The Pacific in March 2011

My planned trip to Japan and the Pacific has been postponed from this coming October to March 2011.  It turns out that civilian access to Iwo Jima is allowed only once a year.  The island is uninhabited except for a military base.  Tour groups of historians, veterans, or families of veterans are allowed one day of access once a year.  We’ll fly in together one morning from Guam and we’ll return that evening.  While in the region I’ll visit other places where Smith photographed the war including Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa.

I’ll also spend time in Japan.  The journey will be anchored by a trip to Minamata with Aileen Mioko Smith, his Japanese-American second wife and co-author of their legendary 1975 Minamata.  She told me that Smith related to the region so deeply that he felt like he’d been from there in a former life.  So it’s important for me to see it.  Smith also spent a “cherished year” (his term) photographing Hitachi in 1962 and I’ll visit pertinent locations there, too.

I’m making efforts to land magazine work to help fund this trip.  The possibilities are various and plenty.  Okinawa and Saipan have some of the most beautiful beaches in the Pacific.  Okinawa is Japan’s Hawaii or the Bahamas, the most popular tropical vacation destination.  The amount of death that took place sixty-five years ago on these small strips of land is staggering.  More than 200,000 people died on Okinawa alone.  It was there in May 1945 that Smith was nearly killed by a bomb while photographing a day in the life of an infantryman.

Gene Smith somewhere in the Pacific 1944-45

One thing I want to do in Japan is try to figure out why jazz pianist Sonny Clark is so popular there.  I wrote about this in a blog entry on the Jazz Loft Project site.  I find it uncanny that Smith had this distinct affinity for Japan; and Clark, who squatted in Smith’s loft and almost died of a heroin overdose there, is more popular in Japan than he is in America.  The two artists also connect in another way.  Clark grew up in a coal mining village 30 miles from Pittsburgh, departing there for California after his mother died of cancer in 1951.  Four years later Smith went to Pittsburgh and attempted the most ambitious photo-essay of his career, a mammoth, quixotic study of the city.