Chewing Gum and Chocolate — Shomei Tomatsu (2014 edition)

This is the 2014 Kehrer Verlag edition of Chewing Gum and Chocolate, a career-defining monograph of Shomei Tomatsu’s work chronicling postwar Japan through its most volatile contradictions. The title itself — sweet, disposable, foreign — cues the tension at the heart of Tomatsu’s images: a Japan occupied, Americanised, economically blooming, and spiritually unsettled. The book presents a black-and-white archive that veers from documentary to surreal, locating beauty in rupture.

Across its pages, Tomatsu focuses on Okinawa and the aftermath of war, US military presence, and the shifting face of Japanese identity. Street portraits of swaggering youths, scarred veterans, military debris, and lovers in shadowy interiors unfold with a calm, pointed urgency. His camera is not voyeuristic but implicated — tuned to surfaces yet dense with political temperature. The cover image, a young man in a white suit in Koza, Okinawa (1976–80), captures a hybridised, poised defiance, a stylish assertion of individuality within the larger scene of cultural occupation.

Tomatsu belongs in Darwin as a central figure in the Japanese postwar photographic avant-garde — alongside contemporaries like Daidō Moriyama or Nobuyoshi Araki, yet more overtly political. If Moriyama’s images dissolve into grain and desire, Tomatsu’s crystallise history into form. Chewing Gum and Chocolate is both an aesthetic statement and a historical reckoning.

Technical Sheet

Title: Chewing Gum and Chocolate
Artist / Author: Shomei Tomatsu
Date: 2014 edition
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Hardcover, printed boards
Dimensions (cm): approx. 24 x 30 cm
Language: German
Pages: Unstated
Publisher / Editor: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg Berlin / Aperture Foundation
ISBN: 9783868284980
Condition: NEW