War doesn’t just destroy precious life, it threatens to erase culture, time-honored history, and—perhaps the most devastating of all—hope.
Nowhere was this destruction more evident than in Japan, where more than 60 major cities were burned to the ground, and millions of citizens’ lives were lost to bombs and starvation. However, as local Santa Maria resident Michael Oren can attest, human creativity and art have a way of surviving even the most devastating disasters.
Oren’s rare Japanese art and photo history collection, Digital Shashin, is proof of that powerful truth.
The compelling images in the collection are exceedingly rare, showcasing a vivid slice of pre-WWII Japanese life in stunning color prints, stark black-and-white photos, and hand-tinted film. Reproductions of 22 of the nearly 28,000 images sourced from the incredibly preserved pages of a long-lost Japanese magazine are hanging now at the Santa Maria Public Library through Jan. 27.
Oren, collector and owner of the artwork, said he is especially proud to share this historic experience with the Santa Maria community. Usually, a collection of this magnitude would debut in a major art city like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York.
“Digital Shashin is the most concentrated collection of this kind of work in the world, and it is certainly a first for Santa Maria history,” Oren said. “I’ve found that national museums don’t come anywhere close to the level of this collection, culturally speaking.”
Bringing these photos to light offers friends and neighbors a portal into a forgotten world. The history of Japan between the ’20s and ’40s is a black hole of sorts, as many cultural materials were destroyed during the war, and the Japanese government subsequently worked to erase the devastating wartime tragedy from its cultural memory.
“However, this 20-year period was unique in both the complexity and rapidity of change imposed upon not only Japan, but the global order in general,” Oren said. “Literally everything happened, and the world of today remains defined by the dramatic events of those busy times.”
Oren began his collection accidentally, while working in Japan between 2005 and 2011.
“One day while exploring the dusty corner of an antique shop, I discovered several ragged photo journals from the Pacific War period. As a military historian long frustrated by the general lack of Japanese military imagery from that period, I was impressed by their unique quality and content,” Oren said. “I wanted to see more, but knowing my own limitations, I turned to the professionals and contacted several antique and junk dealers throughout Kanto with a simple request: ‘Please find this magazine!’”
The journals Oren was searching for? Little-known periodicals unique in the arena of art and photojournalism. Oren explained that, in the decades before the war, their pages were richly filled with news and events, as well as beautiful imagery (known as shashin in Japanese). As the nation was overtaken by conflict, these same journals were exploited as propaganda, and their unique qualities quickly deteriorated until the point where their resources, production, and personnel were wiped off the earth by the war.
“This humble, hand-assembled magazine was produced in very small quantities and quaintly tied together with string, but evolved to become one of the most unique publications ever produced anywhere in the world. Within its pages were recorded virtually every significant event and topic of the era, and since it’s almost totally unknown outside of Japan, the magazine has inadvertently become one of the world’s great untapped historical resources,” Oren said. “Issues gleaned one at a time from old suitcases and dusty attics throughout Japan slowly accrued on my own bookshelves, and by 2013, it was clear I had somehow managed to collect the majority of production from the 1920s through 1940s.”
A visit to the Asian Studies Department at Stanford University and Tokyo’s National Diet Library verified the collection’s rarity and completeness. There was only one thing left to do now: show it to the world. And he did—in very small quantities.
“In every case, the response was overwhelming,” Oren said. “In addition, various historians and authors have claimed that the magazines are filled with unknown imagery not available anywhere else, and indeed, some rare images from the collection have already been published. On the strength of this feedback and as an homage to the long-forgotten Japanese staff who clearly dedicated themselves to this unique creation, I endeavored to somehow make it available to the larger public rather than become isolated again within the vaults of Stanford or elsewhere.”
What followed were years of methodical dissection, cataloging, and painstaking digital scanning of every page.
“The result of these innumerable moments of effort has surprisingly become the largest collection of shashin in the world, and the only one that has been fully recorded and enhanced in digital format,” Oren said.
Yes, you heard correctly: The hidden historical and artistic resource will soon become accessible to everyone in the world for the very first time. The collector said he owes much of his success to his wife, Kumi, who hails from western Japan.
“Although the complex, pre-war Japanese literary script is unreadable by contemporary Japanese, Kumi re-learned the earlier forms and became proficient in translation. Now we not only have the collection recorded and organized, but the capacity to translate all of the text as well,” Oren said.
Kumi finds letters to the editor to be particularly amusing. When reading the century-old pages, the world of pre-WWII Japan—before the devastating loss of life—feels real and palpable. In this way, the dead have a way of reaching out and touching you on the shoulder, if only for a brief pause. This is surely the true power of Digital Shashin.
“It’s the most concentrated collection of this material in the world,” Oren said. “An art show on its own is interesting, but we are only beginning to understand the tremendous depth of this material.”
Hayley Thomas is in awe of the power of art to defy all odds. Contact her at hthomas@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 10-17, 2015.