SENDAI – Color photographs of when Japan was under Allied occupation are vanishing more than 70 years after U.S. service members captured vivid scenes that may hold lost pieces of history. From 1945 to 1952, when Allied forces governed Japan after World War II, U.S. service members stationed in the country photographed postwar Japan on color film, which was still rare in the country. Many of the photos are gradually being dispersed or lost over time, though some may contain historically significant scenes.
An exhibition featuring such color photos taken by U.S. service members was held in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, in August. The photos capture everyday scenes, including the area around a railway station, shopping streets and department stores decorated for the Tanabata festival, one of the three largest festivals in the Tohoku region, and Christmas. Their vivid colors are so striking that they look as though they were taken only recently with a digital camera.
The photos are believed to have been taken by a U.S. Army officer stationed in Sendai with a camera made by Germany’s Leica Camera and Eastman Kodak’s Kodachrome reversal film. Fujio Chiba, 67, a senior official of a local history research association in Sendai, collected the photos on display.
He searches for and acquires Japan-related photos and film through websites run by former U.S. military personnel and their relatives, photo-sharing sites and auctions. Chiba owns about 1,000 such photos, which show mainly cities where U.S. forces were stationed. Some vividly preserve places and objects that no longer exist.
One photo whose photographer and date are unknown shows a monument marking the hypocenter of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing of Nagasaki, capturing a white wooden pillar bearing the black inscription “marker of the atomic bomb hypocenter” atop a rounded mound. It precedes the current triangular black-granite pillar. Urakami Cathedral in the same city, which was destroyed by the atomic bombing, was rebuilt in 1959.
A photo believed to have been taken in 1955 preserves its devastating pre-reconstruction appearance. Color film did not become widely available in Japan until after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. Long before then, however, U.S. service members had been recording through color film the unfamiliar landscapes they saw through their viewfinders.
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