How does a city reinvent itself without losing the traces of what it once was? The question sits at the heart of TOKYO Before/After, an exhibition currently on display at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. Presented by the Consulate-General of Japan and The Japan Foundation, the exhibition brings together more than 80 photographs spanning Tokyo from the 1930s and 1940s to the years after 2010 offering a visual account of a metropolis transformed by time. For namma ooru, a city experiencing its own rapid transformation, the exhibition offers a relevant comparison.
Consul General of Japan in Bengaluru Hiroshi Nawata sees a natural connection between the two cities. Tokyo was left devastated after World War II before undergoing an extraordinaire period of reconstruction and growth to become one of the world’s leading cities. Bengaluru, meanwhile, has evolved from a historic city into an international hub for technology and also manufacturing. “Bengaluru is a city that has developed remarkably and continues to grow. Development is seen not limited to specific areas in the city but is spreading across the city,” Nawata says. He points to the way development has spread across the city, while ‘Old Bengaluru’ continues to retain its historic character.
The tension between the old and the new is integral to TOKYO Before/After. The photographs reveal a Tokyo built through layers of redevelopment and spontaneous growth, with older neighbourhoods and everyday life existing alongside new infrastructure. With Bengaluru expanding its infrastructure and technological footprint, Nawata believes there is value in protecting its heritage and communities. “Becoming a global city does not have to mean losing its identity. Development can coexist with memory, culture and everyday life,” he says.
While Tokyo is often imagined through neon lights, skyscrapers, bullet trains and cutting edge technology, the photographs look beyond its futuristic image. Placing photographs from different decades side by side makes the transformation almost immediate: the change and the remains.
The photographers themselves add another artistic skin to this story. Earlier photographers like Kineo Kuwabara documented a Tokyo caught between tradition and modernisation, while contemporary photographers offer very different perspective of the city, turning their lenses towards its streets, people, popular culture and digital-age identity. Together, their perspectives show that there is no single version of Tokyo.
Among the works that particularly stand out for Nawata is Mika Ninagawa’s Tokyo Innocence. Her highly stylished imagery explores youth culture and eccentricity, presenting people who seem to exist between reality and fiction, nature and artifice and traditional identity and contemporary popular culture.
With Bengaluru, however, the exhibition’s most resonant message may be closer to home. As flyover rise and neighbourhoods change, its identity is being rewritten too. “For a city like Bengaluru, the lesson is perhaps not to resist change, but to make conscious choices about what we carry forward while we grow. A city’s cultural identities is not only its monument; it also resides in its streets, communities, memories and everyday ways of living,” he adds.
As Japan-India relations continue to deepen, exhibitions such as this also create space for people to people understanding. Seen from Bengaluru, it is an invitation to consider what a rapidly changing city chooses to remember and what it chooses to become.
(TOKYO Before/After is on display until August 22. Entry is free)