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Comment by antiterra | Hacker News Reader

I know it doesn’t say ‘first’ or ‘only’ to find the soul of 1950s Japan, but I sense the idea that Switzerland is the familiar and Japan is the exotic. Photography as an art was well established at the time within the borders of the country, and there’s much to discover, such as the work of Hiroshi Hamaya.

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I suspect though that a foreigner who does find the country exotic will choose subjects to photograph and photograph them in a way the "locals" would not. That can be both an interesting perspective for those native to the country as well as for the the rest of us.

definitely. although one of the hallmarks in a good photographer is the ability to find the exotic in the mundane.

but now i'm curious how many foreign photographers we're missing out on.

On that note, does anyone know of works coming from the other direction? Photographers from East Asia documenting the West before the Internet?

It's not photography specifically, but one of Japan's most revered historical figures is Fukuzawa Yukichi. In the 19th century, he spent many years traveling through the West, learned English and Dutch, and wrote a lot of books in Japanese about his experiences.

He "discovered" the West for Japan and brought knowledge back. They used that knowledge to help re-found the country after the Edo period ended; he's regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukuzawa_Yukichi

Indeed this is true from my experience... moments of insight into beauty (which make me want to take a picture) seem to occur much more when I'm away from home.

This is why I love showing tourists around my home city. They notice so many special things that have long since faded into the background for me.

For example I was taking four Japanese grad students to a local park famous for its hikes and waterfalls. But the thing that made them jump up and start pointing and taking pictures was when a yellow school bus drove by. Look, look! It's Snoopy! It's a real yellow bus, just like in Snoopy!"

When my eldest brother was in high school, he did a two-week exchange program with a high school in Italy (where an Italian student came to stay with us for two weeks, and later my brother went and stayed with that student and his family for two weeks). I was fairly young at the time, but I distinctly remember when all the Italian students went out into the city to do some sight-seeing and he came back with basically his entire camera roll filled with pictures of squirrels, and apparently most of his friends had done the same.

If you lived in a country that doesn't have them and your only exposure to them is Disney movies, you'd be awed by squirrels too.

I'd have done the same as your Italian guest did.

The same with deer. Amazing to see deer just walking through American backyards.

> Amazing to see deer just walking through American backyards.

Americans don't understand how underpopulated their country is compared to the Old World.

Yep, I totally understand! I just didn't have this understanding back when I was really young

Hence, photos of the infamous and proliferous vending machines.

Are they infamous? Quite frankly after visiting I wish there were more of them back home, selling something other than soda.

Hm, yes famous would have been the more clear word to use. I think they're great. The word infamous has always been blurry for me, since it's often used ironically, in which case it just means "famous" again.

I think the problem with a word like infamous is that it kind of requires the context of the author or speaker's social mores, and if you don't share their value judgement then they're just famous. And social mores have changed a lot and even now vary from person to person.

I learned English as a second language. I have often found certain usages of the English language imaginative and poetic -- while such observations seem to escape my native speaker friends. for example, I found much beauty that English uses the same word for both "wave someone goodbye" and "water waves". Now when I walk by the shore, I feel the sea is calling out to me -- this is an association that I never had in my native language, which makes no connection between hand-waving and water waves.

Hofstadter wrote about this, that in different languages people bundle together different concepts. and such bundling is hidden from native speakers. My friend (a native speaker of both English and French) once remarked that she really wished she could re-read some French literature as a non-native speaker so as to deeper appreciate the beauty of the language.

> no connection between hand-waving and water waves.

There is a mathematical connection. The vertical bobbing of a boat on the water is more or less the same as a hand waving.

We are metaphorical machines and language drives a large part of it, at least according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I wish I had the perspective of a second language - maybe this is where the statistic of multilingual kids performing better comes from.

I think visitors tend to take more landscape or asmospheric type photos as well as photos of people (sometimes problematic as expectations of privacy/laws are not the same as the US). Japanese tended to take more nature, macro or close framed single subject photos, which makes sense as they have no need to capture an environment they live in all the time. This was long ago who knows if it applies in thr globalizing age of instagram.

Yasujiro Ozu was making films since the 20s.

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