The Shibusawa Photographs

This collection of photographs is a part of “TheShibusawa Photographs” at our institute.
Our institute has a photo collection called “TheShibusawa Photographs.” Mr. Shibusawa was a businessman, president of the Bank of Japan, patron andorganizer of the academic world, a scholar and thefounder of our institute. The collection is made up ofphotos that Mr. Shibusawa had commissioned. They
were taken around 1935 by various people, for example, professional photographers, farmers and scholars from. They show Japanese in daily life, landscapes and tools. They are valuable in the study ofJapanese culture and history. We have wanted toshow them to the public for a long time, but there
have been serious problems to solve first. First, wewould like to explain about the problems we havebeen faced and our plan to open an exhibition.
One of the problems is that almost all of these photos have no negatives, and we don't know if they havebeen lost, or not. After Mr. Shibusawa's death in
1963, his institute almost completely stopped its operations for a while, because the project had been runby him personally. After many twists and turns, 23years ago, our university invited the institute to join
us. From that time, the institute has belonged to ouruniversity. Many historical materials were taken overby our university. Among the materials were 100
photo albums. Each album had small-sized photos,without negatives. We called them “The Shibusawa
Photographs.” No one knew where the negatives
went. The albums contained about 4000 photos, but
their condition was bad, so, we began to take close-up
pictures. That was 15 years ago.
Digital cameras and scanners were not common atthat time. After taking close-up pictures, we madecards pasted with the enlarged photos, and now weare arranging them for analysis. Later, we found 4000
more photographs, so the total number is about 8000.
The latter 4000 are being arranged now.

We got the approval of the Shibusawa family to use
these photos as we like. Since the origin of our institute was Shibusawa's personal institute, this approval
was important. But, of course, it is still difficult to usethem freely in public. Someone, living somewhere,may have the negatives, if only a small part of them.
The real owners of the photos are the people whohold the negatives. We are facing the problem ofdeciding what rights we have to show them in public.
I said, Mr. Shibusawa had photos taken by variouspeople. In almost all of the cases, it is not clear how
Mr. Shibusawa was involved with the taking of thephotos. He might have spent money to have the photos taken, sometimes he might have lent a cameraand film and other times he might have bought previously taken photos, and even more rarely he might
have taken pictures by himself. It is difficult to know
every detail clearly, because about 80 years haspassed. But our right to show them in public may beaffected by his level of involvement in the process.
These four years, we traced the history of some ofthe photos to better understand how and by whomthey were taken. We found it was hard to get accurate information with such a short investigation. As
times passes, the number of people who have firsthand information about the photos is decreasing.
One more thing is that, many pictures have been
pasted onto paper, and some of the pieces of paper
have captions written on them. We found the captions are mostly accurate, just a few of them havemistakes, but we have to check them, too.
At the same time, the number of people who areasking us to show the photos is increasing. If wewant to hold the exhibition, we should start soon,even though we don’t have a clear solution to ourproblem. We have to do it well-mannered and rationally. This book is the first to show these photos tothe general public.The photos in this book weretaken on Kikai island in 1935/1936.

85

編者
香月洋一郎

神奈川大学日本常民文化研究所教授

神奈川大学 21 世紀 COEプログラム調査研究資料 5「澁澤写真」に見る1935-1936年の喜界島“ The Shibusawa Photograph Collection”
of Kikai Island −Ordinary Lives of Islanders in 1935/1936
発 行 日2008 年 2 月 20 日編

集

「人類文化研究のための非文字資料の体系化」第 3 班

発行

神奈川大学 21 世紀 COE プログラム「人類文化研究のための非文字資料の体系化」研究推進会議〒 221―8686
横浜市神奈川区六角橋 3―27―1
http://www.himoji.jp/制作

有限会社あむ印刷株式会社精興社

雑誌コードISSN 1349-7219