| | | T. Enami
A Japanese Farmer and his Wife
A single photograph can have multiple facets to it and the stereoview of "A Farmer and his Wife" taken in around 1897 is an excellent example of this. On the surface all is quite straight forward - a Japanese farmer wearing a grass cloak against the rain, a hoe over his right shoulder and a harvest of long white radishes, daikon, in the other. Behind him is his wife carrying a teapot.
All appears obvious but the photographs were taken in the T. Enami studio in Yokohama as part of a larger series and in this exhibition we can see several other images using the same models and props that were presumably taken during the same session.
The pose itself tells us about the roles of men and women in nineteenth century Japan - in one image she walks behind him and in another she stands whilst he sits to eat. Perhaps we might be reading too much into the image, and those radishes to the unwary eye are just vegetables but look again. In the past in the rural areas of Japan, there were common expressions about the shape of a woman‘s daikon ashi "Legs like a Radish" as indicator of her potential fertility -- a large family being a good thing for a man and the labors of the farm. At the time of these photos, a typical mother might tell her son to look for a more "plump" set of legs, but the radishes seen here point to what most Japanese men really desire as ideal: long, slender, and white as snow...
In Japan the saying Daikon Ashi had deeper sexual meanings that become clearer with a re-examination of the images but were probably overlooked by the western audiences who purchased the stereoviews in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the Griffith & Griffith card from the 1905 series note the way the daikon are laying resting on the hoe. In the card sold by Rose in Australia the title is "Typical Japanese Farmer. See his grass cloak to keep the rain off, his pipe, his hoe for digging the ground, and the bunch of radishes he is carrying" and the farmer is proudly holding up his radishes or perhaps there is another message in this image about his desires?
The original images were taken around 1897 and so the question arises as to why photographs from the same session were first being sold as stereocards by Griffith & Griffith in the USA and by Rose in Australia in 1905. The answer to this lies in the commercial possibilities offered by global politics. Between February 1904 and September 1905 the Russo-Japanese War was fought and it stemmed from rivalry for control of Manchuria. Japanese forces consistently vanquished the Russian army and navy and this was a shock to both Europe and America. As the news spread the interest in Japan and all things Japanese was widespread and older photographs were purchased and reproduced to meet the demand.
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