Takeyoshi Tanuma

Takeyoshi Tanuma was born in Asakusa, Tokyo, and experienced the Tokyo air raids. After photography school, he joined Sun News Photos in 1949 and learned magazine photography as an assistant to Ihei Kimura. FUJIFILM SQUARE’s profile traces his work under Kimura, assignments for magazines including Geijutsu Shincho, and his independence in 1959. ^*1 In an interview with Sarai, Tanuma recalls Kimura warning him that commissioned work alone would never become his own work, prompting him to photograph Tokyo’s children and streets outside his assignments. ^*2

After Kimura’s advice, Tanuma began returning to the streets on a timetable separate from magazine deadlines. Postwar magazine photography transmitted events quickly, then moved to the next story when an issue passed. By continuing to photograph the same city and generation outside commissioned work, Tanuma extended the temporal scale of news photography. Setagaya Art Museum’s Picturing My Tokyo 1948–1964 reedited ruins, markets, alleys, children’s play, and the urban transformations before the Tokyo Olympics as a single history of the city. ^*3

From Ihei Kimura’s Assistant to “My Own Photography”

What Tanuma inherited from Ihei Kimura was more than the technique of working quickly with a small camera. A Tokyo Polytechnic University retrospective recalls Kimura telling him, “Don’t imitate me,” reinforcing Tanuma’s need to find a subject of his own. ^*4 He consequently photographed ordinary contemporaries in the alleys even when no magazine had commissioned the work, alongside assignments involving public figures and events.

Why Photography? LIFE and Children as a “Mirror of Society”

As a young photographer, Tanuma was drawn less to the photograph as an isolated art object than to photojournalism that communicated society across the pages of magazines. In an interview, he recalls aspiring to the kind of reportage he saw in LIFE while still in photography school and forming a study group on reportage with his peers. ^*2 In another interview with the Kanto Federation of Bar Associations, he describes admiring Ihei Kimura, taking up a Leica, and beginning to photograph his own Asakusa neighborhood. ^*27 This starting point makes clear that his sustained attention to children cannot be explained by expressive faces alone.

Tanuma described children as a “mirror of society, a mirror of the times”.^*5 A single photograph can contain, along with a child’s face, the width of an alley, a house, clothing, toys, shops, roads, and surrounding adults. Details that functioned as background at the time of exposure can become evidence of historical difference decades later. By returning to the same subject over many years, Tanuma’s photographs of children moved from one-time news into an urban history in which living conditions and streets could be compared over time.

Children in Postwar Tokyo: How Tanuma Kept His Distance

When photographing children, Tanuma avoided joining their play in order to elicit smiles. In an interview with the Japan Foundation for Aging and Health, he says he tried to become like “air” or a “telephone pole”—a presence the children would cease to notice—and waited until ordinary behavior returned. ^*5 In photographs such as Endai Shogi, what remains is not a smile offered to the camera but the children’s own order of play and their use of the street. ToMuCo holds and publishes the 1955 work. ^*6

Finding “Children of the World” in Paris

While working abroad for Time-Life in the 1960s, Tanuma saw children playing in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and, as he later recalled, clarified his lifelong subject of photographing children across national borders. ^*2 The JPS exhibition Hymn to Humanity placed the children and people he subsequently photographed in more than 130 countries in continuity with his photographs of postwar Japan. ^*7

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2004 exhibition Portraits of Six Billion People states that Tanuma sought to approach the human world through children while looking across differences of culture, religion, wealth, and poverty.^*20 At the same time, his photobook Children of Planet Earth includes children who play, work, study, live through civil conflict, or wait for aid.^*21 “Children of the world” therefore did not erase difference through a simple universalism. The long-term project compares shared bodily vitality with the unequal social conditions that surround it.

From Magazines to Photobooks: Turning News into Long-Term Record

In Tokyo Waga Zanzo, Shitamachi, Hitomukashi, and Sengo no Kodomotachi, accumulated photographs that allow urban change to be compared matter more than isolated high points. JCII’s Sengo no Kodomotachi assembled about one hundred photographs from 1949 to 1964, including kamishibai street theater, stilts, siblings, play, and family scenes, presenting such details as postwar history. ^*8 CiNii Books shows that the series was preserved through both exhibitions and photobooks. ^*9 Another volume devoted to everyday life in the 1950s retains stalls, housing, roads, and clothing that once belonged to the background but now function as clues to postwar life. ^*10

Musashino, Edo within Tokyo, and Postwar Tokyo: Photographing Place, Editing History Later

Tanuma’s long-term documentary work was not limited to children. Geographer Atsushi Naruse analyzes Musashino (1974) as a search for things that endure in place—natural landscape, architecture, and material remains—and Edo within Tokyo (1982) as an inquiry into continuities preserved in faces and ways of life.^*25 For Tanuma, who was unsettled by Tokyo’s rapid postwar transformation, photographing place also became a way to ask what persisted within a disappearing present.

In Naruse’s analysis, Postwar Tokyo (1993) cannot be treated simply as a transparent record of its original moment. Tanuma selected photographs made from the 1940s onward in the 1990s and arranged them as a postwar history; the photobook therefore preserves the past while also registering how the photographer interpreted that past decades later.^*25 Long-term documentary can accumulate time, but the selection made from that accumulation also constructs an image of history.

Tanuma’s work also extended well beyond children. A JCII exhibition on Romanesque culture in Catalonia presents photographs made during repeated visits in 1983–84, observing traces of religious architecture within lived landscapes over time. ^*14 In Children through the Seasons, festivals and annual observances foreground the physical roles children take within seasonal custom. ^*15

In Tanuma’s photobooks and retrospectives, photographs that were independent when made can be reread in new sequences decades later. This is another feature of long-term documentary. Street photographs from the 1950s recorded contemporary life when they first appeared, but they now also serve as historical material for the occupation, reconstruction, and the city before large-scale redevelopment. In a JCII exhibition on occupied Tokyo, Tanuma’s photographs of the “present-day city” were placed beside work by other photographers and reread as comparative evidence of roads, shops, housing, and clothing during the occupation. ^*18 The value of continuing to photograph in large quantity lies less in multiplying masterpieces than in creating enough density for later questions. Clothing, shop signs, roads, and the spacing of families can shift from background information in a single frame to a subject when decades of images are viewed together.

This capacity for reediting has kept Tanuma’s photographs active as historical material in the present.

UNICEF and More Than 130 Countries: A Link to International Humanitarianism

The photographs of children around the world are more than a collection of travel pictures. UNICEF Japan presents Tanuma’s long-term documentation of visits made by Goodwill Ambassador Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. ^*11 A 2005 UNICEF exhibition likewise used his photographs as a public medium through which Japanese audiences could see the lives of children in regions receiving support. ^*12 A memorial exhibition at Tokyo Polytechnic University placed photographs from Afghanistan, India, Cambodia, and elsewhere beside his images of Japanese children, making children living through play, labor, and family life comparable across differences of country and religion. ^*13

This attention to social conditions became even more explicit in his later editing. Crevis’s Mirai e Kakeru: Sekai no Kodomo organized about 210 photographs in chapters ranging from peaceful everyday life to “working” and “surviving”.^*22 By placing photographs that suggest the universality of children’s vitality beside images that register poverty, labor, and conflict, Tanuma’s humanism holds idealization and social documentation in tension.

“Hymn to Humanity” and Postwar Humanism: Universality and Difference

Tanuma is often praised as a photographer of “humanism” and a “hymn to humanity.” The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s major retrospective used Hymn to Humanity as its title and moved across postwar Tokyo, people around the world, and Musashino. ^*16 Crevis’s exhibition materials organize 205 works in three sections and describe the long career through a consistent interest in human beings. ^*17 Yet the phrase alone risks absorbing poverty, war, and the effects of development into a reassuring story of “resilient children.” Tanuma’s repeated work on the same subjects also records how housing, clothing, labor, and urban form change behind those faces.

Tanuma’s “hymn to humanity” shares concerns with international humanist photography after the 1950s, while his long-term projects retain specific social conditions within each frame. MoMA’s The Family of Man (1955) arranged 503 photographs around love, children, death, and other themes to propose common human experience and solidarity in the postwar world.^*26 Tanuma also approached shared human experience through children and families during this decade. His sustained series, however, leave labor, war, housing, religion, wealth, and poverty visible within the broad category of “children.” The Family of Man gathered the world into a single family metaphor; Tanuma’s repeated photographing and attention to place hold commonality and social difference together within a long record.

Tanuma’s work extends far beyond the category of a “photographer of children.” He carried the snapshot practice learned in Ihei Kimura’s magazine world from Tokyo to more than 130 countries and repeated it over decades. The Japan Foundation’s Metamorphosis of Japan after the War presented Tanuma as one of eleven photographers who recorded Japan’s transformation from the immediate postwar period toward high economic growth.^*23 The other participants included Ken Domon, Ihei Kimura, Hiroshi Hamaya, Tadahiko Hayashi, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Eikoh Hosoe, and others. FUJIFILM SQUARE’s Children in the Showa Era likewise placed Tanuma’s photographs of children alongside work by Kimura, Domon, Hamaya, Hayashi, and others, showing that children were a shared subject through which several photographers read social change before and after the war.^*24 Tanuma’s distinction lies in sustaining the subject from Tokyo to the world, and from one-off magazine assignments to a record broad enough to be compared and reedited across half a century.

A JCII exhibition on occupied Tokyo placed Tanuma beside contemporary press photographers and treated the images as testimony to urban history as well as personal memory.^*18 FUJIFILM’s English-language exhibition likewise presented his photographs of Tokyo’s reconstruction and high-growth period through the bodies of children and the changing street.^*19 After his apprenticeship with Ihei Kimura, Tanuma turned the speed of street photography into repeated documentation across decades. Children were a shared subject in his generation, but his sustained movement from Tokyo to the world and the volume of material later available for historical reediting give his work its particular outline.

Photographs of Postwar Children: Alleys, Housing, and Labor as Social History

Tanuma’s photographs of children can invite a humanist reading centered on facial expression, yet a long record makes the edges of the frame equally historical: bare feet or shoes, paved or unpaved alleys, temporary postwar walls or new construction, handmade toys or manufactured goods. Because Tanuma repeated the same broad subject—children at play—these details become legible as changes over time. Setagaya Art Museum’s 1948–64 exhibition and JCII’s postwar collection both organize his Tokyo photographs alongside the city’s reconstruction. ^*8 Tanuma’s method of keeping his distance until children forgot his presence also served more than the production of “natural” smiles. It preserved the social worlds children made among themselves instead of expressions performed for adults. ^*5 Once extended worldwide, the same approach risked romanticizing children as “all the same,” yet clothing, labor, family structure, schools, refugee camps, and other conditions remain visible as differences. Tokyo Polytechnic University’s Children of Japan, Children of the World places both groups together precisely at this intersection of commonality and difference. ^*13 In Tanuma’s long-term work, the child is simultaneously a figure of shared humanity and a sensitive register of historical conditions.