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Shinichiro Kobayashi: Japan New Map

by John McGee

Shinichiro Kobayashi, Oimachi, Niigata Prefecture, 1998
(Images courtesy Shinichiro Kobayashi and East Press)

In 1967, American artist Robert Smithson gave an ironic photographic tour of his industrial New Jersey hometown. His Monuments of Passaic were not bronze sculptures of famous guys on horses but pipes spewing filth, a floating derrick, and a sandbox. Now, photographer Shinichiro Kobayashi, (born 1956), shows us around Japan’s latest “monuments” in his book, “Japan New Map.” 

Decaying buildings and rusting machines in Kobayashi’s earlier book, “Deathtopia” (1998), showed the world’s second largest economy in neglect and denial. “Japan New Map” captures the way the random, devastating aggression of Japan’s insatiable construction industry is reshaping the landscape. Smithson’s deadpan irony has been replaced by sick fascination and dread. 

Japan Rail (JR) propaganda posters entice with scenes of natural splendor, as if just beyond the fringes of Tokyo, beautiful, untouched rural landscapes abounded. Between 1991-2000, Kobayashi traveled from Okinawa to Hokkaido documenting the reality: years of government make-work projects and few environmental safeguards have left no stone unturned. 

Shinichiro Kobayashi, Innoshima, 
Hiroshima Prefecture, 1997 

Think of “Japan New Map” as a photographic companion to Alex Kerr’s 2001 book “Dogs and Demons.” Kerr quantified the abuses of Japan’s construction industry juggernaut—97% of the rivers dammed, 60% of the coastline covered in concrete, 43% of the native forest replanted with allergy-bearing, wildlife-barren cedar plantations—but his book showed nothing. 

Kobayashi’s pictures do. Japan’s land of gods has been torn open and sewn up in concrete. Open pit mines have burrowed deep in downward spirals. Bridges and overpasses have been built solely to appease transportation’s golden calf. Mountainside highways have restrained road cuts behind concrete girdles. Giant pillars have cast cities in monolithic objects with the use-value of Michael Heizer earthworks. 

In one photo, two red surveyor’s crosses mark the middle of an unfinished dirt lane leading into the pitch-black entrance of a new tunnel buried deep in a Hyogo-ken hillside. The Christian metaphor may be unintentional, but anyone can grasp the essence: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. 

But there are no people. They seem to have used up these sites and moved on, leaving only an industrial residue that Kobayashi intensifies with perversely attractive saturated colors. Artificial ponds glow an unholy bright green and despoiled forests bleed fleshy red earth. 

This re-forming of the land is like Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery—wrong-headed attempts to “improve” lead to perverse and pitiable ruin. In both cases, you feel bad, but then wonder why money continues to be thrown at nonexistent problems. 

Shinichiro Kobayashi, Hokudancho, 
Hyogo Prefecture, 1996

Unlike MJ’s nose, many of the concrete constructions in Kobayashi’s photos look extremely sturdy. Yet their purposes are often unclear: An elevated road deadends halfway through a rice paddy, a concrete stream bed is wide but dry. They’re built to last, but why?

Location is also unclear. Each picture is identified only by prefecture and year. The predominantly medium shots form a jigsaw puzzle you have to fit together blindly. 

This placelessness highlights the pervasiveness of the destruction but denies both martyrdom and rehabilitation, leading to shoganai (oh well) rather than gambarimasho (let's go for it). Anger (and hope) need direction to lead to positive action. Shouldn’t a good map show you the way? 

But Kobayashi writes that “the point is not to ask what is right and what is wrong.“ He finds “the contrast between the gray concrete and the complex, beautiful curves of nature strangely erotic.” Kobayashi’s not an environmentalist, he’s a sex tourist getting off in a foreign land, one that used to be his own.

©2006 John McGee

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