MIND SIGHT : In a Land Where Conformity Is the Rule, Blind Yasuhiko Kono Defies Family and Society to Capture a Dream
As a young man, Yasuhiko Kono had few options. Cataracts caused by a case of childhood measles robbed him of his sight by the time he was 17. His family decided his future would be as a masseur, the only real trade available to the blind in Japan.
But Kono rebelled. He became a photographer.
In a land ruled by rigid conformity, where the disabled are generally kept out of sight and out of mind, Kono’s struggle against the odds is an example of extraordinary will.
The truth is, Kono, 43, does not make a living with his camera. For income, he puts on movie screenings at public halls. And photography is not his singular obsession. He is branching out into video.
His camera angles may chop off heads and his compositions tend to tilt, but Kono has resolved to show people their familiar world through his own darkened lenses. Last year, he exhibited his work at a Tokyo photo gallery. Now he is planning a video documentary of his own life.
“I guess I’ve always tended to go against the grain,” Kono said in an interview in the small, tidy apartment in Western Tokyo where he lives alone. “I’ve had to endure a lot of hardships to get where I am today. I’ve been thrown out of a lot of places, but I’ve always picked myself up again and kept walking.”
Blind men with mystical aptitudes have popped up occasionally in Japanese lore. There was Zatoichi, the legendary blind swordsman, whose peerless skills in the martial arts were dramatized in a series of chambara samurai films.
In antiquity, blind bards used to sing the epics, accompanying themselves on the biwa , or Japanese lute. The blind are still represented in traditional performing arts: Chikuzan Takahashi, 80, a master of the Tsugaru shamisen , draws enthusiastic crowds at a Tokyo underground theater where he regularly performs.
But on the whole, the blind remain discriminated against in education and employment to a degree that belies Japan’s status as an advanced industrialized nation.
At last count, in 1987, there were 312,800 legally blind people in Japan; only 22% of those over 18 had any gainful employment. Four out of 10 blind workers were employed in the traditional healing arts--massage and acupuncture. The next largest vocation for the unsighted? Farming.
Last year, only two blind students were enrolled in the national university system, the gateway to elite careers in Japan. The most recent figures available for mainstream private universities indicate there were a mere 99 blind students attending classes, according to the Education Ministry.
No blind person had attained a full professorship at a Japanese college until last year, when Teiji Komori, 50, gained tenure as a professor of English literature at Obirin Junior College in Tokyo.
Although educational opportunities are improving, the blind still remain largely shut out of the job market in the manufacturing and service industries. Akie Kawashima, for instance, graduated second out of 313 students in her literature department at the prestigious Waseda University in 1987, but was rejected by 20 companies before she landed a job as a computer programmer.
“There are a lot of jobs blind people can do, but the companies won’t let us in,” said Kono, the blind photographer. “The government says it’s promoting jobs for the disabled, but it doesn’t really make much effort. Japan is way behind the rest of the world. It’s a very tough life here.”
Kono’s youth in Kitakyushu, a city on the southernmost main island of Kyushu, was a tumultuous one. His father, a bureaucrat with the prefectural or state transport ministry, had little patience with the blind youth’s rambunctious behavior and used to beat him, Kono recalled.
After he started losing his sight at age 9, Kono loathed being packed off to special schools for the blind, where he felt cheated out of a normal education. A double disability made the obligatory training in massage nearly unbearable: Kono’s hands and legs were partially paralyzed from a neurological disorder unrelated to the deterioration of his sight.
Yet, after graduation, Kono’s parents forced him to go to work as a masseur at a local hot springs resort. There he toiled for five years, until he saved enough money to make a break for freedom. At 25 he ran away to Tokyo. There, the only work he could find was as a masseur at a hospital.
Eventually, he gained independence with a scheme selling tickets to movies he would show at rented halls, an enterprise he still does about two or three times a year. The most lucrative part is selling corporate advertisements for his movie brochures. Kono brings in about $20,000 a year selling the ads and screening welfare documentaries, classic Japanese films and American musicals.
One of his favorite movies, based on audience response, is Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights.”
A year after arriving in the big city, Kono bought his first camera. He had remembered how much he enjoyed looking at photographs as a child, and decided there was no reason he could not duplicate that experience for others.
“A lot of people want to know how I take pictures,” Kono said. “But not many people ask why.”
The mechanics of the craft are fairly straightforward. Kono owns an auto-focus camera that also talks, the Minolta Talkman. A microchip in the device advises him to change film or use the flash. His favorite subjects are festivals and other noisy events, where he capitalizes on his sense of hearing.
He is frequently on the road, traveling to festivals around Japan with his white cane and camera. Volunteers meet him at train stations in strange cities and point him in the right direction.
“I like the atmosphere of crowds, people eating and drinking,” Kono said. “I like to get in the middle of things and shoot, to get close to people. I listen to the sounds and feel the vibrations of rooms and buildings. I use my sense of smell. I feel with my hands.”
A camera shop in his neighborhood does the developing and helps Kono choose images for prints, which he stashes away in large cardboard boxes in his room and brings out to show his sighted friends and visitors.
“If I can photograph something that people get pleasure out of seeing, then I can talk to them--it’s my way of communicating,” he said. “And when I die, this will remain as some kind of record.”
This year, Kono bought a video camera, a videocassette recorder and a 19-inch color television, which he operated recently to show a visitor his vision of the “Sansa Odori Matsuri,” a festival that took place in August in the city of Morioka, in northeastern Japan. The screen filled with bright summer kimonos and folk drums, as Kono’s camera panned back and forth to the rhythm of the dancing procession.
Kono offered commentary on the video, having memorized by cues from the sound track which group of dancers would appear next on the screen. He remarked on the colors of their costumes.
His still photographs are equally remarkable. One shot captures the startled, timid gaze of a little boy about to bang a big festival drum. Another paints a dramatic, melancholy composition of a woman at a temple bazaar at dusk.
Kono, like others judged as having “Class A” disabilities, receives $466 a month in payments under Japan’s national pension plan. His rent alone, however, is $900 a month. So he takes his cane and makes the rounds selling advertisements for his film screening brochures, often meeting silence or hostility.
The urban environment in contemporary Japan has a number of highly visible amenities for the visually impaired. Tokyo’s subways have raised yellow tiles that allow the sightless to feel their way along train platforms. Many cities--but not Tokyo--have musical lights at crosswalks so the blind can traverse safely. Elevators in some government buildings display Braille markings.
But, in fact, it remains extremely rare to see a blind person in public.
Kono said a lot of people he meets on the street ask him if he is a masseur out making a house call.
Even this source of livelihood is being threatened, blind activists contend. A group of blind masseurs turned out at the Ministry of Health and Welfare in March to protest proposed regulatory changes that would make it more difficult for them compete against sighted professionals for licenses to practice traditional healing arts. Kono supports their cause.
“It’s not the best way to make a living,” Kono said. “But it’s all we really have. Now the government wants to take it away.”