Maisaka Odaiko Matsuri

AlbumからMOMA入り フェスティバル祭

by
鈴木康友╱Yasutomo Suzuki

In 1970s Japan—the “photobook era”—magazines and museums amplified each other. Camera Mainichi, steered by editor Shoji Yamagishi, boldly published new work while helping usher Japanese photography onto MoMA’s stage (notably the 1974 exhibition New Japanese Photography). That ecology opened a pipeline from hometown subject → magazine pages → photobook. 

Yasutomo Suzuki (b. 1949) is a local historian with a camera within that system. Dealer notes recount that Kishin Shinoyama’s carnival book Olele Olala (1971) spurred him to rebuild a darkroom and keep returning—for about a decade—to his fishing-town festival in Maisaka (Hamamatsu). Parts ran in Camera Mainichi, and in 1981 the series became the photobook 舞阪・大太鼓まつり via the Hamamatsu imprint Hikuma no Shuppan, with text by local writer Minoru Nasuda (who founded Hikuma in 1978). Some listings also claim “67 prints entered MoMA in 1979”—useful context, though this detail isn’t confirmed in MoMA’s public database. 

The Maisaka Odaiko Festival (Gisa/Kisa Shrine) has a 400+ year lineage. Processions feature eight taiko carts, and the largest drum reaches roughly 2.4–2.5 m in diameter—climaxing when the drum teams haul and beat their way up the shrine steps. Suzuki’s book compresses that communal rhythm into the high-contrast, grain-forward language that defined the era’s black-and-white.