The perturbed national body: Kiyoji Otsuji and Nobuya Abe's postwar surrealist body-object

Despite recent newfound interest in Japanese postwar art, the field and its history have not been given sufficient critical attention. Surrealist methods in Japanese photography offered an escape from rigid censorship enforced in the 1930s, forming a unique discourse of coded political critique. Nationalist agendas relied on the official concept of the 'national body' (kokutai), requiring Japanese citizens to essentially surrender their "self" for the nation as it mobilized for war. Continuing into the wartime and postwar period, the allegorical female body continued to be explored through experimental art that covertly criticized oppressive regimes. This study investigates the surreal photographic images of Nobuya Abe and Otsuji Kiyoji in their collaborative portraits from 1950 in an effort to understand the tension between political agency and erotic exploitation of the female form.