Nara in Photographs and the Takabatake Salon: Taikichi Irie and Naoya Shiga

For that reason, tourism in Nara today remains heavily focused on the distant past.

Yet there was once a salon that formed a vital current of culture in modern Nara, and it began with a single person's move to the city. That person was the novelist Naoya Shiga (1883–1971), known for works such as A Dark Night's Passing.

At the time, Shiga was already widely celebrated as a writer and regarded as one of the foremost cultural figures of his age, when in 1925 he suddenly decided to move to Nara.

The place he chose to live was Takabatake, set apart from the center of the city. Because Takabatake had long been a quarter where the Shinto priests of Kasuga Taisha and the Buddhist monks of Todai-ji lived, it was a quiet, out-of-the-way neighborhood that had barely been developed.

In almost no time at all, a cultural community took shape around Shiga, and as more and more people traveled to Nara to visit him, it came to be called the "Takabatake Salon." A remarkable circle of figures passed through this salon—among them the writers Saneatsu Mushanokoji and Junichiro Tanizaki, and the critic Hideo Kobayashi.

A remarkable circle of figures passed through this salon—among them the writers Saneatsu Mushanokoji and Junichiro Tanizaki, and the critic Hideo Kobayashi. Inspired by their presence, younger artists grew up in their wake.

With his departure, the role the Takabatake Salon had played in nurturing cultural life seemed on the verge of being lost. Yet an impulse arose to inherit that spirit and carry Nara's culture into its next stage.

At Kannon-in, the sub-temple of Todai-ji where he served as resident priest, Kamitsukasa opened a new gathering place that carried Shiga's spirit forward. Many people came and went at this "Kannon-in Salon," and it too nurtured a next generation of artists.

Today, the Nara culture born from these salons is already fading from view, yet the cultural soil cultivated there still leaves a quiet, lingering resonance in Takabatake.

Born in Nara, Irie first set his sights on becoming a painter, but after receiving a Vest Pocket Kodak from his older brother, he became completely absorbed in photography. Though he soon made a name for himself in the world of photography, he is almost never spoken of within the standard histories of the medium.

On November 17, 1945, shortly after Japan's defeat in the war, a rumor spread that when the statues of the Four Heavenly Kings—the Shitenno—of Todai-ji were brought back to Nara from their wartime evacuation site, they would be requisitioned by the American occupation forces. Irie resolved to preserve them in photographs before that could happen, and that decision became the turning point that transformed his life as a photographer.

From then on, Irie lived out his days in Nara, photographing the temples, Buddhist statues, landscapes, and festivals of his native place until his death in 1992. In the history of Japanese photography, a photographer who spends his whole life from birth to death photographing his own hometown is exceedingly rare.

Yet Irie refused that stance altogether. Rejecting any overt social message, he devoted himself solely to photographing the changing landscape of his native land.

There is no social message in Irie's photographs, yet that is nothing negative; if anything, it is profoundly Japanese. And it is for that very reason that his work is so rarely discussed, either in Japan or abroad.

Yet no other photographer has captured the landscapes of Japan so magnificently through the emotional sensibility of the Japanese people. One figure who felt a deep resonance with this quality in Irie's work—so difficult to put into words—was the great film director Yasujiro Ozu.

In his films, Ozu was fiercely committed to using only genuine things; the ceramics, the meals, and every object that appeared on screen were of the finest quality. Though it is little known, photographs by Taikichi Irie appear here and there throughout Ozu's films.

To my mind, if Yasujiro Ozu is the film director who gave fullest expression to a Japanese sense of beauty, then in photography that figure is Taikichi Irie.

For centuries, the name "Yamato" referred to what is now Nara; it is only relatively recently that "Nara" came into general use. What Irie photographed across the whole span of his life was the quiet disappearance of the older atmosphere of "Yamato," steeped in history and culture, amid the rapid transformations of the postwar decades.

Tourists rarely find their way there, yet if you travel to Nara and wish to touch the depth of its culture, I recommend visiting this museum first before setting out into the city.

From "Yamato" to "Nara."