Tadahiko Hayashi - The Rotgut Era

The Rotgut Era

Hayashi was still in Beijing at the end of the war. He returned to Japan with Jun Yoshida (吉田潤, Yoshida Jun) in 1946. The family photo studio had been destroyed, but with Yoshida he set up a new studio, busily churning out photographs for twenty or more kasutori magazines (カストリ雑誌, kasutori-zasshi) (cheap, sensational and short-lived magazines) every month. As Hayashi would later describe it, Yoshida would tell publishers that he photographed women, and Hayashi (later renowned for his portraits of men) would tell them that he photographed anything other than women. The ploy seems to have worked: he was frenetically busy, and the photographer Shōji Ueda later termed him “he first professional photographer in Japan”. He also found time to remarry in 1946, his second wife being Kane Watanabe (渡辺カネ, Watanabe Kane); they had a son, Hidehiko (英比古), in 1947.

Always gregarious, Hayashi had friends and acquaintances among the buraiha (dissolute writers), and his portraits of Osamu Dazai and Sakunosuke Oda, both taken in the Lupin (ルパン, Rupan?) bar, are now famous. At the end of that year, the literary magazine Shōsetsu Shinchō published the first of Hayashi's series of portraits, titled Bunshi (literati), of chūkan bungaku (中間文学), other writers and figures close to the world of literature, in its January 1948 issue; the series would continue until 1949 and was later collected into an anthology. Hayashi's portraits show their subjects in context, and the combination of their subject matter and the method by which he took them — by his own account intermediate (chūkan) between the tense, decisive style of Ken Domon and the relaxed, informal style of Ihei Kimura — led them to be termed “intermediate photographs” (中間写真, chūkan shashin). The series of portraits that he was commissioned to take remained fresh; that of an unposed (and unsuspecting) Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is particularly famous.

Meanwhile, his portraits of orphans and the desperate but sometimes pleasurable life of the city were run in camera magazines, general-interest magazines, and more surprisingly in Fujin Kōron; these too would be anthologized, first in 1980 in a book, Kasutori Jidai (カストリ時代, "The rotgut period"), that has a lasting reputation as a historic document.

By 1954 Hayashi and the photographers Shōtarō Akiyama and Kira Sugiyama were sharing a studio in the basement of the Nihon Seimei Building, a dirty old building (subsequently demolished) in Hibiya (Chiyoda-ku).

In the early 1950s, a strong trend toward photographing unaltered reality was fueled by manifestos in camera magazines by Ken Domon and others; Hayashi bucked this by arranging his photographs so that the whole and every part would form a flawless composition, staging if this were necessary. For this reason he is commonly regarded as very unlike a photographer such as Ihei Kimura.

In 1950 his fourth son was born.

Through this period Hayashi was busily cofounding and participating in various organizations of photographers. Together with Eiichi Akaho (赤穂英一, Akaho Eiichi), Shōtarō Akiyama, Ryōsuke Ishizu, Yōichi Midorikawa and Shōji Ueda, he was a founding member of Ginryūsha in 1947; the group would meet once every two months, for discussion and drinking. A year later he joined Ken Domon, Ihei Kimura, Shigeru Tamura and others in founding the Photographers' Group (写真家集団, Shashinka Shūdan), which would later become the Japan Photographers Association (日本写真家協会, Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai). In 1953 he was a founding member of the photography section of Nika Society (二科会写真部, Nikakai shashinbu).