By Henry Hilton

Commentary Sep. 01, 2008 - 07:00AM JST ( 2 )

The barker outside the Gold On pachiko palace in Tamachi was taking no chances. Instead of handing out double-helpings to all and sundry, he waited cautiously before pouncing. Only the most likely suspects got the prize and only when they opened their flimsy packs at home would all be revealed—nothing more than half a dozen coarse tissues to go with the gaudy pachinko and slot wrapper.

Times are getting harder and Japan’s influential pachinko joints are hurting like many other mega-businesses. It’s half rations out there too when 500-yen bento boxes fail to find lunch-time buyers and the discount clothes shops are beginning to resemble the dowdy charity shops of high streets in the West.

Confirmation of the new realities is seen in the latest comments from the Bank of Japan. Instead of the usual “Let’s not rock the boat” guff, it’s actually beginning to recognize the problems that most salarymen and housewives could have identified for the economic bureaucrats several ages ago. Wages are stagnating, prices are roaring ahead and jobs are getting scarcer, while the ruling Liberal Democratic-Komeito coalition has come up with a supplementary package that is aimed largely at helping its core supporters.

The announcement last week from Katsuaki Watanabe, the president of Toyota, that the company is slimming down its sales forecasts and that it has been forced to raise prices on domestic cars ought to be pretty conclusive evidence that things are getting worse. Toyota may still be battling it out with General Motors for the blue ribbon of global automobile production but the company appears to have underestimated the impact of higher manufacturing costs and the current unpopularity of SUV gas-guzzlers.

Yet if you want to put all this doom and gloom in some kind of historical perspective, it might pay to drop in to a revealing exhibition in Tokyo’s swanky Midtown. The show at the Fujifilm Square gallery features the work of two now retired Dutch bankers, who shot a valuable series of black and white photos of Japan in the years between 1951 and the mid-1970s.

Audiences who recall the poverty of the immediate postwar years will need little reminding that this was the era that photographer Hans Brinckmann saw as a “desperate struggle to overcome defeat.” One of his earliest photos taken with his Konica 2 camera looks toward Awaji island and has all the evocativeness of a 19th century pioneering print, while the snap of the emperor’s decrepit Rolls-Royce in 1951 suggests that his motor was fit only for the junkyard.

By the early 1970s, though, we get a very different picture where high-speed growth has set a competitive Japan on the royal road to affluence. The consumer society is represented in all its democratic glory with a shot of pedestrians strolling along a traffic-free Ginza in 1972. Yet it is good to be shown that this rebirth of Japan was built on the sturdy shoulders of the 1959 Osaka dealing room with all its paper clutter and phone banks. The claustrophobia on display vividly recalls how the salaryman lived before the world of computer screens, divided offices and company-wide trips abroad existed.

Today’s increasingly globalized economy almost certainly guarantees that Japan along with its other G-8 partners is in for some considerable pain in the months ahead. A look back to the Japan of the early postwar decades is a useful antidote to any extreme fears. “Showa Japan seen through Dutch eyes” is both an exercise in nostalgia for some and a visual history lesson for younger generations.

The exhibition is open through Sept 30. Open daily 11 a.m.-8 p.m.. Entry free. PHOTO ISS Gallery, 1st floor, Fujifilm Square. Tel: 03-6271-3350. www.fujifilmsquare.jp