Naked Festival

In the spring of 2000, film critic Donald Richie came to Kyoto to meet several KJ editors at a cozy teahouse in Maruyama Park. He implored us to do an article on his late friend, the photographer Tamotsu Yatō, who had photographed Japan’s hadaka matsuri (naked festivals) in the 1960s. Yatō published two books—Naked Festival (1968) and Otoko: Studies of the Young Japanese Male (1972), which he dedicated to Yukio Mishima—before falling into obscurity.

Richie had obtained Yatō’s negatives from a friend and kept some 2000 of them in boxes in a closet in his Tokyo apartment. Photographer Everett Kennedy Brown, who agreed to print some of the badly faded negatives for Kyoto Journal, noted that, “This was before the advent of high-quality film scanners, and working late nights in the darkroom to coax good images from those faded negatives was an awesome challenge. Many fine images were too far gone but seeing the beautiful images take shape in the developer bath was a very moving, almost spiritual experience. Nobody else had photographed those festivals in a way that revealed the naïve Japanese male eros and beauty that, along with those festivals, no longer exists.” 

Yatō died at the age of 45 of an enlarged heart. He was an extraordinary, self-taught photographer whose work attained a cult following among artists working with male erotica. In the end, the prejudice against that subject—the young male nude—was the primary reason for his obscurity, Richie argued.

Novelist Yukio Mishima, a frequent visitor at Yatō’s home, wrote in his preface of the Naked Festival,  “Somehow the naked festivals that have come down to us and still take place today in various parts of the country have managed, though barely, to bring with them the ancient belief that the naked male body is undefiled and sacred; and this despite the fact that that our Westernized intellectuals long regarded these festivals as something to be ashamed of, or rather as something they didn’t want Westerners to see. To hide any of the old ways that might persist despite all efforts to eradicate them. The Meiji-era Japanese were like an anxious housewife preparing to receive guests, hiding away in closets common articles of daily use and laying aside comfortable everyday clothes, hoping to impress the guests with the immaculate, idealized life of her household, without so much as a speck of dust in view.”

KJ 44 dedicated 36 pages to Yatō’s images, accompanied by essays by both Richie and Mishima.