverie to smoldering anger, sometimes within the same photograph, influenced an entire generation of Japanese photographers, most notably Daido Moriyama. The pictures here, never before collected into a single volume, do not invite facile responses as they chronicle military bases and their effluvia in a period that has the Vietnam War at its center: bars, prostitution, mixed-race children, outsize cars, Japanese hepcats in pimp suits, American children wielding toy guns, dish antennas, graffiti, demonstrations, military aircraft coming in low over a junkyard, random shards of tradition and ritual, African-American G.I.s giving the black-power salute, a narrow street of old single-story frame dwellings that is lined with pawnshop signs in English. Almost every picture could be the begining of a long, densely packed personal narrative.

cphmag.com

Joerg Colberg

Shomei Tomatsu‘s Chewing Gum and Chocolate (Aperture 2014) turned out to be a bit of a surprise for me. Expecting a fairly obvious compilation and/or re-release of older, known work, the book instead presents what could or maybe should or maybe just might have been the eponymous book the artist had been planning to make for a while. Included are a few very good essays, which make it a must buy for anyone interested in photography from Japan.

Art in America

Ryan Holmberg

Over 125 of the artist’s interzone photographs are collected in Chewing Gum and Chocolate, edited by two Americans with extensive experience in Japan: photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien (who also contributes an essay) and documentary filmmaker John Junkerman. The title, which is Tomatsu’s, refers to the sweets handed out by American soldiers to Japanese children after WWII. In his essay, Rubinfien (co-curator of a traveling Tomatsu retrospective in 2001-04) describes the photographer’s personal response to the U.S. presence as ambivalent. Yet the overall message of the images–sailors milling about looking for fun, bars with kitschy names and English signage, men in sunglasses swaggering through Japanese streets–is “thanks for nothing.”

Tomatsu never captured servicemen doing anything really wrong, but he knew how to make them look bad in ambiguous situations. Many of the most famous examples use the compositional techniques of modernist ostranenie (extreme angles, tilting ground planes to render their subjects doubly disconcerting.