Nippon

Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (The Society for International Cultural Relations), 1937. First edition. Leporello. Hardcover boards, paper pastedown.. Very Good. The Japanese photobook equivalent of a Leni Riefenstahl movie! Deemed "arguably the high point of both the Japanese propaganda and the modernist photo book" by Parr and Badger in "The Photobook: A History". Oblong folio, 27 by 30 cm. 64 pp., or 32 double-page back-to-back photomontages configured as an accordion fold-out, and a deliberate attempt to adapt the traditional Japanese pillow book to a more modern usage. Text (captions) in English, French and German. The photographers involved were also staff photographers of the Japanese photo magazine, "Nippon". The black and white photos have an extraordinary dynamism and three dimensionality achieved by the artful juxtapositions, and there is a cumulative power to the whole enterprise. Just as the photos themselves are able to convey movement, the message of the whole is that Japan itself was on the march forward into a new dawn! And virtually every aspect of Japanese life is presented -- economic, religious, cultural, architectural, artisanal, rural, urban, etc. Only two of the montages relate to the military -- one, the army, one the navy -- and this is in sharp contrast to similar publications emanating from Germany and Italy at the time. Japan had, by then, actually embarked on its program of foreign aggression and conquest, whereas for the other Fascist regimes that still lay in the future. The scarce book was probably never for sale, but rather was given as a gift to foreign dignitaries. Scarce, with the only known institutional copies at the British Museum, the Library of Congress. Two folds professionally and discreetly repaired, with very minor loss (a very thin sliver) along those joints. A quarter sized infill to where there was a corner chip to the silver Japanese paper pastedown on the front cover. The front blue blank or endpaper does not have a title label pastedown which has been seen in other copies, but it is obvious that there never was such a label pasted into this copy.