We find that a lot of the picture postcards which were produced

domestically in 1904 and 1905 and sent abroad to soldiers on the front,

show women in the most vulnerable, intimate,

private situations, situations in which the women

themselves don't imagine themselves or don't notice that they're being observed.

So, something we talked about in the second module,

the gaze, in a sense

knowing that many of these photographs would be sent off to the warfront,

the gaze of a man separated,

far from the homeland and so forth,

looking in into the private instances and

lives of these women as represented by photographs.

There are always these little stories that we can sort of,

we can see the stories themselves being echoed in the letter themselves,

what's been written as correspondence themselves.

Often, as in the case of this postcard right here,

there's no mention really made of the image.

But often there's reference;

the correspondents will sort of refer sort of gently or often very,

very cleverly to the image itself.

Let's take another look at a woman reading,

which was sent off to the war.

It's a very simple image of a lady sort of lying down relaxing, reading a book.

This is similar, if we want to remember from the second module,

the images from the 19th century in ukiyo-e,

prints of women alone spending

their leisurely time reading book with all kinds of things written about them,

around them, on the front of the page.

This letter is very, very simple.

All it has on the other side is the address of the sender and Isobe's name.

And it says here,

"Kimi ikani?, how are you?"

or "How are you doing?"

Very, very simple, three characters written only in Chinese characters,

and we wonder, you know,

it sounds, it's almost as if these are words from the book that the lady is reading.

Or who is the kimi,

who is the you in it?

The viewer, the gaze,

or the viewer, the man who is gazing,

might be looking at her and and posing

the same question to the woman who's represented in this very,

very sort of pictorial photographic mode.

The composition of a lot of these picture postcards are really intriguing.

Here we can see this, the woman here is lying down, propped up by her left elbow.

But she forms a sort of angle, allowing this border,

this sort of foggy sort of border to sort of cut the image in

half so that the correspondent can write

his or her body of letter on top of her body, so to speak.

This is something we see in Western picture post-cards as well at the time.

But the Japanese postcard manufacturers or editors tend to be very,

very sort of delicate and subtle in the way that they

carve out the free space for writing.

And I would suggest,

assert, that this sense of space,

opening up the white space for letters to be sort of blocked into,

was something that was transmitted as a sense or perhaps as a technique from ukiyo-e

print illustrators who would often

inscribe or have inscribed lots and lots of words

onto the front of the images, the prints themselves.

Anyway, there were a lot of different,

other variations of the women in different positions, poses,

instances, among the hundreds of postcards which were sent to soldiers in these years.

Here we see a woman,

most likely a geisha.

Again, a lot of these images,

if you look through hundreds and hundreds of them you see that the models are the same.

There is a limited number of women,

who are changing their attire and spending

perhaps weeks and months in studios making all of these photographs and so forth.

But anyway, this is a picture and with a sort of comical sort of poem on the top of it,

looking, you know, sort of describing it,

the woman, her very,

very sort of voluptuous sort of posture here and saying that she's a,

this is a beauty for the ages,

a flower who understands words,

which is a sort of trope for courtesans or prostitutes in Japan.

So this is a rather racy edition, not very,

very high class, high society like the ones that we just saw.

The editors, the photographers played a lot with different ways of

exchanging this sort of view between the women who are

portrayed and the recipient of the postcard,

the first viewer, so to speak,

of the image itself.

Here we have a woman, a geisha,

on the inside of her room where she would be entertaining guests perhaps.

Maybe it's her own private room.

There are holes in the paper shoji screen through

which she's looking out on to us looking into her,

so that the viewer here we can imagine being on

the corridor outside of the room near the garden,

or perhaps even out on the street looking into this sort of private area.

She's very, very, you know,

sort of bright and sort of lively looking.

It doesn't look like she's surprised to be seen.

But anyway, these sort of images work like this.

Again, remember, a lot of the early photographs which were used as

calling cards would have writing just like

this written across the front of the passage itself.

Very, very simple compositions,

but using the photograph itself again of

a woman here as a sort of frame to create what are often very,

very simple stories, tales about what's going on back home.

A number of the photographs in this collection of Isobe which he

brought back to him from the warfront congratulate him,

celebrate victories in various battles leading up to the end of the Russo-Japanese war.

Here it says, "Congratulations on your victory."

It's a woman, a Japanese woman strolling in the park.

Of course it's not a park, it's just a studio,

but she's got all of the sort of

accoutrements for walking outside with her umbrella and so forth,

and she is looking down very,

very sort of very, very quiet image, looking down.

Pensive, not very celebratory, I would imagine.

But again, these images of women are sent to these men abroad to sort of

soothe their spirits and their nerves and to comfort them and so forth.

And this was sent as a simple congratulation for victory in battle.

Here again is another commemorative postcard

sent to honor and celebrate the Emperor's birthday,

which was a national holiday at the time.

Rather interesting photograph.

The woman here,

the young woman here is photographed in a Japanese style.

Sort of slightly modified hairdo,

but she's wearing what one might wear to the beach at this time,

what looks like a sort of camisole, sort of very,

very simple Western dress and she's,

has her left arm inside a hammock.

She has a book as well.

So again, there's this little story here. It's a sunny day.

She's in her garden perhaps near the beach and she's about to

get to sort of move into her hammock and read her book.

It's a very, very new sort of images, new mores,

new customs in Japan which are being immediately

folded into the discourse of women's images sent out to the warfront.

One last image here.

There are several images in the collection as well of women as nurses,

caregivers, in this case a Red Cross nurse.

There were Red Cross Japanese nurses who were at the front as well,

but also domestically within

Japan, Red Cross nurses were there for repatriated injured soldiers and so forth.

And here we have a young woman sort of preparing gauze,

looking down again pensively, very,

very quietly but with a very,

very steely sort of determination to

pursue her job and to heal and care for injured soldiers who might come back.

All of these images, when you take a look at them we've just seen a few of them today,

remind us of the importance of images themselves,

how they're used for propaganda and persuasion and so forth,

but also in a very, very personal way private correspondence between individuals.

The war, the fact of the war,

the fact that one doesn't know when the war is going to end.

This young soldier, Isobe,

is right in the middle,

literally in the thick of the battle,

and collects each of the correspondences,

each of the picture postcards that's sent to him.

I imagine him passing them around to his comrades.

It's possible that there were photographs

sent in envelopes as well which could be traded on the front.

We know of situations where soldiers would actually trade them like

baseball cards in a way at the front, so forth,

and sort of they were used and

subsidized by the Japanese government in order to promote the war effort themselves.

We can see that there's quite a change here in the way that

the word and the image are sort of put together.

The word and the image themselves,

the words are not directly there on the image itself,

literally, but they're not necessarily about the image.

The image themselves are separate,

used as a sort of constant sort of flow,

in a sense, of pictures of young beautiful women being sent to the front.

But each of them is from a different source.

They're being exchanged, they're being sent off,

but each of them has different things written on them,

some of them reflecting on the images themselves but

others writing simple reports about what's going on in the family,

in the neighborhood, or current events in Japan at the time.

The fact that public funds were used to subsidize mail to

the military in this age brings us away, I believe,

from the tradition in a sense,

or moves us in a direction apart

from what we've seen throughout the beginning of the early 19th century.

4-4 Picture Postcard II

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

Meet the Instructors