Nobuyoshi Araki picks up women, snaps them naked, then sells the pictures to porn mags. NICHOLAS BORNOFF meets Japan’s unlikely popular hero
NOBUYOSHI ARAKI says Tokyo is obscene. Coming from him, that’s a compliment. For he thrives on both obscenity and Tokyo. Araki was already famous 10 years ago, but today he is probably the most famous photographer in Japan. With a thicket of greying hair erupting around a bald pate, he looks like a cross between an impish satyr and Professor Calculus in Tintin.
Araki’s models have often been prostitutes, adult video protagonists and strippers. But his claim to fame has always been his uncanny ability to pick up girls, ordinary girls, take them to whatever location suits his fantasy, have them strip and photograph them. He has invariably claimed that, regardless of their provenance, he has slept with all of them.
The talk of Tokyo for a long time, Araki generates heated bar-room polemics: does he have sex with them or doesn’t he? These days, moreover, he doesn’t have to look to the demi-monde at all. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Araki phenomenon is that he has to fend off streams of women falling over each other to pose for him.
In the Nineties, Araki’s fame has soared. His pictures have been exhibited by the deadly serious Hara Museum of Modern Art, which would have spurned him a decade ago. He has published more than 80 books of photographs and is becoming an international cult phenomenon in the art world. The implications of pornography as high art beg comparison with the homoerotic images of Robert Mapplethorpe. But Mapplethorpe treated pornography as he did everything else: as a composition contrived according to a deep sense of aesthetics. Araki, on the other hand, merely freezes moments in time.
In an artistic climate in which conceptualism is becoming paramount, Araki strikes a chord: there is practically no separation between his lifestyle and his art. The brash imp who takes pictures of everything is as much of a creation as his photographs. Whatever one thinks about them, Araki’s pictures are a sign of the times. One of the women seeking him out to have her portrait taken – and just her portrait – is rock star Bjrk, for an album cover.
I first met him 10 years ago in Shinjuku, an archetypal Japanese amusement district. All the provinces of pleasure – bars, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, game arcades and sex businesses – are indiscriminately lumped together. So it was no surprise to find Araki there. This particular bar, called Kuro, seemed an odd choice, however, for the eponymous mamasan is known for expelling customers talking smut on the premises.
Araki doesn’t have to talk smut. He is virtually King Smut. Beneath a toothbrush moustache, Araki grins a lot. His speech is rapid and clipped, with the rolling drawl of Tokyo’s East End. Having made a point, he punctuates with a grunt which seems to seek your approval. His raucous laughter is infectious and his charm legendary.
Accompanied by his agent, Araki invited me along to another bar. We were the only customers. Mamasan here had a beehive hairstyle and wore satin toreador pants, but she was male. The agent, the transvestite and I were laughing a lot and very drunk. Araki hardly said a word; he was taking pictures, flashing and clicking away, pausing only to reload. The agent promised to send me some pictures and Araki enthusiastically grunted his assent, but I never got them. The two vanished in the dawn, Araki with a grunt and polite nod.
There have always been figures like Araki in Japanese culture. Renegades and eccentrics who, shy of the far more dangerous stance of political dissent, stand up against the norm by exalting sex. By turns, observer (of everything) and voyeur (with women and couples), he is a man obsessed, a compulsive shutterbug who can only relate to the world with his camera. People are mere subjects, there to be used. And, with women, it’s as though his camera were a prosthetic device forging a link between his mind’s eye and his penis. He has often referred to his technique as “camera fuck”.
In the wake of all his recent notoriety – in Tokyo he is regarded as a cross between Andy Warhol and Father Christmas – a documentary had to come sooner or later. The honour goes to the United Kingdom’s Channel 4.
“Tell me honestly,” asks the female commentator over a shot of a woman in a strategically torn kimono strung up from the rafters in a complex array of bondage knots, “is this beautiful, or does it disgust you?”
The disapproving tone goes straight to the heart of the documentary’s strong undercurrent: the differences between sexual perceptions in two cultures.
In Britain, puritanism still taints sex with an aura of sin. In Japan, sex is matter-of- factly regarded as a natural function, but it is nevertheless governed by rules of decorum that are stricter than in Britain, and all the more stringent for women. Sex is fine in its place, but its allotted space is minimal.
The proliferation of sex publications and industries in Japan in no way implies sexual liberation. On the contrary, it betrays the extreme frustration of a rigid society in which the sexes barely socialise.
In addition to reflecting the Japanese propensity for worshipping brand names and fame, the girls and couples who seek out Araki to have intimate pictures taken do so because it is a liberating experience; an act of defiance.
In Japan, however, to the consternation of some foreign women, this kind of fare is up front, often on the magazine racks outside the shop. Sex magazines and eromanga (erotic comic books) contain depictions of rape, bondage and torture, and are often avidly perused by students and businessmen on commuter trains. Araki’s work mirrors Japan’s collective sexual fantasies.
His style is a photographic and pornographic equivalent to “bad painting”- a popular vogue in illustration and commercial art during the 1980s, which dictated a style compounding the calculatedly amateurish and meticulously trashy. Taken with a conventional reflex camera, the pictures look anyone could have taken them. But herein lies their appeal: anyone didn’t take them and most males wished they could.
Arranged in a magazine format to evoke a scrapbook, the pictures form photographic diaries, complete with captions in scrawled handwriting. Grainy, highly contrasted and often in black and white, Araki’s pictures typically show the model undressing, nude, squatting over the toilet, having a bath and posing on the bed, perhaps all trussed up in ropes.
As a fanciful Hieronymus Bosch touch, she might have a flower blooming from her rectum. The scrawled commentaries are reminiscent of those appearing on pornographic traditional woodblock prints. They are raunchy and will describe all the things Araki might have done with the model and left out of the photograph.
There is censorship in Japan, but it makes no sense. The depiction of sexual violence passes muster, but pubic hair (measured some years ago by the government in terms of acceptable “percentages”) does not.
Araki’s first exhibition was contrived to provide the authorities with no excuse to intervene, but it caused a furore. Circumventing pubic hair altogether, Araki concentrated on the inner recesses – the very penetralia of the female genitals. Hung around the gallery walls in stark monochrome, the pictures became sculptural abstractions.
Channel 4’s documentary Fake Love, true to the man himself, leaves us in no doubt. Araki is weird (certainly), objectionable (arguably) but incontestably an original and dedicated artist. According to the director of the Hara Museum, the vision of the omnipresent Araki on the streets with a camera suggests otherwise, but in reality, “he is a very lonely person”.