Simon: A Private Landscape, Near the Arakawa,

1971

In Hosoe’s series Simon: A Private Landscape (or Shifukei), a young actor named Simon, dressed in a woman’s kimono and traditional Japanese makeup, wanders through or on the outskirts of Tokyo’s Asakusa and Ueno districts. Since Hosoe visited both areas during his youth, Simon may represent a theatrical self-portrait. Although Japan has a centuries-old tradition of men dressing as women in the theater, in the 1970s, Japanese men who cross-dressed outside the realm of entertainment would generally have been shunned. Thus, Simon’s departure from the theater into an outdoor or urban landscape asks us to consider the relationship between identity and setting.