Google Doodle Doubles Attendance at Tokyo Exhibition

Talk about the power of Google: when Google commemorated French photographer Robert Doisneau on its world websites with a simple photo collage, attendance at a Tokyo exhibition suddenly jumped to nearly double.

On April 14, the 100-year anniversary of Doisneau’s birth, Google posted a Google Doodle collage of four of his photographs superimposed with the Google logo. Users who moved their mouse over the collage were automatically shown Doisneau search results; on Google Japan, a top result was an ongoing retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Attendance immediately rose to 1.8 times the pre-Doodle level and visitors to the exhibit’s webpage tripled from 3,000-4,000 to 12,000 per day, according to Masako Sato of Crevis Co. Ltd., who curated the show. When I chatted with her on April 20, Sato reported that a large number of visitors were coming in saying, “I saw you on Google.”

It’s a great exhibit, by the way. Don’t miss the portraits of famous people, as creative and quirky as the subjects they portray –Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Tati and Fernand Leger among others, or the very funny 1948 series on people’s candid reactions to a racy painting in the window of a gallery.

Japan’s Ruling Class: Dogs

The photograph above demonstrates what I was hinting at in my April 17 column in the Japan Times, which is that animals are taking over Japan. Just a generation ago, few people would even think of allowing a dog into the house; now pets rule the roost. I’ve already covered pet manicures; here are more over-the-top pooch products and services.

Hot-spring resorts used to be for people, but dogs have crashed the party. These dudes are hanging out in the wanchan onsen ワンちゃん温泉 (bow-wow bath) at Shiosainoyu しおさいの湯　in Kawatana Onsen in Nagasaki Prefecture. One’s even got the towel-on-the-head trick down.

Meanwhile, this gal is relaxing in an outdoor bath in Hokkaido.

At New Year’s, people eat special food called osechi. Most Japanese don’t care for it, but that doesn’t stop owners from dropping wads so Princess can have her own New Year’s nibbles. Get this set of 26 items, cooked especially for dogs, delivered in a three-tier box for 21,000 yen ($247).

Heaven forbid His Majesty gets wet in the rain. How about this dog umbrella, which costs 4,500 yen on Yahoo Shopping.

Or this less-expensive model, which is just 1,980 yen on Amazon Japan.

Pretty Paws: The Japanese art of dog manicure

In my April 17 column in the Japan Times, I introduced Sase Eiko 佐瀨栄子, a “pet beauty artist” who is booked a month in advance for the high-fashion manicures she does on dogs. That’s her in the photo below, at work on a client.

Here’s the finished manicure, which is called “dog nail art” ドッグネイルアート　in Japanese:

“You have to work fast on dogs, because they don’t stay still, and their claws are much narrower than a human fingernail,” she told me. Despite the space limitations, she’s done even small dog’s claws up up with flowers, hearts, paw prints and even Christmas trees and snowmen.

Sase uses nail color formulated for dogs with more pigment to cover darker claws. It’s supposedly safe even if dogs lick it. She charges between 3,000 to 5,000 yen ($35-58) to do both front and back paws, and says she gets a lot of requests to do up dog’s claws to match their owner’s nail jobs. That’s a stone glued onto in the center of the flower:

Sase is a sought-after trimmer instructor and chair of Pet Esthé International Association, Japan. She must have good eyes and a steady hand: there’s a photo on her blog of the tiny designs she’s painted on grains of rice!

Woman? Or Man? Beato’s Snow Beauty ベアトの雪中美人

If you live in Tokyo, you’ve probably seen the photo above on posters advertising the ongoing Felice Beato exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It was taken around 1868 by Beato, one of the first photographers to record Japan. The print belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum and is titled “Woman in Winter Dress.”

At a press tour last month, curator Mitsui Keishi 三井圭司 tantalized reporters by suggesting that the figure in the photo might, just might, actually be a man! “Look at the feet,” he said, inviting us to move in closer. (For my review of the exhibit in The Japan Times, click here.)

Many of the reporters agreed that the feet were too gacchiri ガッチリ(big and solid) to be a woman’s. Mitsui-san noted that Beato was fussy about his models and didn’t use just any Joe or ho off the street. (I’m paraphrasing a little.) For a series of photographs portraying various occupations (fortune teller, doctor, sumo wrestler), Beato seems to have used people actually engaged in that line of work.

Now for “Woman in Winter Dress,” Beato needed a model who could express cold and wind, and hold the pose without moving for the tens of seconds necessary for exposure. In other words, someone with stage experience. And in those days, professional actors were all men.

Visit the museum by May 5 if you want to see for yourself. But one thing is certain: the photograph borrows from an established theme in Japanese art: Beauties in Snow (secchu bijin 雪中美人), some examples of which I’ve posted below. Beato, who arrived in Japan in 1863, must have familiarized himself with the local art scene by the time he took the photo.

W. Eugene Smith’s famous photos: free in Tokyo

Through May 31 in Tokyo, you can see a small exhibit of W. Eugene Smith‘s photographs up close and for free, at Fuji Film Square, a gallery in the Midtown development in Roppongi.

I have strong and early memories of the photo above, which is titled “Walk to Paradise Garden.” It must have been one of the first photographs I ever really looked at, because it appeared in a book of photographs that was in my home when I was small. I’ll bet some of you grew up with the same book. Does this cover look familiar?

The book was actually the exhibition catalog from The Family of Man, an exhibition organized by Edward Steichen and first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has sold more than 4 million copies

I didn’t know until recently that Smith took the photograph, or that he worked in Japan during and after the war. He took mortar fire on Okinawa and was unable to hold a camera for some time. One of the first photographs he took after being wounded was “Walk to Paradise Garden,” this photograph of his young children walking hand in hand towards a clearing in a wood.

As I stood looking at the photograph in Fuji Square, two older Japanese women in front of me were busy calculating how old the little boy and girl in the photograph must be now. Figuring that the kids were maybe two and three when the photograph was shot in 1946, they estimated that they must be pushing 70.

All the photographs on exhibit are from the collection of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Yamanashi Prefecture.

‘Randoseru’ Recycling – New Life for Used School Backpacks

It’s Randoseru Week here on the Gordenker blog, with posts to link up with my March 20 column in the Japan Times. In that article I report on the origin and history of randoseru, ランドセル the sturdy box-like backpack used by every primary-schoolchild in Japan. Today’s topic: “What the Heck Do You Do With an Old Randoseru?”

As the mother of two children who attended Japanese elementary school, I feel qualified to tell you that a randoseru is likely to be boroboro ボロボロ　(beat up) by the time a child graduates. Even on the off chance that a randoseru survived six years of daily use in reasonable condition, there would be no sense trying to hand it down. No one would want it because getting a pika pika ピカピカ　(brand spanking new) randoseru is a life event, part of the whole experience of growing up and entering school.

At the same time people find it very hard to throw out a used randoseru. It holds so many memories! So retired randoseru tend to end up in the back of closets, up on shelves or out in the shed, as in this photo below:

There are alternatives, however. Some people shell out ¥10,000 or more to have a skilled leather worker resize their child’s old randoseru into a little palm-sized bag, as shown in the photo below. I have no idea if anyone ever manages to use the resized bags for anything, but at least they don’t take up so much room in homes where space is at a premium.

A better alternative, in my opinion, is to donate it to program that will ship your used randoseru to a developing country for a new life with a child who can’t afford to buy anything as luxurious as a school bag. A program called “Randoseru wa umi o koete”　「ランドセルは海を越えて」 (Randoseru Crossing the Ocean) will inspect the bag, repair it if necessary and ship it to Afganistan! (If the bag happens to be made of pigs hide, it will go to Mongolia instead, where there is no religious prohibition against pig products.) To date, more than 80,000 randoseru have found new homes through the program, as you can see in the photos below:

This year’s collection period is closing soon, but if you hurry, you can still apply here (Japanese only.) If you miss the deadline, which I can’t tell you because it’s not posted (they stop accepting when they reach the maximum number they can ship) — stick that old randoseru in the back of the closet, up on a shelf or out in the shed and apply next year.

Or, if you live near a public elementary school that gets foreign students coming in an out, you can do what I did: donate your used randoseru to the school. The school my kids attended keeps a closet full of used randoseru and other school equipment to loan to foreign students who want to use them. For a child planning to attend for a short time, or who comes in at an upper grade when all the kids have beat-up randoseru — a used randoseru may be just fine.

Whatever you do, don’t throw that precious randoseru out!

Backpacks of the World: Origin of “Randoseru”

In my March 20 column in the Japan Times, I explain that the origin of the Japanese word “randoseru” ランドセル is a Dutch word: “ransel,” a military backpack used in the 19th century. As I demonstrated, the Dutch word had entered the Japanese language no later than 1885. I thought it would be interesting to dig up some images of military backpacks from around the time. It’s remarkable how much they look like the randoseru that Japanese schoolchildren still use today!

That hungry fellow above was in the French infantry in 1914.  His backpack looks a great deal like the randoseru my kids used when they attended Japanese elementary school here in Tokyo. Now below, here’s a painting depicting the uniform of a Russian regiment around 1850. Very snappy backpacks, although wider than a Japanese randoseru.

And straying a bit into a somewhat different style, a picture of Swedish soldiers around 1910:

Here’s another military backpack of the era, worn by a Dutch infantryman:

By the way, the word in Japanese for a military backpack is not randoseru; it’s hainō 背囊 （はいのう).