The Japanese army issued a preservation order of the Yungang Grottoes near Datong in September 1937 within a few months after the Second Sino-Japanese War began in July. Subsequently, conservation of and researches on the monument started under the aegis of the Japanese. In the first months, transportation to the site was limited but gradually improved as the Grottoes became a tourist destination. Japanese artists came to the Grottoes one after another since the early stage of the occupation and depicted the site with brush, camera, and pen to publish their works after returning home; meanwhile, those works accentuated the role of the on-site Japanese army in charge of the preservation of the Grottoes. Since the mid-1910s, the Yungang Grottoes was frequently reproduced in luxurious art books such as Toyo bijutsu taikan (Corpus of Oriental Art) for experts by the Shinbi Shoin publishing house. After the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Grottoes became more widely known as a world’s classic monument through popular mass-produced publications such as Sekai bijutsu zenshu (World Art Collection) by the Heibonsha publishing house. Hasegawa Saburo was one of those visitors to the Grottoes on his journey to North China and Manchukuo. As a major advocate of abstract art with a wide appreciation of art of all ages and cultures, Hasegawa saw this classic site with not a brush but a camera in hand in September 1938. Photographs and texts that were published immediately after he returned home and a series of photographs called Kyodoshi (local history) that he took since 1939 shed light on Hasegawa Saburo’s serious attempts to seek for his identity as a painter and as an artist under the unstable political situation of the late 1930s in Japan.
