Dekotora
Julie Glassberg
There is often a distorted image built in people’s mind because of the unknown reality. For that reason, I have been documenting a number of subcultures, often feared or misunderstood. I like misfits, outcasts, those who don’t follow the norms. Recently I have been following an alternative culture in Japan called Dekotora. I started this project as I was living in Japan in 2015 and went back in 2019 to continue.
Dekotora has a duality of attraction and repulsion: attraction, as it revolves around heavily decorated trucks full of colors and lights; repulsion, as people don’t know much about it, besides the visual aspect, and the truckers tend to have a “bad boy” reputation. Dekotora stands for “Dekoreshon Torakku” which is the Japanese version of “Decorated Truck”. This culture started in the 70’s. Initially, those trucks were painted for advertising purpose: for example, a truck selling fish from Hokkaido would have a traditional painting showing so. Today, because of the regulations forbidding such decorations and the bad image it could give, only a few small businesses, such as fish or flower delivery use those trucks for work.
I mainly spent my time with the group Utamarokai, the largest, oldest and only group to have chapters all around Japan. The president, Tajima san, owns a very famous truck: Ichiban Boshi (first star) which starred in a series of movies called “Torakku Yarō” (Truck Dude), with celebrity actor Bunta Sugawara. The ten movies made this culture quite popular. You can find Dekotora today in a music video, a video game, a coffee or tofu commercial. Although this subculture is a closed world, they regularly have public events where they proudly show their creations. A lot of them are for charity, such as relief for 2011 Earthquake victims, still in very precarious situations.
With this project, I want to reflect the esthetic, the mood and the essence of the Dekotora community. They are extremely proud and warm people, with a very traditional lifestyle. I find particularly interesting the contrast between the trucker’s world, often assimilated to a raw and hard world, and the poetry and nostalgia linked to the Dekotora scene. It’s a real journey into the sphere of dreams and ancient Japan.
Moreover, this work archives a part of Japanese culture that will one day disappear. Within 4 years, I already noticed a drastic change and the community getting much smaller.
Julie Glassberg was born and raised in Paris, France. After studying graphic design for four years, she decided to make her passion for photography become her life and moved to NY. Her interests are primarily based on the diversity of world cultures, subcultures, underground scenes as well as the misfits of society. Photography is like a passport to enter worlds that she would never be able to see otherwise.
She regularly collaborates with The New York Times, and from late 2011 to 2015, the Metropolitan section of the paper assigns her, with staff reporter Corey Kilgannon, to photograph the portraits of the weekly column Character Study.
After spending close to 7 years in New York City, she lived in Tokyo, Japan for a year, where she met local artists and experimented more with photography and collaborations. She recently completed a 6 months residency program in Shanghai at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel and lives in Paris at the moment.
Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, The International NYT, El País Semanal, ESPN mag, Neon mag, Stern View, L'Equipe mag, Polka, among others.
She has been awarded a Lucie Scholarship Emerging Grant, a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, a POYi Award of Excellence, an Art Directors Club Young Gun award, an IPA award and her first book was recently shortlisted by Paris Photo / Aperture.