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Zokushin gods of the earth
Publicatiegegevens
| Auteur | Hiromi Tsuchida |
|---|---|
| Uitgever | Ottos Books Company |
| Plaats van uitgave | Yokohama |
| Jaar | 1976 |
| Druk | First edition |
| Bindwijze | hardcover |
| Taal | Engels, Japans |
| Dimensies | 25x26.5 |
| Pagina's | 232 pp. |
Bijzonderheden
| conditie | Very Good (VG) |
|---|---|
| Omslag | Fine (F) |
| Opmerkingen | Clean covers and very good dustjacket with one closed tears; light bump to one corner of back cover; hint of foxing on the first empty endpapers the inside is very bright and clean; very collectible copy With dust jacket. |
Zokushin: Hiromi Tsuchida’s Gods of the Earth
Hiromi Tsuchida’s Zokushin: Gods of the Earth is a landmark 1976 Japanese photobook about folk customs, village life, and religious practice during a period of rapid modernization. The first edition was published by Ottos Books Company in Yokohama and contains 103 black-and-white photographs with an essay by Goichi Matsunaga in Japanese and English (Harper’s Books; SFMOMA). Our catalogue records this copy as a bilingual hardcover with dust jacket and slipcase.
Tsuchida’s subject
Hiromi Tsuchida, born in 1939 in Fukui Prefecture, is a Japanese photographer whose work examines social and cultural phenomena in Japan (SFMOMA). The photographs in Zokushin were made from 1968 to 1975, when economic growth and urbanization were rapidly changing rural communities (Fujifilm Square). Tsuchida’s project was not a nostalgic survey of picturesque customs. It looked at the vitality, absurdity, physicality, and social complexity of people whose lives were shaped by local ritual and ordinary labour.
The Japanese title refers to the gods of common people or gods of the earth. That formulation resists a narrow separation between sacred and secular. Tsuchida photographs ceremonies, gatherings, bodies, faces, and moments of intoxication with the same attention, suggesting that the sacred exists within collective behaviour rather than outside it.
A documentary style with comic force
SFMOMA describes the book’s opening sequence as a group of people picnicking in the woods above a rice paddy. As the farmers become progressively intoxicated, they roll on the ground, joke, and gesture toward the camera (SFMOMA). The sequence establishes Tsuchida’s method: documentary observation becomes physical theatre, and the people photographed are not reduced to ethnographic types.
The images are black and white, but their mood is not solemn. Tsuchida’s subjects are exuberant, awkward, comic, and sometimes unsettling. The camera remains close to lived experience, finding the strange within the familiar. This refusal of polished modernity is part of the book’s historical force.
Publication and critical context
Zokushin was Tsuchida’s first major series and was published in Camera Mainichi before being collected in book form (SFMOMA). In 1974, photographs from the series appeared in New Japanese Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition that introduced a group of Japanese photographers to a major international audience (Fujifilm Square). The 1976 book therefore arrived with an established exhibition history but remained a distinct, sustained argument in sequence.
The bilingual essay by Goichi Matsunaga is important to the edition. It places Tsuchida’s photographs within a meditation on ordinary people, labour, pleasure, and the contradictions of modern capitalism (Harper’s Books). The text does not neutralize the images; it intensifies their mixture of comedy and social observation.
Place in Japanese photobook history
The book is cited in Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian’s Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, a key reference for the period (Vincent Borrelli Bookseller). Its reputation rests on the tension between cultural documentation and visual invention. Tsuchida does not photograph rural Japan as a museum of disappearing traditions; he presents living people whose actions remain irreducibly contemporary.
Collector’s notes
The first edition should be distinguished from the 2004 reprint (Harper’s Books). Collectors should check the Ottos Books Company imprint, 1976 date, 103 plates, bilingual text, dust jacket, and slipcase. Specialist records identify the first printing as a 232-page hardcover, while other catalogue records vary slightly in page count; the physical copy and colophon should therefore control final bibliographic description (Vincent Borrelli Bookseller).
Zokushin matters because it demonstrates how documentary photography can record ritual without flattening it into explanation. Its gods are not remote figures. They are people eating, drinking, laughing, working, and living together—and Tsuchida’s book makes that ordinary humanity feel both comic and sacred.
