Depth of Field

Few jobs are as ready-made to inspire envy among lovers of women than that of PLAYBOY photo director. Yet little has been written about the magazine’s founding “picture editor,” Vincent T. Tajiri, who for 15 stratospheric years oversaw our photo department. During his tenure Tajiri watched the print run top 7 million, thanks in large part to the teeming photographer and stringer ecosystem he developed. Praised as a gentleman and a deep thinker by his former employees (and called a cocksucker by Hunter S. Thompson; more on that later), he remained an elusive figure among the many outsize personalities of PLAYBOY’s early years. So who was Vince Tajiri?

Born in southern California in 1919, Tajiri was a teenager when his older brother Larry, who went on to be a distinguished journalist, brought home a 35-mm SLR camera from a reporting trip to Asia. Vince, who’d been priming himself to be a writer, fell in love with the medium. “I knew very little about photography then,” he told Popular Photography in 1968, “but I shot promiscuously and uninhibitedly.” At the same time he was developing his photography skills, he wrote prolifically for English-language papers that served the Japanese American community.

At the age of 18 he moved to San Francisco to work for one such daily, Nichibei Shinbun. The previous year he had created Rigmarole, an intermittent Nichibei column that variously covered the nisei (Americans who, like Tajiri, were born to immigrant parents from Japan), sports stats, movies and any other topic that caught Tajiri’s attention.

In February 1941 Tajiri was drafted into the Army. He was at Camp Bonneville in Washington state on December 7 of that year when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day the United States entered World War II, and less than three months later the government ordered nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast—the vast majority of them U.S.-born citizens—out of their homes and into incarceration camps. Among them were Tajiri’s mother and younger siblings, who were sent to the camp in Poston, Arizona with only what they could carry. They lost everything else, including the home they owned in San Diego.

Tajiri was a sergeant in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—the famed unit composed of nisei soldiers that became the military’s most decorated—when he married his girlfriend, Rose Hayashi, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in August 1943, ahead of his expected deployment. Poor health ultimately kept Tajiri out of overseas duty. Three of his brothers volunteered to serve. One, who joined the Army out of Poston in 1943, was later awarded a Purple Heart.

The inequity between the Tajiris’ service and the government’s bigotry is almost too obvious to state, but Vince gave it eloquent expression in a September 1942 letter to the Fresno Bee: “Except for minor differences in pigment we are just like you.” Not only did the Army have Japanese American officers, he reminded readers, but “another 16,000 are serving in the ranks.… America’s battle is our battle, and America’s enemies are our enemies.”

After the war, Vince and Rose moved to Chicago, where they started a family. Vince took on freelance photo assignments and soon enough was working concurrently as editorial director of three photo-based titles: Guns Magazine, Art Photography and Figure Quarterly, the first two of which were titles of Publishers’ Development Corp. While at PDC, Tajiri met Hugh Hefner, who worked in the circulation department by day and, later, in his kitchen on his nascent magazine by night. Both Art Photography and Figure Quarterly featured pinup and nude photography, and it’s likely Tajiri’s experience with such material helped Hefner see him as an attractive recruit.

In 1956 Tajiri signed on to be PLAYBOY’s first photo editor, making him Hefner’s “third important hire,” according to Hefner biographer Steven Watts—presumably after art director Art Paul, who designed the Rabbit Head, and A.C. Spectorsky, a key editor. Shel Silverstein, in his 1964 three-part history of PLAYBOY, wryly imagined Hef’s hiring process: “Here’s how it will be…Spec is the associate publisher, so he gets $700 a week... Vic is promotion director, so he gets $500 a week...John is production manager, so he gets $400 a week...and Tajiri, you’ll be photographing the girls, so you pay us $100 a week!”

“When I arrived, the photo department was me, one file cabinet, a secretary and two desks,” Tajiri once said. A decade later, he was managing a staff of dozens and a countrywide network of stringers. The photo facilities he developed at 919 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago included studio spaces, processing labs, a library and a full kitchen, where film was kept in the freezers. By 1968 the in-house lab was developing about 5,000 rolls of film on-site annually, with thousands more sent elsewhere.

In addition to producing images for the magazine, Tajiri oversaw the photo needs of the clubs, which numbered more than a dozen by 1965, and supervised the photography in VIP, the club magazine. Playboy’s many other departments often required original shoots, including for advertising and mail-order products, the Playboy Press and Playboy’s modeling agency. Eventually Tajiri was responsible for Playboy’s three full-time studios in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Naturally Tajiri’s influence went beyond the images: In 1959, Hefner wanted to run a black-and-white photo taken at a nude-dancing establishment. “There’s pubic hair evident in the picture. It’s more than a shadow,” Tajiri told Rolling Stone in 1973. But Hefner didn’t want to retouch it, instead printing it very small. Tajiri was nervous about running afoul of obscenity laws—this was four years before the city of Chicago took Hefner to court for publishing photos of a nude Jayne Mansfield—and so, in Tajiri’s words, he “shaped up the triangle where it was a little ragged. Made it look like a G-string.” Tajiri even created a fake contact sheet. When the FBI came to investigate, they closely inspected the doctored duplicates but found nothing amiss.

His role at the magazine afforded him proximity to celebrities, including Peter Sellers, with whom he played poker at Playboy’s London casino, and John Cassavetes, who became a good friend, according to Tajiri’s daughter, Rea Tajiri, a filmmaker. But not all high-profile interactions were so warm. In 1969 Hunter S. Thompson was working on a PLAYBOY story about French ski champ Jean-Claude Killy and his promotional tour for Chevrolet. Thompson and a member of the Chevy PR team were out drinking in Chicago when Tajiri swung by to ask the flak to bring Killy to the Mansion that evening for a photo shoot. The invite did not extend to Thompson. “The cocksucker told me to get lost,” Thompson groused after the magazine killed his article.

By the early 1970s, Tajiri had begun to doubt the direction the magazine was headed. Penthouse, a raunchy imitator, was gaining popularity and pushing PLAYBOY into new territory. Hefner decided to print a photo revealing a peek of Playmate pubic hair in the January 1971 issue.

“I was very, very unhappy about it. I felt we were chasing an upstart,” Tajiri later told British writer Russell Miller. Hefner eventually agreed, saying the magazine had temporarily “lost [its] compass,” but by then Tajiri had left the company. Back on the West Coast, he contributed technical discussions and commentary sections to books by photographic heavyweights including Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Will McBride and Bert Stern. In 1977 he wrote a thorough and entertaining biography of silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino for Bantam Books.

Life in Los Angeles helped Tajiri reconnect with his roots. “It was kind of like a homecoming for him,” says Rea Tajiri. “He started working more in the Japanese American community.” Among other collaborative projects, Vince edited the 1990 publication Through Innocent Eyes, a compilation of art, poetry and essays created by children incarcerated at the Poston camp.

Despite running the photography department of a magazine renowned for its imagery, Tajiri’s name is not as well known as Hefner’s or Paul’s. Some of his former employees attribute that relative obscurity to his quiet nature and indifference to the spotlight. His grandson Vince Schleitwiler, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Washington, sees cultural factors at play.

“The fact that he was kind of invisible but really influential is very much like a lot of other high-achieving Japanese Americans after the war—people who did really significant things in design and architecture, in the sciences and other professional fields,” says Schleitwiler. “But they were not inclined to call attention to themselves, having experienced what having attention called to you was like.”

Granddaughter Midori Tajiri, who lived in the Tajiri family house in L.A. in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is today a New Orleans artist, remembers how supportive Vince was of family and community. “He loved watching In Living Color because there was a Japanese hip-hop dancer. Every time they would come on, he would point her out,” Midori says. “It was a big deal, because Japanese didn’t always have a role in media and society when he was growing up.”

Of course, it all comes back to the pictures. Tajiri died in 1993, but you can still glimpse his quiet brilliance on thousands of PLAYBOY pages—and in a remark he made to Popular Photography in 1968. “The most important thing in a photograph of a woman is her eyes,” he said. “If a woman’s eyes are not sharp, if they don’t say anything, the picture doesn’t run in PLAYBOY.”

In the same interview, he also said, “Without photography, there would be no PLAYBOY.” To which we might add—without Vince Tajiri, one can only wonder what PLAYBOY would have been.