Hideo Haga

Hideo Haga was born in Dalian in 1921. His father was an avid camera user, and Haga began taking photographs in elementary school; at Keio University he joined the camera club and immersed himself in photography. ^*15 Haga later recalled that, while attending Shinobu Orikuchi’s lectures at Keio, he heard about figures embodying deities who visit a village on festival days and thought that such appearances might be photographable. ^*1 After the news agency where he worked was dissolved after the war, he went to a farming village in Fukushima to photograph and recognized Orikuchi’s “visiting deity” within actual rice-farming ritual. ^*1 When his mentor Shintaro Okuno saw the photographs and suggested that a field called folklore photography might not previously have existed, Haga found the direct impetus to make festivals and folk customs the subject of his life’s work. ^*1

During the high-growth period, rural migration, road construction, tourism, and changes in clothing and tools meant that festivals no longer continued in exactly the same form. Canon’s exhibition Japanese Folklore makes Haga’s nationwide documentation of ways of life that were disappearing or changing with post-1950s modernization central to the show. ^*2 When photographs of the same festival from different periods are compared, changes in fabric, implements, the number of participants, roads, houses, and the presence of tourists can show which parts of a ritual changed and which persisted.

Shinobu Orikuchi and the “Visiting Deity”: Folklore as a Way of Seeing Festivals

For Haga, folklore shaped the act of photographing from the outset. His interest in photography began with his father’s camera. Orikuchi’s concepts of marebito and the “visiting deity” then gave him a question: could an invisible structure of belief become photographable when it took concrete form in costume, gesture, ritual objects, and the order of a visit? ^*1 His photographs became records through which later researchers and community members could reconsider clothing, hand positions, houses, implements, and the arrangement of participants. Haga’s own understanding of folklore photographs as “records of people’s lives,” and his decision to preserve them as a classifiable body, explains why the work moved toward the archive rather than the isolated image. ^*1

In the 1950s, Haga’s photographic skills converged with the subjects of folklore fieldwork, producing a method of “folklore photography” that preserved costume, movement, implements, and ritual order through sequences of images. His encounters with Orikuchi’s concept of the “visiting deity” in actual rituals in Fukushima and Amami transformed photography from a means of collecting spectacular scenes into a record that could later be used to reconstruct how a ritual proceeded and who carried out each role.

The 1955–57 Amami Surveys: The Photographer Enters the Field

The 1955–57 surveys of the Amami Islands by the Union of Nine Academic Societies established Haga’s method as fieldwork. A history of the project published by nippon.com confirms that folklorist Keigo Seki proposed including a photographer and that Haga spent a total of 182 days in the islands over three years. ^*3 Working alongside researchers and repeatedly photographing religious practices involving noro and yuta as well as everyday life turned the camera from a travelogue that brought back exotic customs into a visual record whose field context could also be traced. Amami Horizon likewise shows how the large body of photographs is being reused today as documentation of life in Amami soon after the war. ^*4

In Amami, Haga also organized what he had photographed so that villages, actions, and objects could be retrieved later, drawing on the classification system of HRAF. According to the survey history, he referred to the Human Relations Area Files in organizing the photographs and supplied 562 of the 770 images published in the 1959 report Amami.^*3 Akira Kikuchi’s research likewise treats this collaborative survey as an important stage in the formation of Haga’s method as a “folklore photographer”.^*16 Each photograph could be viewed as an image, but the classified body also enabled later comparisons between different villages, actions, and tools.

Photographing Repetition and Preparation, Not Just the Festival Highlight

JCII’s Japanese Festivals exhibition brought together about 110 photographs that included quiet prayer, preparation, and the gestures of people carrying out rites as well as visually dramatic processions. ^*5 Works such as Seido no Shu and Yutate in the ToMuCo collection record the positions of bodies, the use of implements, and the distance of onlookers as carefully as costume and facial expression. ^*6

Kotaro Iizawa’s discussion of Haga reproduces successive frames from the negatives and argues that preserving what happened immediately before and after a festival’s “decisive” image contributes to both documentary value and expression.^*21 A gesture that looks symbolic in a single photograph can be read across adjacent frames as a grammar of action: who approaches, what is handed over, and where a person moves next. For Haga, shooting many frames was not simply insurance against missing a peak moment. It preserved ritual as an order of actions that could be reread later.

Ae no Koto in Noto: Everyday Practice over a Fixed Ritual Model

In Nami, Noto, Haga focused on the procedures actually practiced within individual households, including variations from any textbook-perfect form. Kotaro Iizawa’s account for nippon.com shows that Haga photographed ae no koto repeatedly, recording regional differences and changes over time.^*9

A Festival Does Not End in One Photograph: Photobooks and Sequential Images

In Haga’s photobooks, a festival is built from sequence rather than from one spectacular instant. Preparation, visits, offerings, ritual performance, and naorai communal meals can occupy the same sequence. Canon’s Japanese Folklore exhibition likewise presents his work as a long-term record of local beliefs and forms of life, giving preparation and ordinary procedures as much weight as colorful climaxes.^*2

Expo ’70’s Festival Plaza: From Recording Festivals to Staging Them

At Expo ’70 in Osaka, Haga served as a producer for the Festival Plaza, placing him on the side that assembled Japanese and overseas festivals within a vast exhibition site. In an interview, he recalled researching more than two hundred Japanese festivals and festivals across roughly one hundred countries, and helping coordinate performers and programs.^*1 In the same year he also published an essay titled “Your Festival and Mine: Expo ’70 Festival Plaza”.^*20 The photographer who usually traveled to a place and waited for a festival to unfold within everyday life now helped detach festivals from their local settings and present them on a stage as comparable forms of “culture.” The episode reflects a broader high-growth-period movement in which folklore could pass, within the same career, from lived practice to record, preservation, tourism, and international display.

Classifying 300,000 Photographs: The Meaning of the Haga Library

Haga did not simply store his photographs; he organized them by region, festival, action, and period. In an interview, he describes establishing the Haga Library in 1985 and treating the work of making this vast body searchable and comparable for future generations as part of his vocation. ^*1 THEATRE for ALL shows how, when communities consider cultural continuity after disasters, Haga Library photographs can serve as material for checking how festivals were practiced in the past. ^*7 The many festival and folklore photobooks listed under Haga’s authorship in CiNii also show that publication and archival organization proceeded in parallel. ^*8

The photographs can also acquire new meanings when they return to the places where they were made. Images once recorded by an outsider may allow current practitioners to verify costumes, tools, and ritual order, while generations without direct memory can see past practices in concrete detail. Re-publication projects in Amami and Tohoku demonstrate how an archive can function as a place where communities reread images, not merely as a repository. ^*11

Does Folklore Photography Preserve Tradition or Record Change?

Haga’s photographs have considerable value as folklore documentation, yet they also carry the risk of aestheticizing a “disappearing Japan.” His repeated return to the same regions made change itself part of the record. A nippon.com feature on Iwaki describes how encounters with annual observances around 1952 became a starting point for his long-term festival photography and how those images later returned to the community. ^*10 Wake Forest University’s Lam Museum likewise exhibited his Tohoku festival photographs as material for understanding continuity and change within local communities.^*11

The problem has also been examined within folklore studies. Akira Kikuchi’s doctoral dissertation places Haga at the center of a chapter that asks why a photographer’s “folklore” and a folklorist’s “photography” do not necessarily coincide, and how modern research and cultural-property systems define what counts as “folklore”.^*19 Photography does more than passively preserve customs that might disappear; it participates in selecting, naming, and classifying what becomes legible as tradition. Haga’s large-scale photographing and cataloging therefore shaped an image of postwar folklore through classification as well as through the sheer quantity of material.

The Expo ’70 work makes this issue more visible. Once festivals rooted in local life are moved onto a single stage as “festivals of Japan” and “festivals of the world,” viewers can compare difference more easily, but the ritual’s relation to a particular season, place, community, and social purpose can weaken. Haga’s field photography and his festival production at Expo are not separate episodes. Together they show two sides of postwar Japan’s treatment of folklore: preserving it while also remaking it as culture that could be publicly displayed.

The work also drew criticism close to its own period. Kikuchi notes a 1971 review by Frank Hoff of an English-language Haga photobook that warned that an editorial emphasis on the “harmony of tradition and modernity” could make the conflicts between festivals and modern society less visible.^*16 The criticism identifies the risk of using Haga’s photographs as proof of a beautiful Japan disappearing into the past. At the same time, the images and archive preserve evidence of transmission, tourism, institutionalization, and changing ways of life; their present documentary value lies partly in the possibility of tracing those changes.

A JPS retrospective presents Haga as a photographer who documented festivals and folklore in more than one hundred countries. ^*12 Exhibition catalogs listed in CiNii show that his work has been received in both art photography and folklore or regional studies. ^*13 Canon Photo Collection’s profile likewise treats his folklore photography from the 1950s and the Haga Library as parts of a single career. ^*14 In Haga’s work, the representative unit expands beyond the instant when a portable shrine reaches its highest point. Preparation, prayer, household visits, and naorai are also photographed, then preserved in a structure searchable by region, festival, and period. That is what turned festival photography into a body of material usable for research and transmission.

Photographing Festivals as an Outsider: Ethics and Limits of Folklore Photography

During the 1955–57 Amami surveys, Haga entered communities as a member of an academic research team and gradually expanded what he photographed as he learned about daily life and religious practice.^*3 That position was not the same as being a community insider. The photographer decided which rituals to record and which images to publish, so folklore photography contains an external act of classification alongside documentation.

Haga’s comparative field also extended beyond Japan. In 1985 he published “Festivals of Asia” in the Agency for Cultural Affairs–supervised Monthly Cultural Properties, confirming an interest in viewing festival practice across Asia.^*17 The 2017 compilation Photographic Folklore: Gods of East and West likewise compares festivals around the world through more than four hundred photographs.^*18 This expansion keeps Haga’s project from collapsing into a search for a fixed “Japanese essence.” It develops instead toward a photographic folklore that compares the bodily forms through which gods, seasons, and communities take shape in different regions.