TOSHIHIRO YASHIRO

「銭湯」は6世紀に仏教の布教活動の一環として庶民に入浴を施したことが由来とされる公衆浴場。洗い場は富士山のペンキ絵や錦鯉のタイル絵を眺めながら体を洗うことができ、脱衣場は老いも若きも世代を超えて交流し、社会のルールを学べる場所となっています。私は1992年に大学の卒業制作において、この「銭湯」をテーマにした写真を撮り始めました。バブル経済の影響で土地が高騰し、広い土地を有する銭湯は軒並み壊されていき、新しい価値観へと移行していく時期の始まりでした。当時大学生だった私は「どうにかして保存したい」、「誰かがやらなければ歴史から消えてしまう」という思いで日本全国を巡り撮影しました。このシリーズは全て8x10、4x5などの大型フィルムカメラを用いて同一方法で撮影しています。2枚1組の写真は一見合わせ鏡のように見えますが、男湯と女湯で構成されており、写真で生まれた独特な空間を楽しむことができます。

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‘Sento’ was originally introduced to the Japanese people by Buddhist monks as a part of their missionary work in the Sixth Century. Basically it has two main areas:  a bathing and a dressing.In a bathing area one can enjoy hot tubs often decorated with the large wall painting of Mt.Fuji or the tiles of colored carps.  A dressing area is more social, many young and old gathered and interacted.  Here we learn social rules spontaneously. I started taking photographs of sentos as my graduation project in 1992. Twenty five years ago social values in Japan were changing drastically.  Real estate boomed because of the bubble economy and it caused closing down of a lot of sentos which often held good size estate.They say “old must make way for new”, whether it is true or not, it saddened me to see these sentos I frequented disappeared one by one from the city. I was a student, then.  I wanted to do something to save them.  I had to do something otherwise they would be gone for good.  That was the driving force for me to shoot as many as I could. This series of works are all shot with same technique. 

At first glance, they look as though there are sets of pictures each with mirror image of the other, however, one is Otoko-yu (man’s bathing area) and the other is Onna-yu ( woman’s bathing area).