A more enduring comment on kasutori culture could be found in a posed photograph taken by Hayashi Tadahiko in 1947, depicting a model in a white two-piece bathing suit lying on a filthy balustrade high above the grimy train tracks and smutty city streets. The hardship of those days is readily apparent, but so also is the esprit of hardship and a humorous, even defiant elan. The photo is witty and sad, naturalistic and contrived, erotic and strangely innocent. Decades later, it remains an icon of the cultures of defeat as memorable for what it excludes as for what it depicts. We see no
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