CHILDHOOD AND WAR 幼少期と戦争

The year was 1936 the February 26 Incident took place in Japan as German troops entered the Rhineland, sparking the flames of the Second World War, and it was in this year that Keiichi Tanaami was born the eldest son of a textile wholesaler in the Kyōbashi neighborhood of Tokyo.

In 1941, the Pacific War erupted after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tanaami's birthplace was put in peril. The bombing of Tokyo began with a B29 on April 18, 1942, and Tanaami fled from Kyōbashi with his family, relocating to his grandfather's house in the Gonnosuke-zaka neighborhood of the Meguro ward. From the house bomb shelter, Tanaami witnessed the over one hundred firebombing attacks on Tokyo that continued until the war ended on August 15, 1945. Images seared into the back of his mind at this time would become major motifs in his art: roaring American bombers, Japanese searchlights scanning the skies, firebombs and flares dropped from planes, the city a sea of fire, fleeing masses, and the flashes of the bombs reflecting off of his grandfather's deformed goldfish swimming in its tank. Tanaami's experience of the war, and in particular this fish, are stored in his memory with the mystery of an illusion.

Old magazine scrap which artist collected in late 1960

"It's a grotesque form of beauty. The fish tank that appears there in the bright light of the flares strong as the noonday sun. In the tank, a twisted goldfish, its scales catching the light, shimmering and shining, fluttering and swaying like it swims. I was scared, but I also felt this excitement going through my whole body when I saw that fish tank. To this day I believe that this experience was more intense than all my hallucinations."

Three FragmentsPart 3 2016

END OF THE WAR AND KAMISHIBA 終戦と紙芝居

As the war conditions deteriorated, Tanaami and his mother evacuated to Muikamachi, Niigata, where they stayed until the end of the war. When they returned to Meguro, they found the town they knew so well had all but vanished. "There is no doubt that fear and apprehension along with anger and resignation surged through my dreams, in which the enigmatic monster of war chased down my boyhood, spent eating and playing to my heart's content. As I recall, one night during an air raid, I watched a fleeing mob of people from atop a hill. But, I wonder about this. I wonder if it actually happened. Dreams and reality are all jumbled up in my memories, stored in my mind in that ambiguous state." Not long afterwards, at the age of nine, the young Tanaami came across kamishibai, picture-card shows, in the scorched streets of Tokyo.

"Yet, the image I have stored in my memory of kamishibai is that of a thick matière similar to that of classic European paintings by the likes of Emilio Greco or Veláquez, painted in meticulous detail. That distinct matière remains permanently linked in my memory with the haunting sight of the baby girl born from the white snake's egg with the body of a snake and the face and hands of a human. the sprite Bella, flicking her red tongue as she slithers her way down the cliff, each distinctive character from The Golden Bat, an action story that was always set against a backdrop of the setting sun."