Shohachi Kimura: Japan, 1893–1958;
Yoshikazu Suzuki: Japan, dates unknown
Yoshikazu Suzuki and Shohachi Kimura's 1954 book Ginza Kaiwai / Ginza Haccho is a two-volume study of Tokyo's famous Ginza district, a prominent shopping area at that time, and today one of the city's most luxurious. In the first volume, Ginza Kaiwai, noted Japanese artist and essayist Shohachi Kimura offers a comprehensive historical account of Ginza, including reproductions of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, maps, drawings, and sweeping photographs by Yoshikatsu Kanno. The second volume, Ginza Haccho, is a long accordion foldout, or leporello, reproducing photographer Yoshikazu Suzuki's panoramic views of the main street of Ginza. Photographs of buildings on each side of the street are montaged together to form continuous blocks that run along the upper and lower edges of the single, impossibly long page, with text in the middle describing the shops. Within the context of documentary photography and conceptual art, Suzuki's foldout is an uncanny precedent to Ed Ruscha's seminal book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, produced twelve years later. Printed on rice paper and housed in a cardboard box, Ginza Kaiwai / Ginza Haccho is a distinctive vision of urban history, detailing the commercial structures of a cityscape, and a precise snapshot of mid-twentieth-century Japanese social identity.
