“Le gayi dil gudiya Jaapaan ki, pagal kar diya mujhe… Jaapaan, love in Tokyo,” sang Koji Sato, Director General, The Japan Foundation, after charming the gathering with his Hindi at the preview of Tokyo Before/After, a travelling photography exhibition by the foundation and the National Gallery of Modern Art. He opened with a “Namaskar” and said, “Main humari taraf se bahut bahut dhanyawad kehna chahta hoon ki Ministry of Culture ne humare proposal ko dil se accept kiya.” Beyond the nostalgia, the exhibition itself looked at a Tokyo that has undergone extraordinary change.
Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, with Koji Sato
Risen In The East on the Asakusa (2011)
The people’s affection for the city and its historical and cultural assets is what the two cities share
Koji Sato, Director General, The Japan Foundation, on what people in Delhi and Tokyo have in common
Jinichi Kadowaki, Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of Japan
Portraits of a city in constant fluxBringing together around 80 photographs from the 1930s-40s and the 2010s, the exhibit places two eras of the city in direct visual conversation. From Kineo Kuwabara’s series called Tokyo In The 11th Year of the Showa (1936) to Natsumi Hayashi’s series Today’s Levitation (2011) documenting rapid digital transformation in Japan, & Shintaro Sato’s photo series Risen In The East on the Asakusa (2011), the transformation is visible not just in what is photographed, but in the colours, frames and visual language of the photographs. Together, they trace Tokyo’s social, cultural and economic shifts, as well as the evolution of its infrastructure. What emerges is a series of portraits of a city in constant flux.
The exhibit juxtaposes Tokyo across decades, exploring a city in flux
For Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, who has travelled to Japan, the exhibition brought back memories of seeing the old and modern city coexist. “My memories of going to Japan are filled with a lot of love and inspiration. It is a resilient city. When I visited Tokyo, I saw the old city and the modern one. Apart from the layered infrastructure, I noticed the city had frugal yet functional infrastructure,” he said.
Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, Director General, NGMA
Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, Director General, NGMA, found another connection between the two countries in the photographs. “The exhibition allows us to encounter the dynamic city of Tokyo through two distinct moments in time and to discover through photography the subtle continuities between memory and human experience,” he said.
A troupe of Japanese women playing Taiko drums
Jatin Das
