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Impressions of a new Japan, captured by Kimura’s mature vision

This is the second volume in a four-volume book series about Ihei Kimura’s Showa-era photography, originally published in 2001. The remaining books in the series are, unfortunately, out of stock.

Edited from photographs taken between the summer of 1945 and 1954, this volume presents a comprehensive overview of Ihei Kimura’s photography in Japan immediately after the end of World War 2. In five themed chapters (“Post-war Sceneries”, “A People Resurrected”, “The Common People”, “The Japanese Islands” and “Characters”, which features portraits of notable artists, writers, thinkers and actors like Junichiro Tanizaki or Koji Uno), Kimura’s photographs capture the immense destruction in the city of Tokyo but also the common people’s rise from the ruins, the postwar optimism and the transformation of the city as the traditional back alleys slowly disappear.

The book concludes with three texts by Takeyoshi Tanuma, Ai Maeda and Hideo Tsumura (all texts only included in Japanese).