Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images 9780226195971

Citation preview

Making Modern Japanese-­Style Painting

Making Modern Japanese-­Style Painting

Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images

Chelsea Foxwell University of Chicago Press  :  Chicago and London

Chelsea Foxwell is assistant professor of art history at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in China 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­11080-­6  (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­19597-­1  (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195971.001.0001

Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association. Publication of this book was funded in part with the support of the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Foxwell, Chelsea, author. Making modern Japanese-­style painting : Kano Hogai and the search for images / Chelsea Foxwell. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-­0-­226-­11080-­6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­226-­19597-­1 (e-­book) 1. Painting, Japanese—­Meiji period, 1868–­1912. 2. Painting, Japanese—­Meiji period, 1868–­1912—­Exhibitions. 3. Kano, Hogai, 1828–­1888. I. Title. ND1054.5.F69 2015 759.952’09034—­dc23 2014029549 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ben

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes to the Reader

xiii



1 Introduction: Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of

the Modern

15

1

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting



43

2

In Search of Images



75

3

The Painter and His Audiences



107

4

Decadence and the Emergence of Nihonga Style



143

5

Naturalizing the Double Reading



173

6

Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga



205

Notes

215

Bibliography

253

Index

269

vii

Conclusion

acknowledgments

This book on the art of the Meiji era is the result of the extraordinary generosity of a number of individuals and institutions. I would first like to thank the mentors who inspired and guided my interest in this chapter of world history. My debt to Satō Dōshin, both personal and intellectual, is too big to ever repay. I am happy to have had the chance to participate in bringing his Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State to English-­speaking audiences and can only hope that readers will see in the present work the extension of some of the many threads spun by his and by Kitazawa Noriaki’s profound scholarship and collegiality. For their help since the earliest days of my career, I am also grateful to Cherie Wendelken, Eugene Wang, Christine Guth, Jerome Silbergeld, Ellen Conant, Andrew Gordon, Emiko Yamanashi, Gennifer Weisenfeld, and Satomi Matsumura. I owe a lasting debt to Melissa McCormick, who supervised my doctoral studies and shaped my perspective on the arts of the Meiji era in two major ways: by challenging me to account visually for nineteenth-­century Japanese art and by helping me gain a thorough understanding of how paintings and other objects were made and viewed in the medieval and early modern periods. During my residence at Columbia University, my research was also shaped and guided by professors Henry D. Smith II, Robert Harrist, Jonathan Reynolds, Anne Higonnet, Carol Gluck, Gregory Pflugfelder, David Lurie, Haruo Shirane, Keith Moxey, Yoshiaki Shimizu, Timon Screech, and Julia Meech, and by colleagues Rosina Buckland, Adam Clulow, Colin Jaundrill, Dipti Khera, Mathew Thompson, Yasuko Tsuchikane, Xiaojin Wu, and Lei Xue. Their guidance and support made a world of difference. The University of Chicago provided the ideal intellectual environment in which to complete this book. I am deeply grateful to the former and current chairs of the ix

Department of Art History, Joel Snyder and Christine Mehring, to Dean Martha Roth, and to colleagues who read and commented on portions of the project, especially Martha Ward, Wu Hung, Ping Foong, Claudia Brittenham, Megan Luke, Cécile Fromont, Richard Neer, Katherine Fisher Taylor, and Aden Kumler. Julia Sapin provided valuable feedback on chapter 5 and on a portion of the project I presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting. My colleagues in Japanese studies, especially Jim Ketelaar, Susan Burns, Hoyt Long, Hiroyoshi Noto, Michael Fisch, Michael Bourdaghs, and Norma Field, provided advice and support. Among the graduate students, I offer special thanks to Nancy Lin, Stephanie Su, Eleanor Hyun, Quincy Ngan, and Helen Findley. I also benefited from the input of Chicago colleagues Elizabeth Lillehoj, Janice Katz, Jun Mizukawa, and Sarah Fraser. Irene Small has been a source of radiant energy and creativity. Mai Yamaguchi and Maria March provided research assistance and organizational support. I also offer profound thanks to Susan Bielstein, Anthony Burton, and Joel Score at the University of Chicago Press, to the anonymous readers of the manuscript, and to Amanda Rybin, Bridget Madden, and Whitney Gaylord in the Visual Resources Collection of the Department of Art History. This book would not have come about without the generosity of the curators, scholars, collectors, and caretakers who facilitated access to the works of art discussed herein. In this respect I am grateful to Satō Dōshin, Furuta Ryō, Anne Morse, Ono Mayumi, Ido Makoto, Seya Ai, Masako Watanabe, Ellen Takata, Rob Mintz, Akira Takagishi, Itakura Masaaki, Andreas Marks, Ann Yonemura, and all those who enabled me to study works in their collections. Thanks are also due to several institutions in Japan, Britain, and the United States that waived image reproduction fees, especially the University Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts, the Waseda University Theatre Museum, and the Khalili Collection. In Japan, Tsunoda Takurō, Katō Hiroko, Yoda Tōru, Honda Mitsuko, Murakado Noriko, Ōnishi Junko, and Adachi Gen provided research advice and trusted friendship. Tamamushi Satoko facilitated my research at the Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and was a source of great encouragement. Essential funding was provided by the Japan Foundation and the MOA Museum of Art, which supported my long-­term research in Japan; the Getty Research Institute, where I found the ideal environment for writing and ideal colleagues; the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University; the Franke Institute for the Humanities; the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities and Department of Art History; the Leo and Catherine Guttman Foundation; and Joan B. Mirviss. Publication of the book and its images is supported by subventions from the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Fund for Faculty Initiatives in Art History at the University of Chicago, the Meiss/ Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association, and the Association of Asian Studies.

x

acknowledgments

I am grateful to my parents, Theresa Foxwell and the late David Foxwell; to my late grandfathers, E. Donald Foxwell and Pasquale Spirito; to friends and family for their truly endless support and encouragement; and to Avery and Derek for their cheer. Final thanks go to my inimitable husband, Benjamin Liu, who has provided support, enthusiasm, creative thinking, and all-­around sunshine for almost as long as I can remember. This book is dedicated to him.

xi

acknowledgments

notes to the reader

Japanese and Chinese names appear in standard order, surname followed by given name, except where the individual was or is primarily active in the West. The romanization of the Kano surname follows Meiji-­era conventions; it is typically rendered as Kanō in modern Japanese. Dates before 1873 follow the Japanese lunar calendar. Japanese characters are provided in-­text only in the case of writing styles such as kanbun where there may be more than one common transliteration and where required to clarify homophonic readings. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

xiii

introduction

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

For Old Japan was like an oyster—­to open it was to kill it. —basil hall chamberlain, Things Japanese (1891)1 The decline of Japanese painting has never been more extreme. —tokyo nichi nichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily News, 1882)2

In the 1880s, two related developments concerning Japanese painting emerged on opposite sides of the globe. In France, England, and the United States, enthusiasts declared that authentic Japanese culture was headed toward extinction, a result of the West’s aggressive “opening” of Japan to trade and diplomacy and the ensuing revolution of 1868, as the Meiji Restoration was sometimes called. Treating Japan as a heightened allegory of their own experience of modernization, many Western writers constructed a dichotomy between Old Japan and the modern, Westernizing Japan. In the same way that Old Japan was seen as having been sacrificed in the process of opening, Japanese art was imagined to be dead or dying under “the withering influence of Western contact.”3 The corpus of Japanese art and material culture envisioned by Western collectors was therefore deeply associated with the past and its preservation.4 In Japan, meanwhile, artists, dealers, and art administrators worked to ascertain the foreign demand for Japanese art. As one Japanese visitor to France reported to his compatriots in 1883, foreign buyers of Japanese art “prefer Japanese-­style flower patterns and so forth and, contrary to what one might expect, they do not like the 1

grand new Western-­style patterns.”5 That Western viewers did not want Japanese artists to paint in the Western style was news in Japanese circles. Such comments were exchanged on the pages of Japan’s first art journals, in the newspapers, and at newly founded societies for the study and promotion of art in the Meiji period. As a greater number of interlocutors turned to the subject of Japanese art and its place within a global context, the new phrase “Japanese painting” (nihonga) arose as a central term in the conversation. Nihonga designated two overlapping spheres of discourse. First, as an unprecedented invocation of all Japanese painting as a single field, it figured in a globally informed metadiscourse on the future of painting in Japan, a collective imagining of what “Japanese painting” might be.6 Second, as a term denoting only painting in the “manners distinctive to our country” (wagakuni koyū no gafū), it reflected the originally Western ambition to “preserve” (hozon) existing Japanese painting from admixture with oil painting and other forms of “Western painting” (yōga, seiyōga) that had gained popularity and accessibility following the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868.7 Under the prevalence of a developmentalist, even Darwinian, paradigm that foresaw native Japanese painting as succumbing to Western modes of representation, the term nihonga reflected a certain view of temporality and authenticity: one in which the hope of preserving authentic Japanese art was tied to the act of segregating Japanese painting from the globally engaged practice of painting at large. This verbal reframing of existing Japanese painting had another effect as well: it inserted a symbolic separation between the painting of the Meiji era and past painting. The result was a mirroring in Japan of the contemporaneous Western appraisal of Japanese painting as bifurcated between an authentic premodern corpus (Japanese painting) and a corrupt modern corpus (Japanese-­style painting, or consciously Japanese painting). With the birth of nihonga, the originally Western fear about the death of authentic Japanese art took on a complex life within Japan.8 This book explores the earliest phase of that process, in the 1860s through the 1880s, years of tremendous social change and economic instability. This period saw fundamental challenges to peoples’ conception of what a painting was and what (or whom) it was for. It was not just—­or not even—­that paintings themselves were changing. Even when paintings stayed the same, there were notable changes in artists, viewers, viewing environments, and the words surrounding painting. The “Search for images” of the book’s title refers to the Japanese and foreign demand for new art that would represent Japan internationally.9 Such demand materialized through the Meiji government’s efforts to support art and craft exports and deliver impressive exhibits to the world’s fairs, and it was a catalyst for many of the objects examined in this book. But seeking is different than finding, mental images work differently than actual paintings, and demand must be gauged, imagined, and speculated on. The emergence of nihonga as a modern “traditional style” of painting was similarly mediated and experimental, a process that involved ascertaining

2

introduction

Western criticism, reframing existing styles and iconography, and exhibiting pictures to diverse audiences. Aimed at capturing and analyzing these forces, this book focuses on individual objects and artists caught in intense moments of interaction with the demand for Japanese images. It centers mainly on Tokyo (known as Edo prior to 1868), where many of the central government’s art policies were formed, and presents a series of studies of individual works and themes rather than a single chronology.10

“The Painting Distinctive to Our Country” The word nihonga arose to fill a new discursive need.11 Prior to the late nineteenth century, there had been no term to denote all paintings made in Japan. Instead, as Kitazawa Noriaki has emphasized, pre-­Meiji interlocutors distinguished “various schools and lineages” (shoryūha) of painting. These might be characterized as primarily “Japanese” (yamato-­e), “Western” (ranga), or “Chinese” (kanga) in style, but the main understanding of a painting school or lineage was based on the models of the household and the master-­disciple relationship. The Kano, Sumiyoshi, Ōkyo, Kōrin, Shen Nanpin, and Kishi schools are all examples of the practice wherein descendents born or adopted into a school were understood as carrying on its master’s lineage.12 In the 1880s, the word nihonga began to assume the status of umbrella term, gathering this plurality of schools under a single heading. But why and how did it emerge? And what were the consequences of reframing the existing schools and lineages of painting in this manner? Although they have been modified by recent scholarly contributions, the most familiar accounts of the rise of nihonga emphasize a linear narrative in which early enthusiasm for oil painting cooled into a desire to protect the “national essence” (kokusui)—­and with it, traditional Japanese painting—­in the 1880s.13 Within the central government, this purportedly led in 1889 to the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) under the Ministry of Education, with Okakura Kakuzō (1863–­1913) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–­1908) in key positions, and later, in 1907, to the founding of the Ministry of Education Exhibition (Bunten), a national salon that solicited painting submissions in two discrete categories, nihonga and yōga, thereby imposing a bifurcated understanding of painting in other circles too. This narrative requires several emendations. First, the notion of a national essence, like that of “traditional Japanese painting,” was projected backward onto the 1880s art world by historians and memoirists.14 While both concepts were more or less present by 1890, the language of the 1880s is far more ambiguous when compared with the late Meiji, after 1900. I have not detected a clear tide of opinion toward painting in Japanese materials and away from oil painting in the 1880s or 1890s but, instead, a variety of opinions from a variety of individuals, even if we limit ourselves to Tokyo or to the central government, which was composed of competing individuals, bu-

3

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

reaus, and ministries.15 Consequently, it is a drastic simplification to conclude that there was a general turn toward painting in Japanese materials and away from oil painting on the level of discourse (as opposed to funding) in the mid-­Meiji. Second, the rise of nihonga as a general category, both conceptually and visually, must be distinguished from the rise of government funding for nihonga at oil painting’s expense, although those two ascendencies are naturally related. Once this distinction is made, the standard narrative’s Tokyo-­centrism and its problematic privileging of Fenollosa and Okakura are both relativized, for the standard narrative pertains directly to the funding situation and is insufficient to describe what was happening visually and conceptually throughout Japan. Third, existing descriptions of the way that Japanese painting became nihonga in the Meiji era use the paintings of well-­known masters to illustrate the narrative, but they have yet to provide a solidly visual understanding of what happened to painting after the Restoration: how did painting change, and what were the causes and mechanisms of that change? This, of course, is a difficult proposition. There were dozens of major painters and literally thousands of minor ones, with documented submissions to the 1882 and 1884 exhibitions from every region of the country. In this book I have endeavored to use visual and textual materials to articulate certain trajectories of this change through the 1880s and especially surrounding the painter Kano Hōgai (1828–­1888), who moved from Shimonoseki to Tokyo in the 1870s and ended up in a patronage relationship with Fenollosa. I see my work as part of an ongoing scholarly effort to understand nineteenth-­and early twentieth-century creators, from Kikuchi Yōsai (1781–­1878), Shibata Zeshin (1807–­1891), Taki Katei (1830–­1904), and Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–­1889) to Takeuchi Seihō (1864–­1942), Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–­1875), and Okuhara Seiko (1837–­1913).16 Given that there are so many painters waiting to be studied, some may wonder why, in the end, I decided to work on Hōgai, an artist who became part of the standard narrative and worked for Fenollosa and Okakura, whose roles in the Meiji art world have already received so much attention.17 Significant questions remain about Fenollosa’s position in the art world of the 1880s, and it is important to continue to think critically about them along with opening other avenues of inquiry, as Ellen P. Conant has challenged us to do.18 This book’s position on Fenollosa’s relation to the emergence of nihonga developed as the result of thinking not about Fenollosa but around him, temporarily bracketing him while studying the discourses and trends with which he coincided. The second major motive in centering on Hōgai is rooted in my conviction about his works, which prompted me to understand him not as a pawn in the hands of prominent advocates or as someone who had later fortuitously entered the canon, but rather as a thoughtful painter who confronted myriad problems of the picture surface, of audience expectations, and of general political and economic upheaval. Most of Hōgai’s paintings look nothing like our mental image of nihonga; acknowledged as strange and outmoded in their own day, they are at odds with the way they have been used as illustrations of a standard narrative that 4

introduction

was used to chart movement from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Institute to the Bunten. The fact of their Kano style does support this school’s instrumentality in the making of modern Japanese-­style painting, but even then, Hōgai had a complex relationship to Kano orthodoxy. Furthermore, in stark contrast to some of his contemporaries and most of his successors, Hōgai left virtually no written records. Understanding his paintings ultimately takes us far beyond the artist himself, and to the extent that his later paintings would be enshrined (and copiously forged) as early nihonga, they provide one window onto the larger problem of how Japanese artists weathered the change from the shogunal era into Meiji. Hōgai was a thoughtful painter, and one final reason his paintings matter to the history of Meiji art is that the making of modern art in this period is, in the end, part of the story of Japanese art’s globalization. Japanese art from the Edo period forward addressed foreign viewers as well as more diverse audiences in Japan within a compressed time frame of interactions made possible by modern transportation and print technology. Seeing Japanese objects exposed to buyers and viewers beyond the artists’ circle of connections and beyond the archipelago’s boundaries, Meiji artists and arts officials concluded that the work of interpreting and valuing Japanese objects could be quite different from that at home. As one of the first Meiji painters to work directly with a foreign patron, Hōgai was in a curious position, but one that would become extremely relevant to subsequent Japanese artists’ attempts to engage foreign viewers and criteria.

Nihonga and the Specter of Foreign Demand The creation of the concept of “Japanese painting” reflected the global nineteenth-­ century impulse to divide painting and other arts into national schools, but it also reflected the stance of foreigners such as William Anderson (1842–­1900), Louis Gonse (1846–­1921), and Ernest Fenollosa, whose position as non-­Japanese made it natural for them to designate all of Japanese painting as a single entity.19 Further research bears out Kitazawa’s initial suggestion that nihonga was “painting in translation”: as will be shown in greater detail throughout this volume, some of the first appearances of the word involved either the translated statements of Western commentators, such as Gottfried Wagener (1831–­1892) and Fenollosa, or Japanese speakers’ perceptions of the profile of Japanese art abroad.20 For example, in an 1876 newspaper article, oil painter Goseda Hōryū (1827–­1892) declared that Japanese artists working in both seiyōga (Western painting) and nihon no gafū (Japanese painting styles) must improve by the time of the Domestic Industrial Exhibition and the 1878 Exposition Universelle. Hōryū also designated “Japan’s paintings” with the phrase nihon no e (日本の画) (written almost like nihonga, but with the hiragana phonetic gloss ゑ[e] over the final character)—­by which he meant oil paintings that would represent Japan’s artistic attainments to Westerners.21 Even before it became limited 5

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

to works in so-­called Japanese materials, nihonga and related terms were tied to the act of positing an international audience for Japanese art. When the words for “Japan” and “painting” were joined to form the word nihonga in the 1880s, it could be said that two different moves took place simultaneously. First, the Western concept of the national school took on life in Japan, one of many new ideas that included the notion of “art” itself (bijutsu), genre categories such as history painting (rekishiga) or the nude (ratai), and the competitive, juried public exhibition (hakurankai, kyōshinkai).22 Second, the word nihonga enacted or performed the distinction between newly imported Western forms and ideas and existing “Japanese” ones. In this way, even though the word nihonga was dependent on foreign concepts of the national school, those who invoked it reinforced the notion that Japanese art should seek independence from Westernizing influences.23 Despite its endemic vagueness, by the first decade of the twentieth century the word nihonga most commonly referred to what writers in the early 1880s had called “the painting methods distinctive to our country”; that is to say, it excluded oil painting in the act of attempting to define an indigenous, distinctly “Japanese” painting. In 1882 the Meiji Interior Ministry hosted the first government-­sponsored exhibition devoted exclusively to painting, soliciting “[works] of all the different schools, with the exception of Western painting” (seiyō-­e o nozoku no hoka, ryūha no ikan o towazu).24 The Second Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition (Dai Nikai Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) followed in the spring of 1884. While the two large, high-­profile exhibitions did not use the word nihonga, their manner of defining “painting” created a conceptual category based on the exclusion of “Western painting.” Furthermore, while many researchers initially concluded that this exclusion reflected Western negativity toward Japanese oil painting, Seki Chiyo has shown that the major outcome of this event was the selection of elegant, pedigreed painters to supply Japanese-­style cedar door paintings for the Meiji Imperial Palace in Tokyo, while Yamaguchi Seiichi and Satō Dōshin cite Japanese concerns about the export market as the primary reason behind oil painting’s loss of government support at this time.25 In each case, it is difficult to isolate a single motive or perspective from which the separation of nihonga from oil painting occurred. Similarly, the government-­sponsored Tokyo School of Fine Arts, founded in 1889 under Fenollosa and Okakura’s advocacy, formally excluded oil painting from the “painting” (kaiga) department, but that decision reflected several different perspectives: Fenollosa and Okakura’s belief in the future of painting in Japanese materials as a progressive contribution to world art; their desire to secure the past; and Meiji government officials’ awareness that the Western market for Japanese oil paintings was limited.26 Here, too, personal, governmental, and foreign-­oriented objectives were intertwined. By the late Meiji, nihonga and yōga (also seiyōga, seiyō-­e) came to constitute a dichotomy, at much the same time that a Western/Japanese dichotomy was being codified in other spheres of daily life and culture, such as architecture, dress, and 6

introduction

cuisine.27 Yet these dichotomies were originally much more ambiguous than they now appear. As one reporter in 1905 would write, “People use the words nihonga and yōga almost unconsciously, although the question of whether these terms should be used or equated to each other [at all] . . . is unresolved.”28 Furthermore, the dichotomy left no obvious place for the category of Qing Chinese culture, save for that of assimilation within the broader category of East Asia.29 The nihonga/yōga binary was ever threatened with dissolution as the boundaries between what counted and did not count as “Japanese painting” were subjected to challenge and redefinition.

Contesting Nihonga As a category, nihonga was contested from the beginning, even before the word entered common usage. Amid political jockeying and the widening of the cultural generation gap in the mid-­Meiji period, the masters of each art, be it literature, theater, instrumental music, or calligraphy, required political patronage, financial backing, and the visibility that would prevent their institution from getting lost as daimyo and shogunal patronage declined and new cultural pursuits arose. Painters secure in their networks of patronage could change at their own pace, but those seeking the support of the government or the export market placed their painting in the service of fluid and competing visions of the Japanese nation. The Interior Ministry’s act of summarily excluding oil painting from the Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions of 1882 and 1884 was an affront to the small but elite cohort of Meiji oil painters and their supporters.30 It was, furthermore, a retreat from the general mindset of the 1870s, when officials at the Ministry of Industry and other cosmopolitan Japanese supported oil painting (yūga, abura-­e) as a “supplement” to “the myriad crafts and industries . . . of our country Japan.”31 At a time when the government printing bureau was working to master the technologies of metal-­plate engraving, chromolithography, and photography, oil painting appeared to be assimilable to similarly practical aims.32 Acting on reports of the centrality of artistic developments in Renaissance Italy, the government hired three Italians to teach draftsmanship, oil painting, and sculpture at the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō), which had been founded by the Ministry of Industry in 1876. Government policies of the 1870s treated oil painting as yet another manifestation of Western technology whose adoption was to be fairly uncontroversial. Policies promoting oil painting were frequently connected to concerns about the impression Japanese art would make on Western viewers. When the government Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku) composed its guidelines for submissions to the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, for example, it voiced the concern that “old-­school” (kofū) Japanese paintings would undermine Japan’s status on the world stage. “In Tokyo and elsewhere,” the guidelines stated, “there are many famous masters of sculpture, but our painting methods still lack detail and refinement [saimitsu]; accordingly, attempts at copying real scenery [shinkei] remain poor.”33 This statement 7

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

reflects the early Meiji assumption that Western viewers would be most impressed by detail, technical refinement, and illusionism because these were the qualities that Western pictures seemed to exhibit from a Japanese point of view.34 At the time, these qualities appeared to be most clearly realized by producers of articulated metalwork dragons and hawks, or by carvers of wood and ivory who devoted themselves to the realistic representation of humans, birds, animals, “genre” figures, and other subjects. Such works did indeed elicit broad admiration and high prices in the West, particularly in the 1860s and 1870s, when only a few European writers had begun to advocate for the value of Japanese graphic arts. 35 Painting—­ particularly the elite painting that was proposed as the equivalent of fine art in the West—­was indeed judged to be lacking in detail and verisimilitude, and the Exhibition Bureau intimated that Japanese painters should increase their mastery of these qualities in general and of oil painting in particular. The Vienna missive continued, “It is true that old-­style paintings by famous masters do have a certain charm that people enjoy. In recent years oil painting methods have also made tolerable progress, and there are some now which are quite worth looking at.”36 Members of the Japanese art world, in other words, did not initially see the Meiji government’s support of oil painting as a threat to “old-­style paintings.” At the First Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, oil paintings, paintings on silk or paper, and even calligraphy had hung side by side in similar framed mountings. In any case, scholars speculate that some paintings at the early Meiji exhibitions used affordable existing materials or homemade oil paints that deliberately sought the effects of oil painting.37 Work on a variety of supports in both oils and Japanese materials flourished within a general culture of exploration. The Meiji officials understandably sought to demonstrate Japan’s mastery of oil painting. The British diplomat Rutherford Alcock (1809–­1897) had scoffed in the 1870s at what he supposed was the Japanese ignorance of perspective, oil painting, and the like; thus, the ambition to demonstrate Japan’s “progress” in the medium was perfectly reasonable from a foreign policy point of view. By the early 1880s, however, this position had come under attack by almost every Western commentator on Japanese art. The French critic Philippe Burty (1830–­1890), who had begun writing about Japanese art in the early 1870s, wrote in 1883: We learn with terror that Japan has invited professors of drawing and painting from Europe. Our methods, good among us, differ radically from those of the country that received theirs from China in ancient times but knew how to appropriate them with an unparalleled delicacy, perfecting them through the constant study of nature, and that would lose everything in exchanging them for others. Without paradox, it is our decorative artists who . . . ought to seek advice from the Japanese masters.38

Fenollosa, who had come to the University of Tokyo in 1878 as a foreigner hired to 8

introduction

teach philosophy and political economy, began his famous 1882 speech Bijutsu shinsetsu (The True Meaning of the Fine Arts) on a similar note. He promised to “prove” that verisimilitude was not the chief aim of painting and to offer more attractive alternatives. Already appealing to listeners through the apparent rigor of his logical predication, which seemed to transcend the limits of mere subjective judgment or regional preference, he further implied that Japan’s arts could contribute to Western art by helping the latter redress its own overreliance on illusionism.39 Rather than constituting another area in which Japan would borrow technology from the West, Japanese art, in Fenollosa’s eyes, was eligible to become one of the first intellectual exports from Japan to the industrialized West.40 Given the affirming nature of this claim, it was easy for Japanese audiences to suppress or overlook the fact of its being made within a broader and more problematic Orientalist discourse. As Elisa Evett and Akiko Mabuchi have noted, Westerners who exalted Japanese art tended to attribute to Japan a “primitive” closeness to nature and innocence of Western high art.41 While the consequences of reimporting the values of japonisme or Orientalism were many, with repercussions that extended well into the twentieth century, this discourse encouraged the perception of “Japanese art” or “Japanese painting” as a unitary category and, moreover, as an entity that was opposed to and ultimately threatened by “Western painting.”42

Kano Hōgai There were clearly winners and losers in this process of consolidating Japanese art in opposition to that of the West, and it is no secret that Kano Hōgai was among the former. Patronized by Fenollosa and eulogized by Okakura, Hōgai would assume a key role in the triumphal narrative of the salvation and development of “traditional” Japanese painting promulgated by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Institute. As early as the 1890s, the Kano painter had effectively become an ideal father figure: laid to rest on the eve of the school’s opening, he provided a symbolic foundation for the next generation without actively interfering in its work.43 The school and the Japan Art Institute, two institutions shepherded by Okakura, went on to write the victors’ history of nihonga. Hōgai continued to be praised and credited, aided by the almost magical hold on viewers of his final work, Merciful Mother Kannon (fig. 6.1).44 Some narratives have treated nihonga like a specific art movement with instigators (Fenollosa and Okakura), leaders (Hōgai, Gahō, and the artists of the Japan Art Institute), activists, and opponents (oil painters, literati painters, and some Kyoto masters). To be sure, Fenollosa and Okakura were utterly partisan in their attempts to control and curate Japanese painting’s past, present, and future. The relation between the term nihonga and these individual actors was, however, considerably more complex. Nihonga was not a discrete artistic movement but a term of discourse that initially bore no ties to a specific style, practitioner, or visual vocabulary, yet it pro9

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

posed a vision of painting in Japanese materials that ultimately bound its raison d’etre to the state itself, seeking to become a “national school” such as was being called for in other countries at the time.45 Fenollosa and Okakura constituted one of several constituencies that competed to articulate nihonga’s parameters by championing certain artists and drowning out competing groups, such as Kyoto “naturalist” painters and Chinese-­style literati painters.46 So, is the continued prominence of Fenollosa, Okakura, and their protégés (including Hōgai) in the narrative of nihonga’s origins due to their profound success at mythmaking or, worse, to scholarly torpor? At a time when so many overlooked painters of the Meiji era await our attention, what can the study of Hōgai bring to our understanding of nihonga’s early years? For me, the answer to these two questions lies less in a reassessment of Fenollosa than in a reassessment of nihonga as such. In a quest to determine who should receive “credit” for Japanese painting’s successful modernization as nihonga, generations of scholars and critics have argued over the extent of Fenollosa’s role in Hōgai’s career, or in the making of nihonga as a whole. But while I am prepared to recommend Hōgai’s paintings as among the most interesting of the Meiji period, my overall attitude is far less celebratory. Fenollosa, as a source of patronage and championship, was the one detail that set Hōgai apart from his colleagues. What does it mean that the man who would be remembered by many twentieth-­century writers as the most prominent Japanese-­style painter of his generation was working for an American? This question is not merely a matter of canon formation. It also had play within the figures’ lifetimes, shaping their careers and the category of nihonga. And it coalesced what would become one of the main problematics of modern and contemporary Japanese art: namely, its negotiation of conflicting domestic and international images of Japan.47 Since the specter of foreign demand for and perceptions of Japanese art loomed so large in the history of nihonga, it is no wonder that one of its most “successful” exponents would be in American employ. What once appeared to be Fenollosa’s or Hōgai’s personal role in the making of nihonga was only one of the earliest and most paradigmatic cases in which the figure (or figment) of Western demand manifested itself in the production and display of Japanese painting.

Exhibition Culture and the Viewers of Meiji Painting The scenario of the exhibition hall and the shadowy presence of its implied Western audience can provide a new perspective both on Hōgai, whose agency and strategies of picture-­making were so different from those of the self-­directed modern artist, and on the history of nihonga. International demand was ultimately far more crucial to the emergence and visual codification of nihonga than any individual artist, patron, or theorist. It gave rise to a two-­tiered system of art exhibition in 1870s and 1880s Japan, one in which domestic exhibitions were directly linked to world’s fairs and domestic audiences were encouraged to view Japanese objects with the knowl10

introduction

edge of their eventual presentation to Western buyers and evaluators. The exhibition hall also yields a model for approaching the broader problem of how to narrate continuity and change across the Tokugawa-­Meiji transition, uniting two periods that had been forcibly separated by Western commentators and by the coinage of the word nihonga itself. Chapter 1, “Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting,” concentrates on domestic and international exhibitions in nineteenth-­century Japan as a fact of history and as a heuristic or methodological tool. Historically, the public exhibition has been a fraught metaphor, a global symbolic form that structured and confirmed the originally Western perception of a break between pre-­and post-­ Restoration art. Yet exhibitions can serve as a model for renarrating the history of painting across the Edo to Meiji divide. Rather than presenting the “opening” of Japan to trade and diplomacy with the West as a stark temporal boundary between premodern and modern modes of artistic production, exhibitions enable us to understand such epochal events as opportunities for objects and ideas to be reframed; this framing process might then be adjusted or undone outside the temporary space of the exhibition hall. Chapter 2, “In Search of Images,” examines Meiji-­era exhibitions in greater detail, analyzing metalwork, ceramics, textiles, and other Meiji craft objects as embodiments of some of the visual problems that Japanese painters would face in the 1880s. Chapter 3, “The Painter and His Audiences,” considers the career of Kano Hōgai as unfolding into a new set of challenges brought on by the Meiji Restoration and by the demand for images to display at public exhibitions. Instead of reiterating the traditional emphasis on Hōgai as a heroic actor involved in the creation of a new mode of modern painting, I emphasize the changing audiences and markets for his paintings. I also detail how Fenollosa’s agenda intersected with painting production by Hōgai and other members of Kangakai, the Painting Appreciation Society. Chapter 4, “Decadence and the Emergence of Nihonga Style,” situates Hōgai’s painting production within broader artistic trends of the 1880s, when the style and subject matter of Japanese painting first became a topic of outright debate. This development solidified the existence of the category of nihonga on a discursive plane well before nihonga became a firm entity in ostensible contrast to yōga, or Western (oil) painting. While chapter 4 is concerned with style, chapter 5, “Naturalizing the Double Reading,” explores the semantics of Meiji exhibition art, with particular attention to images of hawks and eagles by Hōgai and other artists. Painters of flora and fauna were among the earliest to experiment with international reception, exploring the notion that viewers should be able to understand a work of art in roughly the same way regardless of their ethnic background or degree of familiarity with painting history. Further, by claiming that the best nihonga prioritized naturalism, late Meiji and Taishō commentators were also able to avoid the unstable position of late Edo painting seen in chapter 4. 11

Nihonga and the Historical Inscription of the Modern

Ultimately, however, the image of a perfectly legible form of painting grounded only in natural observation was not as compelling as a form of nihonga that founded itself on the selective reuse of past Japanese painting. A progressive nihonga that phrased itself as world art and universal expression proved threatening to some because it seemed to forewarn the very end of “Japanese painting” as such. Chapter 6, “Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga,” explores nihonga’s relation to past painting, in the Meiji period and beyond, through Shibata Zeshin’s variations on the seventeenth-­century Hikone Screen, Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon, and Hishida Shunsō’s Fallen Leaves (1909). Finally, the conclusion proposes the significance of this study for a consideration of nihonga as such. Rather than assuming that nihonga is all-­encompassing or that nihonga and yōga should exist side by side—­a state whose givenness has already been challenged by Kitazawa and others—­I emphasize the term’s provisional, contested status as well as its roots in a nineteenth-­century Western-­centric worldview.48 These circumstances prompt us to consider the ends of nihonga, a term that can be doubly construed. First, preoccupations with the supposed end of Japanese art have defined nihonga from its origins in the Meiji period to the present day. Second, nihonga’s continued existence, with the support of Japanese viewers and institutions, owes to the fact that its most successful or canonical works serve certain functions or ends. While I focus here mainly on Japanese-­style painting and craft objects in Tokyo and will not render a complete picture of Japanese painting in the Meiji era, my analysis is meant to provoke the reconsideration of questions with relevance for Japanese art at large: What is nihonga, where did it come from, and why is it still around?

12

introduction

1

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting Nearly all pictures are nowadays painted with a view to possible exhibition. Fancy Giotto, Angelico, Bellini, and Giorgione, closely crammed into long galleries, numbered 3785 and so forth. . . . The discordant hubbub of modern Picture Exhibitions is . . . the divorce of art from the highest religious, social, intellectual movement of the age which is the root of decadence in art. —frederic harrison, “A Few Words about Picture Exhibitions,” 18881 Each person should have their own religion; for artists [bijutsuka], it is the religion of fine art [bijutsu shū]. Why should we need anything else? —okakura kakuzō, “Kano Hōgai,” 18892

1.1  Frederic Leighton, Cimabue’s

In 1855 the young Frederic Leighton (1830–­1896) submitted a colossal painting for

Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in

exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried

Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1853–­1855. Oil on canvas, 222 × 521 cm. National Gallery,

in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853–­1855) was acquired by Queen Victoria at Albert’s urging; following the purchase, she allowed the public to admire it at

London, on loan from Her Maj-

subsequent exhibition venues (fig 1.1). The critic and poet Frances Turner Palgrave

esty the Queen, L275.

(1824–­1897) saw it on view in the town of Conwy (Conway) in North Wales: That charming work, every one remembers, shows how the great Madonna picture, by the old Tuscan artist Cimabue, was carried in state and triumph six hundred years ago through Florence to the church where it still hangs; and how the delight of the people in its beauty gave the name of “Joyful” . . . to the street through which it passed. Here was a curious analogy. Cimabue’s youthful masterpiece six centuries ago delighted Florence: Leighton’s was today the pride of Conway. An analogy there was, but, I felt, a difference also: —­the modern spectator came to enjoy, where the mediaeval crowd came to reverence.3

Palgrave’s 1888 essay “The Decline of Art” was symptomatic of the late nineteenth century as an age of exhibitions and also, inevitably, of exhibition fatigue. The paint15

ing did more than reference the history of art; it visualized a certain ideal of civic engagement with painting and thus played a part in inciting Palgrave’s antimodernist lament. The depicted scene, taken from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568), represents no ordinary religious procession but rather a special celebratory march from Cimabue’s workshop to the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where the painting was to be installed. As such, the procession “elevate[d] and honour[ed] and perpetuate[d] the glory of the artist and of Art.”4 In Palgrave’s view, the painting literally connected pictorial production to devotion, balancing reverence for the image as a fabricated object and as a representation of the divine. The title of Leighton’s painting, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession . . . , underscores this syntactic linkage: art is returned to the sacred via the community, reconnecting us with the lost ideality of an earlier time in which life and art, religious reverence and aesthetic appreciation, were seen as one.5 By contrast, the modern age of exhibitions represented decontextualization and, with it, the loss of the stable meaning that results from being able to locate the work at the center of a specific nexus: artist, audience, context, and codes of viewing.6 As Gregg Horowitz writes in his analysis of modern art’s crisis of extinction: With the breakdown of the academic and aristocratic control of artistic creation and reception [at the cusp of the modern period], art lost its straightforward connections to its traditional social bases. A gap opened between the practice of art and its functions, and so between the work of art and its meaning. With the eruption of this instability at the heart of artistic practice, art for the first time floated free of contexts in which its meaning could be normatively determined and thereby became unable to sustain proper standards of judgment. The loss of social mooring is the background both of the birth of artistic modernism and of the emerging problem of the judgment of taste (judgments of beauty that cannot be grounded in given social norms).7

This parable of exhibition and decontextualization is too simple to account for the full complexity of the age of exhibitions or of visual art’s modernity, but it does highlight the longing for stability and authority that accompanied the spread of exhibitions in the industrialized West and the Western interest in Japanese art. Meanwhile, exhibitions were also affecting artistic production in the non-­ Western world, including Japan. By 1889 Japanese viewers had become accustomed to the idea that had horrified French and British critics such as Frederic Harrison (1831–­1923), namely, that paintings, sculpture, or craft objects might be made specifically for exhibition. At a time when Western artists and critics were reflecting on the differences between the pious images of old and the brazen exhibition art of the present, Okakura Kakuzō was happy to propose that art was the only religion that a modern person might need—­a statement made even more striking by the fact that the Japanese terms for art and religion were each less than two decades old at the 16

chapter one

time.8 This situation played out poorly for Japanese artists on the world stage: even as some Western commentators bemoaned exhibitions, they essentially reserved the benefits of exhibition culture for the West while treating Japanese art as a foil to modernization. This chapter proposes that both the positive and negative associations of exhibitionary culture in the nineteenth century shaped modern Japanese-­style painting. Further, if we are careful to credit developments from the latter half of the shogunal era, or Edo period (1600–­1868), exhibitions can also serve as a model for renarrating the history of painting across the Edo to Meiji divide. Historians have tended to adopt one of two approaches to the origins of modern Japanese art. The first locates it in the emergence of modern, Western terms and institutions such as bijutsu (art or fine art). The second focuses on aspects of modern artistic consciousness manifested in individual artworks and bearing affinities with cross-­culturally identified traits of modernity.9 Drawing on both perspectives, I propose a more integrated view of what changed and what stayed the same across the Restoration. New developments were enabled by painting’s diffusion beyond the elite, by the growing freedom of some painters from the expectations of individual patrons and workshop heads, and by the increasing complexity of the economy, where goods and ideas circulated with less regard for divisions of region and social status.10 The Meiji era famously saw the coinage of bijutsu as a translation of the English, French, and German words for art or fine art, creating a new metalanguage for painting and signaling ways in which Japanese objects could be accommodated to Western categories.11 This milestone, along with the establishment of words for exhibition (hakurankai) and museum (hakubutsukan), has been taken to signal a new phase in the social consciousness of painting.12 But what was it about these terms that represented such a fundamental change? For at least a century prior to the rise of the international exhibition in mid-­nineteenth-­century England and France, Japanese city-­dwellers had enjoyed a robust culture of urban exhibitions and spectacles. But where exhibitions and spectacles in Edo Japan had been organized by individual entities with the permission of the government or under the protective authority of shrines and temples, the new events were comprehensive, internationally conscious, and usually sponsored by national or local governments. When shogunal emissaries first visited London’s 1862 International Exhibition, they described the event as a hakurankai because it afforded a “vast overview [hakuran] of products from each country.”13 Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–­1901) popularized the term in his 1866 Conditions in the West (Seiyō jijō), noting a space where “useful apparati, antiquities, and unusual things are gathered and shown to all the people of the world.”14 Within a decade, Meiji officials were hosting their own domestic hakurankai: vast, government-­ organized fairs featuring halls for machinery, agriculture, horticulture, art, and the like (fig. 1.2).15 When we shift our attention away from the framework for art to the objects themselves, however, it has long been clear that mid-­to late Edo images, made prior 17

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

1.2  Hashimoto Chikanobu, The

to the rise of bijutsu per se, exhibit lively elements of painterly modernity, whether

Second Domestic Industrial Exhi-

through critical engagement with the world, playful manipulation of the artist’s

bition, 1881. Color woodblock

identity, historical self-­consciousness, or the acknowledgement of image-­making

print; vertical ōban triptych.

means and apparati.16 Without these innovative late Edo objects and artists, Meiji-­

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2000.390a–­c. Photograph

and Taishō-­era Japanese painting would not look the way that it does, nor would

© 2014, Museum of Fine Arts,

artists and viewers have responded so naturally to the Western-­style art institu-

Boston.

tions introduced by the Meiji government.17 When thinking about art in the early to mid-­Meiji period, it is crucial to keep both perspectives in mind: there were serious changes and continuities, and moreover, the new terminological and institutional metalanguage for art and exhibitions worked to reframe or repackage existing objects, experiences, and discourses of daily life. The first part of this chapter provides an overview of painting production and reception in late Edo Japan, while the latter part examines the exhibition as a figurative tool to aid in conceptualizing art across the Edo-­Meiji divide. While aspects of modern Japanese painting and spectatorship predated the Restoration, hakurankai staged and visualized the notion of a divide between premodern and modern art. Accompanied by the conviction that art-­making is an end—­even a religion—­in itself and that the exhibition hall is a reasonable endpoint for the object, the exhibition in Meiji Japan helped to convey the notion that old art was securely embedded in (and subordinate to) aims such as religion, pageantry, or ornamentation, while the modern object had become detached from these contexts, for better or for worse.

18

chapter one

The Diversity of Painting Schools in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries As the literary critic Fujioka Sakutarō (1870–­1910) observed in his History of Recent Painting (Kinsei kaiga shi, 1903), the mid-­to late Edo period featured a veritable “contest of schools” (shoha kakusui), a period of unprecedented density and diversity of painting production.18 If the early to mid-­Edo period had been characterized by the rise and consolidation of Kano hegemony through the iemoto (house) system, the late Edo period was notable for the proliferation of independent artists and small workshops, a trend that began in Kyoto during the time of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–­ 1795) and Ike no Taiga (1723–­1776) and continued throughout Japan during the first two and a half decades of Meiji. Many of these artists established studios to be carried on by disciples who would succeed to the family name, but in comparison with artists of samurai status who served shogunal and daimyo houses (such as the Kano, Sumiyoshi, or Unkoku), the newer schools were less beholden to a single inherited set of “house manners” or styles.19 This stylistic freedom came at a price: unable to depend on fixed, hereditary incomes from daimyo or shogunal patronage, the new independent painters were reliant on the market. Working in urban centers or as itinerants, they attracted patrons through reputation, networking, and the reproductive woodblock print medium. As a result, they were increasingly reliant on novelty and topicality, looking to painting models that lay outside the standard Kano or yamato-­e canons in order to captivate patrons. For example, Ōkyo, whose patrons ranged from a tonsured member of the nobility to a scion of the Mitsui merchant house, derived his new style in part from the study of naturalistic Chinese painting.20 Later, in Eastern Japan, Tani Bunchō (1763–­1841) and his pupils achieved success that relied on daimyo and samurai patronage but was not beholden to it. As Fujioka notes, these painters “were popular among high and low alike,” a fact that helped their students succeed in the Meiji era.21 The increased purchasing power of those outside the shogunal elite fueled painting’s growing diversity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Okakura Kakuzō later emphasized that in late Edo-­period Kyoto, where wealthy merchants, “scholars and free-­thinkers,” temples, and the aristocracy were the dominant patrons, “artists who disdained the Kano yoke could venture to indulge in wilful deviations from tradition . . . [and] the rich middle classes could permit themselves to admire their originality.”22 The results, he notes with some Tokyo-­centric envy, made Kyoto artists “the leading creative spirits in [nineteenth-­century] pictorial art.”23 Such economic and social developments gave rise to a system of artistic production that functioned more like Bourdieu’s nineteenth-­century French cultural field, in which producers and consumers, rather than relying on a single hereditary workshop retained for the exclusive use of a certain elite, confronted what he calls a “universe of options.”24

19

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

There were intimate connections between the diversification of the art market and the growth of a public sphere for the discussion and evaluation of paintings. As Jürgen Habermas has argued, public opinion on art (that is, cultural products) mattered when it was assumed that all evaluators “could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion.” In other words, “the same process that converted culture into a commodity (and in this fashion constituted it as a culture that could become an object of discussion to begin with) established the public as in principle inclusive.”25 Painters in the service of the shogunate and daimyo, by contrast, had a more conservative stylistic mandate and would have been discouraged from sharing their works with outside viewers; their paintings, like the affairs of the ruling elites and their families, were considered private matters. This connection between the diversification of the art market and the growth of a public sphere for viewing, evaluating, and purchasing painting in the eighteenth century onward is foretold in the fame of Hanabusa Itchō (1652–­1724) and his successors. As Miriam Wattles notes, Itchō’s eleven-­year exile during the reign of Tsunayoshi greatly enhanced his public persona. The talented painter’s unspecified crime kept his name afloat; these rumors, juxtaposed with the fact that “some of his [painted and poetic] works . . . were subtly undermining of the social order” helped to create a “brand” that was pinned to the erotic Asazuma Boat motif and proliferated through painting, print, and word of mouth.26 Subtle resistance to authority, combined with the commercialized, print-­based trade in information, helped to constitute a semipublic sphere where artists like Itchō could attain renown apart from the existing, polarized categories of the elite Kano school and the elicit floating world. While the beginning of a commercialized public sphere for painting was thus already present in the eighteenth century, two further nineteenth-­century developments help to explain painting in the years up to and directly after the Meiji Restoration: increasing heterogeneity and the growth of the artistic endeavor as a self-­ directed project.

Heterogeneity and the Merging of Schools In the Edo period, profession was supposed to be hereditary, with proprietary knowledge and skills passed down to one’s heirs as “secret transmissions” (hiden).27 Painters tended to train with one school or master at a time, receiving a character from the master’s name to mark the completion of the training and to cement the bonds of painterly succession.28 From the late eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, however, an increasing number of painters began to train across different schools before establishing their own houses. While Kyoto had been the cultural center for centuries, by the late eighteenth century Edo had blossomed into a rival hub where lucrative patronage by daimyo, wealthy merchants, and groups of lesson-­seeking samurai and townspeople attracted exceptional persons from across 20

chapter one

the regime.29 The stylistic eclecticism of many late Edo and early Meiji painters was the natural result of having studied under more than one master. Diversity increased as artists befriended each other or sought out new credentials as a means of distinguishing themselves in the marketplace, a challenge that high-­ranking Kano, Tosa, Unkoku, and Sumiyoshi painters rarely faced.30 In Kyoto, many nineteenth-­century painters were attracted to the style of Matsumura Goshun (1752–­1811), who studied first with the freewheeling literati master Yosa Buson (1716–­1783) and then with Ōkyo, the epitome of professional diligence. Building on such eclecticism, the Meiji artist Ōba Gakusen (1820–­1899) went on to synthesize the painting of his teacher Oda Kaisen (a Shimonoseki native and disciple of Goshun; 1785–­1862) with Ming and Qing expressive literati painting; crisply outlined Ming academic painting; the soft, pale colors of the artists working in Ōkyo’s style; naturalist Nagasaki painting; and even Tosa and Kano formulations of yamato-­e. The Edo-­period passion for lesson-­taking and other cultural pursuits led samurai and other members of higher-­ranking professions to pursue painting. Sakai Hōitsu (1761–­1829), for example, was the second son of the daimyo of Himeji. Excluded from the succession, he took the Buddhist tonsure in 1797 and consequently enjoyed greater social flexibility to study painting and poetry. He ultimately transformed himself into a semiprofessional complete with heir and pupils, but his distinctive painterly knowledge and identity were based on his ability to leverage his social status in order to gain access to rare paintings in closely guarded elite collections.31 Watanabe Kazan (1793–­1841), a samurai, and Kikuchi Yōsai (1781–­1878), an official at the shogunal mint, similarly attained professional status outside the hereditary artisanal workshop by treating painting as a self-­fulfilling pursuit, something initiated on one’s own terms and not by working one’s way up from an apprenticeship in a larger franchise. Consequently, these men were relatively free from the custom of subordination to a single master that had developed within artisanal circles. Eclecticism also flourished within the conceptual category of literati ink painting (bunjinga), which had attained a similar degree of freedom from the hierarchies of the artisanal workshop. In the latter half of the Edo period, literati painting was a voluminous category encompassing many forms of recent Chinese painting, its exponents bearing close ties to the world of Confucian scholarship and related circles of Chinese literary composition and calligraphy. Sinophile patrons, collectors, and amateurs did more than lend financial support to their favorite painters; they also helped maintain literati painting’s vibrancy by providing access to Chinese books and paintings.32 In this way, Edo-­period literati painting created a fluid relationship between study and production, amateurism and professionalism, private pursuit and commercial production, allowing men and women of means to move in and out of the formerly artisanal, masculine category of workshop painting.33 Operating within a model of production and reception that was already recip21

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

rocal and self-­referential, Sinophile painters and patrons established an almost indefinitely expandable canon that ranged from the loosely brushed works of Ni Zan (1301–­1374) and Wang Meng (1308–­1385) to the more detailed, polychrome paintings of technicians such as Chen Hongshou (1598–­1652), Lan Ying (1585–­1664), Wang Hui (1632–­1717), and Shen Nanpin (1682–­1758), the bird and flower painter who visited Japan in the 1730s. Those who studied and patronized Nanpin’s style in Japan, such as Sō Shiseki (1712–­1786), often united several interests: taste for new, exciting examples of Qing painting and intellectual life, the close observation of natural specimens, and representational fidelity in general—­trends that would eventually reach an even broader audience through the naturalistic depiction of flora and fauna in the woodblock prints and printed books of artists such as Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. Qing painting and Korean “true view” models of observation-­based landscape representation provided an important source of Western-­style “reality effects,” such as aerial views, low horizon lines, atmospheric and mathematical perspective, shading, and graduated scale reduction.34 With time, the corpus of recent Chinese painting available to Japanese painters would grow even broader. The work of Tsubaki Chinzan (1801–­1854), for example, echoed new types of Qing painting featuring pale colors, an ad hoc approach to composition, and soft, loose ink outlines that balance elegant abandon with fidelity to nature (fig. 1.3).35 As the late Edo notion of “Chinese style” was unhinged to accommodate a greater variety of source paintings, the category that we now call nanga or bunjinga attained unprecedented fluidity. The new catholicism of literati enthusiasts implicitly challenged the much older canons of Chinese paintings in warrior families that had formed the basis of the

1.3  Tsubaki Chinzan, Nandina and Sparrows (detail), 1851. Ink and colors on silk; hanging scroll. Private collection.

22

chapter one

Kano styles.36 Literati gatherings also became a means of evading the rigidity of the official status system and of gendered expectations, as individuals of various backgrounds formed ties through aesthetic appreciation.37 By the final decades of the Edo period, a handful of dedicated literati painters like Yasuda Rozan (1830–­1883) began to travel directly to China, and the increased presence of Chinese merchants and travelers in Japan from the 1850s onward meant that Japanese bunjin could at last realize their cross-­cultural aesthetic interactions in “real time.”38 As Confucian learning and other Sinophile habits expanded to encompass a greater segment of the population, including wealthy farmers, merchants, lower-­ranking samurai, and women, literati painting provided entree into an intellectual community of unprecedented accessibility.

Historical Inquiry and Painting as a Self-­Directed Project Somewhere in the midst of this, the pursuit of painting itself began to change. Working together with their elite patrons, well-­educated painters such as Kano Seisen’in (1796–­1846), Tanaka Totsugen (1767–­1823), Sumiyoshi Hiroyuki (1755–­1811), and Tani Bunchō began to emphasize the study and attainment of historical styles preserved as distinctly “other” documents of the past.39 Because of his samurai status and distant blood relationship to Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–­1829), Bunchō was hired as Sadanobu’s bureaucratic assistant (tsuke), a post that gave him greater flexibility than he would have enjoyed as a painter in waiting (on’kakae eshi). Having dispensed with the identity and expectations associated with an ordinary domainal painter, Bunchō and his benefactor were free to use painting in new ways, documenting topography, surveying and copying shrine and temple antiquities, and even generating new scrolls to replace the missing volumes of the medieval Illustrated Legends of Ishiyamadera.40 A prolific literati painter, Bunchō also engaged in literary and social activities typical of bunjin. While the initiative and funding for many of Bunchō’s projects came from a powerful shogunal official, the impact of his activities extended far beyond Sadanobu, expanding and popularizing a range of new artistic practices and objectives. Bunchō went on to train many pupils, his own catholicism leading to even further diversity among the next generation of artists and patrons.41 These new pursuits gave Japanese painting the character of an intellectual pursuit among like-­minded individuals. The emergence of painters from relatively privileged backgrounds further strengthened this trend. Satake Shozan (1748–­1785), the daimyo of Akita, made paintings that combined features of the Shen Nanpin school and of Western images. Sakai Hōitsu leveraged his status as the son of a daimyo when seeking access to the paintings of Ogata Kōrin (1658–­1716), which he then documented and made available in woodblock-­printed form.42 Kikuchi Yōsai, devoting many years to his massive Zenken kojitsu (Customs of Past Sages) project after ceding his inherited bureaucratic 23

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

1.4  Kikuchi Yōsai, illustration depicting the painter Kose no Hirotaka, from Customs of Past Sages (Zenken kojitsu), woodblock-­printed book, 1868. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

position to his son, was able to complete a learned and time-­consuming endeavor that would have been nearly impossible for a self-­supporting artist who had trained since youth in the hierarchical setting of the large painting studio (fig. 1.4).43 Often coming to the career of painting as highly educated adults, these painters appear to have approached the array of existing painting schools as a series of options to be studied, “revived” (fukkō), or consciously reincorporated into new works.44 For the yamato-­e revival painters Reizei Tamechika (1823–­1864) and Ukita Ikkei (1795–­1895), the study of ancient Japanese handscrolls was even more personal. These painters studied and copied works such as the Ban Dainagon emaki (Tale of Major Councillor Ban), Kasuga Gongen genki-­e (Miraculous Legends of the Kasuga Shrine Deity), and Hōnen shōnin eden (Illustrated Biography of the Priest Hōnen), investing the acquisition of ancient painting modes with historical and even political motives. The painters’ level of personal commitment to their endeavors can be seen in the fact that Tamechika, who took the Reizei name as an expression of loyalty to the emperor, was eventually assassinated by a pro-­imperial extremist; similarly, Ikkei was imprisoned during the Ansei purge for his loyalist political affiliations. In 1841 Watanabe Kazan, who was also a scholar of Confucian and Dutch studies, would die for his political and intellectual affiliations. Where painters’ products had once been treated as extensions of their patrons’ ideas, by the late Edo period the choices of some painters were treated as manifestations of personal values. The diversity of painting was thus secured by the need to make fine distinctions of regional, social, 24

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political, and intellectual identity, and because so many different cultural products coexisted in the cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, painters and patrons faced a wide variety of options for their self-­fashioning. Emerging from a medieval environment in which painting lineages and schools under the support of specific patrons were supposed to remain distinct over generations, the painting of this period developed in the interaction between political, intellectual, and artistic motives.45

Academic Painting in the Late Edo Period Despite the emergence of the artist as a self-­guided individual during this time, the hierarchical, large-­scale academic workshop remained prominent. The Kano workshop in particular continued to serve as “a type of [entry-­level] compulsory education” for artists who went on to work in a variety of different styles and modes.46 While complaints about these students’ lack of skill, motivation, and creativity were rife in the Meiji period (and even in the late Edo period), a closer look reveals that painters at the highest rungs of the academic hierarchy had come to exhibit a strong sense of historicity and a catholic approach toward style. Within the most dynamic Kano houses, painters presented themselves as custodians of the old Motonobu, Tan’yū, or Tsunenobu modes but continued to expand their knowledge and repertoire. Kano Seisen’in Osanobu, the most influential and accomplished painter of the late Edo Kano school, was born in Edo in an era in which the achievements of Tani Bunchō and the impact of Sadanobu’s woodblock-­printed Ten Types of Ancient [Objects] (Shūko jisshu; preface, 1800) had already become widely known. The Kano painter applied himself to the study and copying of new paintings and particularly to medieval Japanese handscrolls, using these models to make the first major reformulation of the yamato-­e mode since Tan’yū’s time.47 Like Tan’yū, Seisen’in concerned himself with enriching the established modes of kanga, or “Chinese painting.” He drew upon the new Qing painting models that so interested his patrons and contemporaries, and in 1820 he was commissioned by the Mito Tokugawa family to execute a close copy of Shen Nanpin’s Deer and Cranes screens in the shogunal collection.48 Seisen’in’s study of late imperial Chinese painting is also visible in the dramatically lowered horizon line, atmospheric perspective, and graduated scale reduction in the now-­famous Falconry screens, while the deep blues and greens, slender tree trunks, fantastic rocks, and plentiful moss dots of his other Chinese paintings evoke the late Ming and Qing academic paintings that his contemporary Tani Bunchō would do much to popularize (fig. 1.5). Kano Hōgai’s father Seikō (1797–­1867) trained in his youth in Seisen’in’s studio, and the works he executed in his home domain of Chōfu evince an interest in colorful, illusionistic Ming-­Qing painting. Seikō’s study of new Chinese painting modes should also be understood in the context of Chōfu as a major stopover for itinerant literati painters.49 In addition to defining himself against these painters through the 25

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

1.5  Kano Seisen’in Osanobu,

perpetuation of an orthodox Kano style, it would seem that Seikō, like his teacher,

Falconry, late Edo period. Ink

incorporated new developments and appealed to his patrons’ expanding tastes.50

and color on silk; two-­panel folding screen. Itabashi Museum of Art.

Many of the same trends were at work in Kyoto academic painting. In 1855 around twenty painters, most of them local, contributed sliding-­door paintings to the reconstruction of the Kyoto imperial palace.51 The works’ collective diversity, technical sophistication, and interest in new painting models challenge notions of the decline and monotony of academic painting in the late Edo period: even though the palace’s designers and overseers emphasized architectural fidelity to Heian models, the painters and officials responsible for the interior decoration embraced

26

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new trends.52 Several participants incorporated elements of Qing courtly painting. A sliding-­door program of layered ink hills and peach blossoms by the Kyoto painter Kano Eigaku (1843–­1890) appears as though lifted from a Chinese painting manual demonstration of the “hemp-­fiber” strokes of the Dong Yuan mode. Hara Zaishō (1813–­1871) decorated the Lower Room (Gedan no ma) of the Imperial Study (Ogakumonjo) with an ink and color painting of the Yueyang Pavilion in the Qing architectural style of the late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Yangzhou artist Yuan Jiang (fig. 1.6).53 The pavilion dominates the foreground of one sliding-door pair, while fourteen additional doors encircle the room with a panoramic vista of sailboats in a harbor. With its low horizon lines, measured recessional spits of land, and blue-­ tinted water, the scene evokes contemporaneous paintings and prints meant to document Edo Bay or the Japanese shoreline. Meiji painting would be heavily indebted to all of the technical approaches deployed to decorate the mid-­nineteenth-­century Kyoto palace. In addition to acknowledging academic painting’s formal ambitions in the late Edo period, we can arrive at a new understanding of its structural hierarchies by consulting recent reevaluations of the house-­based (iemoto) studio system in the mid-­to late Edo period. Eiko Ikegami explains that naming, certification, secrecy, and oral transmission were “commercial aspects” of a “system of art instruction” that worked by claiming a monopoly on certification: “From an organizational perspective, the iemoto system operated like a modern restaurant franchise in which the company logo, menu, and manner of food preparation are common to every establishment in the chain. A paternalistic conception of authority . . . unifies the franchise system.”54 Given the late Edo-­period prominence of amateur lesson-­takers who crossed over to patronage or to a semiprofessional level of cultural production, the seeming conservatism of the “absolute master” was in fact highly resourceful. The absolutism of the academic studio master ultimately reflected the absolutism of his patron and of Tokugawa social and political relations more generally.55 The artist-­retainer, being wholly dependent on a single ruling house for his livelihood, was fully invested in the patron’s image-­making needs. Any variances in the image’s signifying power between artist, patron, and intended viewers was highly undesirable to the patron—­and therefore to the artist as well. Since the government sought to stabilize information, symbolism, and the social order, it is no wonder that artists and patrons exercised scrupulous care regarding stylistic and iconographic experimentation. A closer examination of certain artists’ individual projects in the late Edo period indicates that what we perceive as the fixity of their works was not due to limited vision, or worse, to “feudal” ineptness, but incorporated characteristically nineteenth-­century concerns, such as painterly self-­awareness, the search for historical specifity, the consultation of an encyclopedic range of sources, and the negotiation of a personal artistic identity through complex economic and social networks.

27

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

1.6  Hara Zaishō, Yueyang Pavilion (detail), 1855. Fusuma-­e sliding doors originally installed in the Lower Room of the Study (Gakumonjo), Imperial Palace, Kyoto.

Between an Elite Patron and the Crowd Conceiving of Edo and Meiji painting in terms of a spectrum ranging from individual private patronage to works that addressed a mass audience can lead to a more precise understanding of how certain types of Edo painting remained continuous into the Meiji period while others were reframed or reworked into modern exhibition art and, ultimately, into some of the most iconic examples of publicly exhibited nihonga. Given nihonga’s close relation to public exhibitions and government patronage, it is not surprising that today the artists most commonly cited as transitional figures were those who negotiated between elite patrons and the crowd. Kawanabe Kyōsai and Ken’yūsai (Kano) Kazunobu (1815–­1863) both entered exterior (omote eshi) Kano studios from middling status backgrounds and appealed to mass audiences rather than securing a single elite patron.56 Kyōsai, the son of a samurai from Koga domain, Shimōsa (present-­day Ibaraki prefecture), came to Edo with his father. His virtuosic blend of dynamic figure painting and classical ink painting was the result of having learned first with Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–­1861) and subsequently with Kano Dōhaku in Edo. His ability to paint in both Kano and ukiyo-­e styles served him well during the financially trying 1860s and 1870s, when he provided pictures 28

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for a variety of commercial publications ranging from humorous fiction to the grander and more detailed Illustrated Mirror of Falconry (Ehon taka kagami).57 Kazunobu specialized in dynamic figure painting and became known for his Five Hundred Arhats (1854–­1863), in the collection of the Gangōin subtemple of Zōjōji in Edo-­Tokyo (fig.1.7). The son of an Edo antiques dealer, Kazunobu trained under Kano Sosen Toshinobu and painted under the style name Ken’yūsai.58 Appointed hokkyō (Bridge of the Law) in 1856 and hōgen (Eye of the Law) in 1862, he was clearly appreciated in official circles, even though his paintings manifest affinities with the dramatic poses, saturated colors, and eerie, supernatural forms of late Edo popular culture. In terms of patronage, Kazunobu appears to have been the perfect artist to adorn shogunal temples and other pilgrimage sites, which had their own pedigrees but were financially dependent on attracting ordinary tourists.59 Befitting his own situation at the juncture between commoner, samurai, artisanal, and temple communities, Kazunobu became adept at negotiating between an individual elite patron—­in this case, the abbot Hōyo Ryōei (d. 1897)—­and a crowd.60 Installed in a special viewing hall, Kazunobu’s hundred hanging scrolls used illusionistic techniques to captivate viewers.61 The arhats’ individuated faces are full of emotion, while their halos are shaded to suggest spheres of light, especially in nighttime scenes, where the sky is darkened and figures are shown as if in the dramatic 29

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

1.7  Kano Kazunobu, preparatory drawings for The Five Hundred Arhats (detail), late Edo period, mid-­nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper; hanging scroll. Tokyo National Museum.

light of lanterns or the moon. Foreground figures bending downward or upward are occasionally shown foreshortened, while dramatic scale reductions and atmospheric shading for middle­and background figures are used to suggest recession in space. Such innovations have long been celebrated as forerunners to nihonga. Kazunobu, writes Kawai Masatomo, “actively incorporates the Western-­style shading and perspective of his day . . . and it was those expressions of perspective, shading, 30

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and other Western methods that led to the birth of those painters, beginning with [fellow] Kano artists Kano Hōgai and Kimura Ritsugaku (1827–­1890), who would call themselves Western-­style painters.”62 Instead of establishing a direct connection between Kazunobu and “modern” painting from the Meiji period forward, however, it might be more accurate to say that Kazunobu’s Arhats accessed a Western look through the study of Qing painting and, like later nihonga, appealed to diverse audiences by using bright colors, striking compositions, and a host of surprising, unusual details. Conventional pictorial elements from the paintings reflect Ming-­and Qing-­dynasty painting motifs with a directness not mirrored in the majority of Edo-­period Buddhist paintings. These elements include the gnarled, polelike trees whose trunk diameter remains relatively constant from top to bottom, the white auspicious clouds accentuated by a series of curving lines, the delineation of the waves, the S-­curve by which a series of figures is made to come down from the heavens (a particularly common device in Ming-­ dynasty Buddhist paintings), and the blue-­green scholars’ rocks, whose shape and lacy perforations differ from typical Japanese examples. The Arhats synthesized a vast quantity of pictorial data from sources far and wide: an account at Zōjōi from 1900 suggests that around 1853, Kazunobu and his patron traveled to temples in Edo and Kamakura in order to study existing arhat paintings and statues and to query priests about the subject.63 Taking advantage of the genre of arhat painting as an established platform for foreign pictorial modes and the representation of eccentricity, Kazunobu, an academic painter, created a series of strange and exciting images that echoed contemporaneous explorations of the otherworldly in popular mediums.64 In this way, the Five Hundred Arhats offered a popular spectacle while still complementing the dignified setting of a shogunally patronized temple and meeting the criteria of Gangōin’s abbot, who sought more accurate renditions of the arhats’ robes and accoutrements.65 Considered together, the cases of Seisen’in, Seikō, Kazunobu, and Kyōsai reveal how personal agency manifested itself differently at different loci in the status system. At the highest level of shogunal patronage, Seisen’in’s study of Heian and medieval handscrolls constituted an intellectual quest oriented toward securing a new archive of courtly exemplars for the glory of the bakufu and the Kano school. Seikō, Hōgai’s father and a painter in waiting to the Chōfu daimyo, transmitted Seisen’in’s ideas back to the provinces, but the transmission was not unidirectional. In the port city of Shimonoseki, Seikō also likely exchanged ideas with those who had studied in Kyoto and Nagasaki. Finally, like Kyōsai, Kazunobu’s professional success stemmed from his synthesis of the aesthetics of the Kano school, Ming-­Qing painting, and Hokusai (among others).66 This strategy succeeded in engaging the diverse viewers who would see Kazunobu’s works in temple halls. In the world of late Edo painting, the artist’s agency was most commonly expressed in the ways in which he or she made the best of a relatively fixed set of professional opportunities, and this was especially true in the case of academic work31

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shop painters, whose identities were linked to a single lord or patron. New identities were crafted over a matrix of available source paintings and against the familiar horizon of patron demands. When the Meiji leaders dissolved the status system, the daimyo domains, and the payment of samurai stipends, academic and independent painters alike became free agents who were obliged to make their own way in the world. Independent painters, already accustomed to recruiting their own patrons, enjoyed a natural advantage in the new era. At the same time, the late Edo practice of painting as a self-­fulfilling pursuit shows more continuity with the age of bijutsu and bijutsuka—­the modern artist as laid out by Okakura at the outset of this chapter—­ than is typically acknowledged.

The Public Sphere for Painting before Hakurankai As the figure of the artist was changing in late Edo Japan, so were audiences and viewing environments. Painting production throughout the Edo period had centered on a series of private or semiprivate spheres of interaction.67 As we have seen, works of art came into being in a closely determined physical and social context, with patrons often requesting images for a particular space or occasion.68 Even the arts of political legitimization were cloistered: according to work diaries left by shogunal painters such as Seisen’in or Sumiyoshi Hirokata (1835–­1883), elite painters concentrated on screens, portraits, and other works to be circulated among the shogunal family and its ministers, vassals, and allies.69 In such cases, the painter rarely chose what to paint; castle decorations for court and shogunate were proposed, drafted, and submitted for official preapproval. Images made for temples and shrines, such as sliding-­door images and votive plaques, required a similar degree of collaborative input, and with the exception of special airings (bakuryō) and certain votive plaques displayed in specially constructed halls (emadō; see chapters 3 and 4), many were confined to the private portion of the worship compound, reserved as special sights for those who had gained access to the inner rooms through donation or privilege.70 This broader logic of private images and privileged unveilings had structured the possessions of elite nobles, warriors, and religious institutions at least since the medieval era. Viewing, and even knowing about, antique emaki and karamono (fine objects imported from China), early modern tea vessels, and other precious possessions was a privilege in itself; the point of access and the experience of unveiling referenced and mingled with the experience of sacred power accorded to hidden Buddhist icons (hibutsu).71 As Jas Elsner has argued with respect to curtained or covered images, the pleasure and authority involved in quietly unveiling a “secret” object in the company of a small group of viewers harkened back to the experience of sacred relics and was inseparable from the viewing experience of these objects, whose rituals continued into the modern age even as the culture of salon-­style public exhibition and publication caused them to disappear from modern scholarly con32

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sciousness.72 Because the privacy of elite images and objects was even more closely guarded than in the early modern West, public images prior to the Meiji Restoration tended to be those that addressed a general audience—­such as ukiyo-­e and kabuki prints—­and were financially reliant on broad market appeal. The semipublic image lay between these two extremes in nineteenth-­century Japan. Restaurants and temples were common locations for painting and calligraphy gatherings (shogakai), exhibitions, and memorial displays, but most were gatherings of friends and acquaintances with a limited number of strangers and curious onlookers.73 Among these events, exhibitions of temple treasures and historical and religious artifacts (kaichō, degaichō) and the Higashiyama Exhibitions of New Paintings and Calligraphy, also held at a temple, were notable because they offered fine paintings, sacred objects, and rare historical artifacts to all who cared to pay the modest admission fee. The Higashiyama Exhibitions had been organized by the literati painter and scholar Minagawa Kien (1734–­1807) in Kyoto in the late 1780s and 1790s as a recurring event. In 1797, for example, enterprising painters assembled close to three hundred new paintings (shinga) at the temple Kiyomizudera as a means to celebrate and popularize one another’s work.74 Looking beyond art and antiquities, late Edo-­period exhibitions of materia medica and natural historical specimens (known as honzōkai, yakuhinkai, or bussankai) ranged from relatively small, privately organized events to lively spectacles. In particular, the bussankai exhibitions of products and raw materials from each domain date back to the vision of the shogun Yoshimune (1684–­1751) and flourished from the 1750s onward. In their blending of public education, hegemonic vision, and commitments to economic development they resemble the post-­Revolutionary French domestic exhibitions that were systematized by Napoleon and served as the precursors to the earliest international fairs.75 In the field of painting, the success of the Higashiyama Exhibitions, and their location in Kyoto rather than Edo, reflected the presence of what Okakura had testily called the “rich middle classes” who would “permit themselves to admire . . . originality” in painting.76 It also underscores, once again, the close relationship between the rise of public art criticism and painting’s commodification within a sociocultural field. It is against the now-­widespread assumptions about painting as a marketed item, in fact, that we can reassess the positions of the highest-­ranked academic artists and their patrons. Everything about the private patronage system was meant to avoid the emergence of disconcerting gaps between artist, work, and patron, gaps that could allow a painting to embark on its own life in the public sphere, away from the intentions of its patrons. Painters in waiting were literally vassals, their fortunes dependent on those of a single lord. And while elite paintings were occasionally published in woodblock form, most were treated as an extension of patrons’ private affairs and thus unpublishable.77 The Tokugawa status system did not theoretically allow for a public space in the way that Meiji Japan did, for the shogunal government sought to regulate all 33

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

public gatherings, curtail the general circulation of information, and limit fraternization across status boundaries—­goals that were, however, beyond its capacity to fully enforce.78 Shogunal emissaries carefully noted the political foundations that had enabled the early European world’s fairs. When he first wrote about hakurankai in Conditions in the West at the end of the Tokugawa period, Fukuzawa Yukichi had emphasized the British exhibitions’ liberal democratic commitment to the circulation of information and ideas and implied a contrast with life under the Tokugawa regime.79 Meiji officials would soon adopt many of Fukuzawa’s progressive views as they recast the relationship between education, private economic growth, and a sense of national belonging. Thus, while regime change need not bring about marked artistic change, art’s relation to its audiences, and ultimately to the social and physical spaces of display, changed sharply with the collapse of the shogunal government. It is easy to assume that Edo varieties of public space were partial accomplishments on the way toward the liberalism later attained under post-­Restoration Western influence. This viewpoint invites the conclusion that the difference between the boisterous late Edo misemono sideshows and the stately lineup of the Meiji art exhibitions was strictly evolutionary, moving from a rougher and less competent to a more competent and sophisticated form of publicity. Kinoshita Naoyuki wrote, “The misemono is the house where the art exhibition was born and raised. Having grown, that it should have come to so blindly abhor the house where it originated, and to be so ashamed of its poverty, is deeply related to the . . . position that the Japanese came to accord to the fine arts [bijutsu] within modern society.”80 While this perspective has done much to secure the misemono and other forms of late Edo popular spectacle as forms of modern visuality deserving of study, the metaphor of a singular line of filiation between an impoverished misemono parent and sophisticated exhibitionary offspring can be misleading without further context. Because the Tokugawa government treated any crowd as a potential threat to its authority, Edo-­period forms of public gathering and discourse needed to avoid serious topics and seek out extragovernmental funding; the resulting late Edo period “shows” (misemono) were either strictly commercial enterprises or small-­scale events funded by a domain, a private group, or a religious institution (or some combination of the above). By contrast, the liberally inspired hakurankai and kyōshinkai later sponsored by the Meiji officials enjoyed the government’s full support. Spatially, their new civic identity was enacted through their removal from shrines, temples, or the grounds of former daimyo mansions to the newly inaugurated public parks, a form of public yet still government-­regulated space. The domestic hakurankai’s aims, namely, “to stimulate an increase in natural and manmade products, industries, and arts [jutsugei] so that through their fruition we might reach a level comparable to that of the civilized countries,” were phrased as shared goals between the organizers, participants, and audiences, who were now collectively interpolated as “national citizens” (kokumin).81

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Exhibitions and the Framing of Modern Japanese Painting While the Japanese organizers heralded exhibitions’ symbolic relation to openness and equality, Westerners typically responded by disparaging the hakurankai.82 In a way, these two positions were flip sides of the same coin: like them or hate them, exhibitions performed their own modernity, positing a clear divide between modern and unmodern. This function emerges vividly from the work of British reporter and illustrator Charles Wirgman (1832–­1891), who supplied the Illustrated London News with an account of one of Japan’s first domestic hakurankai, the Kyoto exhibition of 1872 (fig. 1.8): Kiyoto [sic], June 16, 1872. . . . Having paid for and received a ticket, printed in English and Japanese, I went in and took a view of the first gallery, containing

1.8  Charles Wirgman, illus-

the armour. The sketch I send you is like a history of Japan. On the white curtain,

tration of the 1872 Exhibition in Kyoto, from the Illustrated

at the back of the armour, is the crest of the Tokugawa family who were, until

London News, October 19, 1872.

the last revolution, the de facto rulers of Japan, and were known in Europe as the

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Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

Tycoons. Two Japanese, in European costume, in the foreground, contrast strangely with the armour they wore only a few years ago. . . . The rest of the gallery is filled with school girls, who, together with school boys, are taken to see the Exhibition. Thus you have Japan past, present, and future, in one sketch. Any remarks of mine would be needless; it is for everyone to draw his own conclusions.

The exhibition having closed for the day, he added, “we then return through the town, and having bought some curiosities, return home.”83 In the picture, the schoolgirls and wizened official look at the same suits of armor, but what is ostensibly part of lived experience for the latter will live on as pure artifacts to the children, who will become the modern Japanese women of the future. Wirgman’s picture suggests that such once-­functional objects as armor and household items are now consigned to the far side of a bamboo barrier, where they have a distinct affinity with the “curiosities” that he and his party purchased on their way home. In addition to its stated theme of time and history, Wirgman’s contribution elaborates another commonplace of late nineteenth-­century European thought, namely, that the museum or exhibition hall was a kind of mausoleum that neutralized the object by removing it from the sphere of lived experience.84 This allusion provocatively overlaps with the then-­prominent warnings of the impending death of authentic Japanese art. In the drawing, the boundary between spectators and humble-­looking objects is abrupt and artificial. The underlying message is one of mournful loss: people are made into spectators of their own prematurely aging past, cut off from objects that used to be part of their daily lives.85 The belief that Japan was doomed by the same forces that were making it modern and civilized—­here an allegory of Britain’s own melancholy reflection on the costs of industrialization—­had a visual counterpart in the discourse about the negative aspects of exhibitions. The interrelation of beauty and utility and the embeddedness of art within the fabric of life were seen as antithetical to a modern art that was made “merely” to be beheld.86 This belief led commentators like the diplomat Rutherford Alcock to boast in the 1870s that “the Japanese with no pretensions to high Art, and who have never painted a picture to hang in a gallery, [are] yet working on the same principle as the great painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe.”87 In Alcock’s view, it was through their unconsciousness of the exhibition hall that the Japanese had been able to mirror the principles of the ancient masters. Hakurankai exhibition practices functioned to change objects even when the objects themselves underwent little or no physical change. Change took the form of a literal, architectural, or conceptual reframing, through linguistic and institutional demarcations such as the exhibition, the school, and the newspaper. But objects could also be unframed, meaning that demarcations like the bamboo barrier in Wirgman’s drawing were not nearly as permanent—­nor as tragic—­as the British journalist would lead us to believe. 36

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Unframing What Wirgman suppresses in his account is precisely the temporary nature of the exhibitions, the way in which things that had been gathered in the exhibition hall could subsequently be unframed, melded once again into daily experience. We can imagine the objects behind the bamboo barrier being returned to their owners and, hence, to regular use. Conversely, the armor he describes was almost certainly not worn during the 1860s overthrow of the Tokugawa regime but had likely been stowed away in shrines or warrior houses and occasionally displayed in a ceremonial context.88 While Wirgman uses the exhibition as an ideal trope through which to visualize the premodern/modern divide, other points of view reveal a less organized patchwork in which things are framed and unframed as new or old, indigenous or foreign, based on the temporary needs of the creator, curator, narrator, or historian. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the physical details of the Japanese domestic exhibitions, as seen through contemporaneous woodblock prints and photographs. A well-­known woodblock triptych of the landmark Tokyo Exhibition of 1872 at Yushima Hall shows the variety of objects presented: paintings in wooden frames, antiquities, bonsai, natural history specimens, and even a live giant sala-

1.9  Shōsai Ikkei, The 1872 Exhibition at Yushima Shrine, Tokyo. Color woodblock print; vertical

mander in a porcelain bowl. Yushima Hall, the site of the former shogunal Confucian academy and shrine, had been the site of occasional displays of products,

ōban triptych. Waseda Universi-

scientific specimens, and antiquities during the late Edo or Tokugawa era (fig. 1.9).

ty Library.

In practice, the early Meiji exhibition at Yushima differed little from these earlier

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displays, although the woodblock prints reframe the site by using a symmetrical European-­style linear perspective to emphasize the rational unfolding of the exhibition ground across three panels.89 In another print (fig. 4.13), the artist’s careful alignment of the monumental shibi or shachihoko roof ornament in its custom-­built 1.10  Art Gallery at the 1877

vitrine with the shibi ornament on the gate of the shrine where the exhibition is be-

Domestic Industrial Exhibition.

ing held shows a pointed awareness both of the power of the exhibition site and of

Photograph. Amagasaki Board

its constructedness as a spectacle of progress under the Meiji government.

of Education, Hyōgo Prefecture. 1.11  Hiroshige III, Interior Display at the Art Gallery, Domestic Industrial Exhibition, Ueno, Tokyo.

From the late 1870s to the early 1880s, Tokyo’s government-­sponsored exhibitions acquired a new site, the recently inaugurated Ueno Park, where Western-­style buildings were constructed. The Art Gallery (bijutsukan) at the 1877 Tokyo industrial

Color woodblock print triptych.

exhibition in Ueno Park, designed by a Japanese master builder (daiku) with training

Edo-­Tokyo Museum.

in European structures, presented paintings, calligraphy, and other finely crafted

objects in a single large room with vaulted ceilings (fig. 1.10).90 Surviving photographs and woodblock prints suggest that oil paintings and works produced with ink, brush, and pigments were framed and hung together on the walls: in this way, works in a variety of mediums were all physically accommodated to the exhibition space (figs. 1.11, 1.12). The administrators of the 1877 Art Gallery apparently made no distinction between nihonga and yōga, supporting archival work that shows these terms did not denote mutually exclusive categories until the 1890s or later.91 In 1877 the main re1.12  Hiroshige III, Art Gallery at the Domestic Industrial Exhibition, 1877. Color woodblock print triptych. National Diet Library.

39

quirement seems to have been that the works be physically packaged as framed tableaux. One might suspect, of course, that in translating the paintings into his own, third medium of woodblock print, the artist also altered them in various ways.

Exhibitions and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting

This recasting of disparate works foretells the consolidation of a variety of painting modes under the nihonga category from the 1880s onward. But it also raises a deeper question about the relation between categories and things, frames and content, or, to expand the matter, a work and its context.92 In a basic sense, the print is simplifying the depicted works of art. In another sense, however, it is crafting a single, larger work of art in the form of an ideal interior, the art gallery, complete with its throng of enthusiastic spectators. In doing so, it calls attention to the ways in which even the same works from the past are never quite the same in the new, Meiji context of the exhibitions. In the print depictions by Shōsai Ikkei (dates unknown) and Hiroshige III (1842–­1894), for example, paintings and viewers are crowded together, variously dressed as Japanese, Western, or Chinese, and fitted with new names: “art,” “exhibition,” “public,” “spectator.” The nihonga category consolidated a variety of painting modes under a single rubric in order to posit them as viable alternatives to “Western painting,” yet over time, the category also fundamentally changed viewers’ understanding of the works. Up to this point, I have been advocating for the malleability of new categories and viewing contexts; at the same time, I maintain that such categories and frameworks fundamentally changed viewers’ experience of the work. While this position may seem contradictory, it is important to be mindful of both possibilities when thinking about where and how to locate modernity in nineteenth-­century Japanese art. Individual objects can challenge the categories or narratives to which they are assigned because of their capacity to remain wordless; moreover, they are adept at integrating seemingly divergent positions of continuity and change. My final point in this chapter concerns the stakes in locating Japanese art’s modernity either before or after the Restoration. To invoke Hayden White’s well-­known analysis of historical writing, it might be said that the colorful Meiji woodblock prints apply a comic or celebratory emplotment to the narrative of the hakurankai and the Meiji era. In celebrating modernity, this mode of representation was fundamentally at odds with the late nineteenth-­century Western emplotment of Japanese modernity as a form of tragedy.93 This latter view found its way into scholarship that perpetuated the view of Meiji arts as little more than awkward amalgams of new and old, East and West. Subsequent studies sought to counter the positivist, Eurocentric bias inherent in these judgments by emphasizing continuities with the Tokugawa or Edo period, writing Edo institutions into a modernity that unfolded across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prior to the establishment of the westward-­oriented Meiji government.94 This perspective is instrumental to our understanding of the Edo-­Meiji transition today, but predicated as it is on showing continuity, it can deemphasize the fact that the break between the Edo and Meiji periods was also a self-­inscribed one. Meiji individuals actively posited discontinuities between themselves and the past. Enacted by such keywords as kaika (openness, enlightenment), nihonga, bungaku (literature), and shūkyō (religion), this break was a representation that exerted 40

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a powerful presence in the lives and discourse of people in the Meiji era; at the same time, however, it was mapped out over a Eurocentric intellectual, economic, and geopolitical terrain that was hardly of Japanese viewers’ making.95 As such, it has carried the legacy of certain Orientalist biases that need to be articulated if we are to more fully engage with Meiji cultural artifacts today. The notion of exhibitions as a negative force robbing images of their spiritual and aesthetic power originated outside Japan and did not immediately take hold among Japanese interlocutors. Okakura was embracing modernity when he recalled Kano Hōgai as asserting that art is the only religion he should ever need. This realization invites the conclusion that even though exhibitions modeled a value-­laden divide between premodern and modern Japanese art in the eyes of some viewers, they might yet hold the potential to extricate us from this fallacy by reminding us that objects can almost always be reframed and removed from the hegemonic curatorship of any particular space of display. Proceeding from this, I encourage viewers to understand late Tokugawa artworks as brimming with modernity—­in ways that would prove quite useful in the construction of Meiji works—­but also embedded within social systems and viewing environments that tended to differ from those of the succeeding era. Once the logic of the Meiji-­era hakurankai had been established, it provided a new framework for painting that, while biased toward the West, nonetheless proved difficult to ignore.

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2

In Search of Images

At that time [of the Vienna Exhibition] people in Europe said, “and to think that the East has such art as this!” [tōyō mata kaku no gotoki bijutsu ari ya]. Such was their surprise and admiration that they acquired the objects on display and founded a museum . . . of East Asia to show them to the people . . . [but nonetheless,] there were no objects of which we would have seen fit to boast as the fine arts of our country. —iida yuzuru, speech to the Dragon Pond Society, 18831 We have found almost nothing among the things brought us which can rank as work of high art. . . . From all this poor stuff exhales the faded scent of a greater art and refinement, which is now invisible, or destroyed, or subsisting only in fragments, difficult of access, or which are far away. —john la farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan, 18842

Western and Japanese commentators alike were dissatisfied with the art objects that were finding their way out of Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cosmopolitan Meiji elites such as Kuki Ryūichi (1852–­1931) were wary of international fairs’ tendency to present “artistic Japan” as a primitive foil to the West. Western collectors, for their part, were continually in search of a bygone Japan that was unengaged with Western trends, fulfilling the voyeuristic fantasy of a land that was gazed upon but did not look back.3 In Japan and abroad, the dynamics of exhibiting and being seen informed a mutual struggle to obtain and display the right Japanese objects, and hence to give form to certain abstract images of Japan, some exoticist, others aimed at undermining that exoticism. The relation between Japan’s domestic and foreign exhibition practices provides the context for a corpus of “exhibition art” that emerged between inward-­ and outward-­oriented objectives. The framework of the exhibition hall in late nineteenth-­century Japan complicates the expectation that each work once belonged to an original site or context. Typically, context is defined as the object’s origin point, the environment that “make[s] the work of art what it is,” and whose excavation can point toward a stable significance for the object.4 By this measure, the international markets and exhibitions of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century might be understood as a conflicted site or even a nonsite, one in which producers were continually induced to anticipate their European or American viewership. In this sense there is a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of Meiji Japanese exhibition art. The 1870s through 1890s, in particular, saw the rise of a two-­tiered structure of viewing in which objects first displayed at Japan’s domestic exhibitions were subsequently sent abroad to world’s fairs. An object produced in Tokyo or Yokohama amid one set of assumptions shifted physical and interpretive contexts once 43

or even several times. Because craft wares rather than paintings were at the heart of this operation, this chapter focuses on works that were executed in lacquer, ceramic, cloisonné, metalwork, or wood. The predicaments and resulting visual qualities of these objects anticipate many of the problems that painters would confront from the 1880s onward.5 Japan’s first exhibition art was suspended between domestic and foreign audiences and shaped by the anticipation of viewers who were necessarily absent from the site of production.

The Two-­Tiered Structure of the Exhibitions In motives, as in actual circumstances, Japan’s domestic exhibitions looked both inward and outward, blurring the line between displays meant for foreign audiences and those intended for viewers at home. From the beginning, the hakurankai were introduced to Japan as models of a Western practice. The promotional announcement for the first Kyoto exhibition in the tenth month of 1871 read: In the Western countries, exhibitions present newly developed machinery, vessels, objects from the past, and so forth to all the people in order to expand knowledge and promote the development of new implements that can be patented and sold for a profit. Emulating this excellent method, we shall host such a gathering and, securing approval from the city administration, exhibit unusual objects and old vessels from Japan and China [wakan koki chinpin] in the Ō Shoin building so that they will be widely available to your view. . . . It is hoped that all spectators will expand their knowledge and delight their eyes and minds, and as the [educational] value is extremely broad, adults and children alike should visit repeatedly.6

Japan’s first large-­scale public exhibitions, the 1871 and 1872 Kyoto exhibitions and the 1872 Yushima Shrine exhibition, occurred after the country received word of the Vienna International Exhibition being planned for 1873.7 The Yushima event followed closely on the establishment of the official Commission for the Vienna Exhibition (Ōkoku Hakurankai Jimukyoku), and at the end of its sixty-­day run, the majority of the exhibits were packed up and sent directly to Vienna.8 An 1872 statement by the Wakayama prefectural authorities, previously cited by Peter F. Kornicki, confirms the close relation between the domestic hakurankai and the need to assemble objects for the world’s fairs: In conjunction with the Austrian Exhibition, instructions have already been received from the government requiring this prefecture to seek out unusual and outstanding things [kibutsu myōhin]; this information has consequently been circulated throughout the prefecture. In order to seek out the said items, it has been decided to hold a small exhibition in the prefecture in the near future and allow even the people [shumin e mo] to see it. (Emphasis added)9 44

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The need to prepare for the Austrian exhibition is identified as the main impetus behind the Yushima event, with the presentation of exhibits to the Japanese public sounding almost like a side benefit. In fact, Japan’s ambitious schedule of domestic exhibitions was prompted by the government’s commitment to present at the world’s fairs. The costly First Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, for example, was threatened with postponement due to the Satsuma Rebellion, but the necessity of preparing for the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris forced officials to proceed as planned.10 In 1880 an editor from Osaka drew on an array of government-­issued submission guidelines for the Second Domestic Industrial Exhibition and the international exhibition in Melbourne to issue a handbook called Naigai hakurankai shuppin kokoroe (Guidelines for Submitting to the Domestic and International Exhibitions), suggesting that organizers and submittors tended to think holistically about exhibition planning.11 Despite the domestic exhibitions’ patent linkage to the world’s fairs, the Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku) under interior minister Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–­ 1878) continually emphasized local benefits such as the spread of knowledge, the growth of industry, and the cultivation of new trade networks—­aims that had also been key motivating factors among the creators of late Edo bussankai and yakuhinkai. It would be incorrect, then, to understand the domestic exhibitions as mere dress rehearsals for the world’s fairs, and in any case, the ministry’s ultimate aim of righting the foreign trade imbalance and enriching the nation meant that domestic and foreign goals were intertwined.12 This approach was most evident in the Ministry of Education’s first semipermanent exhibition space (hakurankai, tenkanjo) and museum (hakubutsukan) in the mid-­ 1870s. Where possible, the ministry had assembled objects for the Vienna exhibition in pairs, so that one could remain on view at home while the other was sent abroad.13 After the exhibits at the Yushima exhibition of 1872 were sent to the world’s fair, the remaining objects were simply left on view as a museum, which moved to the site of the former Nakatsu domain mansion in Uchi-­Yamashita (present-­day Chiyoda ward) in 1873. When the Vienna fair was over and the government’s shipments returned, the unsold Japanese objects were once again made available for public view at the museum in Yamashita for the minimal price of two sen, where they were joined by new foreign acquisitions.14 In this way, the Yamashita museum became a sort of heterotopia, a site that condensed and merged different temporal and geographical layers.15 This is underscored by the case of the prominent British designer Christopher Dresser (1834–­1904). In 1876, seeking to make contacts in Japan, Dresser escorted to Tokyo a shipment of European craft objects intended to replace samples of European goods acquired by the Japanese government at the 1873 Exhibition in Vienna that had been lost at sea. Dresser personally oversaw their installation in the museum in Tokyo, declaring the effect to be “just like the South Kensington Museum.”16 Four years later, the Meiji government gave him leave to tour Japan’s craft production sites; in exchange 45

In Search of Images

for permission to travel at large in the archipelago, a privilege not yet accorded to Western visitors, Dresser was asked to compose a report on the state of Japanese craft production. This report is not known to have survived, but Dresser apparently concluded that the majority of Japanese ceramics were “not suitable for export” due to factors such as small production scale. Before long, however, the British designer sent a new shipment of his own Japanese-­style wares to Tokyo and requested that they be displayed in the government’s museum. Japanese officials expressed their “great surprise” at receiving the shipment but nonetheless appear to have displayed Dresser’s pieces (the vessel in fig. 2.1 exemplifies Dresser’s style but is not one of the pieces sent to Tokyo).17 In this sense, the Yamashita museum of the 1870s was no mere Wunderkammer, a jumble of curiosities native and foreign, natural and manmade. Rather, it was structured by two basic forces: one like a mirror, in which items acquired to submit to the world’s fairs were shown to audiences within Japan, and the other like a revolving door, in which articles from the West and Japan circulated in and out, creating a permeable space between the domestic and foreign displays and objectives. The result was an internalization of foreign views and criteria that Japanese interlocutors on occasion even openly welcomed. In an 1877 publication, the Meiji government Exhibition Bureau18 wrote:

2.1  Christopher Dresser, Sea Urchin Double-­Spouted Vessel, 1879–­1882. Glazed ceramic, 17.8 × 14 × 14.6 cm. Manufactured by Linthorpe Art Pottery. Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

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[We] seek to open [an exhibition] in our own country . . . so that through the fruition [of the arts and industries] we might reach a level comparable to that of the civilized countries (bunmei kakkoku). Yet even if we fall in love with the beauty [of foreign objects] and expound upon their skill, this would be foolish, for we are seeing nothing but the surface aspects. One might well ask how they could have any practical value. It may be that exhibitions are greatly lacking in substance. . . . But if something we can call progress should emerge within written public discourse [jinai no kōron], the government and ministers will be deeply contented. Our satisfaction will be wholly in listening to those who deliberate [among themselves] and in seeing spectators [kansha] [exercising their] critical judgment. If the spectators can use their own powers of inspection and discrimination and thereby advance, they will lead our country ever further down the road of progress, and this will be greatest attainment of all.19

In their endorsement of a new breed of thoughtful, active-­minded exhibition-­goer, such statements imply a concern with mastering not only the format of the exhibition but also the vantage point of the enlightened viewer. By reproducing the conditions of foreign exhibition in Japan, in other words, the Exhibition Bureau aimed to foster the internalization of “powers of inspection” and the rise of a discursive space that would allow for autonomous deliberation and the exercise of critical judgment, which in turn would lead “even further down the road of progress.” This was a vision of the transformative power of the domestic exhibitions at its best: ideally, the domestic exhibitions would go beyond the stimulation of trade and manufacturing to facilitate the development of new modes of critical engagement with the object—­in essence, new types of viewers. In fact, the Exhibition Bureau used similar reasoning when explaining why it was providing Japanese readers with the original text of the exhibition guide that it had sent to Philadelphia for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition: The exhibition guide that we have put together at the direction of [the Austrian] Doctor [Gottfried] Wagener introduces our country’s agriculture, arts, and industry, explaining their salient points, history, and formal properties in detail. Although it was made for the purpose of foreign perusal, [we feel that] if presented to our own people it might also increase the knowledge that leads to progress and profit.20

Thus, exhibits and descriptions of Japan compiled with the aid of a foreigner for the benefit of foreigners were also circulated for domestic edification and reference. Moreover, because Japanese visitors to the domestic fairs knew that the objects and texts presented there had been prepared for Western audiences at the world’s fairs, the domestic fairs became more than a space where visitors could wear Western clothing or exclaim that the scene appeared “just like the Champs de Mars in Paris”; they were a discursive space where viewers were encouraged to imagine and engage 47

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with the Western response to Japanese objects.21 As such, the Japanese domestic exhibitions enacted a foreign context or rationale for art, though not necessarily in ways that Westerners could have anticipated.

The Domestic Fairs and the Birth of Meiji Exhibition Art In his published journal, Japan Day by Day, American biologist Edward Sylvester Morse (1838–­1925) described his experience of the 1877 Domestic Industrial Exhibition as follows: So few years have passed since the Restoration that I was astonished, in going through the Exhibition, at the progress which has been made in the manufacture of objects which only a short time ago the Japanese were importing. In one building were displayed surveyors’ instruments; large trumpets; foreign clothing; beautiful dresses; boots and shoes, some of them quite equal to ours; trunks; chairs and furniture of all kinds; soap; hats; caps; matches; and some machinery, though not much. The Naval College exhibit was a revelation: large cables, ropes, pulleys, and all the rigging-­gear of a ship; and above all a beautiful model of a man-­of-­war, fourteen feet long and perfect in every part; also a model of a drydock. . . . In another dept. were ploughs, harrows, and agricultural implements of all kinds. . . . The school apparatus seemed to include every device used in the laboratories: clocks and telegraphic instruments, telescopes, microscopes, philosophical apparatus, electrical machines, air pumps, etc.22

Morse tended to sympathize with Japanese industrialization and commitments to Western learning, but his comments on the domestic exhibition evoke an experience that was both stereotypical and unnerving to most Western Japan-­watchers: namely, the specter of the perfect replication of Western technology and the corresponding evaporation of ethnic markers. The new Japanese scientific instruments, machinery, and military technology had illustrated the ideals of science and technology to the letter: where function and accuracy were the key objectives, aesthetics and ethnicity were merely distractions. On occasion, European manufacturers had raised patent-­ related concerns.23 The central government’s Domestic Exhibitions for the Encouragement of Industry (Naikoku kangyō hakurankai; hereafter, Domestic Industrial Exhibitions) took place a total of five times: in 1877, 1881, and 1890 in Ueno Park, Tokyo (see fig. 1.1); 1895 in Kyoto; and 1903 in Osaka.24 Like the world’s fairs on which they were modeled, each involved a complex of buildings and attractions—­shops, restaurants, rest areas, and performance spaces arranged in a public park—­and involved the coordination of submissions and exhibits by a variety of governmental and private groups, including local governments, trade associations, and businesses. As such, they created a microcosm of an intensely modern—­but also intensely Westernized—­Japan. 48

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By 1877 the inventors, engineers, and artisans who had remained in Vienna to study after the 1873 exhibition had returned to Japan, displaying the fruits of their learning at the domestic fairs, where they received prizes and even acted as jurors. In judging the products of less-experienced Japanese manufacturers and designers, these foreign-­trained experts literally stood in for the Western juries who would view and judge many of the same Japanese products when they traveled to the world’s fairs.25 The effect was amplified by the Japanese administrators’ decision to prohibit the submission of non-­Japanese goods and decline the applications of foreign businesses and nations.26 At the third Domestic Industrial Exhibition, in 1890, the government presented a sampling of foreign products, isolating them in a strategically named reference hall (sankōkan), where they were offered up to inquiry and emulation but not competition.27 The organizers of the 1903 domestic exhibition in Osaka, which also featured a colonialist Taiwan Hall, decided to accept submissions from foreigners whose businesses were already active in Japan, a provision that was linked to the oft-­expressed wish that Japan might soon hold an international exhibition. Yet here, too, foreign submissions were segregated in a reference hall, eliminating any chance for visitors to compare Japanese and foreign products side by side.28 This decision established the authority of the Japanese products but also removed the potentially discomfiting experience of either difference or similarity. In positive and negative senses of the term, it eliminated discrimination. Morse responded by seeking out the one area of the fair that was supposed to be free from such concerns, the display of Japanese art and crafts: I hope to visit the place twice a week to make a study of its art treasures. . . . Tablets made to hang up as decorative ornaments (whether to use in their houses or made for export I did not learn) were beautiful. On a jet black lacquer tablet was the full moon rising out of the sea. . . . There were beautiful wreaths, cherry blossoms, thorns and little flowers in colors, all made out of porcelain; old Dresden and Chelsea products of a similar nature look weak and putty-­like in comparison. There was a plain ivory fan on which were marvelously wrought a few lacquered figures; price, $90; a screen, upon which was painted a snow scene, was $95; a metal vase; price, $600 (I learned afterwards that these were all made for foreign sale).29

Morse was anxious to determine whether the decorative tablets on display represented objects intended for Japanese daily life, an environment that he would later describe in Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1885), or whether they had been made with foreign viewers in mind; there is little doubt as to which of the two he would assign greater value (fig. 2.2). It is ironic, then, that it is ultimately the objects’ having a price, their positioning within the economic framework of foreign demand and consequent removal from the realm of local affordability, that diminishes the possibility of their having been made for local audiences and “betrays” their status as export art. 49

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2.2  Shibata Zeshin, Bell Crickets and Full Moon with Autumn

We encounter here, in Morse’s writing in the late 1870s, the obvious sense in which art objects are not the same as surveying instruments, farm machinery, or

Grasses, 1877. Maki-­e lacquer panel, 63 × 45 cm. Private collection, Japan.

men-­of-­war. Even though Morse was one of the most open-­minded and appreciative chroniclers of Japanese culture of his day, part of him wanted Japanese art to be self-­directed, contextually grounded, and hence Japanese (“to use in their houses”) in a way that did not matter for a compass or a plough. In the writings of other foreign viewers, the wish that Japanese art not be corrupted by—­or even aware of—­its Western audience was much stronger. Writing in 1876, for example, the American critic James Jackson Jarves (1818–­1888) sighed that Japanese art was “rapidly losing its best original traits, and is even in danger of extinction, gradual if not immediate.”30 Morse regarded Japanese globalization with less regret, yet his admiration of Japanese art objects in 1877 was similarly limited by his lack of familiarity with Japanese visual codes. Like many viewers, he therefore evaluated objects by comparing them to Western art using such standards as technical intricacy and fidelity to nature. From the Japanese point of view, this created an essential paradox: should Japanese art be a globally comparable manifestation of technical and scientific mastery or

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a font of ethnic particularity? This ambivalence was inherent in the parameters of the international exhibitions generally and had a profound effect on the making of Meiji art.

(No) Grounds for Comparison: The Birth of “Artistic Japan” “Art” and “Industry” were the two great epistemological pillars of the world’s fairs and appeared in the formal title and literature of a number of these events. Their definitions in mid-­to late nineteenth-­century Europe were, however, more ambiguous than is typically emphasized. Did the rhetoric of progress, improvement, and competition according to universally agreed-­upon norms apply to the arts, or did art instead provide a valuable respite from such categories through its timelessness and ethnic particularity? Interlocutors were not of one mind. In this sense, the uneasy status of the Japanese (art) object as caught between domestic and foreign expectations was prefigured by the precarious nature of the status of art itself at the fairs. As Judith Snodgrass states, “[Japanese] art and art industries were ambassadors for the nation . . . and proof that it was ‘civilized.’”31 As early as the London International Exhibition of 1862, the ambassador Rutherford Alcock had insisted that painting, sculpture, lacquer, ceramics, and other finely crafted things could rightly “illustrate the progress of the Japanese . . . and [serve] as evidences of their civilization.”32 For all its prominence, however, art had an unstable place at the world’s fairs prior to the 1890s, an index as much of superfluity as of sophistication. At the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, for example, Reverend W. Whewell (1794–­1866), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, reflected: When we come to the higher stages of cultured art—­to the works of nations long civilized, though inferior to ourselves . . . how much do we find in their works which we might admire, which we might envy, which, indeed, might drive us to despair! Even still, the tissues and ornamental works of Persia and of India have beauties which we, with all our appliances and means, cannot surpass. . . . What, then, shall we say of ourselves? . . . [S]urely our imagined superiority is not all imaginary; surely we really are more advanced than they, and this term “advanced” has a meaning; surely that mighty thought of a PROGRESS in the life of nations is not an empty dream; and surely our progress has carried us beyond them.

Whewell’s fears were quelled only through recourse to the core doctrine of the Industrial Revolution. In the “inferior” nations, he reasoned, “Art labours for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less. . . . This, therefore, is the meaning of the vast and astonishing prevalence of machine-­work in this country—­that the machine with its million fingers works for millions of purchasers, while in remote countries, where magnificence and savagery stand side by side, tens of thousands work for one.”33 India and Persia’s mastery of the arts (albeit the ornamental arts) 51

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provokes such anxiety that Whewell is obliged to expel art from the bounds of progress, using the rhetoric of social betterment to affirm the culture of inexpensive “machine-­work” that was ironically in the process of turning British collectors and connoisseurs toward handcrafts in ever greater numbers. In subsequent British fairs, industry would continue to symbolically vanquish art in the name of social betterment. Not only were the arts superfluous; for some, they were also frustratingly imprecise, incapable of cross-­cultural measurement or comparison. In the 1862 International Exhibition, the British decided to exclude the fine arts from the system of awards, a move that dismissed judgments of taste as subjective and fundamentally different from those used to evaluate all other objects in the fair. In practical terms, however, this decision was apparently directed toward reducing France’s medal count; similar motives are attributed to the exclusion of oil painting from the categories of the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition.34 A commemorative review of London’s 1862 exhibition underscored this official stance toward the arts, as well as the patriotic anti-­French motives behind it: Taste, however, is but the dilettanti side of these great Exhibitions, and for many reasons, as well as because it suited the purpose of many who have been supposed to take a highly prominent part in them, has been made somewhat too much of. The grand aim of the Exhibitions is, after all, the bettering of humanity at large, the advance of civilization in its right sense, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” . . . Taste in objects of art, however, but remotely touches the comforts and conditions of peoples, although it may improve and refine, perhaps somewhat exalt, and become rather more, than the luxurious toy of the uppermost classes; it may tinge and perfume these flowers of society, but except in the few who directly as art workers minister to it, can never affect the sturdy stem of labour below, that sustains them all. . . . [N]ever was cant and nonsense more absolute than in the utterance in a recent lecture on this Exhibition, that “a chaste and correct taste in painting influences materially the civilization and morals of a country.”35

For all that France threatened to dominate the category of art, however, it was only when Britain moved to include the fine arts within the scope of its 1851 International Exhibition that France followed suit in its own Expositions Universelles; France’s domestic exhibitions of the first half of the nineteenth century had not included advanced painting and sculpture due to a desire to reinforce the separation between the fine arts and the realm of industry and commerce.36 From this point on, organizers played with the division and ordering of categories in order to create a homefield advantage. They even found room for a competitive, playful give-­and-­take that harkened back to the Renaissance literary form of the paragone, in which the different arts were made to vie with each other for positions of superiority.37 52

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In this sense, when Japanese exhibition organizers, artists, and exporters came to accept the title of “artistic Japan,” they accepted a double-­edged sword. In 1881 the industry and commerce minister Fukuda Takanori (1818–­1894) boasted to his countrymen that “the European and American nations . . . call Japan ‘a nation of artists,’” thus intentionally or unknowingly suppressing the Western images of Japanese naivete, nonprogress, and closeness to nature that supported such an assertion.38 Instead of refusing the identity of “artistic Japan” altogether, officials like Fukuda and the artists and artisans they guided would attempt to incorporate the universal standards of industry and progress within the arts. But could art be approached as a universal dialogue of techniques and forms (as a science, so to speak), or should it represent the irreducible differences of a given maker or culture? The emphasis on artistic particularity tended to provide a fruitful ground for demeaning Orientalist discourse. This was the perspective of the natural historian and Exhibition Bureau veteran Tanaka Yoshio (1838–­1916). In an 1887 speech he noted: There are many different objects displayed in the [domestic] industrial fair, and among them are many—­whether vessels, furniture . . . medical equipment, architectural tools and machinery, or what have you, including painting—­that are derived from Western methods . . . and these look very well [totonotta]. . . . But different from these are maki-­e [lacquer], sculpture, and so forth, which are produced according to Eastern techniques [gigei]. . . . Certainly I will grant that my eyes are biased toward the West . . . but in any case . . . it seems that [objects made according to Japanese methods] have many faults. The conceptions are poor and lacking in design . . . and while this may be because the craftsmen are unlettered . . . it seems that the true source lies in painting itself. . . . [Japanese-­style] paintings are unskillful, and by copying these types of pictures nothing can be achieved. . . . The painting methods themselves are no good.39

He continued: The Great [Domestic] Exhibition of 1890 is approaching, and it is said they will also open the Diet in that year; if that is the case, then we will have even more interaction with foreign nations, human wisdom will rapidly increase, and I feel it is therefore necessary to reform [kairyō] this painting as quickly as possible.40

As a progressive intellectual who had been involved in the world’s fairs since the late Edo period, Tanaka opposed allowing the arts to embody an “inferior” national particularity in an age dominated by the pursuit of the universal progress. Rather than viewing the arts as a positive source of national particularity, he asked, in effect, why painting should be different from any other type of object, such as tools, machinery, weaponry, or scientific instruments. This idea anticipated the pursuit of the 53

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universal by early to mid-­twentieth-­century artists such as Yorozu Tetsugorō, whose self-­assigned artistic project was formal or philosophical in nature, transcending the bounds of national or ethnic particularity.41 It also suggests the potential appeal of Fenollosa’s words for Japanese artists and adminstrators, for the American foretold a day when Japanese art would be a strong contributor to a form of progressive world art that was engaged in an international struggle to overcome realism.42 In theory, a universal principle should be devoid of national particularities. In practice, however, Tanaka’s criticism of existing Japanese painting methods was partisan and Western-­oriented, even by his own admission; trained since youth in the scientific depiction of flora and fauna, his very eyes, he claimed, were “biased toward the West.” This case shows how those who attempted to treat Japanese art and craft objects as contributions to a universal dialogue frequently reinforced—­or were perceived as reinforcing—­globalism’s inherent power imbalances.43 This begged the question: were there really any global standards outside of those devised and enforced by the Western powers? Given the record, it is no wonder that many in Meiji Japan were hoping that Japan might soon host its own international exhibition.44 The tension between art as a reservoir of ethnic particularity and art as a unifying human pursuit persisted into the late 1880s and beyond. In the 1880s and 1890s, Fenollosa insisted that Japanese modern and contemporary art was poised to contribute to world art, not through token diversity, but through the irreducible force of its ideas. Groping his way around the edges of tectonic nineteenth-­century philosophical developments, Fenollosa told Tokyo audiences in 1888 that thinkers had at last proven that visual art was dependent not on subject matter but on something deeper and more fundamental: In music there is no representation, only pure musical ideas; yet it is art. Then there must be a similar art quality of pure idea in painting, which can be conceived apart from the specific condition of representation. . . . What this element of pure pictorial idea is the nineteenth century has at last discovered, and there is no longer any mystery about it. It is the fact that a pure combination of lines, whether expressing anything or not, can be such as to impart a complete idea of beauty intranslatable into terms of words, as full, high, important, and edifying as a piece of instrumental music. It is the fact that a pure combination of colors can be made a kind of visible music, expressing as complete an idea in terms of color as a Beethoven sonata presents in terms of sound, untranslatable into words but perfectly clear to every human mind. . . . And a third coordinate element of pure visible form, capable of expressing a complete idea in terms of itself, is combinations of light and dark parts [i.e., nōtan], which element however has not been so clearly recognized by recent Europeans as the other two.45

Whether allied with the representation of subject matter or not, line, color, and nōtan, says Fenollosa, are capable of expressing “a complete idea . . . full, high, im54

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portant, and edifying.” Fenollosa’s emergent formalism implied the irrelevance of national origin: if pictorial elements could signify in themselves, then subject matter and ethnic background, while interesting, were irrelevant to the production of good art.46 This viewpoint benefited a country like Japan, which had been excluded from the Western canons of great art (with some Western writers even denying that Japan had any art outside of decorative art), but it also benefited America, “the island country of the Far West,” in Karatani Kōjin’s words, which had likewise been excluded from the centrality of European high culture.47 Back in Tokyo almost ten years later, in 1896, Fenollosa reiterated his vision of a single, worldwide category of visual art in which Japanese, European, and American artists would together strive to make formal innovations. Contemporary Japanese art, he said, must strive for more than “self-­preservation. . . . It must satisfy universal standards.”48 Elsewhere, the American collector called this “the duty and opportunity of Japan toward the whole world.”49 While japonistes of the 1860s through 1880s had suggested that Japanese art bore superior qualities it could offer as models to Western art, most of this praise followed a primitivist logic.50 Fenollosa, by contrast, was proposing that Japan could contribute to the central lineage of (Western) world art; moreover, he provided a theoretically equal footing for Eastern and Western art by insisting that art could be analyzed according to “pure” (that is, formal) universal criteria of excellence. At his most impassioned he stated that “it is Eastern art itself which the Western world must look to, to solve its problem, how to [attain] the true art of painting.”51 Fenollosa’s presumption in proposing that Japan might play a central role in the future development of (Western) art quickly made him an object of ridicule by American and British intellectuals.52 When the Japanese Ministry of Education sent Fenollosa and Okakura to Europe in 1887 to survey models of art education prior to the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts—­the first trip to Europe for either man—­the British collector and barrister Marcus Huish (1843–­1921), author of Japan and Its Art (1889), skewered Fenollosa for his ignorance of European art and culture and mocked the American’s idea that Japanese art might become, in Huish’s words, “the leader of the Fine Arts in all civilized countries.”53 Huish’s 1888 comment does prove that Fenollosa disseminated his rosy image of the future of Japanese art beyond Japan. But Huish, retorting that contemporary Japanese art, as everyone knew, was “in a state of rapid decadence,” refused even to consider Fenollosa’s point. Huish added that he had the great British collector William Anderson on his side and quoted the British artist Frederic Leighton, who was said to remark, “The notion that Japanese art could at any time be the expression of Western artistic genius or satisfy Western aesthetic demands is so ludicrously unphilosophical that I am surprised you [Huish] should think it worth refuting.”54 In this view, Japanese art may have been lovely on a naïve or ornamental level, but it could never engage with Western art on an equal footing. If we conclude that this was the majority opinion among world’s fair organizers and art critics in the late nineteenth century, then the preju55

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dice inherent in the term “artistic Japan” reveals itself, along with the true nature of the hurdles faced by Japanese artists and their supporters.

The Edges of Painting The tensions between the desire to appeal to both cultural specificity (i.e., “Japaneseness”) and universal standards played out in various ways when it came to the actual making of art objects. At the early world’s fairs, members of the Meiji Exhibition Bureau had all they could do simply to interpret the endless category descriptions. These categories presumed to cover every aspect of human endeavor but in fact left numerous Japanese objects homeless while, conversely, there were literally hundreds of categories for which Japan had nothing to submit. While the intricate classificatory schemes of the exhibitions were designed to render objects comparable across nations, the reconciliation of Japanese objects within such a system posed considerable problems.55 At Vienna and in many of the subsequent fairs of the 1870s and 1880s, for example, the fine arts were defined as sculpture, oil painting, watercolor, drawing, and engraving, while craft objects such as furniture, ceramics, tapestry, and so forth were categorized as manufactures.56 This left the question of “Japanese painting” vague by definition, while implying that any painting in Japanese materials would necessarily be of lesser status than oil painting. Oil painting’s physical materiality and conditions of viewing were so different from those of the typical Japanese hanging scroll that the latter risked being excluded from the category of painting altogether. In 1882 Christopher Dresser wrote that “the best Japanese art consists of perfect sketches, and not of works which we call ‘finished.’”57 Rutherford Alcock went even further, saying, “The Japanese are neither sculptors nor painters as we understand these terms” (emphasis added).58 Immediately after praising Japanese metalwork, he declared: No Japanese can produce any thing to be named in the same day with a work from the pencil of a [Sir Edwin] Landseer, a [David] Roberts, or a [William Clarkson] Stanfield, a [George Robert] Lewis, or Rosa Bonheur, whether in oils or water-­ colors; indeed, they do not know the art of painting in oils at all, and are not great in landscape in any material. Their knowledge of perspective is too limited, and aerial effects have scarcely yet entered into their conception.59

Within this context, nihonga and yōga were far from given; instead, the category of “painting” was seen to encompass a plurality of options.60 Following the categorization scheme of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the First and Second Domestic Industrial Exhibitions of 1877 and 1881 categorized “painting” or “paintings and calligraphy” (rendered both shoga and kaiga) as the second subsection of the fine arts (after sculpture). Painting was subdivided as follows:

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II. Calligraphy and painting (shoga) 1.

Calligraphy and painting in ink on paper or cloth; all types of painting in water-­based pigments; charcoal, squid ink, chalk, etc.



2.

Oil paintings on rough cloth, panel, etc.



3.

Embroidered paintings and calligraphy

4. Maki-­e, lacquer painting, woodburn pictures (yaki-­e), etc.

5.

Ceramic, enamel, or metalwork pictures61

Within this scheme, ink/watercolor and oil are just two of several types of picture-­ making, many of which do not involve a brush and would ordinarily not be considered painting at all. At first it appears to be a Japanese innovation meant to convert craft technologies such as porcelain, lacquerware, and cloisonné into fine art in the form of framed panels. In fact, however, the catalog for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition had itself suggested that painting may be “in oil and water colors on canvas, porcelain, enamel, metals, etc.” (fig. 2.3).62 Given the commercial-­industrial orientation of the early world’s fairs, the wording in Philadelphia was likely meant to encourage American industries by giving prominence to the growing fields of china-­painting and enamel-­painting; indeed, the Philadelphia fair played a central role in the popularization of china-­painting, which had begun to be taught at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati, Ohio, and several other trade and women’s schools.63 Painting on enamels had flourished in seventeenth-­century Europe under the sponsorship of the aristocracy. Although these “minor” arts were placed under the same heading as oil painting, American and European entrants would have understood that paintings in oils on canvas were the real centerpiece. In Japanese translation, however, the relative interchangeability of the words picture (e) and painting (ga), and the fluidity of a concept of “painting” that encompassed embroidered, lacquered, ceramic, and even metalwork “pictures” along with ink, oil, and watercolor painting, seemed to suggest a possibility for overcoming the opposition between oil painting and “ink” drawing.64 2.3  Art submission categories for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876. From Visitor’s Guide to the Centennial Exhibition

The framed lacquer tablets that Morse was busy scrutinizing at the 1877 exhibition (see fig. 2.2) arose to address international expectations and standards, including the physical requirements of the exhibition hall. Japan’s paintings were not

and Philadelphia (Philadelphia: J.

grouped with Western Fine Arts submissions prior to the Chicago World’s Colum-

P. Lippincott, 1875).

bian Exposition of 1893, but even in the Japanese section or pavilion it was necessary

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2.4  Japan’s exhibit at the Vienna International Exhibition, showing framed pictures alongside hanging scrolls, 1873. Photograph. Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst. Photo © MAK.

2.5  Interior of the Art Gallery, 1877, from Dai Ichi Nikai Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai shashin chō (Photographic Album of the First and Second Domestic Industrial Exhibitions). Amagasaki Board of Education.

to adapt to the hard, high walls and stacked displays of the nineteenth-­century European exhibition space.65 Photographs of the interior of the Japanese section of the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873 show framed paintings hanging alongside hanging scrolls (at least some of the latter were mounts for premodern paintings that the government had decided to lend) (fig. 2.4). Images of the Western-­style Art Gallery at the 1877 Domestic Industrial Exhibition show that the centrality of the frame was quickly realized (fig. 2.5; see also figs. 1.10–­1.11).66 In name and in form, the Meiji tablets in lacquer, cloisonné, carved wood, and other materials were closest to the framed votive plaques (ema) typically found on display within shrine and temple precincts, where they were hung beneath the eves of a shrine building or else presented within a roofed, open-­walled structure known as the emadō (hall for votive plaques).67 From a visual standpoint, ema featured vigorous brushwork and bold compositions that would have been legible from a distance, and in this sense, the Meiji tablet (e kaku) was a creative repurposing of the votive plaque.68 The framed Meiji “pictures” using craft techniques were also related to nineteenth-­century developments in Qing-­dynasty craft production. Catherine Stuer writes that in China “by the early 19th century, the field of ‘painting’ was construed in increasingly new ways.” As evidence she cites one nineteenth-­century Qing writer’s list of “what one might call ‘material/paintings,’” pictures or paintings produced through embroidery, weaving, lacquer, ceramics, and metalwork.69 Such works provided a basis for the similar extension of the category of painting or picturing beyond brush painting in Meiji Japan. In a sense, the inclusion of lacquer, enamel, and ceramic “pictures” helped Japanese creators match or even destabilize the dominant position of oil painting in the Western artistic hierarchy.70 The fused and vitrified colors of the uniquely Meiji “lineless” or sunken-­wire cloisonné represented the Japanese perception that Western paintings eliminated stark outlines in favor of shading and atmospheric perspective (fig. 2.6).71 The gleaming, viscous lacquer, too, may have been conceived as a Japanese counterpart to oil painting. Even the bas-­relief wood or metalwork panels that were produced for the world’s fairs may be interpreted as an attempt to achieve in a framed picture the detail, pictorial depth, shading, movement, and illusionism that commentators such as Alcock or Philippe Burty found lacking in typical Japanese hanging-­scroll pictures (which were understood as ink sketches) or in screens and sliding doors, which risked being classed as furniture. Compared to these works, the framed tablets in lacquer and other mediums matched the built-­up materiality, opacity, stiffness, and weight of the lustrous oil paints and heavy Western canvas in its frame. At a time when European material scientists were seriously experimenting with lacquer and its capabilities, including the development of oil-­ based lacquer coating, the notion that lacquer might have the possibility to expand the definition of painting itself was not far-­fetched.72 Yet not everyone was in favor of these works.73 The German material scientist Gottfried Wagener, who had been hired as an outside consultant to the 1877 Do59

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2.6  Attributed to Andō Jūbei Workshop, Mt. Fuji Panel, ca. 1890s. Hidden wire enamel, 36 × 53.5 cm; framed. Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, E064. A similar work was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

mestic Exhibition, took aim at lacquer pictures in his final report and must have disagreed with the recognition that had been lavished on Zeshin’s maki-­e panels, Bell Crickets with Full Moon and Autumn Grasses (fig. 2.2) and The Hothouse for Bonsai. “Ultimately, they cannot be called paintings,” he asserted. “They are pleasing to the eye but [with their black surfaces] they can represent only the most crucial elements [of a composition] in a limited range of colors, and cannot show an object’s depth or the transitions between light and shade.”74 In his final evaluation, which survives only in Japanese, Wagener is concerned with the boundaries of painting in multiple senses. To him, the lacquer pictures could never be included in the mainstream category of painting, although he is hard-­pressed to articulate his reasons. While he may have been disturbed by the nonfunctional objects’ elision of the boundary between art and craft, ultimately he says that the works’ dark surfaces and limited color palette prevent them from achieving shading and other aspects of realism. Like Alcock, Dresser, and his contemporaries, then, he implies that realism is a fundamental requirement of painting. If the lacquer tablets responded to Western requirements for painting, they did so not by Western expectations but according to the localized Japanese logic of how to address the needs of international exhibition.

The Double Identity of Meiji Exhibition Art The strategy of creating framed pictures out of maki-­e lacquer and other “craft” mediums was not necessarily in vain. By the time Zeshin received first prize at the 60

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2.7  Shibata Zeshin, Eagle with

1877 domestic exhibition, he had already won special recognition in Vienna in 1873.

a Baby Monkey, ca. 1880s. Ink,

Together with his contemporaries Shiokawa Bunrin (1808–­1877), Kikuchi Yōsai,

lacquer, and color on paper (urushi-­e). Joe and Etsuko Price Collection. The horizontal ori-

and Watanabe Seitei (1851–­1918), he found that foreign success amplified domestic fame, and vice versa: foreign writers such as Louis Gonse introduced them as fa-

entation recalls that of a typical

mous painters of Japan, while Meiji viewers associated their detail, naturalism, and

oil painting; this piece was

unconventional materials and techniques with fashionably modern, Western paint-

likely to have been framed.

ing. In addition to producing lacquer tablets, Zeshin painted with lacquer to create urushi-­e (lacquer pictures) on paper, images that treated the lacquer like ink but also evoked gleaming oil painting (fig. 2.7). In this sense, Zeshin’s success abroad and in Japan arguably reflected the lacquer picture’s ability to do double duty as a Japanese and Western object. The circumstances differ from case to case, but this aspect of double duty is visible in a wide range of objects produced for the world’s fairs, even dating back to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. For this exhibition, Tokugawa shogunal officials commissioned two albums of specially produced color woodblock prints. The albums’ present whereabouts are unknown, but shogunal records documenting their production reveal one of the earliest examples of how artists and their government patrons dealt with the new problem of producing objects for the world’s fairs.75 Organizers initially conceived of a set of three albums documenting the scenery of Japan and Edo, the women of Japan, and a third, unspecified subject (the third album was never produced). The subjects of the first two albums reflected existing genres of nineteenth-­century woodblock prints, but there appear to have been differences. While the female figures in ukiyo-­e prints produced for the domestic mar61

In Search of Images

ket were generally beauties, famous courtesans, ghosts, actors, or legendary figures, records note that the album produced for the world’s fair depicted subjects such as an elderly farm woman, a commoner mother, a samurai daughter, and so forth, apparently with the aim of representing a range of social classes and roles. This expository goal of informing outsiders about Japan by documenting contemporary scenery, customs (fūzoku), and people distances the albums from the irreverent and erotic approach typical of ukiyo-­e prints of beauties and actors made for the domestic market.76 The organizers’ choice of the print medium and album format is further deserving of note. Albums had typically provided a way for collectors to organize single-­ sheet prints, acquired individually or within a series. As Yukio Lippit describes, elite painters also produced albums. Some anthologized the works of a particular artist and resembled Ming and Qing literati albums; in other cases, several painters collaborated to offer an overview of varied styles and subjects.77 These highly personalized albums could serve as elite artistic primers in Japan and appear to have been considered worthy gifts for foreign diplomacy. In 1869 the highest-­ranking former shogunal painters, Kano Eitoku (1814–­1891) and Sumiyoshi Hirokata, collaborated with painters from other schools to produce such an album as a diplomatic gift from the Meiji emperor to the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I.78 The painters reprised existing compositions such as the Hikone Screen or standard Tale of Genji iconography, presented lifelike representations of Japanese flora and fauna, and documented famous places, customs, and professions. There was precedent, then, for using the album format to epitomize Japan and Japanese art. Within this presentational logic, the French albums are notable because of the choice of woodblock printing in place of painting. The choice may reflect an awareness of the popularity of Japanese prints in France, but in the shogunal albums the inherently reproductive nature of the medium was never exploited: only a single set of custom-­made albums is known to have been produced.79 If we understand these albums as having been engineered to do double duty, however, we can see that a single set of objects played multiple roles: first, as industrial and artistic samples of Japanese printing technology (in keeping with the technological aims of the fairs) and, second, as ethnographic representations of Japanese topography and society. As samples of color reproduction prior to the commercialization of color lithography, the prints indeed represented a level of technical sophistication that could easily compete with—­and even surpass—­Western technology of the day, and it was partly on this level, not as ethnic or exotic art objects, that such prints and books were admired when they first entered European collections.80 The 1867 albums, that is, express an ambition to compete as universally valid samples of printing technology that could literally represent the land and people of Japan. As such, they placed more or less equal attention on the manifestation of technology and the conveyance of content or subject matter. This dual attention to medium and content would distinguish Japanese sub62

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missions to the world’s fairs throughout the Meiji period. Many objects also demonstrated a creative repurposing of existing forms. For example, a miniature reliquary in the shape of a pagoda provided the template for a metalwork objet d’art that doubled as an architectural model; in addition to representing a full-­size pagoda in three dimensions, the four walls of the miniature version were tasked with carrying two-­dimensional depictions of famous Japanese buildings, such as the celebrated late fourteenth-­century Golden Pavilion, Kinkakuji (figs. 2.8–­2.9). A similar degree of layering is exhibited by the famous Bronze Incense Burner with Peafowl, crafted by Suzuki Chōkichi (1848–­1919) for the 1878 Parisian Exposition Universelle (fig. 2.10). Suzuki’s monumental piece presents a bronze sculptural grouping of realistic peafowl that incorporates a heavily modified replica of an ancient Chinese bronze censer, its legs dramatically extended to attain the height and presence of a typical world’s fair showpiece. The result is not so much a bronze incense burner as a bronze representation of an (ancient) bronze incense burner, a single modern piece that copies both avian specimens and cultural antiquities, evoking the historical roots of East Asian bronzework and demonstrating its modern scientific or technological applications.

2.8  Komai Company (signed Nakagawa), Cabinet Modeled as a Shrine, ca. 1900–­1910. Gilt iron, 32.3 × 20 × 13 cm. Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, M043. 2.9  Detail of figure 2.8.

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A significant number of Meiji exhibition objects undertake this sort of dou-

2.10  Suzuki Chōkichi, Bronze Incense Burner with Peafowl

ble duty by presenting another art object or cultural practice on their surfaces. A

(detail), ca. 1877–­1878. Cast

painted vase from around 1900, for example, incorporates miniature representa-

and patinated bronze, 228.6

tions of all the color-printed sheets of Hiroshige’s well-­known Fifty-­Three Stations

× 128 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum. Exhibited at the Paris

of the Tōkaidō (ca. 1830s) in an illusionistic approach that references late Qing and

Exposition Universelle, 1878.

late Edo trompe l’oeil representations of paintings or prints on the surface of three-­ dimensional vessels (fig. 2.11).81 A maki-­e writing box similarly presents a variety of folding screens on its surface, with each panel of the screens featuring a different animal (fig. 2.12). The act of display is thus intensified, with a single object satisfying multiple functions: as painting and craft, as art and technology, as antiquity and demonstration of representational fidelity on a model perceived by late Edo and early Meiji viewers as being more “Western.”82 They achieved a kind of efficiency wherein a full spectrum of materials and techniques was condensed into a single model or group of models (such as the Twelve Falcons discussed in chapter 5). As such, the objects fulfilled the role of technical sample par extraordinare.

2.11 Ryōzan, Vase with Scenes from Hiroshige’s “Fifty-­Three Stations of the Tōkaidō,” ca. 1900. Painted and gilded earthenware, height 36.5 cm; sealed Kyoto Tōjiki Gōshi Gaisha. Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, S162.

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2.12  Boxes for Writing Utensils and Paper, latter half of nineteenth century. Wood lacquered in

While the production of such works reflected the logic of Japan’s individual craft manufacturers, it also evinced an understanding of the aims of the world’s fairs as exhibitions of art and industry, ethnicity and scientific (hence universal)

hiramaki-­e, takamaki-­e, and

progress. In this light, the 1867 albums of woodblock prints of Japanese women and

other techniques, 4.9 × 23 × 26 cm and 15.1 × 34.5 × 43.1 cm.

scenery and Suzuki Chōkichi’s Bronze Incense Burner with Peafowl might both be de-

Khalili Collection of Japanese

scribed as attempts to demonstrate Japan’s technical sophistication while insisting

Art, L077.

on East Asian or Japanese cultural distinctness. After the Meiji Restoration, such cultural distinctness was most frequently located in the past.

Exhibiting Japanese Images Arising in the tension between foreign and Japanese ideas about Japanese paintings, Meiji craft objects from the world’s fairs prefigure the problems and ambitions that nihonga would confront in the 1880s and beyond. These objects are characterized, first, as we have seen, by the thoughtful repurposing of existing objects (such as the reliquary, bronze incense burner, and lacquer votive plaque) based on the perceived expectations of Western exhibitions; second, by an intensification of the effects of representation by incorporating different types of functionality, such that they both present their own technical achievements and convey content about Japan; and third, as we will now consider, by a tendency to exhibit complex negotiations or condensations of temporality. 66

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2.13  Kawashima Jinbei, Procession to Nikkō Shrine, 1893. Tapestry, Gobelin weaving technique, 12.2 × 2 ft. Field Museum, Chicago.

As time passed, the project of documenting Japanese customs and social mores for the benefit of foreigners grew increasingly complicated. The woodblock prints of women exhibited at the 1867 exposition ostensibly showed them in their current roles and fashions, but as Japan began to rapidly Westernize in the 1870s, figures, dolls, and other accoutrements that continued to reflect Edo models were essentially pushed backward in time: the wooden dolls exhibited in Vienna, for example, still adhered to ceremonial dress protocols for shogunal officials that had been rendered obsolete by the Restoration less than ten years prior.83 A monumental tapestry by Kawashima Jinbei (1853–­1910) exhibited at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 adopts the technologically “superior” format, illusionism, and pictorial conventions of oil painting in order to portray a Tokugawa-era ritual procession to Nikkō, the shogunal mausoleum (fig. 2.13). The tapestry exemplifies what would also become a standard solution for nihonga: the Western equipment of pictorial representation is called upon to accurately represent “feudal” practices of a prior era. This strategy resembled Meiji officials’ use of what they considered the fundamentally Western framework of the hakurankai to commercially and anthropologically frame the objects of Old Japan for audiences that had no direct experience of Japan.84 In the post-­Restoration era, representing or “exhibiting” Japan to the outside world required an object’s maker to choose whether to ground the piece in pre-­or

post-­“feudal” Japan or in some combination of the two. In 1886 the Japanese art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–­1906) wrote to a Parisian audience, “Japan’s new relations with the West having wrought vast changes on our moeurs, it would make me extremely uncomfortable to describe those of the present day. Here [in my written account] I shall present Japan the way it was prior to the introduction of the new civilization.”85 Hayashi nevertheless proceeds to set his account in the present tense, as if refusing to acknowledge that any change had taken place since his own departure from Japan in the early Meiji. In this way, the Meiji Japanese art object proceeded to slip back into the past, or into a past that was carefully partitioned so that modern Japan had the opportunity to prove that it was modern and universal (“industrial”), on the one hand, and culturally integrated and particular (“artistic”), on the other. By the 1890s, in other words, Japanese exhibition art was beginning to engineer a means of exhibiting sophistication, technical mastery, “modern” exactitude, and representational fidelity while codifying “Japaneseness” for the viewer. As foreshadowed in the self-­referentiality of the 1867 print album and the 1878 peacock censer, this involved using the most modern and sophisticated of technological means to demonstrate and codify the past, thereby countering Western audiences’ tendencies to persist in fetishizing straw sandals and old swords as images of a primitive Japan.86 A version of this same strategy would become central to nihonga in the latter half of the Meiji period.

Excavations: Fenollosa in Search of Images As we have seen, Western viewers in the 1870s, such as Edward Sylvester Morse and Gottfried Wagener—­along with Japanese viewers such as Tanaka Yoshio—­tended to assume that representational fidelity was the main criterion for painting, and thus a criterion against which pre-­Meiji Japanese art must necessarily come up short. A few years later, in 1882, Fenollosa would repudiate realism as the fundamental requirement for painting in his lecture Bijutsu shinsetsu, instead focusing on the formal elements of line, color, and shading. In the atmosphere of rigorous cross-­ cultural comparison that dominated at the world’s fairs, we have seen that Fenollosa’s formalism was appealing to Japanese hearers because it appeared to identify standards that were at once universal and free of Western bias. This is not to say that Fenollosa himself was free of bias: taking advantage of his generous salary and extraordinary status as a foreign scholar in Japan, Fenollosa traveled the country to study and acquire specimens of premodern Japanese art, including the temple treasures whose potential loss he warned against in communications to Japanese government officials.87 As a government-­funded foreign professor at the University of Tokyo, Fenollosa had been hired to lecture in the history and study of philosophy, political science, and political economy. For this he received a considerable sum of money by early Meiji standards: three hundred yen per month, in addition to an allowance 68

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for housing and living expenses. Following the examples of Morse, who collected pottery, and the British surgeon William Anderson, who collected prints and paintings, Fenollosa began to collect paintings, and by December 1880 he had assembled his own collection of “Specimens of Japanese Pictorial Art,” relying on his students Okakura Kakuzō, Kaneko Kentarō (1853–­1942), and Ariga Nagao (1860–­1921) for translation and tutelage on the history of painting based on textual sources and paintings in the collections of wealthy individuals.88 Fenollosa began to study painting with Kano Tomonobu (1843–­1912), a Kano painter formerly in the Kobikichō shogunal studio who taught draftsmanship at the university, and he also studied painting history and theory with Kano Eitoku and Sumiyoshi Hirokata, both formerly high-­ranking official artists with whom he had likely become acquainted through Tomonobu.90 Following undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University, Fenollosa had just committed himself to studying painting at the newly opened School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1877 when Harvard zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse invited him to travel to Japan in order to teach at the University of Tokyo. Fenollosa and his new wife Elizabeth Goodhue Millet arrived in Japan in August 1878, a little over a year after Morse’s arrival in Japan and discovery of the Ōmori shell mound. Morse excavated the shell mound to reveal bones, fishing hooks, pottery, and other remnants of a prehistoric late Jōmon settlement, and his discoveries and archaeological methods were reported in the newspapers and even prompted an imperial visit to the excavation site. He was soon offered a two-­year lectureship in biology at the University of Tokyo and also began speaking publicly, delivering the first scientific lectures open to the general public in Japan and popularizing Darwin’s theories of evolution there. When Fenollosa arrived, he too became part of the circle of intellectual and public interest around Morse. By 1878 the two Americans were speaking, together with Fukuzawa Yukichi and other prominent enlightenment intellectuals, at public seminars organized by Egi Takato’o (1849–­1880), an instructor in political economy at the University of Tokyo preparatory school.89 In the spring of 1879 Fenollosa gave a public presentation on the topic of “economics and social progress,” (keizaigaku to shakai shinpo), which accompanied a lecture by the Meirokusha intellectual Katō Hiroyuki (1836–­1916) that called for “the establishment of a worldwide commonwealth of nations” and one by the Cambridge-­ educated scholar Kikuchi Dairoku (1855–­1917) on vacuums.91 Fenollosa soon equipped himself to make his own excavations of the shrine and temple storehouses of the Kyoto and Nara region. In 1880 he began the practice of heading to the quiet Nara region to explore the temples there during university breaks. His posthumously published Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art is dotted with the resultant narratives of discovery. At the ancient temple of Tōshōdaiji, “amid a mass of broken statues and interesting refuse,” he wrote, “I found in 1880 a life-­sized piece which seems to have been one of the original Greco-­Buddhist models, or at least experiments. It is like a great doll of wood, apparently finished into surface 69

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2.14  A Mass of Broken Statues and Interesting Refuse, ca. 1880. Photograph. From Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912).

with over-­layers of modeled clay. The Greekish modification of Indian drapery over the legs is under-­cut in deep, strong catenary folds; the body, nude above the waist, shows strong markings of the primary muscular tracts . . . the head . . . is semi-­Greek in profile . . . [and] a top-­knot was added to the Greco-­Buddhist hair.”92 The caption dates an accompanying photograph to around 1880: it shows old beams and dowels piled together with fragments of Buddhist statues (fig. 2.14).93 In his text Fenollosa excavates the mound of refuse by performing visual analysis on it. As such, Fenollosa’s “mass” becomes the detritus within which he is able to discover an art-historical missing link, “one of the original Greco-­Buddhist models, or at least experiments.”94 While he must have been acquiring works on the side, Fenollosa considered his shrine and temple visits to be academic surveys, and he began to advocate for the documentation and preservation of Japanese antiquities. With the presentation of Bijutsu shinsetsu and similar speeches in the early 1880s, his views were solicited by Japanese officials and intellectuals and formally made known to members of the government. Officially Fenollosa advocated for government support for the arts and for the institution of cultural preservation laws, and he appears to have been 70

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gratified by the government’s help and attention. In 1884 Fenollosa began to receive assistance from the Ministry of Education, which sent officials, translators, funds, and even an artist, Andō Hirochika, to support the summer art-­viewing excursions to the Kyoto and Nara regions that had already become customary for him.95 While these actions have typically been considered an outcome of Fenollosa’s advocacy, government officials may also have been motivated by the need to supervise Fenollosa and assert government control over his expeditions. By the fall of 1884, Fenollosa confided to Morse in a letter that he had already acquired a number of important antiquities and was concerned that the Japanese Ministry of Education or imperial household would demand to purchase them in order to keep them in Japan. The following year, the Bostonian surgeon Charles Goddard Weld (1857–­1911) came to Japan and quietly purchased the Fenollosa collection with the understanding that it was to be deposited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, thereby resolving the potential contradiction between Fenollosa’s public, seemingly disinterested or pro-­Japanese scholarly perspective and his private work to exploit the turmoil of the early Meiji period for personal gain or that of American collectors and institutions.96 In the same letter that divulged his concerns about the fate of his collection, Fenollosa discussed developments in his new “art club.” In January 1884 he had founded the art and antiquities appraisal group Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society) with the dealer and appraiser Machida Heikichi as a forum to hold public and private exhibitions of Japanese painting. Machida wanted Fenollosa to systematically exhibit his own collection to the public as part of the group, possibly in order to stimulate interest among Japanese buyers and provoke domestic demand for art antiquities; the group would then offer appraisal services to other collectors of antique paintings.97 But Fenollosa quickly changed the direction of the Kangakai. Instead of pursuing the appraisal and display of ancient objects, he moved to promote the work of new painters, hanging old pieces beside new ones for criticism and advocating for a revivalist or preservationist approach. In this way, even as he quietly arranged to move ancient works out of Japan, he directed his efforts toward augmenting a supply of new Japanese art that would close the gap between old and new art.98 The text of a speech delivered in Tokyo in 1881, about a year prior to Bijutsu shinsetsu, is recorded as follows: Gentlemen, It has been known to the world for some time that Japanese art is rapidly dying; but it has been reserved for the national exhibition of the present year to show that the art of Painting at least is already dead in Japan. This is indeed a sad confession; and if it was absolutely certainly true, it would not be worth while for me to [deliver] these lectures. For more than a thousand years this country has been blessed with a succession of great masters in painting. But today those who are capable only of copying these great works can be numbered in the [illegible]. Indeed it cannot be said that the art is dead when Mr. Yeitoku can make such a 71

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copy of Masanobu. But a few years more, when these are dead, then the traditions of the art will be lost, no one will take their places, and one of the world’s greatest schools of painting will have gone forever. Is this death which stares us in the face inevitable? Are the conditions such that the degeneration of a national school is irresponsible? Will no one arise with power and will to blow up the dying embers into a new flame?99

At Kangakai meetings Fenollosa exhibited a selection of medieval and Tokugawa-­era works from his own collection and those of local temples and collectors, focusing on Buddhist art in one meeting, Kano painting in another, and the school of Maruyama Ōkyo in a third. A decade later, Fenollosa interpreted his actions as the search for a middle path between what he once described as the “ignorant conservation” of “the old styles” and the “impure” art of painters who actively studied Western images, such as Shiba Kōkan (1747–­1818) or Kazunobu. “The true logic of the Kangakai position,” he later proffered, was “that of self-­development, as opposed to the radical programme of foreignizing Japanese art on the one hand, or the conservative programme of maintaining it unchanged on the other. A progressive Japanese Fine Arts School was seen to be a possibility.”100 Okakura Kakuzō, who collaborated with Fenollosa on the establishment of the art school and became its first headmaster, appeared to have been similarly committed to experimentation and the maintenance of existing painting modes.101 Fenollosa’s juxtaposition of the language of revival and progressivism relied on ambiguities inherent in the idea of revival, which could signify a simple bringing back to life (as in an economic revival, or the revival of a defunct institution) but more typically concealed a complex rhetorical position that sought to effect change in the present, as witnesses of the Meiji Restoration well knew.102 In this case, the figure of revival concealed the paradox of Fenollosa’s own position as a foreigner who sought to intervene in Japanese art in order to save it from excessive “foreignizing” while simultaneously encouraging it to be progressive and international. In one of several speeches delivered in Tokyo in the early to mid-­1880s, he argued that there were “limits within which Eastern painting must work in order to remain its individual self. It is just because Shiba Kokan, and Hokusai, and Kazunobu are trying to get out of these limits [by referencing Western art] that their work is so impure and bad. I believe such attempts to be the death, not the revival of Japanese painting.”103 In another reading of the situation, we could say that if the combined ills of “ignorant conservation” and excessive foreignizing were causing Japanese art to cease being a vibrant “living tradition” of world art (just as excessive exhibition culture, modernization, and secularism were described as having killed decorative art in the West), then Fenollosa, like his Meiji government employers, ambitiously sought to suture the rift that was causing Western critics to spurn contemporary Japanese art.104 But what were the aforementioned limits that Fenollosa’s progressive Japanese art would have to respect in order to be Japanese? This conundrum would 72

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continue to destabilize nihonga throughout its long subsequent history, arguably to the present day. Fenollosa’s solution was to have contemporary painters produce new versions of works in his collection, a response that accords perfectly with Satō Dōshin’s “economics of japonisme,” for it seemed to ensure that the supply of salable Japanese art would continue unabated—­a scenario that was also most profitable for him as a collector, trader, and Japanese government contractor. On an intellectual level, meanwhile, Fenollosa’s plan sought to ensure that there would be no disruptive (modern) break in Japan’s artistic trajectory, so that Japanese art would continue to function as a transmission between past and present. In order to act on these ideas, Fenollosa needed an artist. By a combination of design and serendipity this turned out to be Kano Hōgai, a regional painter who in 1868 was engaged in a revival (fukko) of his own, according to a different set of agendas.

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3

The Painter and His Audiences

Because people of the time did not understand his paintings, they did not consider him a great master but instead thought him coarse or strange. . . . He was told, “Your paintings do not sell because they are behind the times” . . . but in fact it was because they were so far ahead of their time. —yokoyama kendō, “Kano Hōgai”1 Writing is an ambiguous reality: On the one hand, it unquestionably arises from a confrontation of the writer with the society of his time; on the other hand . . . it refers the writer back, by a sort of tragic reversal, to the sources, that is to say, the instruments of creation. —roland barthes, Writing Degree Zero2

Before nihonga, when Japan as a symbolic and political entity was still oscillating between a single, unified body and a collection of daimyo domains, forty-­one-­year-­ old Kano Hōgai was in the distant domain of Chōfu (present-­day Shimonoseki) at work on a large landscape painting of the four seasons (fig. 3.1). The painting takes the temporal narrative of seasonal change found in the Long Landscape Scroll (1486) of the medieval ink painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420–­1506) and redistributes it across the twelve panels of a pair of folding screens. The right-­hand screen features a high view of a summer mountain flanked by middle-­and background views of a landscape in spring. The left-­hand screen shows a bay with skiffs moored among autumn grasses and framed by distant snow-­covered peaks. The two screens counterpose mountain and water, solid and void, growth and barrenness, creating an environment of endless change and renewal that had long served as an auspicious setting for elite patrons in Japan.3 Hōgai’s pair of screens uses an archaic ink-­painting mode to figure circularity; it is, moreover, a revolutionary object. The right-­hand margin of the right screen (representing summer) bears a large, dated signature in careful standard script, like no other among Hōgai’s surviving works: Koretoki Keiō yonen saiji boshin natsu kaheijitsu Kano Hōgai ga. (維時慶応四年歳次戊辰夏嘉平日狩野芳崖画, Painted by Kano Hōgai in the Summer of the Fourth Year of Keiō, Boshin, kaheijitsu). These screens were completed in the summer of 1868, just as the new Meiji leaders were consolidating their control over the country in the wake of their victories over shogunal forces. This raises a number of questions. For whom did the paintings function, and how? What broader transition do they chart between painting under the shogunate and in the new, internationally informed era?

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This chapter traces the arc of Kano Hōgai’s life while chronicling painting’s

3.1  Kano Hōgai, Landscape Screens, dated 1868. Ink and color on paper. Private collection, Japan. Photographs courtesy of DNP Art Communications.

broader transition across the Restoration years. I do not claim here that Hōgai made any special contribution to a telos of modern Japanese art, or that the future of nihonga would have been fundamentally different without him or any of the other painters who continued their careers across the Restoration turmoil. Rather, in charting the way that painting’s production and its relation to audiences changed in these years, I hope to call attention to painting production as a negotiation between different viewing communities and social codes. Hōgai is a particularly apt case for several reasons: First, because he began his career in the remote port city of Shimonoseki and traveled to and from the shogunal capital several times before eventually settling in post-­Restoration Tokyo, he literally embodies the back-­and-­ forth process that led to the creation of modern Japanese painting as a negotiation between local and international imperatives. Second, Hōgai began to work for Fenollosa while in a state of dire financial need in the early 1880s, and the artistic exchange between the seasoned painter and the self-­important but passionate young American patron epitomized the broader transition that Japanese painting in Tokyo experienced in these years. This was the transition from localized audiences, such as the daimyo or shogakai, to the more generalized and heterogenous audiences of the exhibition hall. Finally, from the beginning Hōgai worked outside of contemporaneous urban standards of taste and was deeply interested in linking past and present in his paintings. This ambition bears comparison with the intellectual climate leading

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up to the Meiji Restoration. Pro-­Restoration thought spoke in Confucian terms of “repair[ing] the disjunction . . . between past and present,” so that antiquarianism and the study of ancient texts and artifacts became a means of unsettling the status quo and positing a new reality.4 Hōgai, too, was caught in the eddy of revolutionary time, where old and new created an extraordinary state of being outside the present. This state of action was eventually seized upon by Fenollosa, in line with his own agendas, and brought to bear in a different context.

Painting and the Country The summer of 1868 was an earth-­shattering period for the small but strategically located domain of Chōfu or Nagato. A subsidiary of the powerful Hagi or Chōshū, Chōfu was located on the strait between Honshū and Kyūshū and centered on the port city of Shimonoseki. Chōfu played a role in bringing down the shogunate but only after experiencing fiscal troubles, exchanging fire with Western ships, and overcoming deep factionalism. Hōgai and the rest of the domain representatives in Edo had returned home in the mid-­1860s not knowing when they would next see the shogunal capital. In 1863 the domain leaders in Chōshū decided to open fire on arriving Western ships off Shimonoseki strait; they suffered a joint Western retaliatory attack on the port, within walking distance of Hōgai’s home. Thereafter, the local domain administration fell into disagreement and was forcibly seized by a radical faction. 77

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Prices throughout the archipelago were rising as a result of the sudden inception of foreign trade, and protests and insurrections broke out in various domains. In 1868, after helping to defeat the shogunate under the rallying cry fukko tōzoku (復古討賊, revive antiquity and strike the enemy), Chōshū forces were still engaged in fighting Tokugawa supporters in the northern part of Honshū.5 Chōfu and Chōshū were ruled by branches of the formidable Mōri family, descendents of a sixteenth-­century daimyo who had amassed a large estate while serving Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/37–­1598). On the fifteenth day of the first month of Keiō 4 (1868), just days after the decisive shogunal defeat at Toba and Fushimi, the Mōri family conducted rituals at Toyokoto shrine in Shimonoseki, rallying behind its deified ancient historical figures: the mythical general Takeuchi no Sukune, the legendary Emperor Ōjin, and the founder of the Chōfu Mōri family, Mōri Hidemoto (1579–­1650), whose castle once stood on the site. Chōfu and Chōshū pledged to give special attention to this shrine and its deities while dedicating themselves to the new spirit of imperial rule (ōsei ishin).6 In doing so they were essentially gathering at the place where local historical significance overlapped with the imperial and international registers: Hidemoto had been a powerful general who had fought on the Korean peninsula for Hideyoshi before becoming the founder of the Chōfu domain, and Emperor Ōjin and Takeuchi no Sukune were also associated with naval battles launched from the Shimonoseki region. The collapse of the shogunate and the renewal of imperial rule was a time of ritual return to the origins of domainal identity and local meaning, a time to remember past battles and patriarchs while canceling out certain aspects of political life that had become routinized under Tokugawa rule. The Mōri kajō (History of the Mōri House, 1883) offers a view of the events surrounding the Restoration as they must have appeared from Shimonoseki. It was compiled from original sources by the final lord of Chōfu and privately published in 1883. On the eve of the Restoration, in the sixth month of 1867, Chōshū received formal word of the Satsuma-­Tosa alliance that would play a crucial role in uniting the domains that would “revive imperial rule” and overthrow the shogunate. The alliance text begins by pledging “To together rectify the national body [kokutai] so that across the myriad rulers and nations we shall not be shamed; this is our first [and primary] principle.”7 “It is unacceptable,” it continues, “that one who occupies the position of shogun should direct the affairs of government. Power should revert to the lords, who shall aid and support [the emperor] as their sovereign.”8 The architects of the alliance that precipitated the shogun’s overthrow used the ancient language of official Chinese history and the threat of impending shame in the international arena to define the parameters of a new state: the declaration begins with the word kokutai, literally “the body of the country,” a word that could also be used to denote the country’s prestige or honor. In Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron (New Theses) of 1825 and other intellectual discourse leading up to the Restoration, kokutai had functioned to define a sphere of national sovereignty in the context of increased concern about the foreign threat and the strained shogunal system.9 In 78

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the alliance text, the notion of the body of the country as suffering shame before “the myriad rulers and countries” of the world effectively defined the realm apart from shogunal control. The third item of the alliance similarly foregrounds the word “country” (kuni): “in a country, there are not two sovereigns; in a house, there are not two masters.” Finally, the fourth item calls for the elimination of the shogunate and the restoration of the emperor by way of the daimyo.10 The multivalence of the word kuni or koku (国) emerges throughout these official documents. Writings from these years cited in the Mōri kajō note that Chōshū had begun musketry training and add, “The main house [of Chōshū] has proclaimed throughout the two countries [nikoku] that it is forbidden to travel to other countries [takoku] . . . because all those outside [our] borders are enemies.”11 In this case, the word kuni or koku refers to the daimyo domain of Chōshū and its branch domain of Chōfu, which issued the announcement. In the 1860s, one’s country was conceived both as the daimyo domain to which samurai pledged their allegiance and more broadly as the nation of Japan, which the alliance defined as one nation amid “myriad countries and reigns” (bansei bankoku) but also in terms of competing “systems of government” (kokutai seido).12 The symbolic and the practical reach of painting, its relation to history, nation, and the world beyond one’s kuni—­one’s domain and one’s country—­was equally divided in these years. Early twentieth-­century biographers such as Yokoyama Kendō and Mori Daikyō portrayed Hōgai as a painter who was actively struggling to “revolutionize” Japanese painting for the sake of the new era or to secure Japan’s reputation in an international context.13 The reality was humbler but arguably equally profound: just as the kuni, time, and language were in flux in these years, so, too, were the language of painting and its means of signifying open to questioning and redefinition. Rather than symbolizing a heroic striving to create a new form of painting, Hōgai embodies the often lonely work of shuttling between representational modes and different audiences. His paintings negotiate between the two senses of kuni: the daimyo domain and the nascent “country.” They also move between local elites, such as those who assembled at Toyokoto Shrine in 1868; diverse viewers in the renamed and transforming city of Tokyo; and international audiences for Japanese painting, which were growing even as Westerners watched to observe the outcome of Japan’s civil war.

A Regional Painter The first half of Hōgai’s life was shaped by a series of back-­and-­forth journeys between Chōfu and Edo. He first traveled to Edo in 1846 at the age of nineteen, likely as a member of the retinue that accompanied the domain lord to his residence. Hōgai’s trip was officially sponsored and funded, and the domain administration expected him to serve the domain when not in Edo. Hōgai’s father Kano Seikō (1797–­1867) had trained in Edo under Kano Seisen’in and spent the rest of his life serving as a 79

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painter in waiting to the Chōfu domain lord. This position carried samurai status equivalent to that of a domainal physician, and Hōgai married the daughter of a Chōfu domainal physician, Tahara Yoshi, no later than 1857.14 Hōgai’s mother was the daughter of a samurai named Ijichi Heikurō.15 At the Kobikichō studio in Edo, Hōgai studied under Seisen’in’s heir Shōsen’in (1823–­1880), who was one year Hōgai’s junior. Surviving copies that Hōgai made of works in the Kano collection range in date from Kōga 3 (1846) to Ansei 4 (1857) and show that he mastered a range of Kano styles and techniques and was engaged in assisting Shōsen’in, who had already received the title hōgen (Eye of the Law) in 1844 and supervised the Kobikichō studio following the death of Seisen’in in 1846. Shōsen’in received the supreme painterly title of hōin (Seal of the Law) in 1860.16 While the titles hōgen and hōin were marks of artistic merit, they also elevated the recipient to a status at which he could be be granted the right to be in the direct presence of the shogun on special occasions. Shōsen’in was present at the first shogunal audience of the American consul general Townsend Harris (1804–­1878) in the autumn of 1857.17 In a letter to his wife’s family, Hōgai reproduces a sketch that his teacher produced on the occasion and vividly notes that “the eyes and noses of all the daimyo and officials were moist [from anxiety], and wiping the sweat with their hands they had nowhere to go.”18 Hōgai adds, “Everything ended up [progressing] without incident, but it seems that the coming years will hold great financial hardship for Japan.”19 In these troubled years, Shōsen’in was one of the most relied-upon shogunal painters. Capable, if not necessarily inventive, he participated in the 1844 reconstruction of Edo castle and supervised the interior paintings for the 1861 reconstruction. He also participated in and likely supervised the production of ten folding screens that were presented by the shogunate as a gift to King William III of the Netherlands in 1856, and he continued to devote himself to the yamato-­e mode of his father Seisen’in. Among his surviving works is a screen pair with auspicious motifs from the Tale of Genji likely produced as part of the bridal dowry for a wedding involving a shogunal family member. Shōsen’in also produced a monumental yamato-­e screen pair for the shogunal government’s exhibit at the 1867 International Exposition Universelle in Paris.20 Hōgai received the name Shōkai by 1849, a symbol that he had completed the regular Kano-­school education, but he remained in residence at the Kobikichō studio perhaps even until 1855 to assist with commissions.21 Throughout the 1850s he traveled back and forth between Chōfu and Edo. His last documented trip to Edo was around 1860, when he again assisted with the wall and ceiling paintings of Edo castle. It is not known when he returned to Chōfu, but he produced several votive plaques and portraits there between 1864 and 1867, suggesting that the political tensions of the mid-­1860s had put an end to his stay in the shogunal capital.22 Before leaving he produced his own copy of Sesshū’s Long Scroll, a resource that would sustain his painting production throughout the 1860s and become the basis for the 1868 Landscape Screens. 80

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During the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, Chōfu stood firmly within the Tokugawa political order. In a reflection of the two-­tiered Tokugawa bakuhan system of shogunal and daimyo rule, Chōfu’s Kano painters studied painting while serving the shogun, just as its daimyo traveled to the shogunal capital, Edo, as part of the system of alternate attendance. When they returned to the home domain, painters like Hōgai and his father transmitted the shogunally sponsored Kano style back to the provinces. As such, the pro-­Tokugawa symbolism of Chōfu’s highest-­ranked painters was clear. The services they provided to the domainal government ranged from the production of new paintings to the painting of buildings and statuary to the decoration of sliding doors and the repair and documentation of old works.23 This shogunal-­era arrangement resulted in relatively stable careers for Hōgai’s father and other Kano painters, who were freed from seeking out individual patrons and from establishing their reputations on the open market. During the last years of the Tokugawa era in Chōfu, Hōgai’s output was almost wholly determined by the nature of his official commissions: he produced portraits of domain officials and dignitaries, screens for weddings and other important events, auspicious images for the new year, and votive plaques, which his patrons donated to shrines. Once the Restoration occurred, however, the circumstances that had guaranteed his income became a liability. Unlike unstipended painters, whose careers had been supported by market demand and sustained by reputation, collaboration, and word of mouth, Hōgai had little name recognition or experience outside of the shogunal Kano workshop and the daimyo circles of his home domain.24

Representing Daimyo Rule: Hōgai in the 1860s Because of his periodic movement between Chōfu and the capital, Hōgai had little standing as an independent painter, and the upheaval of the 1860s only exacerbated his situation. By the time he returned to his home domain in the early to mid-­1860s, the routes of vassalage and cooperation between Edo and Shimonoseki had completely broken down. During these politically and financially trying years, the newly negotiated treaties with the Western powers also came into effect. Foreign ships became common in Japan’s waters. Hōgai continued serving the ruling elite in Chōfu by producing portraits, votive plaques, and the other art objects associated with the needs of those in power. Late in 1864 he produced the votive shrine plaque (ema) Takeuchi no Sukune Throwing the Pearl (1864) (fig. 3.2), a work in the orthodox Kano figure painting mode that was commissioned and donated to the Iminomiya Shintō shrine by the wife of the Mōri Takachika, daimyo of Chōfu. The dynamically posed figure of an aged general in court dress is painted in heavy colors against the blank background of the framed wooden panel. Shrine plaques represented a way that pre-­Meiji paintings could work in public, 81

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3.2  Kano Hōgai, Takeuchi no Sukune Throwing the Pearl, dated 1864. Ink and color on panel, framed votive plaque, 84 × 57.9 cm. Iminomiya Shrine, Shimonoseki.

as a visual statement or entreaty offered to the gods that would also be witnessed by shrine visitors and installed in a ceremony at which other viewers were present. Inscribed and exhibited on the premises for all to see, the plaques originally functioned as surrogates for real objects, such as a spirited horse donated to the gods, and physically represented the donor and his or her needs.25 The 1864 Iminomiya Shrine plaque depicts the mythological general Takeuchi throwing an ocean-­drying pearl into the sea, an act that thwarted enemy invaders and secured the authority of Empress Jingū. Iminomiya Shrine was named for the temporary encampment that Empress Jingū had established in preparation for battle off the Korean peninsula, and two islands off the coast were said to have formed after Takeuchi threw the original pearls into the sea there. These islands were overlooked by the Toyokoto Shrine, where the Chōfu Mōri daimyo were enshrined. Mōri Hidemoto built his cas82

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tle on this spot in the late sixteenth century, following his return from Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea. The motif was therefore grounded in the utmost geographical specificity and spoke explicitly of Japan’s international naval battles. In the months prior to the plaque’s donation, the Mōri family and their retainers had been engaged in a major naval disturbance, firing on Western ships on several occasions as they attempted to enter the straits of Shimonoseki in accordance with the new treaties. By firing on representatives of the treaty powers in what would turn out to be a futile attempt to “expel the foreigners” (jōi), the Mōri were effectively refusing to obey the Tokugawa-­negotiated treaty. A combined British, French, and Dutch fleet responded to this recalcitrance by bombarding and even temporarily occupying Shimonoseki in July 1863 and again in September 1864, forcing the domain to pay a sizable indemnity. Mōri Takachika’s wife donated the shrine plaque around December (roughly the eleventh month of the year Genji 1 in the Japanese calendar) in the wake of these humiliating events.26 Because of the connection to Empress Jingū, who led troops in her husband’s stead, it is easy to see the symbolic resonance that the Takeuchi motif offered to a politically prominent female donor. The plaque operated as a means of personally and ideologically mitigating reality to improve the daimyo’s image. The narrator of Shimazaki Tōson’s 1932 historical novel Before the Dawn was fascinated by these centuries-­old strategies, which persisted up to the end of the Tokugawa regime in an increasingly futile attempt to exert control over the representation of reality. As things fell apart, writes Tōson, officials increasingly “displayed their power, as in the spectacular ceremonies . . . at Nikkō [the shogunal mausoleum]. . . . [T]hey even went so far as to change the era name. . . . All this was done in order to assert their control over the processes of change.”27 Similarly, in Tōson’s account a local official in a town along the post road deep in the mountains combats a series of tragedies by declaring a second New Year in the middle of the eighth month, a kind of Christmas in July, for which residents were required to erect auspicious decorations at their gates, restarting the year and securing a means of transferring present mishaps to the past.28 In such ways, members of the old regime attempted to transform words and images from representation to reality at both the national and local levels of command. The effectiveness of such actions, however, hinged on the strength of the government’s ability to control the flow of information within geographically specific areas, and thus secure and monopolize the channels of representation. This monopoly was broken, however, and the symbolic power of the daimyo and shogun relativized, as powerful forces beyond each individual town or fief, and even beyond Japan, came to impact local realities. In the wake of the temporary occupation of Shimonoseki and the extraction of an indemnity, Chōshū was forced to interact with the Western powers on the terms of the Western treaty; foreigners could scarcely be expected to understand the symbolic language of the old regime, let alone to respect it. This ultimately transformed the experience of authority even for viewers within Japan: 83

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while the Meiji government would continue to use visual representation as part of its self-­representation and rule, it would increasingly do so through such means as Western-­style military processions and imperial pageantry, hakurankai modeled on the world’s fairs, and other forms that were not only phrased in Western terms for the benefit of Japanese viewers but meant to be legible to viewers outside Japan.29 This new set of representational codes and prerogatives took time to develop. For artists in the Kano or literati traditions and others who worked for wealthy private patrons, the effects of the political changes on the production and reception of paintings were not so far-­reaching or immediate, leaving much of their work caught between the visual habits and concerns of the old regime and those of the new. The subsequent history of the 1868 Landscape Screens, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, is a case in point: Within a few years of their production, the domain of Chōfu had been abolished; by 1876, the year that samurai stipends were finally terminated, Shimonoseki was incorporated into the newly founded Yamaguchi prefecture, whose day-­to-­day governance would be transferred to a central government official from an entirely different part of the country. The screens resurfaced in Shimonoseki in the 1910s in extremely poor condition, accompanied by tales of how the work’s patron, a restaurateur, had been disappointed after receiving them as a substitute for a painting he ordered from Hōgai’s father Seikō and consequently treated them roughly.30 This anecdote is unsubstantiated and bears evidence of having been tailored to fit the screens’ physical condition in the early twentieth century. The anecdote also functions within a larger, unsubstantiated early twentieth-­century narrative of Hōgai as a tormented genius who was unpopular in Chōfu. Closer examination of the Landscape Screens suggests that they were an important commission, although by the time of their completion the Restoration was on the verge of changing life irrevocably. That being the case, it is little wonder that they failed to receive proper care. Hōgai had been engaged in producing a type of picture that functioned within a Tokugawa social, stylistic, and political order. Its vehicles of signification relied not on the work’s theme or expressivity but rather on contexts and imperatives specific to the late Edo Kano school and 1860s Shimonoseki.

Identity and Difference Hōgai’s Landscape Screens were unusually faithful to the medieval master. Those familiar with Sesshū’s Long Scroll and other works would have easily recognized the high precipice capped with pine trees, the low port wall, the boats in a harbor with reeds, and the small pavilion at the edge of a promontory or overlook. The 1868 screen paintings’ high, distant vantage point—­what Furuta Ryō calls their “consciousness of the horizon”—­suggests their status as products of the nineteenth century, but the crisp, clear brushwork and tonal and compositional balance surpass what Hōgai had achieved in his transcription of the Kano copy of Sesshū’s Long Scroll. 31 This was no passing attempt at citation but a concerted effort to attain the master’s style, even 84

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to the extent of suppressing individual tendencies. Following the completion of the Landscape Screens, Hōgai continued to emulate Sesshū’s style and made it the foundation of his own, which synthesized Sesshū, Southern Song and Yuan ink painting, later Chinese ink painting, and the Kano modes. In the 1880s, members of Kangakai (the Painting Appreciation Society under Fenollosa’s direction) also adopted Hōgai’s style.32 Hōgai’s reliance on Sesshū can seem paradoxical, given that modern painting is associated with a growth in artistic autonomy, experimentation, and self-­awareness. The choice to adopt Sesshū’s motifs and brushwork can appear as an effacement of personal identity, but, in fact, by choosing Sesshū, Hōgai was also establishing his difference from other painters of the time. Hōgai’s decision to emulate the medieval ink painter was bound up with issues of his personal identity as formed jointly between the shogunal Kano school in Edo and circumstances at home in Chōfu. Writing in 1903, about fifteen years after Hōgai’s death, Fujioka Sakutarō reports: Possessing great gifts, he would wield his brush with talent and frequently return to old-­fashioned ways. In those times, Kano school students were made to copy old painting models [funpon] exclusively and were never allowed to express their own ideas.33 Because Hōgai’s [painting] went against the house methods [of the Kano school], the teacher became angry, but sensing that his pictures were far from ordinary, he did not criticize him very harshly. At this time, domestic affairs were in a great disarray . . . and Hōgai returned to his hometown.”34

Fujioka describes Hōgai as chafing against the restrictive hierarchy and “house rules” of the shogunal atelier, yet he also notes that Hōgai’s talents went hand in hand with a return to old-­fashioned ways (kokaku ni modoru).35 Similarly, in 1917, Yokoyama Kendō noted that Hōgai’s devotion to “coarse and strange” medieval ink painting seemed old-­fashioned in comparison with the lightly brushed, naturalistic styles that were popular across the Edo-­Meiji transition.36 Hōgai’s emulation of past painters reflects a mode of Tokugawa-­era self-­ fashioning in which identity was expressed not through the attempt to create something completely new but through one’s selection of a particular affiliation within a range of options. Hōgai’s choice of Sesshū as opposed to any other painter was significant. As Yukio Lippit has argued, Sesshū was an artist of vital importance to the Kano school, and indeed to all of Japanese painting history.37 In addition to his creative brilliance, the wandering monk-­painter held particular cachet for the Kano painters because he traveled to China, something the Kano painters would never have an opportunity to do. In this sense, by aiming for Sesshū, Hōgai was demonstrating the ultimate ambition, placing himself in dialogue with the orthodox vision of Japanese painting history as presented by its influential Kano narrators since the seventeenth century. Hōgai’s serious study of Sesshū likely began at the Kobikichō studio in Edo, where Kano Tsunenobu, Isen’in, and Seisen’in had assembled a tre85

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mendous archive of old paintings based on their privileges as shogunal artists.38 In this sense, then, Hōgai’s study of Sesshū was a Kano project undertaken at the core of the Kano school and realized with resources that only a shogunal painter could have compiled. As Fujioka describes, however, Hōgai’s own talent and his act of “return[ing] to the old fashioned ways” were somehow inseparable from the act of breaking with the Kano house rules. In this sense, Hōgai’s interest in Sesshū was like a fulcrum that derived from the Kano school but nonetheless enabled him to establish his distance from it. Visually, there were some differences between Hōgai’s appropriation of Sesshū and the relations that had already been established by earlier Kano artists. Earlier Kano school copyists, such as Tan’yū or Seisen’in, wore Sesshū’s style lightly, switching between it and other modes depending on the context. Tan’yū, for example, had a deep relationship with the medieval painter but nonetheless became known for his light, airy style in both ink and polychrome modes. Seisen’in—­who taught Hōgai’s father Seikō—­also copied Sesshū, but like his knowledge-­hungry contemporary Tani Bunchō, his taste for old paintings did not discriminate between schools. Seisen’in devoted himself to the study of handscrolls and old Tosa paintings, on the

3.3  Shiokawa Bunrin, Summer

one hand, and of illusionistic Qing painting, on the other, using them to construct

and Winter Landscapes, dated

a delicate style that updated the image of the Kano school. In this way, Seisen’in

1864. Ink and color on paper; folding screen pair. Freer Gal-

and Seikō invoked Sesshū through the filter of their own lighter brush handling,

lery of Art.

softening the medieval master’s angularity and diminishing his strangeness. These

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choices bore affinities with the watery, delicate touch featured by the Kyoto schools and some literati painters during this time period.39 Hōgai’s Landscape Screens, however, emphasize angularity, tonal contrast, and strong, sinuous lines. These qualities are indelibly associated with Sesshū but are perhaps more notable for their departure from the contemporaneous embrace of delicate, detail-­oriented painting and loosely brushed, atmospheric compositions. An 1864 landscape screen pair by the Kyoto artist Shiokawa Bunrin, for example, uses gentle brushstrokes and ink washes to produce a mist-­filled composition whose spatial relationships are difficult to gauge (fig. 3.3).40 After the Meiji Restoration Hōgai continued to pursue Sesshū, studying his works first in the collection of the former Shimazu domain lord for whom he worked in the mid-­1870s, and later with Fenollosa, who had gained access to Sesshū’s iconic painting of Jurōjin (in Chinese, Shoulauren), the god of longevity, in the collection of Lord Hachizuka (fig. 3.4).41 In this work, branches of blossoming plum, pine, and bamboo create an intricate web of lines on the surface of the composition. Jurōjin’s body is shown in profile, while a deer, its body hidden behind the old man, angles its head downward and outward toward the viewer. While legible as a three-­ dimensional space, the painting is especially concerned with surface patterning and challenges viewers to visually untangle its maze of outlines. The plum blossoms, Jurōjin’s body, the deer, and a circular halo are all pressed close to the surface of the composition and hemmed in from behind by the curved trunk of an old pine tree.

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3.4  Sesshū Tōyō, Jurōjin beneath a Plum Tree, late fifteenth–­early sixteenth century. Ink and color on silk, 127.7 × 62.5 cm. Tokyo National Museum. Photograph courtesy of DNP Art Communications.

In the coming years, Hōgai made several versions of Jurōjin, gravitating especially toward the eerie or strange aspects of the medieval monk-­painter’s work.42 The bent form, protruding tree branches, and pronounced facial features of Hōgai’s Jurōjin (fig. 3.5) are derived from Sesshū and contrast significantly with those in a version by his father (fig. 3.6). Seikō’s figure follows a different model, standing upright with mild features and more gently delineated robes. Further, Sesshū’s attempt to evoke three-­dimensional space even within a compressed pictorial setting appears to provide the foundation for Hōgai’s successive experiments with the manipulation of space and vantage point in his Jurōjin works. In all, Sesshū aided and legitimized Hōgai’s rejection of the benign and graceful in favor of the severe, exaggerated, and unsettling. 88

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3.5  Kano Hōgai, Fukurokuju, ca. 1880. Ink on paper, 107.5 cm × 53.5 cm; hanging scroll. Mōri Museum. 3.6  Kano Seikō, Jurōjin, dated 1867. Ink and color on silk. Shimonoseki City Museum of Art.

Local Politics Hōgai’s commitment to Sesshū was not threaded exclusively through the Kano school in Edo but also reflected his local affiliations as a painter from Chōfu. Sesshū had once lived near Hagi, the old capital of the Chōshū region, and served the Ōuchi, the powerful medieval warrior family whose lands and legacy would be inherited by Hōgai’s patrons, the Mōri family. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mōri embraced Sesshū in the process of constructing themselves as the Ōuchi’s rightful successors, and they appointed one of their own artists, who became known as Unkoku Tōgan, as the heir to Sesshū’s Unkoku studio.43 After the establishment of the new Tokugawa ruling order in 1600, the Kano became the hereditary painters 89

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in waiting to the shogunate, while the Unkoku painters, with their characteristic hard-­edged style based on the close study of Sesshū’s Long Scroll, became the analogous house of painters in the service of Chōshū. The history of the Long Scroll was thus tied up with history of the Chōshū-­Chōfu region and the Mōri family, which presided over both domains. Hōgai’s surviving paintings of the 1860s show a deep connection to local imperatives. As previously mentioned, the votive plaque Takeuchi no Sukune Throwing the Pearl (see fig. 3.2) was commissioned by the wife of the Chōfu domain lord and was directly linked to Chōfu’s sensitive political situation. Another plaque, Han Xin Crawling through His Adversary’s Knees, can also be read as an allegory of the domain’s recovery from humiliation at the hands of the Western powers. Additionally, Hōgai painted portraits of local personages, including a domainal councilor (karō), the daughter of the domain lord, a Noh performer, a blind shamisen player, and the Zen abbot of the Kano mortuary temple in Shimonoseki. The specific context of the Landscape Screens remains unknown today, but given that they were made in Chōfu and reflect an awareness of the Long Scroll, it makes sense to review local circumstances at the time of their making. Barring perhaps Hōgai’s 1864 copy of the meter-­long Long Scroll, the Landscape Screens are the largest and most ambitious of his surviving landscape paintings. As noted at the outset of this chapter, the right margin of the right-­hand screen bears a long, dignified inscription: “Painted by Kano Hōgai in the Summer of the Fourth Year of Keiō, Boshin, kaheijitsu.” The left margin of the left screen bears the signature “Fujiwara Tadamichi hitsu” (藤原雅道筆, brushed by Fujiwara Tadamichi) accompanied by two intaglio seals: a small, oblong Kano seal and a square Tadamichi no in. The right-­hand screen bears two seals: the Tadamichi no in and a raised, gourd-­ shaped Sōkai (爽海, a variant of Hōgai’s official Kano name, Shōkai). By including his old name (Shōkai), his formal court title (Fujiwara Tadamichi), and his new name (Hōgai), the screen effectively unites these three social roles in the one brush of the screen’s author.44 This form of detailed standard-­script signature appears on only a limited number of Hōgai’s surviving works, all from early in his career, prior to his final departure from Shimonoseki in the 1870s.45 In each case, the work had a ceremonial component and was likely made as a formal gift or offering, either from painter to patron or in a devotional context, as in the case of the images of Benzaiten, Confucius, and Takeuchi no Sukune. While it is possible to imagine a case in which Hōgai would thus inscribe a painting produced for a patron who was a social equal, the formal signature frequently indicated an offering to one’s superiors or to a religious institution, the visualization of a dedicatory or offertory act that often also commemorated a specific occasion. While Hōgai’s disciple reported that the Landscape Screens were made for a local restaurateur, it is worth exploring the possibility that they might have been produced for Hōgai’s main patron, the Chōfu domain lord Mōri Motokane. 90

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In fact, shortly before the screens were finished, in the summer of 1868, Motokane died, at the age of forty-­two. According to the Mōri kajō, he had fallen ill following his return from Kyoto, where he had been involved in the Restoration fighting. Although repeated prayers and offerings were made for his recovery, he was forced to retire in the third month of the year; he succumbed two months later.46 Motokane was less than a year senior to Hōgai and had participated in the disastrous 1864 attack on the foreign ships that precipitated the donation of Hōgai’s Takeuchi no Sukune Throwing the Pearl by the daimyo’s wife (see fig. 3.2).47 The presence of the unusual word kaheijitsu (嘉平日) in Hōgai’s signature is a key to thinking about the work’s geographically and temporally specific meanings. The word, which also appears in Sesshū’s grandiose dated inscription at the end of the Long Scroll, refers to a day for making offerings to one’s ancestors, typically in the twelfth month.48 Based on this and other factors, the scholar Kageyama Hideo has proposed that Sesshū’s Long Scroll was made to express memorial reverence and gratitude toward Sesshū’s late patron, Ōuchi Norihiro, while at the same time expressing wishes for the living members of the Ōuchi and their continued patronage of Sesshū. Given the recent passing of the domain lord, Hōgai’s main patron, it is tempting to imagine that Hōgai’s citational screens were invested with the similar dual intent.49 In any case, while Hōgai undoubtedly hoped for continued daimyo patronage in the wake of his lord’s death, this was not forthcoming. The new lord, Motohisa, was obliged to cede his title of domain governor (han chiji) with the abolition of the domains in the summer of 1871; later that year he departed on the Iwakura Mission, the Meiji government’s high-­profile ambassadorial tour of Europe and the United States. Chōfu became part of the modern prefecture of Yamaguchi, and a former Tokugawa loyalist was installed as Yamaguchi’s first governor, part of the Meiji leaders’ efforts at political reintegration. In 1877, at the age of fifty, Hōgai left Shimonoseki for Tokyo with his family, never to return. The painter was dead by the time the Landscape Screens reached Tokyo in their damaged condition, not long after the death of the last daimyo, Mōri Motohisa, in 1908. In Tokyo it is said that the screens were repaired by Kawai Gyokudō (1873–1957), a student of Hōgai’s close friend and colleague Hashimoto Gahō.50 Gyokudō and Hōgai’s former student Okakura Shūsui (a nephew of Okakura Kakuzō) were part of the new generation of artists trained at the new, Meiji government–­sponsored Tokyo School of Fine Arts and engaged in painting as a personal, self-­directed act, albeit one frequently injected with the mid-­to late Meiji language of patriotic service to the country. Within this context, the Landscape Screens’ earlier meaning had little resonance, but they may have been given new meaning through anecdotes that emphasized Hōgai’s status as a suffering artist struggling to emerge from his father’s shadow. In this sense, Hōgai’s Landscape Screens and shrine plaque, produced in Shimonoseki and inscribed with a specific day and year, speak to the way in which profound social, political, and economic change disrupted the channels of signification between artist, patron, and viewers. 91

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While we are not yet able to connect the 1868 Landscape Screens to a specific patron, we can reflect on their broader significance as archaizing images of the four seasons and as conscious emulations of Sesshū’s Long Scroll. Sesshū was a figure of utmost significance within the overall Kano-­school consciousness of painting history, yet he was also a figure whose connection to the Chōshū domains was frequently reiterated by the Unkoku school of painters in Hagi, whose works Hōgai must have had opportunities to view.51 Mōri Motokane of Shimonoseki employed painters in the Kano, yamato-­e, and literati modes, but during the tumultuous decade of the 1860s he took orders from the head domain in Hagi. Stylistically, therefore, it is easy to see how elite viewers from this region would have felt a sense of closeness to the Sesshū style, even if its dark, sober marks lacked currency in Kyoto or Edo. Hōgai’s Landscape Screens are the product of Edo and Chōfu perspectives. Hōgai’s ambition to return to Sesshū has further weight when considered in the context of nineteenth-­century painterly and scholarly antiquarianism. The idea of dislodging the present by returning to the virtue of the ancient past presented itself in almost every strain of thought leading up to the Restoration. In the words of H. D. Harootunian, the late eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century kokugaku (nativist) tradition sought “to yoke past and present into a continuous presence” and emphasized that archaism and the detailed study of the past were not “merely an effect (elegance),” but rather a means of conveying the true Way.52 In his account of the Tengu insurrection in Mito, Victor Koschmann similarly emphasizes the centrality of ritual time, which, he says, calls “attention to the accessibility of origins and the possibility of renewal.”53 Against the overwhelming sense of groundlessness that came from the threat from abroad, the financial instability caused by the new trade agreements, and the deadlock of government officials, the sphere of verbal, visual, and ritual acts cleared a place for the “dramatic, often violent gestures” that made the final push toward Restoration.54

Hōgai in the Early Post-­Restoration Years Over the course of the late 1860s and 1870s, when Hōgai remained isolated in Chōfu or struggled to make a living in Tokyo, he continued to use the Sesshū style but further reworked it, referencing Sesshū-­style works in the collection of the Shimazu, his new employers. In Tokyo, he also had the chance to view previously unfamiliar paintings, in elite Tokyo collections with Fenollosa, or at the Domestic Painting Exhibitions of 1882 and 1884.55 In so doing, Hōgai seized and developed the raw, unfamiliar side of Sesshū’s work that had been naturalized in the course of the monk-­painter’s citation by Tan’yū or Seisen’in. For all his fame, Sesshū had been an outsider, a wandering monk with many pupils but no formal successor. His works frequently play with the limits of representation, using jagged, twisting lines to construct an image of the wizened Jurōjin, for example, or adding the dark hatch-­marks that mediate between cliff 92

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and sky in the famous Winter Landscape. That strangeness was arguably more than a source of visual interest: in the medieval period, when most painters were still considered craftsmen, it was also a means of constructing the painter as an exceptional figure, the artistic counterpart of the enlightened teacher, arhat, or immortal. One locus classicus for this paradigm is represented by Tang-­and Song-­ dynasty accounts of the late ninth-­century Chinese monk-­calligrapher Guan Xiu, who painted arhats—­spiritual adepts and followers of the Buddha—­as wizened, unkempt, foreign ascetics, on the walls of a temple in Chengdu. In ink rubbings of the eighteenth-­century engravings based on Guan Xiu’s paintings, the arhats are depicted with bold, deeply carved, tapering brushstrokes. They are bony and angular, with large hands and feet, and large, misshapen features. Song-­dynasty accounts note that people marveled at these figures, whose images were said to have reached the painter in a dream.56 Here, the arhats’ foreignness, strangeness, and divinity are conveyed by the exaggerated, unconventional manner of depiction; at the same time, however, the strangeness and foreigness of the divine figures—­and the origins of their forms in a dream—­validate Guan Xiu’s astonishing manner of portrayal and provide a model around which the painter could fashion his own identity as an exceptional figure. By founding their painterly reputation on the basis of divine strangeness rather than beauty, delicacy, or technical virtuosity, Guan Xiu and Sesshū were following the model of Buddhist or Daoist attainment, which canonized the strange appearance, manners, and even the writing style of those who had escaped the fetters of mundane convention. In choosing the name “Hōgai” around the same time that he adopted the Sesshū style in the late 1860s, Hōgai was openly drawing on this lineage of artistically codified eccentricity, as Tsuji Nobuo famously described it.57 The name Hōgai is homophonous with the phrase “outside the Law,” a phrase that could refer to transgression but also to the transcendence of ordinary conventions, acts that were often linked in Daoist and in Chan or Zen thought, with their frequent use of paradox.58 The pervasiveness of the cachet accorded to eccentricity in these years can be confirmed through the writings of Kikuchi Yōsai. Around the same time that Hōgai thus renamed himself, Yōsai, who was largely self-­trained, was using Daoist or Zen oxymoron to establish his own difference as a painter, writing, “In the place of no-­dharma [or lawlessness] lies the natural dharma [or Law]; in the place of no-­ lineage lies the natural lineage.”59 In addition to the Shimazu family version, which Hōgai likely painted while he was in the former daimyo’s service around 1880, the painter went on to produce at least four more monumental images of Jurōjin, moving away from Sesshū’s composition but retaining its effects through the use of dark, taut lines, grotesquely twisted branches, and crowded, flat compositions. While retaining Sesshū’s emphasis on two-­dimensionality, each of these works experiments with spatial illusion. Sesshū’s Jurōjin is pictured frontally, but Hōgai’s late painting (in the Shizuoka Museum of Art) approaches the wizened figure from a high, diagonal vantage point, placing 93

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him in a Chinese-­style chair rendered in an isometric perspective that excavates space within the painting (fig. 3.7). Yet even as it introduces depth and a fixed vantage point, Hōgai’s late Jurōjin maintains an interest in the confusion of surface lines that distinguish Sesshū’s original: the attenuation and sharp angling of the pine and plum branches create a skein of lines on the painting’s surface and are echoed by the linearity of the figure’s staff and the serpentine cord that surrounds it, the deer’s antlers, and the grotesque thinness of the creature’s leg. The base of the pine tree at lower left is gnarled almost to infinity: each dark texture stroke creates another hole or ridge in the trunk’s surface, inviting the viewer to mentally register its three-­dimensionality and strain to see the crevices. The foreground rock is covered with dark ink blotches that are neither texture strokes in the established literati vocabulary nor evocations of volume in the Western sense. Caught between these representational schema, they seem to unmake the object, reverting it back to a series of brush marks rather than affirming its mass. In the sense of its departure from, or status in between, conventions of East and West, the work appears perennially strange, even as it relies on the most canonical work of all: that of Sesshū, whose lineage was claimed by multiple schools of painters. In this sense, Sesshū and his works, like the notion of the strange/different/foreign (i, 異), were rhetorical figures offering a means of transcending, and therefore emerging outside of, the dominant network of taste and style: the mystical eccentric or untrammeled (ippin) class was associated with artists, calligraphers, and thinkers whose genius exempted them from abiding by the ordinary precepts of their trade.60 Hōgai’s understanding of these forms of strangeness or eccentricity would have been further shaped by eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Japanese codifications of the eccentric or extraordinary person (kijin).61 Through them, he partook of a private dialogue with past masters that could be accommodated within the Kano canons even as it distanced itself from certain aspects of eigh3.7  Kano Hōgai, Jurōjin, ca. 1881–­1885. Ink and light colors

teenth-­and nineteenth-­century Kano style.

on paper; hanging scroll. Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art.

Hōgai in Tokyo When Hōgai moved to Tokyo in 1877 at the age of fifty, his status as a middle-­aged domainal painter with a taste for Sesshū 94

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did little to advance his hopes of employment. The market for making and selling painting was different than the one he had left in the early to mid-­1860s. In an undated letter to Kamiryō Seiju,62 a medical doctor formerly in the service of the Chōfu daimyo, he writes: After having arrived in Tokyo I should have written you straight away, but with one thing or another I have been passing the days in frustration. . . . Daily I am relying on [the wages from] painting ceramics in order to subsist. . . . You ask about hanging scroll [painting]s, but there is no [use] speaking of them—­if it be painting on ceramics it goes to the West, and this is the extremity of the situation. . . . I will grant that the road ahead looks rough.63

Kano painters who once served varying levels of Tokugawa officialdom and who lacked the ability or inclination to cater to popular trends within Japan had little choice but to turn to export ceramics.64 While the sudden burgeoning of the Tokyo and Yokohama export markets and the lack of domestic patrons in the old shogunal capital must have been pronounced, it is not exactly true that no one was buying hanging scroll paintings. The production and appreciation of literati painting at social gatherings such as calligraphy and painting meetings (shogakai) continued unabated in these years and attracted many employees of the new government.65 Most of the painters who remained dominant across the Edo-­Meiji divide ran successful private workshops rather than receiving a stipend from the shogun or from a single domain lord, as Hōgai had. After the Restoration, these painters continued to rely on private commissions and public reputation to maintain their careers, while those who had formerly received stipends not only suffered a sudden loss of income but also lacked experience in marketing themselves to consumers. In this sense, the distinction that remained most relevant for painting in the nineteenth century was not between elite and “vulgar” painters but between salaried, government-­sponsored artists and private artists supported by popular demand. The highest-­ranking Kano painters did manage to continue their careers, but in ways that were much less dependent on securing popular approval. Satō Dōshin notes that elite Kano painters took bureaucratic positions with the Meiji government.66 They served as jurors and consultants in the Exhibition Bureau or as collaborators in the government’s project to design a permanent museum. Younger Kano painters with knowledge of Western painting, such as Kano Ōshin (1840–­after 1902), Kano Tomonobu, and Hashimoto Gahō, found employment as drawing instructors; Tomonobu, a drafting (gagaku) instructor for students at the University of Tokyo preparatory school, would become a colleague of Fenollosa.67 Kano Shōsen’in, the head of the interior Kobikichō Kano studio, where Hōgai and Gahō had trained, was retained by his wife’s powerful ex-­daimyo family, the Nabeshima, as a painter in waiting.68 Other high-­ranking Kano painters enjoyed similar protection under 95

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the new government. Eitoku (1814–­1891), the second son of Kano Isen’in Naganobu (1775–­1828) and bearer of the court-­appointed title of hōgen (Eye of the Law), was repeatedly called on to serve as a juror for government exhibitions and was involved in the creation of the new museum. He became a trusted painter for the imperial household and the Meiji government, which relied on him for room decoration of the type that Kano interior studios (oku eshi) had regularly supervised during the Edo period. Eitoku produced an album that was presented to the Austrian emperor in the second year of Meiji, and Iida Kyoshin credits him with the production of wall paintings for the Korean embassy (Chōsen kōshikan) in Japan, possibly in the 1880s.69 The success of the foregoing painters cannot be attributed merely to their distance from the shogunally patronized Kano school. Hōgai’s younger colleague Hashimoto Gahō had trained alongside Hōgai in the Kobikichō studio but had less difficulty finding new sources of income after the Restoration. Unlike Hōgai, Gahō had been born and raised in Edo and had absorbed the new trends of nineteenth-­century elite painting: a soft, delicate style, lyrical subject matter, atmospheric shading, and other gentle illusionistic effects that make use of ink wash in the manner of the Kyoto schools (fig. 3.8). Although Gahō shared Hōgai’s dis3.8  Hashimoto Gahō, Doves and Bamboo,

tinctive ink landscape style for a period in the mid-­1880s, the difference

1882. Ink on paper, 176.3 × 93.6 cm,

between the two painters remained strong, as Taki Seiichi cogently noted

Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Museum of the

in 1927: “At a glance,” many of Gahō’s compositions “may seem rather

Imperial Collections.

ordinary [heibon], but it is in their relaxed elegance that Gahō’s true personality comes through. Technically they are very sophisticated, and this aspect, elegant yet entirely free of pretense, is very fine. We would never expect such elegance from any of Hōgai’s paintings throughout his entire life.”70 The qualities Taki attributes to Gahō were those of the most successful painters of the early to mid-­Meiji period: relaxed elegance, lack of ostentation, and a form of mellow technical finesse that was most apparent to the trained observer. This helps to explain why Gahō was given top honors and commissions—­including imperial household commissions—­in the 1880s while Hōgai was bypassed.71 Hōgai’s engagement with the grotesque as a form of exploring the limits of representation found little support among his contemporaries. As life in the former shogunal capital settled into a routine under the new regime, the most accomplished forms of painting reverted to the “relaxed elegance” that had characterized elite painting before the Restoration, leaving the unbeautiful for those who continued to nurse dissatisfaction: the underemployed, the exceptionally principled, street performers, and satirists.72

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A New Patron: Hōgai and Fenollosa By a strange twist of fate, it was an American, Ernest Fenollosa, who emerged as Hōgai’s most supportive patron. As we have seen, Fenollosa alternately claimed commitments to protect Japanese painting from Western admixture, to “revive” it in its purest forms, and to wholly rethink its visual appearance and social roles—­a combination of aspirations that could be satisfied only by a painter both old enough to have produced art under the old regime and independent enough to work outside of the conventions of elite painting in the early Meiji period. At Kangakai meetings and in other venues Fenollosa criticized nineteenth-­century elite painting for its lack of grandeur, frequent literary allusions, and illusionism, which came uncomfortably close to that of the Western tradition. While Fenollosa was dissatisfied with the state of elite painting in 1880s Tokyo, he further detested the Japanese painting that dared to dissolve its own “Japanese” character by incorporating elements of Western painting. Hōgai’s comparative lack of involvement with the Western tradition or with recent Japanese trends made him a source of interest. At the same time, in comparison with Sumiyoshi Hirokata, the former shogunal painter whom Fenollosa had engaged to help him with yamato-­e and whose surviving works are dominated by faithful copies of medieval handscrolls, Hōgai was more open to the type of “experimentation” that interested the American. Fenollosa privileged the history of Japanese art over then current practice, and that history was mainly provided by Kano canons.73 In 1880 he named his son “Ernest Kano,” and even his understanding of the Chinese masters was based on Japanese tutelage, as revealed in his use of Japanese pronunciation for the Chinese artists’ names in his posthumous Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912).74As seen in his juxtapositions of old and new art at meetings of Kangakai, Fenollosa openly challenged current-­day painters to vie and engage with ancient paintings in his collection. In this sense too it is easy to understand his attraction to Hōgai, who had been cultivating his own relationship with the old masters of the medieval ink-­painting tradition via the Kano canons. The careful circularity of the seasons in a work like the Landscape Screens, moreover, demanded no outside literary background, as with Ming-­and Qing-­style literati painting.75 The Landscape Screens and most of Hōgai’s other paintings were conceived with great attention to composition and other formal details, a fact that gave them visual interest, even among viewers with limited knowledge of the work’s cultural background: Seated Eight-­Armed Benzaiten, for example, centers the deity beneath the archlike opening of a cave, an archaic compositional strategy found in the works of Sesshū and Minchō (fig. 3.9). The edge of the deity’s scarf overhangs the rocky ledge where she is seated, calling attention to the narrow passageway below. The configuration of the cave and Benzaiten’s positioning within it defines a space that is not only womblike but vaginal; this foreign, female goddess of music and water, who

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was specially patronized by female dancers and prostitutes and sometimes worshipped in the nude, is thus situated in an environment where her identity is defined not only by an attribute (frequently the lute, also a symbol of the womb, but absent here) but also, metaphorically, by the painting’s overall construction. This early painting prefigures Merciful Mother Kannon (see chapter 6), combining antiquarianism with strongly formalist tendencies that would make the painting accessible to foreign audiences.76 Hōgai and Fenollosa first became acquainted around 1883 or 1884, shortly after the establishment of the first government-­sponsored domestic exhibition devoted to “the painting methods distinctive to Japan.” Fenollosa may have taken note of Hōgai’s works at the first Domestic Painting Exhibition in the autumn of 1882, or it may have been simply that Kano Tomonobu introduced them.77 In any case, their collaboration appears to have begun just as Hōgai’s commission for the former Shimazu daimyo was drawing to a close.78 An early biographer, Mori Daikyō, even suggests that the monthly salary at which Fenollosa retained Hōgai was equal to the pay that Hōgai had been receiving from the Shimazu.79 The American thus assumed the role of Hōgai’s earlier daimyo patrons, as he later described the arrangement in a letter to Charles Lang Freer: “I took Hōgai into my employ, paying him a monthly salary, and letting him paint for me as he felt. Then I got him a house near mine where we began a long series of experiments looking consciously to the perfect control of his strongest powers. These works came out at the monthly meetings of the art club I had established, and were mostly my property, though I occasionally allowed him to work for others.”80 Fenollosa’s language is imperious and proprietary, suggesting links, real or imagined, to the Tokugawa world of individual elite patronage.

3.9  Kano Hōgai, Eight-­Armed Benzaiten, ca. 1860s. Ink, colors, gold on silk; hanging scroll. Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art.

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Fenollosa’s Formalism From the earliest Western-­inspired exhibitions in Japan, government representatives, still using the classical Chinese-­dominated official language of the previous era, announced their search for “unusual and outstanding things” (kibutsu myōhin) or for “unusual [or extraordinary] things” (chinpin) to display.81 The word shinki was also frequently employed as a term of praise in early to mid-­Meiji exhibitions. The word literally meant “new and strange” and was employed with both positive and negative connotations. In the context of the Meiji exhibitions, shinki conveyed the favorable appraisal of novelty and inventiveness, but without linguisitically emphasizing the connotation of strangeness. Hōgai’s archaizing Sesshū style briefly became one model for a new, internationally informed Japanese painting. In 1884, as Fenollosa took greater control of the Painting Appreciation Society (Kangakai), he encouraged experimentation and revivalism among the member painters, who included Hōgai, Gahō, Tomonobu, Kobayashi Eitaku (1843–1890), Yamana Tsurayoshi, Andō Hirochika, and Kimura Ritsugaku (Ryūgaku). The society’s activities were supported by William Sturgis Bigelow, a wealthy Boston surgeon and friend of Fenollosa who had come to Japan to travel and collect.82 Either through purchase or because of his status as patron, Bigelow ended up acquiring a number of Kangakai-­related paintings, which now survive in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At a time when evaluations of pictures generally dealt with the artist’s treatment of a narrative or seminarrative subject matter, Fenollosa’s prescriptions were basically formalist. He isolated four pictorial elements, line (zusen, 図線), shading (meikai or nōtan, 濃淡83), color, and subject (旨趣), and three transcendent qualities of excellence: unity (taigō 泰合), beauty (keirei, 圭麗), and strength (chikara), combining them to create ten categories. He also emphasized the conception (ishō, 意 匠), sometimes glossed as Idea or idée (イデー), as that toward which all elements in a picture should be coordinated. To this end, Fenollosa encouraged painters to eliminate any secondary elements that might be seen as detracting from the attainment of the central idea: “Nature is a distracting blur of imperfect forms. But art grasps clear, perfect relations of parts by a single feeling which nothing distracts. . . . Ideal relations of parts . . . refer to nothing outside of themselves, and in the perfect interrelation they make us feel their wholeness as a blow. To have such relations of parts . . . is the true definition [of artistic quality].”84 Fenollosa’s emphasis on unity and interrelation found two main manifestations within the paintings of Kano Hōgai and Hashimoto Gahō. The first is the appearance of the circular shape, explicit in works such as Merciful Mother Kannon (see chapter 6) and Benzaiten on a Dragon (fig. 3.10). Second, certain works by Hōgai and Gahō show interest in moments of physical tension or arrested motion as a means of representing the single most heightened moment in a pictorial conception and of creating an interrelation of parts within the picture, which are now literally tied together 99

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3.10  Hashimoto Gahō, Benzaiten, the Goddess of Music and Good Fortune, on a Dragon, 1880s. Ink and colors on paper, 119.4 × 76.9 cm; framed. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2014, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

by physical connections and force vectors. Hōgai’s Valiant Steed beneath the Cherry Blossoms, for example, derives its pictorial strength from the tension between the groom and the spirited horse, who turn toward one another, creating a circular nucleus of pictorial tension (fig. 3.11). A similar tension is present in Niō Seizing a Demon, where the guardian king is shown grasping a demon by the neck (fig. 3.12); in Merciful Mother Kannon, which presents the seminal moment of Avalokitesvara’s water entering the baby’s nimbus; and in Gahō’s Bulls, an ink painting based on a motif 100

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3.11  Kano Hōgai, Valiant Steed under the Cherry Blossoms, ca. 1884. Ink and color on silk, 138.1 × 63.5 cm; hanging scroll. Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Exhibited at the Second Domestic Painting Exhibition, 1884. 3.12  Kano Hōgai, Niō [Benevolent King] Seizing a Demon, 1886. Ink and color on paper, 123.6 × 63.4 cm; hanging scroll. Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Exhibited at the Second Painting Appreciation Society Exhibition.

of struggling bulls, which was already familiar from Japanese painting history. The use of mist, curtains, and other diaphanous forces as framing devices to draw the viewer into the painting is likewise present in Niō and in a number of Hōgai’s late works, such as Arhat with a Dragon. At the second Painting Appreciation Society Exhibition in 1886, Fenollosa gestured to three paintings by Hashimoto Gahō: Arhat, Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain, and Elder (老人). In a passage that survives only in Japanese translation, he reputedly asked, “Which of these three compositions do you think is the best [kannen nari, 完全ナリ]? I think it is Shaka Emerging from the Mountain. This is because the right-­ hand portion is shaded more darkly, while the left half is shaded in lighter ink, thereby . . . creating clarity in the composition and skillfully realizing the methods of light and shading.”85 While the corresponding paintings have yet to be identified, Fenollosa’s interpretation of Gahō’s Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain recalls the example attributed to the Song-­ dynasty master Liang Kai and long preserved in Japanese collections, a work with which Kano painters were deeply familiar (fig. 3.13). Fenollosa’s praise of the division of light and dark in this painting also recalls the diagonal separation of light and dark that Okakura Kakuzō pointed out in Merciful Mother Kannon, and which also appears in Hōgai’s Two Dragons (fig. 3.14).86 Each of these paintings, which in its own way is profoundly unrealistic, presents itself to viewers’ consideration as a series of interrelated units that invites a formal, rather than contextual, reading: Merciful Mother Kannon uses the coordination of umbilical and womblike formal elements to express the idea of

3.13  Liang Kai, Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain, late Southern Song dynasty, early thirteenth century. Ink and color on silk. Tokyo National Museum. Photograph courtesy of DNP Art Communications.

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3.14  Kano Hōgai, Two Dragons,

the relation between bodhisattva and child. The subtly modulated color transition

1886. Ink on paper; framed. Phil-

that extends in a rough diagonal behind the main figures in Merciful Mother Kannon

adelphia Museum of Art.

reads like a cosmic division, reinforcing the idea of birth or creation as a cosmic parting, a coming into the earthly world. Two Dragons likewise takes creation or genesis as its main theme. The entwined dragons, together but pulling in their own directions, evoke the act of creation or continuation as a form of birth, while the relation of the depicted forms of the dragons to the pooled and expanding charges of ink and water themselves evoke, the painterly act of creating forms, the materialization of the drawn form out of the primordial ground of ink and water. In other words, the painting Two Dragons can also be read as an allegory of artistic creation due to the way in which it foregrounds the bare materiality of ink and water. Fenollosa’s readings of paintings were largely formal in that they required less knowledge of East Asian brushwork or iconography and were more concerned with the relation between elements within the painting. This arguably placed paintings in a different type of relation with their viewers when compared with allusive literati painting and other late Edo modes. It is therefore not coincidental that the paintings of Fenollosa’s circle debut the radical enlargement and paring down of motifs 103

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that would become a general feature of nihonga by the late Meiji period. Fenollosa’s more detailed criteria of circular compositions, divisions between light and dark, and so forth are, however, so abstract that they were hardly perceptible outside of his immediate circle.

Roots of a “Strange and New” Style Around 1885 Fenollosa declared: Many things must be tried before the appropriate one will be found. And such preliminary originality, as we may call it, must be fostered. No variation, no progress, is the law of the universe. But the old styles hang as a drag upon this freedom. . . . [S]ome [painters] deliberately insist upon doing no more than preserve the old styles. Unless this ignorant conservation is broken down, Japanese art cannot begin to revive.87

In practice the American opposed “ignorant conservation” to learned revival. As an example of the latter, the painter Andō Hirochika produced an enormous horizontal landscape, over three meters wide, in ink and light colors, utilizing the hard-­edged style, compositional clarity, and motifs of a horizontal ink painting by the medieval painter Kenkō Shōkei that had been purchased by Fenollosa prior to 1886. Originally Hōgai’s personal style, the hard-­edged ink landscape became a signature painting mode for the Painting Appreciation Society, to be taken up by Gahō, Ryūgaku, Hirochika, and Tomonobu in Kangakai works that found their way into the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after having been painted for Fenollosa and Bigelow: Hōgai created his monumental polychrome figure paintings Fudō Myōō and Niō Seizing a Demon for the Kangakai public exhibitions (Kangakai taikai), but he also produced numerous ink paintings in his characteristic style, most notably Hawks in a Ravine (see chapter 5) and Landscape: Scenes along the River (see fig. 7.1). These works share an eccentric or eerie ink style, with twisting or sloping lines, unconventional texture strokes, stark contrasts between light and dark, and grotesquely bent tree trunks and branches. They were exhibited at the Kangakai meetings and annual public exhibitions along with equally eccentric works like Hōgai’s Niō Seizing a Demon, but their impact on the Japanese public is unclear. They were mainly supported by Fenollosa and Bigelow and appear to have functioned for Japanese viewers primarily as significations of a means of combining newness (shinki) with the study of past styles. Hōgai consistently gravitated toward painterly models that combined structural clarity with a certain insistence of mark-­making, one that relied not only on Sesshū but also on much later forms of strange and surprising effects in painting, including the models of Soga Shōhaku, Kuniyoshi, and Kyōsai. The Chōshū painter’s works also cited the Chinese literati tradition of ink-­painting eccentricity: his 104

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depictions of old, broken winter trees in works like Hawks in a Ravine (fig. 5.1) cited Southern Song and Yuan images of the same theme, which in China became associated with the exile and isolation of the upright individual (see chapter 5).88 Hōgai’s landscapes may also relate to the fantastic, darkly inked Qing-­dynasty landscapes of Yuan Jiang and his followers.89 As Anita Chung notes, Yuan Jiang and Yuan Yao explored transformational movements between the fantastic and the real, animating the spirit and qi (life force) of the landscape through “convulsive movements of rock masses activated internally by thrusts and counterthrusts.”90 Such forces were not gloomy but rather awesome or sublime, as in Yuan Yao’s 1777 representation of Penglai (Palace Museum, Beijing). Overall, the eccentric tradition in East Asian ink painting ran the gamut from the desolate and unsettling to the fantastic and sublime; extending Chung’s observation, we might even say that the potential for inner transformation and harmonization of these forces was among such painting’s deepest concerns and might be interpreted to function on a symbolic level as a means of balancing, integrating, or systematizing ethnic and cultural difference.91 Hōgai’s interest in eccentricity similarly resonates with the violent political change of mid-­nineteenth-­century Japan and with the challenges to painting that it introduced. The strangeness of Sesshū and the supernatural stretched the limits of aesthetic function and hence of painting itself. Painters and viewers born after the Restoration were unsympathetic to this approach, which was perhaps destined to remain that of an oppressed and revolutionary minority. Taki Seiichi wrote in 1927 that “the innovation school [kakushin ha] [of nihonga in the early twentieth century] somehow found it necessary to follow Hōgai even in his strangeness and eccentricity,” even in his outmoded embrace of Sesshū, as a means to “propagate its own cause.”92 To the extent that it was repudiated by Taki and other early twentieth-­century painters and intellectuals, Hōgai’s characteristic style resembled the “repressed modernities” of late Qing-­dynasty culture chronicled by David Der-­wei Wang.93 While such modernities were denigrated by those intellectuals who wanted to position themselves as first-­generation modernists, they also represented what were to some the “unwelcome aspects” that complicate a tidy narrative of modernity patterned on Western ideals.94 For reasons to be explored in the following chapter, the late Edo type of modern Japanese painting disappeared by the 1890s, giving way to a diametrically opposed mainstream nihonga style.

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4

Decadence and the Emergence of Nihonga Style We must . . . preserve what is in good taste and prevent it from becoming mixed up with the Western style. With progress, however, [things] naturally become Westernized [ōshu ni ka shi] all on their own. Accordingly art, too, becomes Westernized, but from our country’s standpoint this is economically unviable. —inoue kaoru, 18891

Early Meiji officials expected Japan’s submissions to the world’s fairs to display marks of progress, such as technical sophistication and intricacy, and art objects were no exception. For this reason, they avoided placing Japanese paintings in the limelight at the early exhibitions, eschewing what they saw as old-­fashioned, simply brushed sketches in favor of craft pieces that showcased fine carving, realistic modeling, and other techniques. This is the situation Kano Hōgai confronted when he arrived in Tokyo in the late 1870s. In the 1880s, however, things began to change. Exhibition administrators turned to painted images for the first time, proclaiming that painting “presides over all the crafts and [constitutes] the foundation of the fine arts [bijutsu no kihon].”2 Yet once painting had become the focus of discussion, new questions emerged: out of the plurality of styles and themes that had flourished in the Edo period, which were most suitable, and how should they be promoted? This chapter examines nihonga’s discursive and stylistic emergence among Japanese painters and viewers in Tokyo with reference to three well-­documented cases. The lively comments on an anonymous lacquer panel of a ghost exhibited in 1877, Kawanabe Kyōsai’s Winter Crow on a Bare Branch of 1881, and Hōgai’s Hotei with Children of 1882 provide insights into the emergence of nihonga as a stylistic and thematic narrowing of Japanese painting. If the concept of criticism suggests a process of negation or elimination, then it could be said that the rise of public art criticism in Japan accompanied nihonga’s emergence by narrowing what it meant to be a Japanese painting, at least for the purposes of public exhibition.3 What was cast off or disowned, meanwhile, was frequently subsumed under the amorphous but powerful category of the declining or decadent.

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To be clear from the outset, I am not proposing that Japanese art in any way declined across the nineteenth century. Nor, again, is this a complete account of painting in the 1880s. My focus, rather, is on developments in the world of exhibition painting that anticipate the apotheosis of a certain recognizable, paradigmatic nihonga style as a response to the rhetoric of decadence and decline that had been initiated by Western commentators. Although it originated outside Japan, this figure of decline became part of domestic discourse and played a major role in nihonga’s conceptualization (as a category) and visualization (as a series of images). This chapter is also concerned with the emergence of style as a national discussion, beyond the boundaries of any individual painting school. Prior to the 1880s, the different schools of painting, particularly literati painting (bunjinga), but also the Kano and Kōrin schools, had their own, highly developed modes of metapictorial commentary through text and images. True to their name, literati painters and patrons—­scholars who may have been amateur painters as well—­were the most apt to take up the writing brush, comparing painters and commenting on relations between the different schools or on trends of the time. Many such writings circulated in manuscript form or in small, private publications, but they were published in greater numbers in the Meiji era. In 1874, for example, the late-­Edo kokugaku scholar Seimiya Hidekata (1809–­1879) published Un’en ryakuden (Brief Accounts of Clouds and Mist), a text that focuses on the lives and works of famous literati painters but also comments on the shashin (transcribing reality; see chapter 5) approach of Maruyama Ōkyo and its overwhelming popularity in nineteenth-­century Kyoto.4 The forms of public art criticism that began to develop in the 1880s were much different. Consistent with the emphasis in the early domestic exhibitions on export and international reputation, they combined existing, Tokugawa-­era viewpoints with ideas related to Western artistic standards. As a result, the act of viewing and discussing art in the first half of the Meiji period was simultaneously localized and international.

The Rise of the Domestic Exhibitions As detailed in chapter 2, the late 1870s and early 1880s saw the creation of a number of nationally sponsored exhibitions to guide and stimulate the production of contemporary Japanese painting. In 1877 and 1881, a special office related to the Exhibition Bureau staged Japan’s first and second Domestic Industrial Exhibitions (Naikoku kangyō hakurankai, literally Domestic Exhibitions for the Encouragement of Industry).5 While the scope of the exhibitions exceeded the fine arts, the events represented an important moment in the lives of painters, craftsmen, manufacturers, and exporters, who had the opportunity to make connections, ascertain where their products stood with respect to patrons and competitors, and receive guidance about the ways in which they should direct their energies. Then, in 1882 and 1884, the Exhibition Bureau (now under the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce) hosted 108

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the first and second Domestic Painting Exhibitions (Naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai; literally Domestic Competitive Exhibitions of Painting).6 As we saw in the introduction, these competitive exhibitions were devoted exclusively to painting in Japanese materials, that is, to all painting with the exception of oil painting and images executed according to other “Western methods” (yōhō). Like the first and second Domestic Industrial Exhibitions, the Domestic Painting Exhibitions were held in Ueno Park, Tokyo, and attracted hundreds or even thousands of visitors each day. In each case a jury awarded prizes and honorable mentions to outstanding submissions and published detailed commentaries on its findings. The domestic exhibitions thus led the discussion of new Japanese painting out of the realm of abstraction and into the contentious territory of producing and viewing actual works of art. Japanese commentators initially described these events as reviving or stimulating the arts in a very literal sense. The events of the 1860s had subjected Edo-­Tokyo to a tidal phenomenon. Beginning in 1862 the shogunate drastically relaxed the conditions of sankin kōtai, or alternate attendance of the daimyo on the shogun in the city of Edo. “In the space of less than seven years,” writes Henry D. Smith, “Edo lost half of its population of over one million, with a final exodus of more than 300,000 in 1868 alone.”7 The reduction of sankin kōtai obligations had been motivated by a desire to encourage the domains to concentrate on strengthening their coastal defenses, but it became a centripetal force that heightened the sense of local, domainal ties, which grew stronger as the shogunate’s authority waned. The population flux in the cities of Kyoto and Osaka was less severe, though the sudden jump in foreign trade and the elimination of samurai stipends had economic repercussions. After the Restoration, people began to return to Edo (Tokyo), and the city was declared the official capital. Kyoto, meanwhile, had been deprived of its long-­standing status as imperial center; accordingly, artisans and merchants worked with the local government to ensure rebuilding and to support local industries.8 In both cities, but especially in Tokyo, the collapse of the shogunate and the subsequent abolition of daimyo domains impaired many of the private circles and meeting groups that had served as patronage networks and supported a variety of painters, writers, and printmakers.9 Japan’s earliest domestic hakurankai were in this sense born of desperation as much as optimism, determined to proceed at all costs to stimulate and reinvent local industries while connecting them with domestic and overseas markets.10 The result of all this activity was the rise of a vocabulary meant to prod people into action by calling attention to the direness of the current situation. In this context, a word like suitai (decline) referred less to the symbolic cultural decline invoked by Western commentators than to the financial toll of a trade imbalance and of sociopolitical change experienced by so many businesses and households. In 1875 one contributor to the Yomiuri newspaper wrote, “When you inquire into the true circumstances at various businesses, you hear that their financial situation is so bad that they want to quit. . . . There are rumors that even the [comparatively wealthy] oil companies and the thread producers of Kyoto are in such a state of decline that they are applying for 109

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loans from the [government] Bureau for the Stimulation of Commerce and Industry [Kangyōryō]. . . . If private wealth-­holders and the government do not begin to cooperate there’s simply no hope [for us].”11 In this context, the words shinkō (stimulation) and fukkō (復興; revival, revitalization) denoted the basic work of economic recovery that so obviously demanded attention. Yet these terms quickly became entangled with more complex Western, Orientalist cultural tropes of a declining Asian art surrounded by deleterious modern influences.

Nihonga Style When painters “of all the schools, with the exception of Western paintings,”12 were first invited to submit works to the Domestic Painting Exhibitions of 1882 and 1884, they were asked to identify their work as belonging to one of five or six numbered categories. By the time of the Bunten in 1907, however, there was only one category, nihonga, which was pitted against yōga. At the Fifth Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1903, the jurors reported with satisfaction: Nihonga has fully broken down the ramparts of the various hereditary schools [ryūha] and has finally succeeded in creating designs that, overall, take the study of nature [shasei] as their foundation. This is indeed a happy outcome. Those who take particular care with color application, striving to avoid the faults of excessively heavy coloration, on the one hand, and the duplication of [previous] designs, on the other, have shown marked progress over the previous [industrial exhibition].13

By the end of the Meiji period, nihonga was on the way to being conceived as a single school unified by shared commitments to naturalism, originality, and tasteful propriety in color application and subject matter. Nihonga was financially successful as well. The same jurors tartly remarked that “the great old doyens . . . were so busy with their regular [painting] commissions that they lacked the time to devote to putting sufficient thought into their conceptions [for public exhibition].”14 These painters also submitted works to the world’s fairs, but despite the intensive attention toward Western opinions in the 1870s and 1880s, by the end of the Meiji period in 1912 nihonga’s main audience was domestic. What Inoue Kaoru had described as Japanese painting’s inevitable yet undesirable change or “progress” did indeed continue apace, but even if nihonga was unprofitable as an export product, its value continued to grow at home. What we witness in these years, in the interaction between domestic and foreign imperatives, is not only the emergence of nihonga as a discursive term—­the emergence of the nihonga concept, as Kitazawa has called it—­but also the emergence of a nihonga style. The nihonga style was most visible in paintings produced for high-­profile exhibitions, beginning with the Chicago World’s Columbian Expo110

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sition of 1893 and continuing with the large-­scale domestic exhibitions of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Its features include a concern with the continuation of past artistic methods into the present day; a preference for pastel colors, subdued, contemplative themes, and simplified compositions; the slowing or suppression of markers of the passage of time; polychromy applied to a large proportion of the picture surface (as in oil painting); and the lack of pictorial depth. The Edge of the Field by Kosaka Shōdō (1870–­1899) is one relatively early example of this nihonga style (fig. 4.1). Kosaka, who had a background in both yōga and nihonga, exhibited this nihonga piece at the progressive Japan Fine Art Association (Nihon bijutsu kyōkai) exhibition in 1898; two years later, following Kosaka’s untimely death, it was acquired by the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, where Kosaka had been a teaching assistant to the oil painter Asai Chū. The Edge of the Field pres4.1  Kosaka Shōdō, The Edge of the Field, 1898. Ink and color on silk, 86.4 × 110.8 cm; hanging scroll. Tokyo University of the Arts.

ents a level view of a woman, boy, and baby making their way through a field as tall, gently delineated summer plants rise around them, limiting the spectator’s view to the immediate foreground. The plants’ striking height creates visual interest, af-

Exhibited at the Japan Fine Art

firming the flatness of the picture plane and slightly defamiliarizing the Japanese

Association Exhibition, 1898.

countryside by evoking the virility and wildness of nature. This painting represents

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a trajectory toward images of the countryside that were also evident in Small Spring (Koharu, 1897), a nihonga work that won praise from a reviewer who was glad to see Kosaka abandon his earlier cerebral compositions in favor of a simpler, more relaxed approach, “jettisoning his ego and becoming intimately familiar with things [in the natural world].”15 During these years, when many of the “old masters” (rō taika) born in the late Edo were still active and popular, there were still those who disdained the wholesale embrace of Western pictorial space in a work like Kosaka’s. In general, however, newspaper critics and exhibition-­goers were beginning to welcome the progressives, claiming, for example, that “a new Japanese society” was in the process of construction in every field of social, political, and intellectual endeavor, and that art should be no different. That said, however, commissions for the progessive nihonga painters tended to be slow in coming.16 Or, rather, there was a divide between the habits of elite clients, whose circles of painting, display, study, and patronage tended to be more private and to recall those of the late Edo period, and the exigencies of national and international exhibitions, which were essentially populist and oriented toward creating nodes of verbal and visual discussion and debate. Kosaka’s painting exemplifies large-­scale nihonga works that captivated exhibition-­goers with their sense of immediacy and illusion. Painters used the compositional modes and techniques of Western painting to achieve such results even while tackling technical problems distinctive to ink and mineral pigments. Progressive nihonga was also scrupulous in its citation of a select group of premodern paintings, as if to assert its authenticity as “Japanese painting.” Finally, because exhibition art arguably conceived of its ideal audience as “the people” (kokumin) and its ideal client as the Japanese government, successful paintings affirmed dominant late Meiji ideologies, presenting the countryside as the site of stable class and gender identities.17 In terms of color application, composition, and subject matter, such paintings shared common features with Kano Hōgai’s later paintings, particularly Fudō Myōo and Merciful Mother Kannon (see fig. 6.1). At the same time, they excluded many other types of Restoration-era painting, not to mention the majority of Hōgai’s own ink-­painting oeuvre. While a full account of nihonga’s development from Kosaka’s time onward has yet to be written, it is apparent that from the beginning, nihonga was not meant to be a revival of just any forms of Japanese painting: the selection of past models was itself deeply political, as was the larger question of whether nihonga could, in fact, “progress.”

Wagener’s Alarm In his report on art at the first Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877 (see chapter 2), the German material scientist Gottfried Wagener enjoined Japanese officials to protect “paintings that have been transmitted from old” against the supposed threat of usurpation by oil painting. The surviving Japanese version of his text reads: 112

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The current exhibition . . . makes clear that today’s Japanese painters [nihon gakō] are now completely given over to the study of oil painting. This is in accordance with the times. . . . But it should not be too hastily decided whether Japanese fine art industries [bijutsu kōgyō] will be benefited by following the trend of the times and so rapidly changing to oil painting. Painters should also strive not to lose the character of the paintings in water and ink painted on silk and paper that have been transmitted from old. For if [these disappear], in time the true foundation of the art will be lost.18

Rather than condemning oil painting outright, Wagener’s text focuses on the question of “whether Japanese fine art industries will be benefited” by its adoption, a phrase that suggests economic motives in preserving the old styles and challenges the Meiji government’s earlier association of Western draftsmanship with the benefits of science and technology. He continues: Even though the new trends of the time will not necessarily overwhelm Japan’s existing ancient methods, it would behoove you to select experienced instructors and appoint them to the schools, institutes, and museums and thereby to preserve each type of old painting, so that at the same time [as oil painting methods become more established], the recondite methods of Japanese painting that have been passed down over time are not lost.19

In structuring his response to the painting section of the exhibition around the fear of gradual but inevitable extinction (messhitsu), Wagener introduces the terms “Japanese painting techniques” (nihongajutsu) and “preservation” (hozon) by way of a government-­endorsed infrastructure of schools and art museums. He also emphasizes the idea of “Japanese painting” as a body of methods transmitted from the past. As early as 1877, in other words, the factors that led to the conceptual formation of nihonga as we know it were already in place, articulated by a Western observer within the framework of extinction and preservation, but literally set down and circulated in a Meiji government–­generated Japanese text. The text was inflected by the inclusion of certain important terms: hiketsu (secret or private transmission) and koyū (distinctive; long-­held). The notion of transmission described painting methods that were passed down (aitsutawaru) across generations from master to pupil, like the dharma lamp in Zen teaching.20 This notion appears repeatedly where it would today be logical to use the word “tradition,” but the Japanese text has a degree of specificity with regard to preserving particular brush habits and compositions that is not seen in the mystified modern notion of tradition as fixed and authoritative. In Japanese, Wagener is made to advise that schools and institutes sponsor the continuation of “each type of Japanese painting,” a term that preserves the Edo-­ period notion of painting as divided into several different schools or lineages. 113

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Wagener’s position as an outside consultant was not renewed for the second domestic industrial exhibition in 1881. Instead, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce enlisted the publisher and businessman Fukuda Takanori to produce a similar overview. Fukuda began with a section called “The Origins of the Way of Japanese Painting” (Nihon gadō no kigen), in which he gave an account of the history of Japanese painting since its origins: Even though there have been changes in the study of painting [since the time of Kose no Kanaoka in the eighth century], there has been no shortage of people who follow the old ways. . . . In the 1,419 years since the time of Kanaoka, the lamp transmission of the ancient law has not been lost, and the pure way of Japanese painting [junzen taru nihon gadō] has been transmitted and preserved, forming a model for craft and art. . . . It is no coincidence that Japanese vessels have been able to attain honor abroad through their wondrous skill, which is replete with the delicacy, sophistication, and frankness of ancient times.21

Writing prior to Fenollosa’s Bijutsu shinsetsu (The True Meaning of the Fine Arts), Fukuda constructs a scenario in which the essence of Japanese painting now appears as a reified but living transmission faithfully carried on by previous masters. This emphasis on the unbrokenness of Japanese painting history as a companion to its purity draws on the medieval and early modern conceptualizations of workshop lineage but also finds an obvious parallel in the discourse of the imperial lineage as a foundation for the modern state. The practice of replacing a foreign authority with a domestic one was common in those years, but Fukuda’s contribution is notable because it weaves in and out of earlier Western assessments, overlaying them with his own class-­based views of Japanese art. He wrote, “The word bijutsu [art; fine art] has European precedents, but in fact there have long been distinctive forms of art in our country. . . . Therefore let there be no mistake: just because the word bijutsu was first used in our country only recently, at the Vienna Exhibition of 1873, this does not mean that art is found in Western countries alone, or that our country originally had no art.” Fukuda goes on to define bijutsu as encompassing painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry and says that the purpose of art is to give pleasure and “by its elegant charm [fūchi], noble coloring, full, beautiful forms, and calm, elevated nature, to elevate peoples’ minds and personalities, eliciting trends of friendship, love, dedication, and generosity.”22 In an argument that would become well exercised in Tokyo in the ensuing years, Fukuda emphasizes uplift, the ennobling or civilizing function of the arts. 23 At the same time, he grounds his emphasis on elegance, nobility, and grace in the need to act upon another audience: Westerners, who, although they acknowledged that Japan had art, confused with Chinese goods 114

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all of our painting, ceramics, fabric, and metalwork that had a Chinese air and only considered as Japan’s distinctive art ukiyo-­e, nishiki-­e, Hokusai pictures, and other low [zoku] images of men with two swords and half of their hair [shaved off ]. In the West, outside of a few famous artists very few people know the elegantly crafted and noble qualities of our old paintings and designs, nor have they seen the beauty of our magnificently refined ceramics touched with gold. Meanwhile, many artisans who produced things for sale took Hokusai, ukiyo-­e, nishiki-­e, and other vulgar works as their model. It is because they sell such vulgar products that Japan’s distinctive fine art is declining.24

The opposition that Fukuda establishes between ukiyo-­e and true art—­or between urban commoner culture and Western high culture—­was widespread during the 1880s. At the same time that Tokyo was hosting the first government-­sponsored public exhibitions devoted exclusively to painting, Tsubouchi Shōyō was writing his Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui, 1885), which endeavored to establish a new role for the novel (shōsetsu) apart from the class and ethnic boundaries of Tokugawa-­ era fiction. Introducing the newly prominent word for fine art (bijutsu) as a means of holding the novel to high standards—­a theoretical turn that drew internal support from Fenollosa’s Bijutsu shinsetsu—­he wrote, “An art-­lover who indulges himself frequently will develop more and more of a taste for elegance, and his character will become increasingly finer. As the novel is an art-­form, it too, of course, offers this benefit.” Tsubouchi’s focus on moral amelioration or uplift is almost the same as that of Fukuda and other writers of the time. Tsubouchi adds, “It is a very rare Japanese novel justifiably classified as art, however. . . . As I remarked in an earlier chapter, the novels prized in Japan are crude; they lack the qualities of art. They occupy a position like that of ukiyo-­e, which cannot be called genuine paintings. If we appreciate the significance of this example, we can comprehend something of the nature of the true novel.”25 The novel is to Edo popular fiction as true art is to ukiyo-­e. And the consequences necessarily had international repercussions. Fukuda writes that “producing things in the style of Hokusai or ukiyo-­e prints and so forth” not only “bring[s] about the decline of Japan’s distinctive fine art; [it also] cause[s] Japanese art’s reputation to plummet on the foreign market [kaigai shijō].”26 Fukuda combined his injunction about ukiyo-­e and Hokusai with an angry warning against “abandoning the orthodox beauty [seibi] particular to . . . [Japanese painting],” thus grounding the notion of good taste itself in a rejection of the Western style: “Running astray, entangled down the heterodox path of chiaroscuro, shading, watercolor, and other superficial elements of Western painting which corrupt the ignorant eyes [of the people] [zokugan],” he wrote, “it is these [painters] who cannot discriminate between the sophisticated and the vulgar [ga zoku].”27 These criticisms by Fukuda, Wagener, and others can appear vague, but when it came to their application to specific art objects they were fairly consistent in signaling that elements of popular culture—­what Fukuda called “Hokusai’s pictures 115

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and other low images”—­should be excluded from the exhibition. Indeed, the commentators implied, such images did not constitute “art”—­a foreign term that the cosmopolitan officials felt entitled to define as they saw fit, culling positive and negative examples from among the exhibited works. At the end of his 1877 critique of framed lacquer panels (see chapter 2), for example, Wagener s­ ingled out a lacquer tableau of an apparition emerging from a bamboo blind. The image is unidentified today, but it apparently took the visual experience of black on black—­the low-­relief figure materializing from the black background of the lacquer panel—­and likened it to the experience of perceiving a ghost emerge out of thin air in a penumbral environment. Compositionally and conceptually, the ghost panel drew on the expansive corpus of illusionistic, mid-­to late nineteenth-­century ghost images that served both as individual works and as props for oral performances of ghost stories (kaidan, yūreibanashi).28 These works use the shadowy effects of ink painting and the conceit of indirect perception to heighten the confusion between seeing and not seeing, so that the painted image becomes the surface on which the shadow of a ghost is cast directly or through a bamboo blind, curtain, or paper lantern (fig. 4.2).29 The unknown author of the Kiriu Kōshō Kaisha panel attained similar effects by exploiting the obscurity and reflectivity of the lacquer picture as a medium. In its beguiling subject matter and medium-­specificity the panel likely attracted the attention of ordinary viewers and jurors alike, but Wagener’s text notes the image only to dismiss it as an example of the genre’s unviability. The Japanese jury, too, singled out the ghostly lacquer panel for criticism, noting that while the items submitted by the Kiriu Kōshō Kaisha deserved high honors overall, the lacquer panel with a monster (yōkai) lurking beneath bamboo blinds was “outside the true purview of artistic skill [myōgi no honshin ni arazu].”30 Comparing this response with Wagener’s, it becomes 4.2  Kikuchi Yōsai, Ghost before a Mosquito Net, nineteenth century.

apparent that the process of negatively defining ni-

Ink and light color on silk, 126 × 55.6 cm; hanging scroll. San’yūtei

honga took place through a combination of domestic

Enchō Collection, Zenshōan.

and foreign voices. 116

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Problem Pictures The ghostly lacquer panel was just one example of the type of problem picture that Japanese juries sought to manage in their early guidelines for Japanese painting and craft objects in the 1880s. During this period officials recognized that all the technical precision in the world was misguided if the subject matter continued to reference the “vulgar” tradition of Hokusai, ukiyo-­e, kabuki, and illustrated fiction. An undated bas-­relief standing screen in bronze, carved wood, and other materials, likely made for international exhibition and now in the Crow Collection, Dallas, indicates how even the high ambitions of early historical works were rendered in an aesthetic related to ukiyo-­e that was distasteful to critics like Fukuda (fig. 4.3). The mythological snake-­slayer and kami (detail) of storms and seas Susanoo no Mikoto

4.3  Two-­Sided Screen with Susanoo no Mikoto, Meiji era, late nineteenth century. Carved and lacquered wood with gold, ivory, and hard stones; standing screen. Crow Collection of Asian Art, 3451.

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stands above the sea and grimaces as he reaches out to grasp the ocean-­drying pearl, plunging a skillfully foreshortened forearm in the direction of the viewer. Susanoo’s necklace of prehistoric magatama jewels is adorned with real stones, and the carving’s additional surfaces are covered with naturalistic depictions of birds and beasts in a variety of materials. This work was likely conceived in the late 1880s or 1890s to present a Japanese mythological subject with the illusionism and grandeur of a European or American history painting or monumental sculpture.31 At the same time that it acknowledged Western codes of naturalistic, didactic exhibition art, however, its iconography and composition were almost wholly dependent on Japanese popular imagery,

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since mythological figures typically appeared in kabuki, on public votive plaques that would have been donated to a shrine or temple (see chapter 2), or in affordable, single-­sheet ukiyo-­e prints and woodblock printed books.32 The tension between elite and popular modes of depiction in Meiji art was further complicated by the fact that in the mid-­nineteenth century it was popular art, not high art, that made the most thorough use of Western-­style illusionism.33 In his representation from Dai Nihon meishō kagami (Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan, 1876–­1882), for example, Yoshitoshi draws on Western tropes for the densely folded fabric and oblique, aerial view, while the body proportions of his long-­legged, broad shouldered Susanoo differ from those of the typical late Edo-­period figure (fig. 4.4). Early Meiji craft objects that sought to impress Western audiences with their naturalism ended up moving closer to this popular art tradition. Another apt example is an intricate iron charger produced in the mid-­Meiji period by the Komai Company, one of the principal manufacturers of export metalware. Two wizened arhats in low relief burst from the center of the platter brandishing a rosary and other attributes (fig. 4.5). Dragons have clawed their way through the surrounding decorative band,

4.4  Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Susanoo no Mikoto, from the series Honchō meishō shū (A Collection of Famous Generals of Our Realm), 1880s. Color woodblock print. Library of Congress. 4.5  Komai Company, Dish with Arhats, ca. 1885. Iron with copper, shibuichi, silver, and gold, diameter 48.6 cm. Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, M158.

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which bears a detailed pattern resembling brocade or ceiling coffers with at least ten different designs. The vessel’s outer rim is decorated with scrolling grapevines.34 For Japanese viewers in the 1880s, the charger would have evoked Kazunobu’s spectacular Five Hundred Arhats, a series of scrolls in a dense, illusionistic style that had been produced in the 1850s and 1860s to appeal to ordinary visitors at the shogunal temple of Dōjōji (see fig. 1.7).35 On the one hand, Kazunobu’s Arhats were important precursors to Meiji exhibition art in that they bridged popular and elite styles and were meant to address large crowds of viewers; furthermore, the use of a dense, unbeautiful aesthetic to express the arhats’ untrammeled personalities had a respected history in East Asia.36 On the other hand, the Arhats’ affinities with a popular art of the ghoulish or grotesque provoked contemptuous responses from Fenollosa and Fukuda, for whom the “heterodox path” of Western illusionism was part of the problem. Although earlier Japanese officials of the 1870s had encouraged illusionism, Fukuda branded the adoption of Western painting methods as something that was inherently low class (zoku) and would serve only to “corrupt” ignorant viewers.37 Jurors occasionally offered positive examples as models for the future. At the first Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition in 1882, for example, a painter named Tanaka Kichinosuke led the long list of second-place awardees, where he was recognized for his folding screen decorated with affixed bird-­and-­flower paintings (oshie byōbu). The jurors wrote, “recently, screens with pasted on images mainly depict little more than kabuki actors or crudely brushed birds and flowers. This screen fully disengages from that custom: with its gentle delicacy [on’yū] and finely crafted composition [seibi ishō] it demonstrates considerable progress.”38 Within its comments on the individual products in the lots by Matsui, Wakai, and the Kiriu Kōshō Kaisha, the jurors’ committee extolled the “calm, sophisticated, and masterfully executed” (onga takuzetsu).39 The elite commentators’ intense concern with limiting popular imagery, the occult, and the unbeautiful and introducing alternative models for the people’s relation to “art” reflected an eagerness to clarify Japanese art’s position in the international arena. “When foreigners first came to Japan,” said the diplomat and first Imperial Museum president Kuki Ryūichi, they purchased large quantities of pictures of prostitutes and so forth. Because of this, [Japanese artists and merchants] mistakenly thought that these were the pictures that best suited their taste and incorporated the designs into a large number of objects. But the real reason why [foreigners] sought out these [low] works is not because it suited their taste, but because, seeing the difference in [our] clothing and manners, they took [the prints] home in order to show the oddness [of our ways]. This being the case, why would you go out of your way to present them as elegant amusements? . . . [Your] subject matter should be noble and honorable, and you should choose what best expresses the true nature of our fine arts.40 120

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Western Viewers and Japan’s Decadent Aesthetic Woodblock prints and their related aesthetic, then, represented the wrong kind of art and were feared to function as a spectacle to amuse Western viewers at Japan’s expense. It is hard to say that such worries were completely misplaced. Even as Western collectors’ knowledge of Japanese art became more sophisticated, their appreciation often took the form of an illicit pleasure. The practice of terming nineteenth-­century woodblock prints as decadent began in early twentieth-­century Europe and America, but the word drew on a much longer tradition of savoring the challenges that Japanese images presented to notions of aesthetic appreciation rooted either in moral virtue or in disinterested, subdued beholding. In the early 1860s, shortly after the port of Yokohama was opened to foreign trade, British critic William Michael Rossetti documented a startling encounter with a black-­and-­white, woodblock-­printed book, Hokusai’s Ehon sakigake (Famous Warriors of China and Japan; 3 vols, 1836). In a long, unillustrated exposé, Rossetti described each of the book’s thirty-­one images in turn, crowning his unconventional ekphrasis with the following judgment: Notwithstanding their grandeur and fineness of line, there is nothing in them which can be identified by a European as the feeling for beauty. . . . One would say, as a result of an inspection of the works . . . that beauty does not present itself to the [Japanese] mind as an intrinsic element of art, nor almost of nature. And this may be partly dependent upon a cognate fact—­that there is nothing throughout the designs in the least suggesting moral beauty; the distilled essence of the whole of them may even be termed atrocity. Ferocious faces, ferocious passions, ferocious deeds and achievements; beetle brows, mouths grinning, snarling, howling, or champing; muscles, limbs, and extremities, on the stretch. . . . Our parting wishes are that we may see may more such [works], and that the persons into whose hands they come may recognise their superiority, in some respects, to anything which contemporary European art has to show us.41

As if responding to tired popular pronouncements about art’s civilizing power, the British critic revels in foreign images that appeared ignorant of the celebrated alliance between truth and beauty, in which line, composition, and form flourish seemingly independently of content. This decontextualizing effect was augmented by the fact that the historical contexts of Hokusai’s book were beyond any hope of access in 1860s Britain, forcing the work to be appreciated on formal grounds alone. Rossetti’s text therefore exemplified a formalist reading that highlighted the conventional limits of Western nineteenth-­century painting as it set forth Hokusai’s images as a form of art whose “visionary suddenness” and “perfection of expression” were divorced from morality.42 In this way, Rossetti’s text codified the overlapping senses of the word “decadent” with respect to Japanese prints, even though the term would 121

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not be applied to such works until the 1890s.43 As the Taishō-­era oil painter Kishida Ryūsei (1891–­1929) would later note, the notion of the decadent implied the degradation of art’s past moral and aesthetic attainments, but it nonetheless framed this lack as a source of intense, elicit pleasure.44 Similar pleasures are at work in L’art japonais (1883) by Louis Gonse.45 On one level, Gonse’s lavish volumes prompted readers to compare ancient Japanese paintings to the works of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and even Rembrandt. At the same time, the incidental illustrations on almost every page present the symptoms of japonisme that officials like Kuki were eager to avert (fig. 4.6). Lofty passages are accompanied by unlabeled or partially labeled incidental illustrations of naked bathers, bums, frogs, or radishes.46 Pictures of half-­naked wrestlers vie with and ultimately overwhelm lines about the “progress of Japanese art” (la marche de l’art japonais), while technical details on the sophisticated fabrication of ceramics and bronzes fail to compete with comic renditions in the margins. Many of Gonse’s illustrations were lifted from popular, affordable nineteenth-­century woodblock-­printed books: they spill out from the pages meant to contain them, exemplifying his own project of making out of Japanese art a titillating spectacle for European audiences.47 4.6  Illustration from Louis Gonse, L’art japonais

From the Japanese officials’ point of view, japonisme’s emphasis

(Paris: Quantin, 1883).

on the uncanonical kept French, British, or American audiences spellbound by Japanese popular culture, undercutting attempts to present a “noble and honorable” vision of Japan abroad.

Winter Crow on a Bare Branch Given the foregoing circumstances, it is no surprise that the artists who seemed to provoke Meiji exhibition officials’ anxieties about style and the image of Japanese art were those whose careers, like Kazunobu’s, straddled or combined elite and popular artistic genres. Kawanabe Kyōsai was a key figure in the emergence of nihonga style through exclusion rather than exemplification.48 Trained in the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi before becoming a disciple of the Surugadai “exterior” Kano studio, Kyōsai—­or Tōiku, to use his Kano name—­had established his reputation in Edo-­Tokyo by way of a bold, vigorously brushed style. Lacking the official patronage of a shogun or daimyo, the prolific painter made his reputation through the industry of popular print 122

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and book illustration in the 1860s and 1870s, when he associated with the popular fiction writers and essayists Kanagaki Robun and Sansantei Arindo and with the ukiyo-­e print designer and illustrator Ochiai Yoshiiku; like them, he satirized both Tokugawa and Meiji governments and identified with the Edokko (Edo-­born commoner). While Kyōsai and his colleagues produced many commercial works under the direction of a publisher, they also relied on patrons such as Tsuji Den’bei, an official from the shogunal mint who supported Arindo, Yoshiiku, the kabuki playwright Kawatami Mokuami, and even the elegant painter and lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin. In the late Edo period, Tsuji’s parties had provided an opportunity for artists and patrons from both commoner and samurai backgrounds to mingle based on the shared culture of wit, low humor, and veiled sociopolitical commentary. 49 Humor, topicality, and satire being their business, the producers sustained their critical spirit while shifting their target from the old government to the new one, and it was not long before their countercultural position came to accommodate voices from the Freedom and Popular Rights movement, in which those who were dissatisfied with the policies and power balance of the Meiji government could demand representation and redress.50 Kyoto and Osaka painters reaped the benefits of similar local “salons,” as well as of public initiatives such as the Higashiyama Exhibitions discussed in chapter 1. According to the Kyōsai gadan (Kyōsai on painting, 1887) and other Meiji accounts, Kyōsai had been arrested and interrogated in the first years of the new regime after producing satirical pictures of Meiji government officials at a private party.51 While there were many ukiyo-­e artists and other cultural producers who were capable of satirizing the government through “low” art or popular culture, the threat that Kyōsai posed to arts officials in the new regime arguably stemmed from his status at the boundary between high culture, or Kano painting, and low culture, or ukiyo-­e prints, illustration, and paintings with comical, theatrical, or supernatural themes. Kyōsai was also capable of producing works in the more cultivated, orthodox Kano tradition, a capacity that Meiji arts administrators sought to encourage while suppressing the lowbrow (zoku) aspects of his art. As the artist’s fame during his own lifetime spread even among Western connoisseurs, Kyōsai served as a reminder of the way in which problem pictures could take hold among a domestic and international public.52 Buoyed by mischief, scandal, and market value, his images consistently exceeded the Meiji government’s attempts to guide and supervise contemporary Japanese painting and its public along appropriate lines of development.53 The story of Winter Crow on a Bare Branch is one of several anecdotes that defined Kyōsai’s reputation during his lifetime; it also came to define the image of nihonga’s style and social functions (fig. 4.7). While conforming visually to the parameters of highbrow, pro-­government art, Winter Crow was manipulated by the painter when it was shown at exhibition in a way that demonstrated how popular opinion could supercede the government’s authority to judge paintings. 123

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The painting was submitted to the second Domestic Industrial Exhibition under the title Koboku kan’a (枯木寒鴉), where it received the highest de facto prize of second place (tied with two other painters), facts recorded in government publications related to the exhibition. To this day, the work remains with the heirs of the Eitarō Confectionary proprietor Hosoda Yasubei, who is reported to have purchased it in 1881 at the phenomenal asking price of one hundred yen.54 An 1887 account in Kyōsai gadan, a four-­volume work comprising images by Kyōsai and a biography edited and recorded by his disciple Baitei Kinga (1821–­1893), reads: In the early summer of 1877 the first Exhibition was held in Ueno Park.55 Kyōsai submitted one of the paintings of crows he had painted at the time and attached a price of one hundred yen to it.56 When an official [kakariin] criticized him for demanding such a high price he responded, “This is not the value of the crow, but the value of the decades of hardship I endured for the sake of painting, and the value of what I have attained through study. What I have done is regardless of whether or not it was sought according to the rules of the government exhibition [tenka no hakurankai]; I set the price I saw fit.” At this the official desisted. This crow was purchased by the Nihonbashi confectioner Eitarō of Nishikawagishi, and it was truly a windfall as far as Kyōsai’s reputation was concerned.57

In a manuscript from around 1900, Iijima Kyoshin (1841–­1901) provides a more elaborate version of the same story: April 1881: the second Domestic Industrial Exhibition took place in Ueno Park. Kyōsai painted the Winter Crow on a Bare Branch and submitted it. This is the painting for which Kyōsai received the greatest honor of his entire life; it became very famous and was known throughout the country. So what was it like? Moving his brush very lightly, Kyōsai painted one winter crow and added a single bare tree.58 It must not have taken even ten minutes to paint, yet it transmitted the truth and entered [the realm of ] the divine [shin o utsushi shin ni iri]. Its marvelous flavor could not

4.7  Kawanabe Kyōsai, Winter Crow on a Bare Branch, 1881. Ink and color on silk, 148.2 × 48.2 cm; hanging scroll. Eitarō Confectionary Collection.

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be expressed in words. It was a case in which the divine quality grew and became replete in inverse proportion to the number of strokes, and when he exhibited it in the hall he attached the price of one hundred yen. If a person of discrimination had seen it he would have thought it a low estimation of its value, but all the ordinary people were aghast when they saw it: it is said that some people sneered that if it were really worth so much they should steal it. One person asked the master, “Isn’t one hundred yen a gross overestimation of the value of just one crow?” The master laughed and replied, “That is not the value of the crow, but of my many years of hard study. If a buyer doesn’t emerge, then I don’t sell it: that’s all.” Now the master of Eitarō, the Nihonbashi confectionary, was a cultivated person who liked painting. One day he came into the hall, studied the painting closely, recognized its magnificent flavor, straightaway presented one hundred yen to reserve it, and took a receipt. As soon as the receipt left the building everyone looked on amazed; as they realized the painting’s extraordinariness for the first time they were in awe. The account of how one crow fetched the precipitous price of one hundred yen was heard far and wide, and many people came to see it out of the curiosity of what such a painting must look like. On account of this it is said that the exhibition itself came to be very crowded and lively. At the end of it the master was awarded Second Place for Outstanding Skill [myōgi nitō]. From this point Kyōsai’s reputation gradually began to spread throughout the country, and with it Eitarō too became famous. One account alleges that the master and Eitarō had cut a deal from the beginning, agreeing to stage this outrageous happening at the exhibition [ichijō ni kigyō o enji] in order to invite fame upon themselves. This [speculation] was clearly made by someone who does not know the master’s usual behavior. He is not the type of person to carry out such a scheme. Eitarō’s purchase of the work was completely fortuitous, and even Kyōsai was surprised. It was so unexpected that he was beside himself with joy. . . . On reflection, paintings seem like things that have but then again do not have value, and it is extremely hard to decide the price of a painting. Things once valued become worthless, while the things we value today were once quite humble. The value is not set from the beginning, but is determined by onetime trends or fashions [ichiji no ryūkō]. It is not right to have to set the price of one’s own painting since everything depends on what others decide. . . . [Setting one’s own price] lacks humility and inevitably amounts only to greed, yet the exhibition officials asked painters to decide the prices of their own paintings. The master is honest and straightforward, and the demand to attach a price to his painting went against his true intentions. Still, since he was forced to name a price . . . he tentatively set it at one hundred yen to see what people would say. If it was too high then no one would buy it, and this was just as it should be: one should not make paintings out of the intent to sell them. This was the true meaning of setting the price at one hundred yen.59

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The two texts offer a glimpse of the latent forces that characterized the relationship among painters, government officials, and the diverse range of Japanese viewers at the earliest Meiji art exhibitions. Kyōsai’s early satirical images had set off a general tension between him and Meiji government representatives.60 Here an exhibition official is the one who challenges the painting’s extravagant price, while Kyōsai sneers, “I did it regardless of whether the rules of the government exhibition demanded it.” The tension between the two parties comes out equally distinctly, albeit with greater subtlety, in the Iijima account: Kyōsai’s outlandish price can be read as a snub of the government’s commercially oriented requirement that artists price their own paintings. By placing the issue of monetary value on the table, causing an uproar among viewers, and introducing elements of doubt and anarchy into the process of aesthetic judgment, Kyōsai threatened to undermine the notion of a legitimate, government-­dictated standard for new Japanese paintings, disrupting the orderly sphere of display, commerce, and aesthetic appreciation that the Exhibition Bureau had managed to erect. That the jury awarded the highest prize to this simple painting—­ironically passing over Kyōsai’s true tour de force, the intricate, 4.8  Kawanabe Kyōsai, Snake Encoiling a Pheasant, 1873–­1877. Ink and color on silk. Tokyo National Museum. Photograph

brocadelike (but also garish, twisted, and violent) Snake Encoiling a Pheasant, shown at the same exhibition (fig. 4.8) demonstrates the extent to which Kyōsai succeeded with Eitarō’s help in forcing the government’s hand: once the painting had become

courtesy DNP Art Communi-

famous, jurors were forced to confer on it the measure of worth, recognition, and

cations.

monetary value that it had already achieved in the public sphere.61 The award was granted begrudgingly, along with the following comment: [He has] created instantly, in a stroke, a painting of a crow perched at the top of a decaying, bent branch, something extraordinary without wasteful embellishment, and has attained the divine sense of vitality, quite removed from his usual crazy antics. His outstanding skill is hereby to be recognized.62

Winter Crow, while orthodox enough in style, represents a masterful case of antics no less characteristic of Kyōsai than his earlier, more overtly political satires of the 1870s.

Hōgai and the Domestic Exhibition of 1882 Like Kyōsai’s Winter Crow, Hotei with Children by Kano Hōgai can be seen as a painting that distilled ongoing conflicts over what constituted an acceptable form of Japanese exhibition painting (fig. 4.9). This painting was exhibited in 1882 at the first Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition, the event at which Hōgai made his Tokyo debut, submitting an astonishing eight paintings, where most artists submitted one to three. Hotei, the jovial monk of Buddhism, is pictured with five young children, who scamper about, tugging at his bag.

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This theme had been especially popular in fifteenth-­through nineteenth-­

4.9  Kano Hōgai, Hotei with Children, ca. 1882. Ink on paper. Whereabouts unknown. Ex-

century China, from which it traveled to Japan.63 Hōgai’s painting takes the typical image of Hotei to an extreme: his chin, chest, stomach, and armpits are covered with

hibited at the First Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition, 1882.

fine, dark hair; his breasts sag down to his stomach; and his belly looks as though it might burst. Tiny eyes are set low on either side of a large, misshapen nose, and even the top of his head is fat and lumpy. The entire painting seems soiled and disfigured by an excess of mark-­making: the fine hairs on the body and the ink shading on Hotei’s foot, for example, only make him appear dirty, while the pitted surface of the walking stick does little to increase its naturalism. Hōgai’s attempts at shading and surface texture are clearly inspired by Western painting at a conceptual level, but as representational habits they have little to do with their Western referents: instead, the dark and sagging flesh and the wiry quality of the hair seem to argue eloquently for the benefits of abbreviation, as they only serve to alienate viewers. Regardless of the extent to which it is undone by the style or handling of its imagery, the painting’s net affect on the viewer is subtly calculated. Building on earlier images of Hotei as an unusually, if not improbably, fat and hairy figure—­one that is

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4.10  Detail of figure 4.9.

clearly not East Asian—­Hōgai seduces the viewer with techniques and bodies that are new and foreign. The minute detail of his drawing and unprecedented handling of forms draw the spectator inward, evincing the dark fascination of a freak show that trades in awe or pleasure at the expense of the like-­but-­different body, removed from society and fixed within the secure and marginalized space of spectacle.64 Yet even as viewers are drawn in by the dirty, dehumanized, surreal depiction of Hotei, their close looking facilitates the work of acceptance and naturalizing of the foreign: the children are portrayed in a tender, convincing manner, absorbed in play around Hotei and utterly at ease in his presence, an ease that counters any initial repulsion viewers may feel toward the monk’s foreign body. On the one hand, the children’s ease assures us that we were wrong to judge by appearances, that ill looks can be deceptive. On the other hand, their affection appears indiscriminate; their empty stares in particular seem to express the painting’s unresolved question about human nature and about the approachability of foreign bodies, echoing the viewer’s own uncertainties (fig. 4.10). While its style would be abandoned by the 1890s, the painting’s mode of relationality with the viewer is paradigmatic for later nihonga to the extent that it puts the viewer through the paces of repulsion and acceptance and models the act of denaturing or disarming the foreign. It does this in a way that is far more obvious than any other painting in Hōgai’s oeuvre, leading to an intensity that still challenges and unsettles today. The painting survived the war and was exhibited during the American occupation, but, its existence has not been subsequently disclosed, with many scholars still presuming—­too conveniently, perhaps—­that it was lost in the war.65 129

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Hotei with Children was not an award-­winning painting: despite submitting a dozen paintings between the two Domestic Painting Exhibitions in 1882 and 1884, Hōgai was denied an award; neither was he invited to paint a set of cypress wood doors for the Meiji Imperial Palace, as were many of the most highly acclaimed painters at the exhibition. Prizes and imperial commissions were instead awarded to stable patriarchs and their more conservative students who upheld the aristocratic traditions deemed appropriate fare for government expositions at home and abroad. That said, Hotei with Children did not go entirely unnoticed; the attention it did receive is tied up with the unsteady and seldom-­posed question of what constituted success at the 1880s government-­sponsored exhibitions. The critic commenting on Hōgai’s painting wrote, “The crowd’s evaluation of Kano Hōgai’s Hotei—­that it is like a testicle with eyes and nose, or a potato with arms and legs—­is not without reason. But judging from the way that everyone chuckles as soon as they see it, ‘Oh, my, what a strange Lord Hotei!’ we can certainly judge this Hotei to be a lovable fellow.”66 This, the critic’s only comment about Hōgai despite his seven other submissions, shows that in a way the painting achieved its goal: to entertain the crowd and provoke a reaction through its novel reinterpretation of a familiar theme, to draw people to the composition and hopefully commend the artist to memory. As such, Hōgai would be prepared to make his name much as his seniors had, with their public shrine and temple compositions and woodblock prints. This is seen not only in Hōgai’s Hotei painting, but also in the works of other popular artists and even in the newspaper writings of the earliest critics. Reviewing a painting of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion who was frequently depicted as a woman, a Tokyo nichi nichi reporter wrote: The Kannon of Kitō Dōkyō [1840–­1904] has a beautiful face, and the ink handling is nicely done, but she wears her clothes like a Western lady, even a geisha. It is as if Kannon . . . had eloped with Christ . . . and run off to London and Paris. . . . This must be Kannon, savior of the pleasure quarters—­not one of the standard thirty-­ three manifestations—­and if she’s anything like the ladies of [the Tokyo brothels] then the crystal vase in her hand is really a sake bottle ready to fill your glass. . . . There’s a bearded gentleman hanging around [the painting] as if to say, “If [I met] the likes of her, I would give her loads of cash, and it wouldn’t be as an offering to the Buddha!”67

The anonymous passage suggests the hand of one of the popular fiction and essay writers who wrote for the newspapers from their beginnings in the early 1870s. It is not so much a critical review—­the genre had yet to exist—­but uses the exhibition as a source of entertainment, undermining the painting with a vulgar reading or vying with it for popularity. In comparing Kannon to a prostitute, it draws upon an ukiyo-­e tradition in which courtesans were shown in the guise of various deities or 130

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even serving the deities as clients. At the same time, the text satirizes the early Meiji trend of “updating” familiar painting themes by adding Western techniques; hence Kannon now “wears her clothes like a Western lady” and might be seen “running off to London and Paris,” something that would literally be true of many artworks exhibited in Tokyo at this time, which were intended for export or foreign display. The writer’s style placed him in the category of gōkan (long fiction) or gesaku (playful writing) that Tsubouchi Shōyō had disparaged: within a year of the exhibition the professor and translator of Shakespeare would make the case that “comparing the Japanese novel with its Western counterpart is thus like comparing Utagawa ukiyo-­e woodblock prints with Kano paintings. The prints . . . have nothing to offer to the viewer’s aesthetic sensibilities; they merely serve to amuse women and children.”68 “Real” novels in the Western tradition were to Japan’s ­popular writing as the Kano paintings once patronized by shogun and daimyo were to ukiyo-e. With this statement, the anxious overlay of ethnic difference (Japan versus Europe) onto social and gender-­based cultural difference (ukiyo-­e versus Kano painting) served to glorify elite Japanese culture at the expense of popular culture even while offhandedly subordinating all Japanese cultural productions to those of the West.

The Domestic Trope of Decline Once artists understood what was expected at the national exhibitions, many tried to be obliging: Shibata Zeshin, for example, had made his name with a shrine plaque of a demon hag fleeing with her own detached arm in hand, but he suppressed the weird and shocking elements of his style in his submission to the Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions of 1882 and 1884, understanding that he was instead to “transmit” the naturalist style of his formal painting teachers Suzuki Nanrei (1775–­1844) and Okamoto Toyohiko (1773–­1845) as faithfully as possible (figs. 4.11–­ 4.12). Hashimoto Gahō departed from the standard Kano style to produce a lyrical painting of doves in ink wash on silk that emulated, with limited success, the popular Kyoto wash style (see fig. 3.8). An additional context for this move is suggested by the fact that the 1884 painting exhibition was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce and the Imperial Household Ministry, and one of its covert purposes seems to have been the identification of painters who would be appropriate to contribute Japanese-­style paintings to the interior of the Meiji palace.69 These would be the painters of quiet beauty and “refined elegance” that Fukuda had solicited in his 1881 report, which emphasized maintaining the orthodox schools of painting (Kano, Tosa, Maruyama-­Shijō, literati, etc.) while saying almost nothing about innovation. While this approach initially satisfied exhibition organizers, it was problematic to Japanese critics and patrons inasmuch as it ignored models of painting production based on authorial creativity or uniqueness. The unviability of a painting culture that sought mainly to preserve or transmit ancient styles was perhaps most apparent to those outside the art world. A Tokyo nichi nichi newspaper 131

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4.11  Shibata Zeshin, Demon Hag, 1840. Ink, color, and lacquer on panel, 163 × 222 cm; shrine plaque. Ōji Inari Shrine, Tokyo.

4.12  Shibata Zeshin, Waterfowl and Stream, ca. 1886. Ink and color on sliding-­door panels for the Meiji palace. Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Museum of the Imperial Collections.

contributor returned from the first Domestic Painting Exhibition in 1882 with this conclusion: The painting methods [of our country] . . . having been transmitted from master to pupil over the course of a thousand years, have somehow survived to this day even as everything around them is Westernized. While they would hardly serve to provoke oohs and ahs from the foreigners, one could at least point to them and say, “Well, and here we have the painting of Japan.” It’s rather as if a little conservation group had been formed with exactly this purpose. . . . [T]he show suffices to prove at least that the decline of Japanese painting has never been more extreme.70

The reporter emphasizes that it is painting methods that are being “preserved,” suggesting an instance of ethnographic salvage work conducted on one’s own civilization, if only to represent true Japanese culture to the foreigners. Yet because one can no more effect a return to antiquity in Japan than in the West, the paintings are spiritless fossils. In this brief comment, the reporter seems to have easily encapsulated

both the aporia of attempting to preserve Japanese painting through the creation of new paintings, and the Western origin of the notion that Japanese painting needed to be preserved in the first place. Beginning around 1881, foreign assessments of Japanese artistic decline or decadence came to play a crucial yet ambiguous role in the formation of the concept of nihonga, as well as in early formulations of its style and social functions. In discussions of the domestic exhibitions, the government itself had set the tone of lamenting the decline of Japanese painting by picking up on terms that foreigners like Wagener and Fenollosa used in their speeches and reports and merging these with assessments of “decline” and hopes for “revival” that had developed within the economic context of post-­Restoration Japan. Coinciding with or directly following presentations by Wagener and Fenollosa—­and Japanese reports about Western thoughts on Japanese art—­speeches, newspaper reports, and government documents on the first and second Domestic Painting Exhibitions list the decline of Japanese painting as their primary rationale.71 It was only a matter of time before this rhetoric emerged in popular discourse: “Having had the first opportunity to survey the current state of painting from throughout all of Japan during the first Domestic Painting Exhibition,” wrote one newspaper critic, “we were all shocked and saddened by its extreme state of decline.”72 The specter of decline was even invoked by the government-­directed jury itself. One jury report read, “Exactly as in the case of Group 1 [the Tosa, Kose, yamato-­e, and Kōrin school painters], you [Kano painters] exclusively preserve the existing compositions of your forebears without manifesting any new developments. . . . [I]f you do not reform these faults, we can expect nothing other than the decline [suitaiki] [of your school].”73 Even an unlearned country bumpkin in a humorous fictional account of the 1880s is seen to grumble on his visit to the Domestic Painting Exhibition, “It’s because our painters didn’t work hard at all this year that our nation’s paintings have seen a permanent end to their progress!”74 The rhetoric of decline was effective because it gave a common name to many different shades of dissatisfaction. It also paved the way for measures meant to effect a revival (fukkō), an established notion that was not only appropriate to the atmosphere of Meiji “renewal” (ishin) but that also drew on a vaunted model of government and elite patronage of cultural institutions. For hundreds of years, efforts to restore or rebuild shrines and temples or to resume cultural practices (such as forms of music, dance, martial art, or ceremony) that had fallen by the wayside had been cast in terms of decline and revival. The notion of Japan’s artistic decline also took on new meanings during this period. For one thing, it encompassed the serious problem of whether Japanese painting in the 1880s should exhibit novelty or whether its purpose as an institution was the continued transmission “from master to pupil” of themes and practices elaborated “over the course of a thousand years.”75 This value conflict foreshadowed the divide between “liberal” and “conservative” nihonga factions that would occur 134

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around the turn of the century. The pursuit of transmission (authenticity, orthodoxy) by some foreign viewers and by elite Japanese officials would repeatedly clash with the desire for novelty (hybridity, excess) that alone held the power to engage contemporary Japanese viewers. As the Times (Jiji shinpō) critic asked on his return from the second Domestic Painting Exhibition in 1884, “What impact, what effects should the paintings from this event have on [our] society?” (Sono kai no kaiga shakai ni ikan no eikyō kekka o atau beki ya).76

Aesthetic Response and the Audience for Japanese Paintings The novelty of the word for “art” during these years was accompanied by the equally new and much more controversial question of what constituted an appropriate aesthetic response. A moot point for existing patrons and theorists of fine paintings in Japan, it became real when thousands of artists and viewers were suddenly brought together in the new space of the exhibition hall. In a humorous newspaper story from 1884, a writer named Minami Shinji (1835–­1895) recounts how his narrator was inadvertently forced to play tour guide to a “country bumpkin” that he met on the train. The narrator takes the man to three popular sites around Ueno Park in Tokyo: the new museum (hakubutsukan), the old mausoleum of the Tokugawa shoguns, and finally the government-­sponsored Domestic Painting Exhibition. “No sooner did I take him into the painting exhibition,” he says, than [the man] cried hyaa! in utter surprise while looking in every direction [kyorokyoro], and I realized I’d made an absolutely horrible mistake. He was making such a racket that the other spectators were also . . . looking at him and laughing. I was really vexed. But then again when I took a step back and thought about what a rustic like him was used to looking at, it seemed to make sense . . . the only landscape painting he ever saw was on the big plate underneath the sushi.77

At first it seems as if the rustic visitor is impressed with the paintings on view, but ultimately we learn that his comments are negative ones. “‘It’s because our painters didn’t work hard at all this year that our nation’s paintings have seen a permanent end to their progress!’ [The rustic] was making these sorts of negative comments exclusively,” said the narrator, so I thought with all that complaining he must be getting hungry, and I whisked him out of there . . . to go have a cup of tea around Hirokōji Street. While we were eating I asked him what he liked best out of the day, and he said it was the painting exhibition! . . . He had seemed so unhappy that I thought I was doing him a favor by getting him out of there, but the fact that he said seriously, “It was my favorite part” just goes to show that even for a country bumpkin he is an absolute ignoramus, making a fool of people.78 135

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The narrator had twice been had. Not only did he miscalculate the rustic’s initial response to the paintings, he then erred in interpreting the vitriolic comments as an expression of displeasure. Curious, too, is the way in which the rustic echoes more official rhetoric about “our nation’s paintings” and “progress,” willingly taking on the government’s standards and then criticizing the exhibition for falling short. In bringing together viewers of unprecedented diversity, the exhibition could not preclude the variety of interactions they would have with the objects, interactions that went far beyond the attitude of reverent beholding to encompass humor, eroticism, anger, and fear. This appears to be the theme of a now well-­known woodblock print from the 1872 exhibition in Tokyo (fig. 4.13). Among the exhibits sent to Vienna in 1873 was a ceremonial gilt bronze ridgecap that once crowned Nagoya

4.13  Shōsai Ikkei, Thirty-­six Playful Selections of Famous Places in Tokyo: The Exhibition at the Former Shōheizaka, 1872. Woodblock print. Aoki Collection. Photograph courtesy of the Chiba City Museum of Art.

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castle, where it had until 1868 served as a symbol of ruling authority under the shogun. The argument here is that the object retained its old power despite having been civilized by the exhibition or “captured” in a custom-­built vitrine. Yet it retains this power only for the rustic or uneducated, who are presented as politically and intellectually outdated: still attentive to the representational codes of the old regime that had oppressed them, and still under the spell of images in a literal way. The coy depiction of the bowled-­over peasant with the view of his loincloth obscured by an opportunely placed foot was something that appeared now and again in Utagawa-­ school actor prints, and the connection with the theater is not irrelevant. Here it plays another function, modeling a mode of response to objects and images that is not exclusively visual and individual, ennobling and serene, but instead bodily, collective, and passionate, governed by awe or fear.79 In emphasizing these distinctions I do not want to imply that pre-­Meiji Japan lacked a public audience for images or that viewers then were somehow under the spell of representation in a more literal way.80 In fact, in their address of a broad segment of the population and their rootedness in the social and political concerns of urban life, ukiyo-­e prints and printed books had serious points of overlap with the role of the image in the age of the hakurankai. Like images at the world’s fair, ukiyo-­e anticipated and were received by large numbers of ordinary viewers, who had the opportunity to view and discuss them as a crowd. Yet ukiyo-­e and other popular imagery comprised the category of visual production that Meiji officials would most vigorously try to purge from the realm of artistic production, and it happened at the same time that Tsubouchi Shōyō was working to distinguish the category of the shōsetsu from the haishi and other forms of late Edo popular fiction, which he deliberately lumped together with ukiyo-­e.81 Nihonga and ukiyo-­e represented a socially loaded stylistic distinction but also fundamentally different conceptions of aesthetic response. The pre-­Meiji public sphere for images and art criticism was shaped by the kabuki theater, where audiences gathered to watch a performance together in real time and became consumers of the first body of art criticism in Japan, which was theater criticism.82 As in ukiyo-­e and related images, beauty per se was secondary or irrelevant to the main effects of kabuki. Topical and trend-­based, it relied on a viewing public whose tastes were shaped by what went on in the playhouse: acting and interaction, gossip, news, and tricks meant to create suspense or elicit momentary thrills. Similarly, nineteenth-­ century Japanese prints often depict extreme actions and emotions, the occult, and the sexual. In this sense, nineteenth-­century prints, post-­Hokusai, tended toward overstimulation or sensory overload: lines double back on each other or fold into brain-­teasing intricacies; patches of shading appear like cavities drilled in pictorial space without aim or logic; and there are overwhelming eruptions of graphic vigor, intricate patterns, disquieting subjects, and strident color combinations (figs. 4.14).83 The pictorial strategies of these images and the types of viewer interaction they prefigured extended across a range of genres and the various schools and workshop 137

Decadence and the Emergence of Nihonga Style

4.14  Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The

lineages into which the practice of nineteenth-­century Japanese painting was di-

Earth Spider Slain by Raikō’s

vided, both before and directly following the Meiji Restoration. They reached large

Retainers, ca. 1838. Woodblock print; vertical ōban triptych. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

numbers of ordinary viewers through three main channels: the woodblock print (in single sheets and books), the public shrine or temple picture hall (edono, emadō),

William Sturgis Bigelow Collec-

and authorized and unauthorized reiterations of a single, striking composition by a

tion, 11.38196a–­c. Photograph

number of different—­and even rival—­artists (see chapter 6).84 Because they drew on

© 2014, Museum of Fine Arts,

current topics of conversation, the theater, and tourist sites, they did more than just

Boston.

circulate, generating verbal and visual responses that in turn prolonged their fame. 85 Late ukiyo-­e thus faced an inherently vulgar and unconventional range of subject matter with an equally novel range of visual devices. The result was an identifiable late Edo popular style characterized by bright colors, broad gestural strokes, tense dramatic poses, crowded compositions, and play between surface and shadowy depth—­the same style that would first come to be labeled “decadent” by Western connoisseurs in the early twentieth century.

Decadence and Dissent In her study The Concealment of Politics, the Politics of Concealment, Atsuko Ueda demonstrates that late Edo fiction and its Meiji continuations made political dissent possible and spoke to those who had been rendered invisible by early Meiji policies. As a result, these literary subgenres became off-­limits for modern Japanese fiction: the repressed modernities of late Edo fiction (to borrow David Wang’s for138

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mulation) were repressed because they were politically potent. Tsubouchi and others invested in the existing Meiji sociopolitical order had systematically removed the novel from the overt political sphere and then concealed that process of concealment. To this it might be added that that body of literature and the analogous—­ and related—­body of popular imagery and ukiyo-­e were already outcast or abject to the extent that they were associated with the politically disenfranchised in the late Edo period and perpetuated themselves only through constant struggle against censorial crackdowns, government-­imposed economic sanctions, and class-­based ideological condemnation. It is here that early twentieth-­century Western conceptions of nineteenth-­century Japanese art as ailing or decadent deserve attention. Arthur Davidson Ficke begins his 1915 chapter “The Decadence,” on the woodblock print post-­Kiyonaga, by noting, “We find the sound and classic figures of Kiyonaga gradually replaced by new and differing types—­ slender drooping bodies, wonderfully piled coiffures, elaborately brocaded robes; and the virile drawing of the earlier master gives way to the sinuous curves and arresting plasticity of the new designers.”86 Like Rossetti, Ficke heightens the sense of wanton indulgence by heaping descriptive phrases and adjectives upon each other, his florid verbal description itself becoming a hedonistic pleasure. Described in Ficke’s terms, the decadent is languid, alluring, and female, not ar4.15  Vincent Van Gogh, Japanese Courtesan (after Eisen),

tistically impoverished but overly concerned with con-

1887. Oil on canvas, 10 × 60.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum,

sumption, adornment, and the visual. In this sense, the

Amsterdam.

depicted women’s elaborate coiffures and brocades, their vain indulgence in fashion (as opposed to art), become a metaphor for the excesses embraced by the artist and the beholder: Ficke’s description recalls Van Gogh’s copy of a print by Keisai Eisen in which the face is intense and elongated, with large hairpins overtaking the head in a manner that exploits and embraces distortion for its visual interest quite apart from beauty in the traditional sense. The decadent has little to do with classic beauty but everything to do with the visual (fig. 4.15). 139

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To be decadent is also to be late in time. Epigoni mourn the creativity and grandeur of an earlier time and feel destined to copy, reiterating in their own inferior, mannered, and materially or technically deficient way the achievements of past masters: “Every line betrays the weariness of the hour,” wrote Ficke, “and its craving for novelty.”87 The notion of the decadent was also pliant: in the case of Japanese prints, which in fact markedly increased in technical prowess and breadth of subject matter over time, technical brilliance was itself labeled a downfall even as it was admired for its skill and sumptuousness. Finally, the decadent is political. The notion of a decline in artistic quality as representative of a political, moral, and cultural falling-­off, the loss of a mandate to rule, already appears in Fukuda’s 1881 text The Origins of the Way of Japanese Painting (Nihon gadō no kigen). When he demands “the nobility of tone, the beauty and fullness of color, the relaxed elegance of form” as essential qualities of good art, Fukuda also adds, “and therefore all the civilized countries prize [art], and it is said that its rise and fall foretells a country’s degree of civilization or boorishness, as well as its rise and fall.”88 If we believe Ficke, writing in 1915, then Fenollosa himself was among the earliest to associate social unrest with the so-­called decadent element of late Edo visual culture. “It was,” Ficke quotes Fenollosa as saying, a period of crisis in Tokugawa affairs. The cleavage between the aristocratic and the plebeian strata of Japanese life, which had become placidly conscious of itself in the days of Genroku, now threatened a moral, a social, if not a political disruption. The new factors of popular education—­art, prints, illustrated books, the theatre, novels, contact with the Dutch at Nagasaki—­all had stimulated the spirit of inquiry and of unrest which had penetrated back in investigation to the facts of the Shogun’s usurpation; which wrote new, popular histories of the national life; which gave plays and novels a semi-­political aim. This deeper wave of self-­ consciousness on the part of the people was met by the authorities with sterner repressions. The better elements that might have drifted into improving the popular standards in pleasure and art were driven out by a strict censorship . . . which tended to isolate and give prominence to the coarser side of the popular feeling. . . . Thus there arose a sort of alliance between the theatre and the houses of pleasure on the one hand, and the disaffected among the literary and political agitators upon the other. Men, great men who sowed the seeds of the revolution which ripened in 1868, had to flee for asylum, not to Buddhist temples, but to the labyrinths of the Yoshiwara, where, in the care of a romantic love lavished upon them by its then highly cultivated hetaerae, they could print and disperse, from their hidden presses, seditious tracts which set the heart of the nation on fire.89

In tones that oscillate between heroicization and dismissal, Fenollosa provides a sweeping diagnosis of the broader social and political circumstances behind the art of the last decades of the shogunal era. What Ficke and many other Western and 140

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Japanese commentators termed the decadence of late Edo culture was invariably tied to social unrest and to the rise of increasingly educated and vocal “plebian strata” to challenge the rationale behind artistic and intellectual pursuits that had previously been limited to the ruling elite. Fenollosa notes that print and theatrical culture played a crucial role in this process, as did the semiprivate social circles of Edo’s Yoshiwara brothel district and elsewhere. In this sense, his commentary implies a certain democratization of expression by a people who have come into their own. These comments show surprising insight into the pre-­Meiji basis for images as a mode of discussion in the public sphere. Yet they also reveal the sources of elite Meiji commentators’ dissatisfaction with the more public and discourse-­provoking forms of late Edo art, which manifested alternative modernities that they felt a need to repress. An 1882 issue of the Tokyo nichi nichi posted the following admonition on behalf of a government administrator: What Western thought calls bijutsu [the fine arts] is simply that which is noble in air, beautiful in colors, elegant in form, harmonious in tone, admirable in meaning, tasteful in subject, well proportioned, appropriately organized . . . and while satisfying all these aspects is generally pleasing to the eye. It soothes the thoughts even as it excites the spirit . . . suppressing mean and ungenerous feelings in the appreciator [kan’ōsha]. Thus the countries all place great value on it, for its rise and fall also tells the rise and fall of [nations].90

The text almost certainly draws on Fukuda’s Origins of the Way of Japanese Painting from the previous year. It reassures its readers that “fine art” does exist in Japan, but it restricts the meaning of art by insisting on a set of conservative Western notions about its nature and purpose.91 Japan’s administrators were already prejudiced against ukiyo-­e in the strict sense and against contemporary painting in general—­ especially that which catered to popular audiences—­not only because it went against imported notions of the arts, but also because of its uncomfortable associations with theater, sexuality, irreverence, and the lowbrow humor of the common classes, which was naturally often at the expense of elite authority. The impact of these views accordingly extended beyond the realm of verbal discourse, leading in the 1880s and 1890s to the emergence of an official, establishment aesthetic for Japanese painting—­one that sought to circumscribe what Westerners and Japanese alike would soon come to see as the “decadent” trends of the late Edo and early Meiji periods in favor of a style conducive to government agendas.92 These decades saw the attempt to secure Japanese fine art as such against the paradigm of ukiyo-­e, on the one hand, and against foreign allegations of Japanese art’s extinction or decline, on the other. In visual terms, nihonga emerged as the inverse of ukiyo-­e.

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5

Naturalizing the Double Reading

Hōgai’s paintings proceed from the study of nature [shasei]. —yokoyama kendō, “Kano Hōgai” (1917)1 Just around the time that [Hōgai] moved from Shiba-­Shinbori-­chō to Hongō Nishikata-­machi, I went over to get some glue at Tomonobu’s behest. This was the first time that I received a personal lesson from the master. [Hōgai said:] “In making pictures, sketching from life [shasei] is foremost. After that one must learn from the ancients, but you must not simply imitate them as has been done thus far. . . .” As he said this, he put both hands into the front opening of his kimono and extracted them [exclaiming], “Motonobu here, Tan’yū there,” and out fluttered a rolled-­up painting. “It lacks unity,” [he said]. “If you would look at copious paintings by the old masters, copy them [mosha], and learn them well, then you should put them in your belly and digest them, for they won’t be of any use to you until they appear again [in your work] as your own.[”] This he taught me with care. . . . The paper which he gave to me as wrapping for the glue was his disused scrap of paper [i.e., the rejected painting], and it was published last year in the Collected Works of Hōgai as an autumn landscape panel. Even now I have it in my keeping, and whenever I see it I think of that lesson: it is always teaching me. —oka fuhō, Shinobugusa (Longing Grass) (1910)2

The story of Japanese painting’s modernization often suggests that art became less convention-­bound and more naturalistic under the sway of Western models of illusionism and originality. Beginning in the late Meiji period, artists such as Hōgai are portrayed as abandoning past approaches to picture-­making in order to start over, if not exactly with a blank slate, then at least with the goal of “proceeding from natural observation” and becoming innovators. Perceptual fidelity was a convenient goal for twentieth-­century critics and narrators because it eliminated the need to acknowledge how pictures were phrased in terms of other pictures—­late Edo-­period images, for example, or Qing or Western ones. In this sense, the rhetoric of modern Japanese painting’s origins in the study of nature worked to naturalize modern Japanese art by making it seem as though it had arisen smoothly, uncontentiously, and of its own accord.3 In reality, existing motifs and iconography, not to mention earlier notions of nature, illusion, and originality, were appropriated and modified to suit the new criteria for painting in the Meiji period. This chapter evaluates the context surrounding natural forms in the late Edo and Meiji periods, arguing that it was not so much that painting became more realistic as that the idea of how a painting could be legible to its audiences changed. This process involved the widespread ideal of the transparent image, a work of art that would be equally accessible and praiseworthy to all viewers, regardless of background. The discussion centers around a large painting now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, known as Hawks in a Ravine (ca. 1885) by Kano Hōgai (fig. 5.1). Despite its large size, this painting has received minimal scholarly attention for several reasons. First, in contrast to Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) (fig. 6.1), Hawks in a Ravine had few opportunities to impact audiences in Japan, having been acquired by William Stur143

5.1  Kano Hōgai, Hawks in a

gis Bigelow and taken to America a few years after its completion. Second, writers

Ravine, ca. 1885. Ink and color on

have tended to take a matter-­of-­fact stance toward the painting, emphasizing its

paper, 93.2 × 165.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Exhibited at the first Painting Apprecia-

“Western perspective and chiaroscuoro,” based on the standard narrative that art grew more naturalistic after the Meiji Restoration.4 This standard account is particu-

tion Society Exhibition, 1885.

larly ill-suited to Hawks in a Ravine, which, though clearly different from Edo-­period

Photograph © 2014, Museum of

works, is in many ways profoundly unnaturalistic. Third, and partially related to this

Fine Arts, Boston.

seeming failure of naturalism, is the latent sense that this painting is not among Hōgai’s most successful works: it has an awkward, even pedestrian quality that deserves further exploration. If Hawks in a Ravine, and Hōgai’s paintings in general, do not fit with the standard assumption that Japanese painting simply became more naturalistic after the Meiji Restoration, then why did early commentators insist on situating him within the discourse of shasei, or sketching from nature? In the mid-­Meiji period, the will to natural depiction itself signified modernism in art and letters, and until the 1890s or later, Japanese naturalism was also ratified by a majority of Western viewers. In the shared perceptual environment of the exhibition hall, the notion of fidelity to nature became an important means of linking different viewers and requirements, 144

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for almost everyone could agree on the preferability of some form of representational fidelity—­be it the literal study of nature or the more spiritual and formal expression of the “idea” of nature that Fenollosa advocated. In this environment, varied approaches to nature and its pictorial representation were engaged and confronted, and the ambiguities between them exploited, in ways that allowed Japanese and Western viewers to believe, briefly at least, in the validity of natural depiction as a universal endeavor.

Naturalism as a Rhetorical Strategy In the passage from Oka’s 1910 memoir quoted at the opening of this chapter, Hōgai literally keeps his painted study of Kano Motonobu (1476–­1559) and Tan’yū (1602–­ 1674) in his belly (fuku, 腹)—­or rather, against it, tucked within the recesses of his clothing (fuku, 服). He advises Oka, the would-­be pupil, to prioritize the study of nature over that of the old masters, yet ironically it is Hōgai’s discarded painting that goes on “teaching” Oka long after its creator has died. At a glance, the proffered advice about transcending past masters and studying nature appears to reflect the attitude of a distinctively modern artist who is not content to copy (mosha) or imitate (mane) “as has been done thus far,” but turns, in theory at least, to natural observation and mimesis. But how much of this stance is reflective of Hōgai’s career, and how much is projected by Oka? An investigation of the narratives that artists, observers, and other commentators erected around the paintings reveals multiple phrases, images, and narrative tropes that invoke other images of “nature” and acts of artistic creation, both East Asian and European in origin. Just as the making of modern nihonga involved selecting and reframing certain visual elements from past art, the construction of a narrative of modern Japanese painting in the decades after Hōgai’s death relied on established East Asian tropes of the artist’s biography in earlier times, now cross-­referenced with Western narratives about artistic genius and pictorial representation as the product of the artist’s direct confrontation with nature. Far from offering a unique image of Hōgai as a modern artist, Oka’s early twentieth-­century account draws heavily on established examples of the artist’s biography in East Asia. Chronicles of Chinese artists such as Fan Kuan (ca. 990–­ ca. 1030) in the Xuanhe huapu (The Xuanhe Painting Catalogue, purportedly twelfth century) contain similar elements: In the beginning, Fan Kuan studied the method of Li Cheng. After realizing the futility of this, he said, “My predecessors always found their methods in natural phenomena. So for me to take people as my teachers cannot compare with learning from natural phenomena[”]. . . . Dwelling in . . . [the] foothills of Mt. Chongnan and Mt. Hua, he observed the changing effects of atmosphere and light so difficult to represent in painting.5 145

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Just as natural observation trumps the study of individual Chinese and Japanese masters in the Hōgai anecdote, the twelfth-­century biography portrays the famous master Fan Kuan as departing from Li Cheng in order to take nature as his supreme teacher—­although in doing so, he carefully grounds his choice in those of his predecessors. The text shows that long before the development of observation-­based representation as a modernist, Western empirical stance, the idea of basing one’s painting on the interaction with observed phenomena played a rhetorical role in established discourses of innovation and originality. Before dwelling further on the many problems inherent in textual constructions of either originality or naturalism, let us consider Hōgai’s painting.

Hawks in a Ravine Almost a meter tall by over a meter and a half wide, Hawks in a Ravine is executed in ink and very light colors on paper and reads as a colossal ink painting: adhering to the conventions of Southern Song–­style one-­corner composition, the main motifs, two large birds, some old trees, a waterfall, and a rocky precipice, are concentrated at the lower right. A third raptor enters from the upper left, with a large, unfigured expanse at the painting’s center. This central unfigured zone would have been ordinary in the intimate format of a fan, album leaf, or small hanging scroll, but in Hōgai’s painting it is so large and prominent that it leaves the viewer confronting an abyss. Darkness rises up from the lower margin. A few gnarled tree branches are just visible through the thick mist of ink washes. Spattered ink and vertical striations add further complexity to the darkness. A cluster of splashed ink hovers toward the left end of the lower margin, where it is too large to be read as a simple accident. From there, ink droplets seem to ascend and dissolve into the less heavily shaded background at the painting’s center. Because such a small percentage of the picture surface is given over to discrete motifs, the experience of standing before Hawks in a Ravine might be categorized as bodily and temporal. The painting draws the beholder into an eerie, mist-­filled space. Ink washes and large, unfigured expanses were not, of course, new to Japanese painting. Hasegawa Tōhaku’s evocative sixteenth-­century Pine Grove screens continue to beguile viewers today, and Shiokawa Bunrin’s 1864 landscape screens (see fig. 3.3) also employ broad areas of pale, nearly monochromatic washes. These works showcase the painters’ control of the medium. Bunrin was admired precisely for his ability to resolve passages of wash into delicately volumetric rocks, trees, and houses; Tōhaku’s approach, while simpler, nonetheless comes across as rhythmic, controlled, and synecdochal: a few trunks and branches convey a forest. The object’s status as a three-­dimensional folding screen further mitigates the intervening areas of blank space, since the screen’s natural folds create depth. In Hawks in a Ravine, by contrast, we are literally made to stare at a chasm, a negative space activated by

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shading, striations, and splashes of ink and in contrast with the clarity of the birds and tree branches. The birds in the painting are carefully painted and posed. Read from right to left, they appear to progress temporally: the first is at rest with wings outstretched; the second is about to take flight; and the third, in the upper left corner of the composition, makes its return. The two birds at right are minutely outlined and shaded with ink, white pigment, and brown and yellow washes to create a sense of volume, and the soft texture of the feathers is rendered through the blurring of ink and brown pigment in a “boneless” or unoutlined (mokkotsu) method (fig. 5.2). The central precipice is sharply defined against a background of white paper held in reserve to represent the waterfall, and saturated ink wash suggests the depths of a ravine

5.2  Detail of figure 5.1.

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below. At the upper left, it is as if the mist has been pushed downward by a concave indentation, forming a passageway through which the third bird enters the space of the painting. Like Jurōjin (see fig. 3.7) and other paintings by Hōgai in the Sesshū mode, Hawks in a Ravine references a form of traditional East Asian eccentricity that is fundamentally at odds with the illusionistic premise of Western art. The enormous painting does employ certain types of illusionism. Its gloomy chiaroscuoro resembles late Edo varieties, which were likely based on Western engravings.6 The birds’ wings convey a sense of volume but are clearly not based on anatomical analysis; similarly, the broken, grotesquely twisted trees, purple dots of moss, oddly shaped peaks, and rock faces seem far from any believable referent in the real world. By contrast, we find an abundance of referents for these forms among other East Asian paintings: the distorted trees, moss dots, and unusual rock formations are easily traced back not only to the eccentric or untrammeled (ippin) models of Sesshū and Sesson but also as far as Liang Kai, whom Japanese viewers associated with the motif of “old trees.”7 The choice of hawks departs from known models, but the painting otherwise fits within the established East Asian thematic category of birds and old trees in a “cold forest” (kanrin, 寒林) or a desolate autumn or winter landscape, a theme that Chinese poetic sources linked to political exile and to the upright isolation of the superior man.8 In this sense, the painting’s eerie, barren sensibility was fully grounded in past painting models. As with the Jurōjin paintings, however, Hōgai seems to further challenge the “familiar” eccentric mode, pushing it in unfamiliar directions that diverge from past examples. For example, the semicircular outline at the upper left is a more drastic version of similar compositional strategies in the works of Minchō and Sesshū, where an ink contour is used to suggest an opening in the mist or a cave.9 The vertical lines that mark the abyss evoke the puzzling striations in Sesshū’s famous Winter Landscape (1486), though they go even further than Sesshū in diverging from the ordinary parameters of representation. Finally, the birds’ mysterious actions, the jarring purple accents, the drastic experiments with chiaroscuoro, and the painting’s enormous scale all carry us beyond any known precedents of birds and winter trees, essentially estranging us from an established category that was already functioning as an expression of isolation and eccentricity. In this sense, Hawks in a Ravine is irreducibly strange, having arisen at the uneven juncture between dramatically different definitions of “nature,” “innovation,” “artistry,” and even what it means to be a painting.

Exhibiting Hawks in a Ravine The anomalous qualities of Hawks in a Ravine can be traced back to the circumstances of its creation, when it was forced to address both Japanese and American audiences based on new and existing ideas about Japanese painting. It was exhibited 148

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at the first Kangakai Exhibition (Kangakai taikai) in 1885, where it won second prize. As seen in chapter 3, Kangakai (the Painting Appreciation Society) was a painting society founded by Fenollosa in Tokyo but conceived with the larger goal of enriching Japanese painting, both for “[Japan’s] own sake” and “for humanity’s sake,” as a global commodity “which the whole world cannot afford to let die.”10 In this sense, although Hawks in a Ravine was produced for exhibition in Tokyo, it is likely that Hōgai also treated it as a specific commission for his American patrons, Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow. As noted in the press surrounding the 1885 exhibition, Bigelow provided the prize money; he also ended up acquiring Hawks in a Ravine and several other Kangakai works, likely on the basis of his status as the group’s financial backer. A wealthy Bostonian surgeon who had traveled to Japan in 1882 with Edward Sylvester Morse, Bigelow was then in the process of amassing a collection of premodern Japanese art with Fenollosa’s help; following his return to America in 1890 he deposited the Kangakai works with the rest of his collection.11 Fenollosa was dissatisfied with the showing at the 1882 and 1884 Domestic Painting Exhibitions. His own conception of a good painting placed a premium on the work’s exhibitability. He told Kangakai artists that, in the past, the traditional confining of [paintings] . . . to the awkward and inexhibitable form of [the] makimono [handscroll], kept the public quite shut out from participating in the appreciation, made the forms small and trivial, and frequently led to these very paintings becoming only expensive playthings. . . . [T]reat these pictures in such a way that they shall have strong effect at a distance, if hung up, say, on the walls of a large room.

“To do all this,” he added, “[the] Japanese have not, as some suppose, got to resort to foreign methods of oil painting. But it lies quite within the qualities of pure Japanese art. . . . Is there no third thing between minute makimono, and large oil paintings?”12 In several ways, Hōgai’s Hawks in a Ravine attempted to be that “third thing,” although, as we have already begun to see, this immediately made it an anomaly within the history of Japanese painting: compositionally it resembles a more intimate ink painting, but its dimensions match those of a large, horizontally oriented Western painting and anticipate the environment of the exhibition halls at Japan’s domestic and international exhibitions (see figs. 1.9–­1.11). And while it is currently mounted as a prodigious hanging scroll, it is possible that Hōgai and Fenollosa originally intended the work to be framed: photographs of Fenollosa’s Tokyo residence in the 1880s show framed paintings by Gahō and Hōgai, and beginning in the Meiji period a number of premodern artworks were also mounted and framed to facilitate their presentation on the walls of Western or Western-­style museum structures (fig. 5.3). The Meiji government organizers of the Domestic Painting Exhibition of 1884 also requested that all submissions be framed, so Fenollosa’s expectations would not have appeared unreasonable: in fact, around this time the forerunner of the Tokyo 149

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5.3  Ogawa Kazumasa, interior of Fenollosa’s home in Tokyo with framed Japanese paintings, mid-­ 1880s. Photograph. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

National Museum in Ueno commissioned a large number of copies or reworkings of horizontal sections of handscrolls, which it prepared for display in black lacquer frames.13 The new Meiji-­era expectation that a painting should have size and grandeur helps to explain why, compositionally, Hawks in a Ravine looks like a small album leaf or hanging scroll painting blown up to enormous proportions. In sum, Hawks in a Ravine came into being under layered circumstances: an American sponsored the picture, yet with the intent of impacting Japanese viewers in Tokyo. This is nearly the inverse of the situation described in chapter 2, in which Japanese artists and craft producers were following Japanese advice to make objects for export to the West, and it hints at the reasons why the painters would take Fenollosa’s advice in the first place. It was not only that the painters were short on patrons generally; they reasoned, with the government’s encouragement, that foreign viewers were one key to their livelihood. Hōgai’s painting was therefore caught between different audiences and different modes of presentation, and in Derridean fashion, this instability extended to the areas around the painting: its frames, display context, and even its referents in the outside world.14 This brings us to one of the painting’s main problems: while historical records in the Boston museum label the work as Hawks in a Ravine, Japanese records from the 1885 Kangakai exhibition show that it was first exhibited under the title Eagles (Gunshū zu).15 Not only is the umbrella term of naturalism generally a poor 150

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fit for the painting, but Hōgai’s fancifully drawn animals do not appear to match any particular group of birds. Given that the hawk (taka, 鷹) and eagle (washi, 鷲) had different connotations for audiences in nineteenth-­century Japan, the matter of the painting’s title reflects a broader state of natural and iconographic indeterminacy. Before we can address this matter, however, it would be beneficial to review the cultural and art-­historical stakes of naturalism and the depiction of nature in general.

The Natural Attitude in the West and Japan Thus the old paintings are by no means merely aberrant and fantastic. For the fact is that the appearances of things were quite different then. —zhang yanyuan (815–­8 75) 16

Early modern approaches to the depiction of nature in Japan and the West developed divergently and corresponded to vastly different pictorial genres and treatments, but they exhibit two fundamental similarities. The first is an endemic vagueness: not only do the terms “nature” and “naturalism” mean different things at different times, but in any single time and place they appear to have multiple meanings, underscoring that the will to observe and depict nature is a rhetorical stance that is individually determined.17 There is no one method of producing an exact copy of nature, only various tools designed to produce “reality effects” in viewers.18 In this context, it is useful to consider Maruyama Ōkyo and his school, long recognized as a technical model for those paintings that asserted the strongest claim on naturalism in the Meiji period (fig. 5.4). “[Ōkyo] looks only at things / And copies their forms with authenticity,” wrote Motoori Norinaga in 1799.19 By claiming that Ōkyo looked only at things, Norinaga was contrasting his with the more common practice of making paintings by looking primarily at other paintings. In fact, Ōkyo combined and adapted a number of existing painting techniques, some of which were previously found in albums of sketches such as those that he and Kōrin copied from Tan’yū (and that are in turn partially based on Chinese models), others of which were abbreviative methods to suggest forms caught at a glance. Ōkyo’s style reflected a new “prioritizing of looking,” as Timon Screech has observed, but also a new blend of conventions for representing things in the world that was based on an overwriting of existing Kano, Tosa, and ukiyo-­e school conventions—­with more conventions.20 Significantly, however, Ōkyo’s success depended on the notion that he freed viewers from convention as such—­a fact of which no less a mind than Motoori Norinaga claimed to be convinced. This brings us to a second fundamental similarity between European and Japanese tropes of naturalism: both are predicated on a rhetorical claim for the accurate transcription of nature (“a copying of forms . . . with authenticity”), a denial of convention, a denial even, in the most extreme cases, of the style or hand of the artist.21 Citing its reception by contemporaries such as Shiba Kōkan and Rai San’yō, 151

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5.4  Maruyama Ōkyo, Pine Trees

Screech proposes that Ōkyo’s painting “posed as a kind of styleless style . . . hiding

in Snow (detail), mid-­eighteenth

its debts to the past and to abroad, and announcing it was the pure conflation of ico-

century. Ink and gold powder on paper, 155 × 362 cm; pair of six-­ fold screens. Mitsui Memorial Museum.

nography with observation.”22 For some, the dissolution of style and the attainment of a perfect copy was an ultimate threat to be guarded against. This was especially true of Edo-­period literati painters, who, together with their Chinese and Korean contemporaries, criticized illusionistic paintings as lacking the requisites of ink tonality and “the spirit of antiquity.”23 Yet for others, especially from the Meiji period onward, the attainment of a perfect copy was an end to be striven toward, for it suggested the attainment of a “pure” relationship between the painter and the observed subject (nature) without the intervention of past masters or models. The notion of style in the sense of a personal style or hand is even more complex in the case of the Kano painter, who was trained to master a number of preexisting styles that client and painter alike knew by name. This practice originally reflected the craftsmanly position of the painter, whose status and identity were subservient to that of the patron, with whom he consulted closely in producing the work. 24 Yet this multiplicity of preexisting styles, some of which explicitly bore the names of other masters, did not lead to the suppression of the individual name or talents of their Kano executor; instead, these styles, which were highly, but not absolutely, correlated with particular themes and genres of painting, themselves became the expressive idiom of the artist. Precisely because their characteristics and contextual identity were familiar to artist and patrons, the choice of a particular style or mode of rendering was a way in which an artist could construct his or her identity with respect to past masters and masterpieces. Returning to the Oka anecdote, in which Hōgai criticizes his own painting as a

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disjointed pastiche of existing masters (“here Motonobu, there Tan’yū”), it is easy to see that in Hōgai’s case, as in the earlier tale of Fan Kuan, “nature” is invoked not as the potential object of an Essential Copy but as an antihistorical attitude that would dislodge a painter from past conventions, enabling him to form his own style. Oka’s Hōgai notes that any painting that relies too much on the study of old masters necessarily “lacks unity,” for its copied and reconstituted trees, boulders, and other motifs refer primarily to the disparate hands of their inventors, and only secondarily to real trees and boulders—­that is, to nature. Against the model of nature, the individual brush styles resemble Norman Bryson’s description of style as “informational noise,” announcing the hand of this or that artist and consequently revealing the extent to which the painter’s work is based on a series of inherited conventions.25 The study of nature represents an idealized return to a simple, immediate relation between the artist and the external world, free from the accumulated marks and encodings of past masters.

Recalibrating the Rhetoric of the Real The vision of naturalism as a transparent means of representation, capable of transcending localized interpretive communities, held increasing appeal for painters and viewers in Meiji Japan. In 1908, for example, the pioneering art historian and literary critic Fujioka Sakutarō wrote: Western painting, which proceeds from shasei [the study of nature], seeks first, following the attainment of overall technical competence, to paint with nature as its model. In this way, leaving aside the question of [the painting’s] gaucheness or virtuosity [of handling], beholders can likewise be expected to critique it against the model of nature. But those [paintings] produced in accordance with shai [ideational painting] . . . exhibit a prodigious gap with respect to nature.26 In order to copy a Mi-­dot mountain, or recognize a dry brush-­method river,27 artists and audiences are bound by a mutual agreement attained only through study, so that one can neither wield the brush nor critique paintings until one has arrived at a thorough [understanding] of these agreements [or conventions]. . . . They are a peculiar characteristic of nihonga, and to dissolve them is also to endanger the life of nihonga itself. . . . There are those who would preserve Japanese painting without its conventions, but to discard the skin and keep the meat is a task that awaits one who shows considerable skill with the knife.28

Fujioka’s analysis betrays a wistful appreciation, even envy, of Western painting’s presumed universality, which he suggests can be judged and appreciated by anyone based on its degree of fidelity to the real world and not on cultivated knowledge of brush idioms of the past. It is no coincidence that Fujioka wrote his comments as part of an exhibition review, in which he duly noted that Japanese 153

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viewers thronged the display of oil paintings while in the nihonga section “even the gallery attendant drowsed.”29 His article began with praise for Takeuchi Seihō’s “marvelous skill in [expressing] the animal vitality” of what would become his famous nihonga masterpiece, Chained Monkeys and Penned Rabbits, an animal subject that enthralled viewers with its skillful representations of nature and its immediacy (fig. 5.5). In coming years Fujioka would also embark on a history of Japanese painting in the Edo period, which he felt was already neglected and misunderstood in his own time. Yet this legacy of misunderstanding seemed only to confirm his conclusion that Japanese paintings were bound by their conventions to address an elite audience of the learned or initiated, while Western paintings could be evaluated against nature itself and were thus universally accessible. The same manner of thinking appears in one Japanese journalist’s experience viewing a historical kabuki play some years earlier, in 1873. According to the journalist:

5.5  Takeuchi Seihō, Chained Monkeys and Penned Rabbits, 1908. Ink and color on silk, pair of two-­fold screens, each 163.5 × 183 cm. Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Exhibited at the Second Ministry of Education Exhibition (Bunten), 1908.

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A foreigner was in attendance [and sat] among the crowds. Although it was unclear whether or not he understood our language, how must he have perceived the most awful, unbearable part when Shibata [Katsuie] publicly humiliates Hideyoshi? When I turned to look at him, [I noticed that] he was staring angrily [at the stage]. Even though he didn’t know our language, that foreigner, seeing a depiction that follows the truth [ma ni haru no narifuri], naturally grasped the goings-­on and expressed his joy or anger [as the scene demanded]. For this reason [in our theater] we should always avoid falsehood, prizing techniques that pursue the truth.30

The point is followed by a counterexample. During a performance of a Coxinga (Kokusen’ya) play on the same occasion, as the ordinary spectators applaud the actors, the reporter steals a glance at the foreigner: He looked on, completely oblivious; he must have thought it all incredibly foolish.

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Some days later I learned that members of the Russian imperial family had been in attendance, and that they have decided to show such a play at their world’s fair [presumably the Nizhny Novgorod Fair of 1875]. As we gradually head toward enlightenment and foreigners, too, begin watching, it is all the more [pressing] that we should abandon old habits [within the theater].31

In the 1880s, artists began to experiment with modifying Japanese painting to suit these new conditions of viewing, including the premise that “foreigners, too, would be watching.” Here the understanding of natural depiction as transparent—­and thus outside the bounds of any local idiom, whether Western or Japanese—­would prove crucial to envisioning a new model of Japanese art.

In Search of Transparency This new understanding would first be put to use in the area of export art. Exporters and commissioners chaperoned a steady stream of custom-­made Meiji bronzes to foreign markets beginning with the Vienna World’s Exposition of 1873 and continuing into the early twentieth century.32 The famous censer with peafowl from the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris is a notable example of a Japanese work that flaunted its mimetic successes and technical mastery (see fig. 2.8). In doing so, it played to the market by picking up on what Western viewers had already begun to admire in Edo-­period okimono (figurines or small standing sculptures) and other objets d’art: a level of technical command and fidelity to nature that appeared to transcend cultural boundaries. Edmond de Goncourt’s diary entry of 1875 exemplifies this mindset: “I have a Japanese bronze, a duck, which is remarkably similar to the antique animals in the Vatican Museum. If one like it turned up in the excavations in Italy you would probably pay 10,000 francs for it. Mine cost me 120 francs.”33 Goncourt mentally transposes his Japanese duck—­and the thrill of “unearthing” it in a curio shop—­to an Italian excavation site. Rather than being marked with the signs of its Japaneseness, the work is warmly familiar: Goncourt compares it favorably with works of Western antiquity, but in calculating his bargain he goes even further by pretending that the vast difference in monetary value between it and the hypothetical Italian duck lies in the mere contingency of their cultural origin. Added to the sense of a bargain is the preciousness of the material itself, which has intrinsic value, is difficult to work, and makes the figure comparable to the ancient and Renaissance category of the small bronze statuette.34 Goncourt also writes of “a Japanese ivory, a monkey in the armor of a Taikun warrior. . . . It is like a jewel by Cellini. Imagine what this piece of ivory would be worth if the Italian artist had signed it with his point!” The fact that it wears Japanese armor is a minor detail, for Goncourt appraises it based on its universally appreciable “finish and perfection.”35 The monumental bronze peacocks by Suzuki Chōkichi (1848–­1919) entered directly into this category of appreciation.36 156

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The display of naturalistic copying may have been cleverly engineered from existing Japanese practices. According to Gregory Irvine, “The tree stump may have been cast from a real piece of wood, a process known to have been carried out by other nineteenth-­century Japanese metalworkers. The extremely realistic detailing of the birds suggests that the artist may have worked from live models, although the tradition of casting directly from dead animals also existed in Japan.”37 While it seems unlikely that the cast of an actual bird—­or an actual stump, for that matter—­ could have yielded this level of crispness, compositional balance, and detail, the process of taking an impression of the actual tree or animal provides the mental image of a perfect transfer from nature to art, theoretically obviating the gradient of human error associated with any practice of life sketching or modeling. The casting method would ensure that the object arose directly from nature—­free from corruption by localized conventions. Regardless of whether or not the Chōkichi bronze was produced in such a manner, the ideal suggests both a “trick” solution directed toward overtaking the presumed European mastery of representational fidelity, and the closest possible reach of “noiseless,” therefore scientific, representation within the value system of the late nineteenth-­century world’s fairs. The use of detailing and chiaroscuro in Hōgai’s Eagles (or Hawks in a Ravine) can also be interpreted as a gesture in the direction of naturalism and transparency, but unlike the peacock censer, we have seen that its success at creating a sense of actual illusion was compromised by a simultaneous commitment to the Chinese painting genre of winter birds and old, desolate trees. I would now like to suggest that instead of—­or in addition to—­these attempts to achieve a universally respected measure of representational fidelity, the painting endeavors to achieve semantic transparency for foreign and domestic audiences through its choice of natural subject matter, and particularly through use of the eagle.

Early to Mid-­Meiji Hawk and Eagle Representations and Their Prototypes In the Edo and early Meiji periods, hawks (taka) and eagles (washi) overlapped from a taxonomical point of view; even today, in English or Japanese, these are the common names for a large number of birds of prey that may or may not be closely related taxonomically. In general, though, the washi was the larger, less familiar, and more intimidating of the two; today it refers to a few species of Asian eagles and sea eagles that are seen only sparingly throughout the Japanese archipelago, but it also denotes carrion birds such as buzzards and vultures. Meanwhile, taka denotes species of hawks, falcons, and other smaller and more familiar predatory birds, including the birds used in falconry.38 While the terms washi and taka may have overlapped in denoting predatory birds, their pictorial identities were more distinct, having been governed by discrete visual conventions and contexts of appreciation since the medieval period. 157

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Depictions of taka were bound closely to two contexts: first, as auspicious images they served as New Year’s decorations, and second, they were depicted in conjunction with the sport of falconry (takagari).39 In the 1860s, Kawanabe Kyōsai produced A Pictorial Mirror of Falconry (Ehon taka kagami) in three fascicles, a pictorial and literary guide to and celebration of the elite male world of falconry. Providing detailed and labeled depictions of the gear, practices, and birds, along with copies of old paintings and classical poetry on falconry, the book proved to be so popular that Kyōsai added two more fascicles in the early Meiji period, and a new publisher reissued the entirety in 1879–­1880. Under the Tokugawa status system, the who, what, and where of falconry had been strictly regulated. In the early Meiji period, as wealthy commoners began to engage in the sport on their private lands, Kyōsai’s book functioned as a compendium of the previously inaccessible terminological intricacies, pageantry, and cultural trimmings that enhanced its appeal. Seventeenth-­through nineteenth-­century pictures of hawks or falcons (the word taka denotes both) were limited to a set number of specific types, each of which bore an explicit social function in the world of humans. The most common of these featured the bird as a symbolic motif with auspicious New Year’s associations, which centered on the felicitous resonances of the word taka. Taka literally meant “high” or “lofty” and could also express a state of material wealth or plenitude. Auspicious seasonal hanging scrolls, meant to be displayed around the time of the New Year, usually showed a stately hawk at rest on a single pine, a style of depiction that had its roots in Chinese and Muromachi-­period imagery. Later versions, such as Hiroshige’s vertical diptych, added a festive image of the red rising sun (fig. 5.6). Japanese depictions of taka also served as aestheticizations of the economy and precision of elite power. Large-­scale screen and sliding-­door images of falcons keeping watch on a somber winter pine or pursuing their prey, executed in the vigorous Chinese-­style brushwork that was itself associated with virility, were extremely popular among sixteenth-­century warlords and warriors. Taka portraits were even more explicitly associated with the sport of falconry. This elite genre, based on Chinese models and executed with fine lines and extreme precision, acted as both a celebration of and a surrogate for the fine animals 5.6  Utagawa Hiroshige, Hawk, Pine, and Rising Sun, 1852. Col-

it depicted. The birds are shown on their perches enlivened by a

or woodblock print; vertical diptych. Museum of Fine Arts,

variety of poses and accessories, carefully individuated and framed

Boston. Photograph © 2014, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

by their status accoutrements, just like human sitters.40

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The circumstances in which pictures of washi first rose to prominence, meanwhile, remain vague. They appear beside taka in mid-­to late seventeenth-­century bird sketches by Kano Tan’yū (1602–­1674) or paired with taka in a hanging scroll associated with the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Soga school. In painting, as in real life, they were relatively scarce, however, and were not a meaningful symbol within the context of elite life. Moreover, when they did appear as a widespread visual theme in the early eighteenth century, it was within the “low” genres of ukiyo-­e and kabuki, where their connotations were sardonic and playful. Imahashi Riko has suggested that washi were first established through ukiyo-­e prints around the circle of Torii Kiyomasu (active 1697–­1722).41 In these prints, the bird is perched in a pine tree in the manner of auspicious images. Rather than assuming a stately pose, however, it scours the ground for prey or sets its eye on a fleeing monkey, behavior that can be traced to the now-antiquated saying ue minu washi (the eagle that never looks upward), a reference to a person in the position of utmost authority, literally at the top of the food chain (fig. 5.7). At the same time, Imahashi shows that these illustrations do double duty by making reference to another more graphic proverb, kosaru o mitsuketa washi no yō ni—­“like an eagle that has found a baby monkey”—­describing a person who has chanced upon an opportunity too good to pass up. The discovery of the images’ roots in popular proverbs, where they were linguistically determined as washi and not taka, sheds light upon the subject as it appears in a number of well-­known works of Kawanabe Kyōsai, in which the “downward-­gazing ea5.7  Nishimura Shigenaga, Ue minu washi (The

gle” eyes or seizes a rabbit, monkey, or other (often surprisingly

Eagle Does Not Look Up), hand-­colored wood-

large) form of prey (fig. 5.8). These paintings suggest that viewers

block print; vertical hosoban. Tokyo National

relished the sight of a powerful bird taking up so large a prey,

Museum. Ex-­collection Hayashi Tadamasa.

but their bravura style—­an exuberant extension of the masculine virility of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century ink-­painted taka—­implies that the other impressive performance they embodied was that of the artist, whose gestural strokes evoke the swift movements of the raptor. This may help to explain the subject’s development among Torii school artists, who used a similar gestural idiom to describe the movements of the aragoto (“rough style”) actor.42 The difference between Kyōsai’s gestural portrayals of fierce washi and the restrained, delicate descriptions of taka in the Pictorial Mirror of Falconry also correlates with the change in his patronage circumstances and in the political connotations

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of his art during the Meiji period. While the Mirror of Falconry was a learned compendium of poetic, artistic, historical, and scientific sources on taka, produced for enthusiasts in the sport, the “wild” washi paintings are dominated by large-­scale compositions on silk and are usually dated to the mid-­Meiji period, when he began to paint for domestic and foreign exhibitions and for Western patrons. It would be misleading to imply, however, that the popularity of predation-­themed works on the whole was provoked by the emergence of the foreign market. It seems to have been Hokusai who established predation as a favorite theme of the nineteenth century, and Kyōsai’s Meiji works are heavily indebted to those of the earlier ukiyo-­e master. Hokusai repeatedly strayed from the established prototypes of the ue minu washi in his depictions of eagles. His startlingly unconventional eagles turn one eye skyward, humorously contradicting the saying that “the eagle does not look up” (fig. 5.9). It is also noteworthy that Hokusai’s eagle resembles his hawk as much as they both resemble creatures in nature; their identities are determined contextually, through their accoutrements, while even his deliberate shifting of the categories of eagle and fighting cock serves to preserve the established semantic distinctions between the two.43 Amid the general popularity of predation themes in late Edo Japan, the taka retained its auspicious characteristics and continued to be portrayed with the pine and rising sun in New Year’s decorations, while the washi was a more intimidating figure, often cast as a villain or interloper. This distinction is preserved in Meiji-­period newspaper articles, to judge from the sampling provided by Hayashi Jōji, who surveyed and reprinted stories on animals that appear 5.8  Kawanabe Kyōsai, Eagle Attacking a Mountain Lion,

in newspapers of the Meiji period. In his anthology,

1885. Ink and color on silk, 166.4 × 83.8 cm; one of a set

stories of taka are more prevalent in the early to mid-­

of four paintings of eagles and prey. Charles Stewart

Meiji and most frequently describe humorous or im-

Smith Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

pressive stories about trained birds used in falconry. By contrast, newspaper stories about washi, which appear after 1891 and continue through 1912, show the bird as a rare and violent predator whose occasional

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incursions into the human world often result in conflict between man and washi that ends in a sort of “victory” for one or the other.44

Found Art: Hawks and Eagles in Meiji Export Wares Meiji-­era exhibitions removed existing hawk and eagle imagery from their typical contexts and categories of appreciation, implicitly or explicitly positing new, foreign audiences for the images. During the same era in which eagles and other wild carnivores were being repackaged as exhibits for public entertainment and edification in the Ueno Zoo (founded in 1882), the washi in art underwent a similar process of reinterpretation.45 Kyōsai and Hōgai were not the only artists to paint washi in the 1880s. The motif is also found among the works of Shibata Zeshin, whose hanging-scroll diptych of an eagle gazing at his reflection in a waterfall is reproduced in Gonse’s L’art japonais (1883).46 A painting of eagles by Okakura Shūsui took fourth place at the same Painting Appreciation Society exhibition in which Hōgai exhibited his Eagles, and an eagle by Hōgai’s associate Hashimoto Gahō, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is also associated with the Painting Appreciation 5.9 Hokusai, Washi, from Ehon saishiki tsū, 1848. Private collection.

Society activities of the mid-­1880s.47 The motif also appeared in the Paris Salons of Japanese Painters of 1883 and 1884, the latter of which included a painting by Kyōsai entitled Eagle Carrying Away a Marcassin (probably a tanuki).48 The four large paintings on silk of eagles and their prey by Kyōsai that are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art may also have been produced for export. While these exhibition paintings of the 1880s were formally indebted to ukiyo-­e renditions of the “eagle that doesn’t look up,” they differed in their grandeur of scale and tendency to dramaticize the ferocious birds. These trends were carried even further during the last two decades of the Meiji period, which saw the emergence of large-­scale, naturalistically rendered paintings of washi as a popular theme in domestic exhibitions. The taka motif was not as favored within the context of public exhibition. The one notable exception, Suzuki Chōkichi’s Twelve Falcons of 1893, will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. How might we explain the increased prominence of the eagle motif during the last two decades of the Meiji period? This problem must be considered in light of the prominence of the eagle motif in Japan’s highly acclaimed export metalwork beginning in the 1870s. In 1875 the South Kensington Museum spent one thousand pounds (13 percent of its total purchases for the year) to acquire a hammered-iron incense burner in the form of a sea eagle from the collection of A. B. Mitford,

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secretary of the British Legation in Japan from 1866 to 1870 (fig. 5.10). The work was given pride of place in the museum’s galleries and was soon joined by the still more costly peacock censer.49 A number of similar pieces were produced for foreign exhibition and sale by Japanese metalworkers and are currently found in the Khalili collection (fig. 5.11).

5.10  Artist unknown (formerly attributed to Myōchin Muneharu), Incense Burner in the Shape of a Sea-­Eagle, ca. 1860. Hammered iron, 72.5 × 94 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum. 5.11  Suzuki Chōkichi, Incense Burner Crowned with an Eagle, 1870s. Cast bronze with gilding and shakudō, 280 × 130 cm. Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, M062.

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These elaborate works often fell into one of two categories: the incense burner, which we have already seen, and the articulated figure (jizai okimono), a curiosity developed by Edo-­period metalworkers as a surrogate for or complement to the real falcons kept as prize possessions by the ruling elite. The Tokyo National Museum contains an Edo-period example, a roughly life-­size falcon whose head, wings, and claws can be moved into a variety of positions. At once lifelike rendering and display of technical mastery, such figures were brilliantly successful as export objects. On some level, it appears that Japanese artists and exhibitors were familiar with the eagle’s status also as a prominent European and American symbol. Austria-­ Hungary and the United States were among the first nations to host Japan at international expositions, in 1873 and 1876, respectively, and the fact that both used the eagle as a national emblem may have made an impression on exhibition organizers such as Sano Tsunetami, who went on to play a central role in Japanese arts administration during the 1880s. Many elite houses of Europe also used the eagle as a family symbol.50 When the United States hosted its exposition in Chicago in 1893, Suzuki Chōkichi submitted a bronze eagle, while Imao Keinen made a polychrome painting of an eagle and monkey based in part on a model by Jakuchū. Thus, it seems that first in metalwork, and later in painting, preexisting washi motifs were selected in response to the prominence of similar eagle themes in the West. Significantly, it appears that the success of this motif abroad had repercussions for domestic imagery as well, giving rise to a new status for the eagle as Meiji motif. This calls into question the customary value-­laden distinction between export art and art for domestic consumption.

Transparent Allegory While hawk and eagle representations were thus part of the overall success of Japanese bird and flower painting abroad, they differ from other motifs in their implied or explicit violence and long history as symbols of military authority, in contrast to the ordinary bird and flower tropes of delicate natural order and transient beauty, connubial bliss, and fecundity. While foreign viewers may have generally appreciated Japanese bird and flower compositions for their naturalism, painted and sculpted birds of prey were distinguished by the force and resonance of their allegorical overtones. The sea eagle censer purchased by the the South Kensington Museum in 1875, a leering figure with outstretched wings, had many similarities to the bronzes of the celebrated animal sculptor Antoine-­Louis Barye, who died that same year. Like Barye’s works, Japanese bronzes could be divided into two categories: monumental showpieces, and works of corresponding quality and intricacy but small enough for private households. Their dramas of predation and combat visually codified the distinctively nineteenth-­century passion for nature as a “wild” realm useful in the allegorical description of human affairs, making prints by John James Audubon 163

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(1785–­1851) look stiff and awkward by comparison (fig. 5.12).51 As the grandiose eagle representations and other animal depictions were displayed in Japan before their travel abroad, the birds’ “fierceness” (mō) and “strength” (gō) would become open to new, overtly Meiji readings. Such an interpretation would seem plausible, for example, when Eagle with Cherry Blossoms by Fukui Kōtei (1865–­1939) was exhibited at the third competitive exhibition of the Japan Young Painters’ Association (Nihon Seinen Kaiga Kyōkai) in late June of 1894, during the early stages of the first Sino-­Japanese War.52 Consulting reviews in the Japanese newspapers and art journals, however, we find little evidence for such a symbolic reading. Reviewers praised the painting’s composition and animation as well as its clever juxtaposition of a powerful bird with delicate cherry blossoms. “The appearance of the eagle that has just captured a pigeon [or dove] is full of movement,” wrote one admiring critic. Another critic objected at length, however, to the “the deplorable error of having the cherry and wisteria bloom at the same time,” writing, “I have heard that there are many eagles in Hokkaido, where it might be possible to find a late-­blooming cherry hung with wisteria simultaneously in bloom. Could this be a scene of Hokkaido? If that is the case, then it should be entitled ‘Hokkaido Eagle and Cherry Blossoms.’” Taken as a whole, the critics’ discussion remains confined to the realm of the literal, centering on the painting’s formal properties and relation to reality 5.12  J. J. Audubon, Golden Eagle, from

rather than probing any allegorical level. In fact, the latter critic wages an attack on

Birds of America, from original drawings,

metaphor with every turn of phrase, writing, “The jury’s statement claims that ‘the

published 1827. Engraving and aquatint with watercolor, 96.7 × 65 cm. Library of Congress.

enormous eagle unleashes its rage,’ but . . . having obtained its meal the eagle should be happy. . . . The statement that ‘the flowers are smiling’ is [equally] ridiculous.”53 The critic holds the painting verbally and visually to the laws of nature, refusing to allow an allegorical reading of the powerful bird that grasps a hapless dove as blossoms scatter. The allegory nonetheless seems too powerful to deny, particularly given the painting’s timing and its unusual juxtaposition of an eagle with cherry blossoms, their boughs heavy with centuries’ worth of symbolism.54 The durability of such natural depictions in both the West and Japan owed much to the fact that the symbolic register remained latent. In sum, two types of transparency were at work in pictures of natural phenomena: first, as transcriptions of reality, and much like later wartime nihonga paintings, they pretended to be “innocent” of deeper meaning or ideology; second, as governed by “natural laws,” the meaning they did contain was supposed to be accessible to all viewers regardless of linguistic and cultural boundaries. We have already seen how this latter notion played into the nineteenth-­century view of nature as “a hos-

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tile and rugged landscape,” the template for a set of universal laws that also applied to the human political sphere, where, in the words of Alex Potts, “the struggle for survival and elemental conflict between (male) rivals is constantly being acted out.”55 In the case of naturalistic Japanese exhibition art, the “realities” of nature were themselves treated as a realm to which all viewers had access, regardless of prior learning and cultural background, and whose implications for the arena of human interaction were regarded as obvious. In this sense, it is not surprising to learn that Kyōsai’s Snake Encoiling a Pheasant was originally intended for the Vienna Exposition of 1873: the work shows the attacking snake in the moment of realizing that it is being watched “from above” by a pair of hawks (see fig. 4.8).56 While they ostensibly derived their value from the accurate documentation of appearances, bird and flower images also had the potential to function as a form of universal allegory, communicating messages that were assumed to be so obvious that they could pass unacknowledged.57 This function was equally effective within Japan. The critic Philippe Burty (1830–­1890) suggested that the Japanese people themselves possessed an intimate relationship with nature and with “natural,” unaffected expression: “Japan is surely the one country in the world where one finds the greatest number of people—­men, women, and young people—­who are capable . . . of transmitting their thoughts [to paper] with the aid of a brush,” he wrote, conjuring images of the artistic process as an unmediated act of expression, a singular “oneness” with nature far from the densely accumulated layers, both physical and metaphorical, of European academic painting.58 It was precisely this myth of transparency that allowed paintings of nature to function, in the words of Roland Barthes, as “constantly moving turnstile[s],” revolving doors of form and meaning, as we have seen, but also, in the case of East-­West cultural exchange and exhibition, as revolving mirrors, reflecting and transmitting views of one culture to the other and back again, resulting in images that were heavily layered or mediated artistic acts.59 Returning to Hōgai’s painting, we find this symbolic or allegorical register much closer to the surface than it may have initially seemed. During the Taishō era (1912–­1926), it was given a new official title that emphasizes the traversal of a deep chasm: Keikan yūhi zu (渓間雄飛図), or Valiant Flight across the Ravine. Removed from the category of Southern Song–­style “wintry forest” paintings and from the tropes of surveillance, predation, and violence repeated in countless paintings of hawks and eagles from the Edo period to the twentieth century, it charts a much grander allegorical path—­which also recalls the discourse of freedom and expansion that the American eagle was used to promote, as in the case of a patriotic promotional pamphlet distributed by the Borden Condensed Milk Company for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (fig. 5.13). While pre-­Meiji bird and flower painting often bore allegorical overtones, the overt use of a heroic narrative allegory in a bird and flower painting was highly unusual. It enabled all viewers, regardless of cultural background, to derive meaning from the work in a way that was relevant to the human world. It is significant that 165

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5.13  Illustration from The Story

such a marked departure from the familiar patterns of Japanese bird and flower

of an Eagle, 1904. Color litho-

painting would have been taken by Hōgai, the mid-­Meiji artist who worked most

graph (detail). Smithsonian Institution Libraries. The text of this patriotic promotional pamphlet, prepared by the Borden Condensed Milk Co. for the 1904

closely with a foreign patron. Fenollosa, as we have seen, was already striving to establish universal parameters through which Japanese art could be made visually accessible and meaningful to foreign viewers. In this context, the chasm of Hōgai’s barren landscape, a theme he explored

Louisiana Purchase Exposition

in other paintings as well, evokes rupture: the “dark valley” of the Restoration

in St. Louis, 1904. reads, “E plu-

chaos, perhaps, but also a gulf—­cultural, linguistic—­to be traversed, a back-­and-­

ribus unum [the eagle] and her brood would then be at liberty to fly over the land in freedom

forth journey to be attempted not once, we imagine, but many times (fig. 5.14). Just as Hōgai’s painting was created to address both Japanese and foreign audiences,

and inhabit it from East to West

the hawks and eagles exported to the West in the early Meiji period included both

and North to South, from the

custom-­made works and earlier, Edo-­period pieces analogous to “found art”: objects

rising to the setting sun.”

transferred from one context to another, where the act of rediscovery and revaluation literally gives new meaning to a preexisting thing. Presumably, the Japanese eagles that were exhibited and sold to Americans and other Westerners in the late nineteenth century were produced or exported with the logic that the birds would symbolize the power and prestige of the buyers. As export art, then, the eagles rep166

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5.14  Kano Hōgai, Landscape

resented their clients. Once washi imagery was established in Japan, however, it was

with Chasm, ca. 1885. Ink on silk,

just as logical that the birds—­not the awkward, rapacious washi of ukiyo-­e but the

30.4 × 31.5 cm; hanging scroll. Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art.

noble, powerful washi of the foreign client—­would represent Japan. The clearest embodiment of this transformation can be found in Hōgai’s Great Eagle (Ōwashi) of 1888 (fig. 5.15). An ink monochrome hanging scroll on paper now in the collection of the

5.15  Kano Hōgai, Great Eagle, dated 1888. Ink on silk, 325.7 × 204.5 cm. Tokyo University of the Arts.

Tokyo University of the Arts, it was reportedly presented to Itō Hirobumi to help secure his support for the Ministry of Education–­sponsored Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where Hōgai was set to become an instructor when it opened the following year.60 Great Eagle was startlingly unlike existing hawk or eagle paintings of the 1880s and earlier. The intimidating bird is face to face with the viewer, one improbably large foot raised as it perches on a grotesquely formed broken branch. When he created the image, Hōgai would have been able to see eagles and hawks at the Ueno Zoo, and a number of ink sketches of eagles and other wild animals survive among his works.61 Upon inspection, however, the eagle sketches in Hōgai’s oeuvre prove

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to be compositional studies, not life sketches, attesting to the root of the image’s effectiveness in artistic manipulation rather than natural depiction. In Longing Grass, Oka transcribes a spurious-­sounding letter (present whereabouts unknown) concerning the production of this image. According to this account, Hōgai visited Oka in order to obtain his help and opinions on the eagle commission; Oka being absent, the master left a note: “This washi picture is a request from Itō [Airobumi, the prime minister]; as I realize it is a decisive commission. . . . I would like to ask your help, particularly on the face. As it should have the air of [being prepared to] seize the five continents, it is not enough to rely on natural depiction [shasei].”62 Regardless of the letter’s veracity, Oka’s citation reveals the way in 5.16  Eagle, late nineteenth century. Iron, pigment, shakudō, shibuichi, and wood; height without base 43.18 cm. Metro-

which by 1905, when Longing Grass was published, the eagle could be interpreted as a nationalistic expression in a manner that appropriates and inverts the symbolism of export art. With its pronounced divergence from reality, Great Eagle also embodied

politan Museum of Art, Gift of

the tensions between natural depiction and “ideal painting” (risōga) that provoked

James R. Steers, 1911.

much debate within Japanese painting at the time Oka was writing.63

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As it turns out, the pose of Hōgai’s Great Eagle closely resembles that of an undated Japanese ironwork eagle now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 5.16). A number of further connections can be drawn between nihonga paintings around the time of the Sino-­and Russo-­Japanese wars and Japanese metalwork eagles now in American collections, suggesting a mutually dependent relationship between domestic exhibition paintings and metalwork eagles sent abroad.64

The Twelve Falcons (Not Eagles) at the 1893 Chicago Exposition The case of the Twelve Falcons, a series of castings in bronze and other alloys by the master metalworker Suzuki Chōkichi, is a special case of the foregoing analysis (fig. 5.17). Given my emphasis on the eagle as a distinctly Meiji motif, the prominence of these falcons at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 warrants close attention, since it is precisely at the American fair, where the falcons were displayed beneath American and Japanese flags crossed in a sign of friendship, that one would expect to find a representation of eagles. While European and American viewers had admired the naturalism of the bronze and iron figures of eagles, hawks, and other animals since their earliest days of collection and display in the 1860s, the Twelve Falcons displayed with great pomp at the Chicago Exposition are generally agreed to surpass all previous examples. Life-­size and set on their lacquered perches in a variety of poses, each bird exhibits different metalworking and finishing techniques, which were carefully specified in the catalog. They were the ultimate showpiece, a display characterized not only by visual variety but also by the methodical will to demonstrate the full range of Japanese metalworking skills. This display was orchestrated not by Chōkichi but by the established Parisian dealer Hayashi Tadamasa, who advertises himself in the exhibition catalog as having selected the artist and conceived of the project. Known for his years of experience in Paris and his rapport with European collectors, Hayashi was frequently involved in the world’s fairs as coordinator of projects or exhibits within the Japanese section and would be contracted by the Japanese government as the head commissioner for its delegation to the Parisian Exposition Universelle of 1900.65 In his catalog, Hayashi first notes that falcons were universally “recommended to kings and princes of old” as “the noblest of the feathered family” and the most trainable. He then proceeds to situate the Twelve Falcons within their Japanese geographical and historical context: There are in Japan forty-­eight places where falcons are found native, hence the prevalent expression “Forty-­eight falcons.” In [the] time of [the] Tokugawa Shogunate . . . the best twelve were selected for the use of the Shōgun in hawking. . . . On the occasion of his inspection, there used to be certain rules to be followed in their decorations, which have been conformed to in preparing the twelve bronze falcons for the Columbian Exposition.66 169

Naturalizing the Double Reading

5.17  Hayashi Tadamasa, design-

Coyly setting his American viewers in the position of the shogun of “Old Japan,”

er, and Suzuki Chōkichi, chief

Hayashi emphasizes the viewing of the falcons as an authentically Japanese experi-

metalworker, Twelve Falcons,

ence, implicitly framing them as an equivalent to the American eagle but adamantly

1893. Gold, silver, shakudō (copper alloy with gold), rōgin

maintaining their Japanese specificity. While the bronze birds were thus consum-

(copper alloy with silver) inlay

mately faithful to nature, they were also described as accurate reflections of Japanese

on bronze ground, casting;

geography, history, and art, rooted in elite Japanese traditions of ritual and represen-

maximum height 52 cm each.

tation. This was opposed to the violent eagle, which by this measure had little real

National Museum of Modern

stature within Japanese history and culture, despite its modern popularity.

Art, Tokyo. From The Twelve

Prior to being shipped to America, the Twelve Falcons were exhibited in the ball-

Bronze Falcons Exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition by Hayashi Tadamasa (Tokyo, 1893).

room of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, which catered to international guests, to the accompaniment of a military band and were ebulliently reviewed by the representatives of each Japanese newspaper. Even in Tokyo, Hayashi’s figures were presented in a setting that was both Western and national. From the beginning, they were viewed as something to be sent abroad, where surely, wrote the Yomiuri shinbun, “they will be a considerable addition to the already high reputation in which the productions of the fine arts of Japan are held.”67 The fact that Chōkichi “kept several live falcons as models, and carefully watched their habits and movements,” was duly noted

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in the newspapers. One added, with a macabre touch, that “while he was making moulds, falcons died and had to be replaced from time to time. It might be said . . . that in producing these metallic representations, two or three generations of falcons passed away.” While acknowledging the skill and sacrifices of Chōkichi and his team of workers, the reporter also seems taken with the idea that the birds’ lives were somehow transferred to the replicas, which “appear to be actually possessed of animation.”68 Compared with the case of Hōgai’s painting, that of the Twelve Falcons shows how particular Meiji art objects applied opposing strategies toward the problem of addressing multiple audiences. The Falcons impressed foreign and domestic viewers with their verisimilitude. The claim that they replicated elite Japanese falconry customs provided further voyeuristic pleasure to those who experienced the sculptures as a window to the past or to a cultural Other. By contrast, Hōgai’s painting, along with the late Meiji nihonga eagle depictions that would follow it for consumption within Japan, reflects a blurring of the washi/taka distinction and, consequently, a blurring of foreign and native symbolism. The Twelve Falcons, commissioned by a Japanese outsider, clears away these ambiguities by offering a faithful depiction of pure Japanese customs whose meaning and identity are fixed in the past. This was a standpoint that was as yet difficult to assume for Japanese who had little real contact with the world outside of their country. By fixing the taka as an authentic, historical Japanese symbol, Hayashi took hold of the oscillating and indeterminate symbolism of birds like Hōgai’s and allowed the Twelve Falcons to function for all audiences as unambiguous representations of Japan. While this may seem like the ultimate nationalistic gesture (indeed the birds, which could not but symbolize “Japan,” returned to Japan to be placed in a museum instead of being sold to an American buyer), it actually reflected the outsiders’ penchant to use the past to fix Japan as Other. In time, this same method of self-­objectification would become the dominant way of fixing “Japaneseness” within Japan. Given this, it is logical that Hōgai’s painting would have been entitled Eagles when exhibited in Japan and later preserved in an American museum as Hawks, as if to acknowledge, with Hayashi, the “authentic” historical predominance of the taka in Japan. Yet as Japanese exhibition painters would abandon the eagle motif after the 1920s (it remains to this day in carved wooden keepsakes), it also makes sense that Hōgai’s pupils in the early twentieth century would deemphasize the birds’ identity, instead choosing to bring out the painting’s narrative or allegorical level with the Japanese title Valiant Flight across the Ravine. In thus renaming it, they took the emphasis off the birds’ potentially Western or American “eagle” identities and allowed them to function as a symbol of Japan. As nihonga became progressively less concerned with addressing audiences outside Japan and more involved in domestically negotiating the Japaneseness of Japanese painting, the harmonization of different possible interpretations within a single painting would become an increasingly important part of its day-­to-­day role. 171

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6

Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga

The fine crafts of our nation were excellent in the past but have now declined. Luxury items and vessels were once of fine craftsmanship, but the new ones are rough and crude. It is now necessary to study the old [things] to benefit the present [kōko rikon, 考古利今]. . . . This means that we must mind both the past and the present without tending too much toward one or the other. . . . We hope that you, our members, do not remain satisfied with the past but achieve the goal of benefiting the present, thereby serving as models for the entire country. —sano tsunetami, lecture to the Dragon Pond Society, January 11, 18801 “Painting, painting, why don’t you progress?”—­there are some people who try to crack the whip and compel [progress] with such words . . . but exhausting all their passion on old paintings, it’s as if they are actually impeding the progress of new works. . . . If you want to see progress in tomorrow’s painting, you need to respect the paintings of today. —aeba kōson, “The Progress of Painting,” Yomiuri News, May 23, 18842

This chapter examines the tensions between innovation and preservation that emerged with nihonga’s first generation of practitioners in the 1880s. When the administrator Sano Tsunetami addressed the Dragon Pond Society in 1880, he was mainly addressing artists, officials, and exporters who were striving to profit from exporting craft wares (kōgei) to the West. Fifteen years later, in 1895, a new generation of painters who had graduated from the Meiji school system were establishing their careers, and viewers, too, were thoroughly accustomed to the museums, reproductive images, and large-­scale exhibition halls that had been so exotic in the early 1870s.3 There were fundamental changes to patronage, viewing environments, and general expectations about painting’s social roles. And as the domestic market for contemporary Japanese painting, illustrations, and art lessons began to revive, concerns about marketing Japanese paintings to international audiences lost their centrality, paving the way for more localized debates about what made a good painting.4 Through it all, there was sustained interest in past art and debate about the roles that it should play in the present. In my analysis, I focus on the notion of transmission from the past (denrai, koden), which appears liberally in 1880s discourse, as opposed to using the word “tradition,” which has no precise counterpart in early to mid-­Meiji writing. The discussion centers on Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) (fig. 6.1) and Shibata Zeshin’s playful emulations of the Hikone Screen (fig. 6.2).5 Each of these works was produced by an artist who had matured within late Edo contexts of painting production, in which the model of a painting as a transmission or iteration of an existing lineage was much stronger than that of a painting as a singular “original” that was supposed to be fundamentally different from previous examples. In fact, the late works of Hōgai, Kyōsai, and Zeshin came into being in an age when formerly secluded antiquities 173

6.1  Kano Hōgai, Merciful Mother Kannon (Hibo Kannon), 1888. Ink, color, and gold on silk, 196 × 86.5 cm; mounted as panel. Tokyo University of the Arts.

6.2  Shibata Zeshin, The Four Accomplishments, ca. 1880s. Ink and colors on gold leaf; folding screen pair. Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the Meiji period, similar screen pairs by Zeshin were published under the titles Bijin yūgi zu (Beauties at Recreation) and Genroku jinbutsu zu (Figures of the Genroku Era).

were first being exhibited and published as “originals” that could now be assumed to be universally known to a viewing public.6 In this sense, these works can be analyzed as visual responses to the complicated debate about how to link the present Japanese painting to the art of the past. Unlike Hōgai’s Hawks in a Ravine, the three works chosen for discussion in this chapter were among the most successful of their day and in succeeding years, as can be judged by primary source commentary, the early history of publication, and the number of subsequent copies, emulations, and reiterations. They emerged at a time when government exhibitions were making past masterpieces publicly visible 175

Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga

for the first time, and their rise to prominence foreshadows how twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century nihonga would ultimately gain coherence by selecting and remaking past Japanese painting. Yet because such methods were essentially opposed to modernism’s typically critical or antagonistic stance toward the past, they raised a powerful question, and one that many future nihonga painters and critics would feel compelled to address: can (or should) nihonga leave the past behind? The roots of nihonga’s fundamental conservatism in the foreign perception of the decline or “loss” of Japanese artistic heritage created an uneasy legacy.

Joining Past and Present We have seen that in the 1880s, members of the Dragon Pond Society and other supporters of the arts in Tokyo were in the process of coming to terms with reports that Westerners, for all their love of Japanese antiquities, had a low opinion of contemporary works. Japanese commentators offered varying interpretations of these reports. Some, such as Shinagawa Yajirō (1843–­1900), the minister of trade and agriculture, referenced typical Orientalist discourses of corruption. In 1882 he announced, “The fine arts of our country are superior among nations . . . yet in recent years our painting techniques have declined; they are losing the spirit transmitted from the past [koden no seishin] and running the course of the times so that now, if we do not rescue them, our fine arts will ultimately become extinct.”7 Others, such as Sano, seemed to conclude that Japanese fine crafts (kōgei bijutsu) had lost their former brilliance and become “rough and crude,” perhaps as a result of the Restoration’s financial toll on traditional patronage. Yet while they emphasized the need to study the past, Sano and Fenollosa were also among the first to suggest that Japanese painting needed to abandon past practices of copying in order to create “original” works. Submission guidelines for the early industrial exhibitions and competitive painting exhibitions in the mid-­1880s repeatedly specified that submissions must be “new paintings” (shinga) and not simply copies or reiterations of existing paintings. The jury report from the 1884 Domestic Painting Exhibition further enjoined, “Even though you should by all means commit yourselves to the painting styles distinctive to our country [honpō koyū no gafū], you should not dwell on copying the ancients over and over again . . . but rather apply our [existing] designs in ways that no one from the past has ever attempted.”8 In the same year, after the critical and financial failure of the Dragon Pond Society’s second attempt to present a Salon of Japanese Painters concurrent with the French Salon exhibition in Paris, Sano irrupted in frustration: “To paint landscapes, people—­aspects of the human world as it appears to people’s eyes—­and to have the wondrous capacity to move the spectator [kanja]: this is painting as a fine art. It follows that many of Japan’s new paintings . . . are nothing but copies of old paintings . . . and do not constitute painting as a fine art.”9 With the rise of exhibitions and knowledge of Western approaches to the fine arts, old art became more readily available, yet painters were also being 176

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told to prioritize original ideas. While this juxtaposition of circumstances may appear ironic, it can also be understood as the dual outcome of the creation of a public sphere of unprecedented openness, in which artists and viewers could study old masterpieces “in the original,” while new pieces, too, were seen as singular events that could be displayed, critiqued, published, and entered into a collective mental archive of recent painting developments. Exhibiton, art criticism, and publication had a way of finalizing the artwork as an event, hardening the boundaries between a new work and an old one. New experiences of the artwork in public were combined with snippets of Western Orientalist discourse that further underscored the pastness, hence inaccessibility, of past Japanese art. Finally—­and, importantly for Meiji arts officials—­Western buyers tended to prioritize past art, whose finality indicated a limited supply and hence higher market value.10 All these factors meant that even as Japanese commentators began to posit a break between old and new Japanese art, they also sought a means to repair it. In advance of the first Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877 and the Paris Exposition Universelle of the following year, the Exhibition Bureau began to emphasize the saying onko chishin (温故知新, look to the past in order to know the future), even incorporating the phrase into the title of the series of export-­oriented craft designs it assembled between 1878 and 1882: Onchi zuroku (Onchi Catalog).11 This perspective emphasized the active incorporation of past designs into new works. In 1879 Exhibition Bureau members Sano and Kawase Hideharu founded the Dragon Pond Society (Ryūchikai, named for the Benten shrine on Shinobazu Pond, Ueno, where the group met) as a private study group in Tokyo. Dedicated to the encouragement of art manufactures (bijutsu seihin) and the study of past art, it received government funding, hosted an annual exhibition of antiquities known as the Kan kobijutsu kai (Exhibition of Ancient Art), and included artists, dealers, collectors, government officials, and other members of elite society.12 In other Tokyo ventures, outside the Dragon Pond Society, the efforts to join past and present continued throughout the 1880s: the 1882 and 1884 Domestic Painting Exhibitions featured a reference room (sankōshitsu) of premodern Japanese masterpieces in the same way that some of the Domestic Industrial Exhibitions had incorporated reference rooms with recent European and American products. When Fenollosa became involved, in 1884 and 1885, he similarly used the Kangakai as a platform dedicated to the “revitalization” of current-­day painting, even though the society’s original mission centered on the exhibition and appraisal of old art. In the fall of 1885, the Dragon Pond Society also began to show contemporary works alongside premodern objects at its Exhibitions of Ancient Art.13 While it may have been initiated in part as a response to Western notions of the end of authentic Japanese art, the attempt to suture the rift between past and present soon took on a life of its own in Tokyo. There, artists and viewers were already in the process of responding to the body of ancient works to which they had newly gained access. Their results were not limited to the concerns of Meiji government officials or Western japonistes. Rather, through a combination of long-­held 177

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practices based on reiterating earlier compositions and the use of past paintings to address present-­day concerns, they established nihonga as a form of new art that “cherished the old” for the sake of Japanese viewers.

Hōgai and Merciful Mother Kannon Hōgai’s last major work, Merciful Mother Kannon, was a vision of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara on silk that shimmered beneath gold dust, mica, pastel colors, and an intricately rendered lace veil. Different in materiality and sensibility from all his earlier works, it immediately elicited comparisons with medieval Buddhist icons and was praised both for its serenity and its experimental use of colors (see fig. 6.1).14 While there is no proof of his intention for it, the fact that he was completing it in a building belonging to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in the period leading up to the school’s opening and while on salary from the Ministry of Education suggests that he intended it as a model for incoming students, and after his death it was immediately canonized. Okakura Kakuzō included a full-­page photographic engraving of it with the artist’s eulogy in the second issue of Kokka (1889), Fujioka Sakutarō commended it in his 1903 Kinsei kaiga shi (History of Painting from Recent Times), and later in the Meiji period its soft, glowing colors would be replicated in both weaving and embroidery for the world’s fairs and the Japan-­British Exhibition of 1910. Countless handmade copies of it circulated with varying degrees of fidelity to the original, and according to Furuta Ryō, Hōgai’s version also inspired at least one artist to return to devotional icons of Avalokitesvara with a child or children from earlier time periods and to remake them while incorporating cues from Merciful Mother Kannon. Twentieth-­century scholars once expressed concern that Merciful Mother Kannon’s relation to a host of past prototypes and later copies seemed to threaten Hōgai’s “originality” (orijinaritii), but their concerns seemed to miss the point that, in this period, Fenollosa, Japanese arts administrators, and the artists themselves were heavily inclined to take established, already meaningful works of art as the basis of new compositions, for at least two reasons: first, this was the way that painters had worked in the Edo period, when the public sphere for paintings was more limited. Second, by making new works based on existing paintings, many artists reasoned that they could allay concerns about the so-­called decline or extinction of Japanese painting. Hōgai rewrote the existing Kannon-and-child iconography to emphasize ideals of pictorial legibility similar to those that emerged in the discussion of Hawks in a Ravine: in the later work, he transformed scarves, jewelry, and other Buddhist attributes into a phallus, womb, and umbilical cord, thereby inventing and literalizing a maternal or parental link between Kannon and child not seen in preexisting iconography (fig. 6.3). In doing so, the painter relied on a rich inheritance of ideas and images of a maternal Avalokitesvara.15 While twentieth-­century scholars once implied that this might undermine Hōgai’s genius, a further examination of the 178

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6.3  Detail of figure 6.1.

decade’s painting practices suggests that, as in the late Edo period, citation was the driving, if not dominant, generative mechanism for painting.

Kyōsai’s Lone Crow Here it is worth revisiting the case of Kyōsai’s Winter Crow on a Bare Branch and Hōgai’s Hotei with Children (see figs. 4.7, 4.9–­10). Neither painting was a compositional original but instead was built on well-­known prototypes. As we learn from Kyōsai’s own statement about the years of training that went into his masterful brushing of one simple crow, the painter staked the work’s value and his own reputation on painting as a virtuoso performance of a familiar theme. In conception or as an application of a body of techniques, little in the work was novel. Earlier in the nineteenth century, for example, Sakai Hōitsu had used a similar approach to create 179

Transmission and the Historicity of Nihonga

a less-imposing image of a black bird on a persimmon tree (fig. 6.4). As with Kyōsai’s Winter Crow, the tree trunk dominates and reinforces the hanging scroll’s verticality and suggests the simplicity and continuity of a single stroke of the artist’s brush. In 1874 the well-­known Kyoto painter Mori Kansai made a similar, albeit more involved, image of two crows on a snow-­laden winter branch against the moon, again using the tree trunk to emphasize the verticality of the hanging scroll format. As in Kyōsai’s work, the theme exploits the contrast achieved by plain ink against a blank ground (fig. 6.5).

6.4  Sakai Hōitsu, Tenth Month (Black Bird on a Persimmon Tree), from Birds and Flowers of the Twelve Months, early nineteenth century. Ink and colors on silk; one of twelve hanging scrolls, each 140 × 50 cm. Etsuko and Joe Price Collection. 6.5  Mori Kansai, Crow on a Bare Tree in Winter, 1874. Ink and color on paper, 143.2 × 64.7 cm. Kyoto Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

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The appeal of Kyōsai’s painting for Japanese viewers stemmed in part from the familiarity of the lonely winter crow as a poetic and painterly motif, one that also appears in a celebrated poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644–­1694): Kare eda ni

On a withered branch

Karasu no tomari keri

A crow has paused

Aki no kure

Autumn evening16

The eighteenth-­century poet and painter Yosa Buson also produced poetry and abbreviated ink paintings in which black crows stand out against a snowy background, explicitly drawing on the poetic tradition and providing a familiar precedent for Kyōsai’s stark and lonely image. It is no wonder, then, that Kyōsai emphasized that he was not “selling” the crow so much as his own skilled (and witty) gesture in producing it. And if this painting was the endpoint of a long history of similar images, it was also the beginning of even more iterations. In making and popularizing his image at the exhibition, Kyōsai was establishing the value of a lifetime of crow paintings, which he could continue to produce as need demanded (fig. 6.6).17 As new ideas about painting emerged, and as the formats of exhibition and photomechanical replication demonstrated their power to establish a single image in the public sphere with hitherto unseen speed and completeness, this model of painting as a transmission and (re)enactment became less tenable. As we will next see in the case of Zeshin, however, the modern exhibition was not a one-­sided attack on the resonance of the transmissive, iterative

6.6  Kawanabe Kyōsai, Crow on a Plum Branch in Moonlight, ca. 1870s–­1880s. Woodblock print in black and gray, 35.4 × 50.2 cm. Israel Goldman Collection.

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painting: exhibitions of past paintings also strengthened existing citational networks, opening these up in a way that allowed new painting to reshape the values and meanings of past images.

Zeshin and the Hikone Screen Sometime in the 1880s, the Japanese painter and lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin depicted a group of figures at play or rest across the twelve panels of a pair of folding screens (figs. 6.2, 6.7). Their dress is visibly old-­fashioned and evokes the early seventeenth century, with its characteristic figure painting genre of fashionably attired dancers depicted in bold kimono against the plain picture surface or before the reflective surface of a gold screen. Unlike these earlier screens, however, Zeshin’s seated, standing, and dancing figures are arranged according to the logic of a stable ground plane. We are meant to envision them as inhabiting the same space, a well-­ appointed interior whose ambience is evoked by a few choice pieces: a central Asian rug, a Chinese lute in a brocade bag, a lacquered table and other lacquer implements, and, most notably, another screen, to which a girl is gesturing. On the neighboring screen, two ladies and a man dance while others watch. Produced in the middle of the Meiji period, which was dominated by questions of trade, international competition, and Western-­style progress, Zeshin’s screens likely felt quite distant from the circumstances of the time. As it turns out, however, they were engaged with an antique work of art that was much on the minds of Meiji connoisseurs, and which is now one of the most famous paintings in Japanese art

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history: the early seventeenth-­century Hikone Screen (fig. 6.8). Zeshin made at least four finished screen pairs based on the Hikone Screen, each slightly different in composition and signed “after an old painting—­Zeshin” (hokozu Zeshin, 倣古図  是真).18 Zeshin’s choice of the Hikone Screen was not a generic case of emulation but instead related to specific circumstances in the 1870s through 1890s. The screen can also shed light on the acts of copying that were integral to Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon and its legacy. In the same way that an understanding of the significance of Merciful Mother Kannon in the Meiji period must account for the local significance of the Kannon-and-child imagery at the time, Zeshin’s act of remaking the Hikone Screen reflects concerns that were specific to a Meiji community of artists and viewers. The Hikone Screen is an anonymous early seventeenth-­century painting whose current name derives from its only known proprietor, the Ii family, former daimyo of Hikone. Men and women in a brothel assume a variety of poses against a gold background, relaxing and playing amid a number of finely crafted objects: a lacquer smoking box and letter chest, an armrest, a game board, and a brilliantly executed screen within a screen. This miniature work shows a detailed landscape in the

6.7  Shibata Zeshin, Elegant Pastimes, second half of nine-

medieval ink-­painting mode with mists of gold dust, and like other famous cases

teenth century. Ink, colors, and

of metapictures and double screens, it plays a key role in establishing painting it-

gold on paper; folding screen

self as the subject of the larger work.19 In particular, scholars have long treated the

pair. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, John R. Van Derlip Fund; purchase from the collection

miniature screen as a form of signature: its remarkable success at capturing the style of Kano Motonobu (1476–­1559) long suggested to connoisseurs that the Hikone

of Elizabeth and Willard Clark,

Screen could only have been executed by someone trained in Kano painting and,

2013.31.47.1–­.2.

furthermore, that it represents a work that was antique with respect to the figures

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6.8  Hikone Screen, early seven-

in the painting. As Yukio Lippit has written, “While paintings within paintings had

teenth century. Ink, colors,

been a common motif for centuries, never had one been used so purposefully as an

and gold on paper; originally mounted as a folding screen.

anachronism, towards such specifically hermeneutic ends.”20 The gold mists and hard-­edged ink style situate the painting firmly in an earlier era: rakishly dressed

Hikone Castle Museum.

contemporary Japanese figures—­the forerunners of ukiyo-­e—­are cunningly juxtaposed with elite painting’s “proper” preserve, which was ink-­based, timeless, and Chinese. What the Hikone Screen represented to Zeshin and his audiences was not necessarily what we derive from it today. In the nineteenth century, the Hikone Screen was not attributed to a Kano painter, since high-­ranking Kano painters in the service of a lord were expected to avoid producing ukiyo-­e. Instead, Zeshin’s contemporaries grouped the screen with a range of alluring early genre paintings that were collectively associated with the origins of ukiyo-­e: along this timeline, the Hikone Screen was among the first paintings to depict the spirited and fashionable life of the urban brothels; its diminutive size with respect to standard six-­panel screens suggests that it was used in a private, informal setting, a further nod, perhaps, to its unofficial status at the time of making. For nineteenth-­century viewers, who were accustomed to the delicate, aloof, and idealized image of the courtesan as it subsequently developed in the works of Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Shunshō, and so forth, the appeal of early ukiyo-­e arguably lay in what the journal Kokka in 1898 called its frank, unfettered quality, which allowed the pictured prostitutes to retain their slightly coarse and easygoing status while simultaneously projecting a sophisticated air of taste and eroticism. This tension between the rough and the fine was inscribed in the materiality of early ukiyo-­e paintings, which lavished the best pigments and technical skill on women once assumed to be below the dignity of being painted. Compositionally, the Hikone Screen and other early ukiyo-­e paintings also draw on the ancient Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song genre of picturing alluring palace ladies in dynamic, colorful, 184

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and mathematically inspired groups, further conferring on contemporary Japanese prostitutes the dignity of an established Chinese model. This type of tension between the low and the high existed in countless works of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century ukiyo-­e, but what is remarkable about the Hikone Screen is how simply and effectively it maps this social or cultural tension onto a visual and stylistic distinction that takes place within the screen itself, with one mode of colorful large-­scale figure painting being used to treat the brothel inhabitants and another mode of detailed medieval ink landscape painting being used for the painting within the painting. The screen within the screen is used not only to cite painting history but also to trouble the viewer’s notion of reality and propriety. By one account, the screen within the screen is merely an illusion, in contrast with the real physicality of the folding screen, yet the orthodox landscape might also be interpreted as the only real painting in the room, so to speak, for in contrast to vulgar ukiyo-­e, only the sophisticated metapicture can represent a proper and orthodox definition of what painting should be. In this way, these two works, the painting and the metapainting, exist slightly at odds with each other. The Hikone Screen constructed an elaborate conceit: in contrasting the Japanese ancients and the Chinese moderns, the colorful figure paintings and the ink landscape, it sublimated the real-­life tension between the lowly social standing of the prostitutes and their status as exalted objects of desire. In the context of the Edo period, the painting performed the inversion of traditional status distinctions that occurred naturally in the brothel, where, in the words of the eighteenth-­century painter Hishikawa Moronobu, even the highest-­ranking samurai could be made to feel gauche and boorish, “shamed before the Ladies of Love.”21 In the late Edo and early Meiji periods, when Zeshin was active, the Hikone Screen and many other seventeenth-­century depictions of brothel women were all attributed to a fictionalized painter named Ukiyo Matahei or Matabei, whose identity had been built up around the core of a real early seventeenth-­century painter, a sophisticated figure named Iwasa Matabei (1578–1650) whose painting style combined qualities of various painting schools. Within the nebulous realm of nineteenth-­ century painting attribution, Matahei was imagined as the ultimate shape-­shifter, someone who was both a commoner and a sophisticate, a master of painting styles old and new, and who, in the words of one Meiji commentator, seemed to have subsumed “all the various schools of painting within his brush.”22 In copying the Hikone Screen during the Meiji period, Shibata Zeshin inserted himself into an arena of competition among painting styles and schools, among class or status groups, and finally, between the ancients and the moderns. In a further twist on the referential game of the Hikone Screen, Zeshin executes the screen within a screen in a different style, the soft-­edged Shijō mode that used modulated ink wash to suggest forms and depth mediated by atmospheric perspective (see fig. 6.15). Having studied in Kyoto as a youth, Zeshin successfully brought the paradigmatic Kyoto Shijō style back to his native Edo in the final years of the Tokugawa 185

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regime, and the soft-­edged naturalistic style continued to serve him well in the Meiji years, when he became one of the most renowned painters of his generation. By Zeshin’s time, ukiyo-­e painting commonly used metapictorial screens as a means of highlighting and even challenging the relation between the styles of various painting schools, and particularly between the vision of orthodox, upper-­class painting and of popular painting like ukiyo-­e. Fifty or more years after the production of the original Hikone Screen we find ukiyo-­e artists such as Hishikawa Moronobu (1618–1694) and Utamaro depicting the interiors of restaurants and brothels, lavish spaces that inevitably included the works of high-­ranking artists. Moronobu and Utamaro in particular were masters of dissemblance: the overall illusionism of their works dictated that they also precisely depict the works of these elite painters, but in numerous works attributed to them and their school, they craftily conceal precisely the portion of the metapicture where the signature should be found, thus refusing either to claim the work as the product of their own brush or to sign the name of 6.9  Kitagawa Utamaro, Moon-

another artist (fig. 6.9). In doing so, Utamaro and his fellows actually reversed a more

light Revelry at Dōzō Sagami, late

established practice in which a painter of good standing paints a beautiful woman

eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Ink and colors on silk, 202.2 × 356 cm. Freer Gallery of

but then signs his name only to the fictive screen within the painting, essentially disavowing his production of the more lowbrow work. This strategy is epitomized

Art. A standing screen (left) is

by an alluring painting by the exterior Kano painter (omote-­eshi) Kano Akinobu from

concealed by a pillar.

the late eighteenth century (fig. 6.10). In the case of the ukiyo-­e painters Moronobu

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and Utamaro, the deliberate avoidance of signing a name to the screen within the picture can be interpreted as a further bit of coyness: were they humbly demurring from affixing a signature to “high” art or confidently embracing their identities as lowly ukiyo-­e painters? Taken as a whole, such works contain an implicit oscillation whereby two different modes of painting, official painting and ukiyo-­e, are put into competition with each other based on the brush of the painter. The contest also reflects the competition between raw purchasing power and the cultural authority that is attained through the mastery of certain codes of taste. Within this competitive environment, it should come as little surprise that Zeshin’s painting ups the stakes: having established himself first as a lacquer artist, Zeshin seems to have homed in on the stylish lacquer objects in the original

6.10  Kano Akinobu, Beauty, late eighteenth century. Ink and

Hikone Screen, for in his own works he greatly expands these in quantity and quality.

colors on silk; hanging scroll.

In sum, with his emulation of the Hikone Screen, Zeshin recreates a masterpiece of

Itabashi Museum of Art.

two and a half centuries earlier, challenges the Kano school of Edo-Tokyo with his

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own Shijō style from Kyoto, and calls attention to his dual mastery of painting and lacquerware by presenting their two-­dimensional surrogates as equally under his artistic control. Zeshin’s masterful treatment of lacquerware in the painting calls attention to another way in which his nineteenth-­century works vie with the Hikone Screen by seeking to outstrip it technically. Each of Zeshin’s screen pairs showcases the distinctive fluidity of his figural style. His attempts at a form of foreshortening appear modern but are closely related to similar attempts in Chinese figure painting. Their illusionism seems further destined to trump the Hikone Screen: given Meiji painters’ ambitions to master Western illusionistic painting techniques in order to avoid being classed as primitive in the eyes of the West, it is logical that Zeshin would also attempt to surpass the ancients in his use of illusionism. Since the late eighteenth century, illusionism (shashin; literally “transcribing reality”) had been a hallmark of the Kyoto-­based Maruyama and Shijō schools, the locus of Zeshin’s own painterly training, in contrast with the historical consciousness of the Kano school.

Copying the Hikone Screen Having seen how Zeshin deliberately made statements about his craft through the borrowed medium of the Hikone Screen, one major question remains: If the Hikone Screen was, as Fenollosa reports, the “great treasure” of Baron Ii, “formerly the daimio of Hikone castle on Lake Biwa,” how did a commoner artist like Zeshin have the opportunity to see it, and how would Zeshin’s audiences in turn have known about the work in order to appreciate his citational gesture?23 Because all documentation of the Hikone domain collections were destroyed in a fire, it is unknown precisely when the screen entered the Ii family collection, although the antiquarian Aimi Kōu (1874–­ 1970) claimed that Zeshin first saw the screen at the house of an Edo commoner or pawnbroker prior to its acquisition by Ii.24 According to Aimi, Zeshin went home and painted the work from memory since the owner did not assent to having it copied; visiting again on a subsequent occasion, Zeshin reportedly managed to come away with a rough copy, which he continued to study and refine at home before finally having the opportunity to peruse the screen without interruption in 1880, when it become publicly visible in government-­sponsored exhibitions.25 In his tribute to Zeshin and his struggles to copy and rework the Hikone Screen, which was later canonized as a National Treasure, Aimi credited the painter and lacquer artist with the work’s “discovery.”26 Yet speculation about where Zeshin might have seen the Hikone Screen has concealed an important point: the nineteenth-­ century painter and his audiences would not have needed to see the original at all because by the early nineteenth century the Hikone Screen had already been transmitted throughout Japan in a number of copies rough and fine, a testament to the work’s compelling status among artists and viewers alike.27 In the shogunal era, Kano painters in particular made their living by sketching and appraising past masterpieces, 188

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which they compiled into libraries and compendia and used to assess or produce new works. Yet copying the Hikone Screen was never just work. Like Zeshin, copyists freely played with the poses, number, and displacement of the figures, a practice that the original painting facilitated by placing them against a blank gold background, a two-­dimensional template against which they could come to life (fig. 6.11). The figures are only loosely attached to the architectural background. Some lean, point, or gaze in one direction while facing another, engendering a sort of abstract visual play as our eyes experiment with different groupings, idly tracing the implicit web of gazes and gestures. We are reminded of a game of strategy or of the open-­ended possibilities of musical phrasing—­both of which are underscored by the presence of music, dance, and gaming in the painting. The further implication that the scene takes place in a house of pleasure, a brothel, leads us to conclude that this game of idle, open-­ended grouping transcends formal parameters, for in a brothel, the question of just who is with whom is never conclusively answered. This painting that also names the act of painting within itself virtually begs to be remade. Given the way in which it treats the eternally troubling questions of real and imagined wealth and social status, the relation between old and new art, and the tension between various forms of representation, the Hikone Screen for Zeshin and his audiences was not necessarily a physical screen at all, but only, or especially, a form of myth to be reconfigured time and again, a screen in the mind. Further, until its public exhibition in 1880 (at which point it was mounted as a series of hanging scrolls due to the deteriorization of the support), the mental and painterly action of regrouping and rearranging the figures and other motifs was heighted by another dance: the social dance that painters, viewers, owners, and caretakers would have engaged in through the process of hiding the screen, revealing it (says Aimi) at a wedding, frustrating a painter’s attempt to copy it, or tempting potential buyers with rumors of its availability and provenance. For much of the nineteenth century it would have been possible to see the Hikone Screen through painted and imagined copies, engaging fluidly with the composition time and again without ever having seen the original. In this sense, the figures on the surface of the Hikone Screen really could move; their fluidity against the screen’s blank background also evokes the habit of using a blank screen as the holding zone for snippets of images and texts, as in the case of a screen pair that includes ink-­painted versions of famous works that Zeshin had dedicated himself to copying over the course of his career (fig. 6.12).28 Precisely because the folding screen was also a surface for images, it could become a space onto which copied or imagined forms of earlier paintings could be projected or transferred in a temporary way. What I have just described is an Edo-­period way of engaging with images. Thinking back to Aimi’s story, it is not surprising that the Edo-­period owner tried to limit Zeshin’s access to the work, especially if he or she were intending to sell it to an elite client: had Zeshin been empowered to generate new paintings after the seventeenth-­century masterpiece, they would have surely changed the meaning—­ 189

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6.11  Kano Tanshin Morimichi, The Four Accomplishments, a Copy of the Hikone Screen, early nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, 96.6 × 34 cm; hanging scrolls. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2014, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

6.12  Shibata Zeshin, Screen with

possibly even the value—­of the precious screens. Within the context of the limited

Copies of Famous Masters, date

availability of the original, copies, too, had enormous power.

and whereabouts unknown. Formerly in the Ōkura collection. Reproduced from Zeshin Ō gakan (Tokyo: Gahōsha, 1908).

In the Meiji period, the ascendancy of art museums, exhibitions, journals, and new standards of accuracy in reproduction meant that the imperfectly copied or imagined image was often easily replaced with the real thing or its precise replica. The original Hikone Screen became publicly visible in Tokyo for the first time at the Kan Kobijutsu Kai, or Exhibition for Ancient Art, in 1880—­when Fenollosa likely saw it as well—­and again on at least two subsequent occasions in the 1880s at government-­sponsored art exhibitions that until now have received little attention. Zeshin’s use of the Hikone Screen to produce new paintings in the 1880s can thus be understood within the context of the availability of premodern art objects in these decades.

Venues for the Display of Antiquities in the 1880s Fine paintings, ceramics, lacquerware, and other art antiquities attained an unprecedented degree of visibility in 1880s Tokyo. Here the English term “art antiquities” refers to the Meiji categories of koga (old painting), kobijtsu (old art), or koki (old vessels), categories that alluded to both the ancient and the recent past, denoting ancient temple treasures as well as objects that were only a few generations old. In the 1880s, Tokyo supported three main venues for the appreciation of art antiquities: the Kan Kobijutsu Kai, which began in 1880 and took place annually through 1886; the antique paintings reference room attached to the 1882 and 1884 Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions; and the several exhibitions associated with 192

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Fenollosa’s Kangakai. Each of these showings, announced in newspapers such as the Yomiuri and Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily News), made privately held artworks accessible to a wider range of viewers, essentially to anyone willing to pay the admission fee. By the mid-­Meiji period, people in the major urban and provincial centers were well accustomed to public exhibitions, but the antiquities exhibitions of the 1880s were major events by any standards. They featured paintings and other objects from illustrious private repositories that many artists and connoisseurs had heard of but never seen, such as the Hikone Screen or Southern Song–­dynasty Jian ware teabowls. These items were loaned from the imperial household and the nobility; powerful daimyo families such as the Sakai, Matsudaira, Tokugawa, Date, Ii, and Mōri; shrines and temples; dealers, connoisseurs, artists, and collectors; the government Exhibition Bureau; and members of the Meiji bureaucracy. The Kan Kobijutsu Kai was founded by the Interior Ministry in 1880 and subsequently taken over by the Dragon Pond Society.29 The preface to the first exhibition states: On this the fourth day of April in the thirteenth year of Meiji [1880] we have prepared a hall in Ueno Park and selected from works beginning with treasures from the imperial storehouse and extending to the cherished possessions of the nobility, warrior families, and commoners, all those that would be a mirror for the way of crafts [kōgei no michi no kagami to narinu beki], to show them to all people so that they might instruct them in the ways of their skills; such an event is called an art gathering [bijutsukai].30 193

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The Interior Ministry statement predictably focuses on the production of contemporary craft objects in accordance with the trade and manufacturing emphasis around this year.31 Yet the general atmosphere of the Kan Kobijutsu Kai was far from that of a trade fair: within the seven years of its existence it was graced by visits from the emperor and involvement by other members of the imperial family, and the visible contributions of high-­profile lenders were part of its prestige. While the exhibition purportedly separated objects into five categories according to medium, the catalog is organized in terms of donors. As a result, paintings of every format are listed alongside Chinese and Japanese ceramics, lacquer, textiles, bronzes, swords, and even furniture of various time periods. Among the objects documented are Japanese handscrolls such as the Ban Dainagon ekotoba (Illustrated Tale of Major Councillor Ban) and Chōju giga (Playful Pictures of Animals and Birds), Kamakura-­era Buddhist statues, the famous cypress wood fans (hiōgi) from the collection of Itsukushima Shrine, Ogata Kōrin’s iris screens, the Matsudaira family manuscript for Sadanobu’s famous Shūko jisshu (Ten Types of Ancient [Objects]), landscape scrolls of the four seasons attributed to Kano Motonobu, a Fukurokuju by Sesshū, a handscroll by Hishikawa Moronobu, the Hikone Screen, and even a set of birds and fish by the seventeenth-­century Chinese master Bada Shanren. A handful of these works were documented by photographs and woodblock-­printed sketches by the painter Yamana Tsurayoshi. The assemblages of antique paintings shown on the occasions of the 1882 and 1884 Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions were even more impressive. Here, too, the catalogs were organized by donor, the lists headed by the imperial family and the Exhibition Bureau. The 1882 exhibition included the Miraculous Origins of Mt. Shigi (Shigisan engi emaki), the Tokugawa family’s twelfth-­century Genji scroll sections, medieval handscrolls including the Miraculous Origins of Ishiyamadera, along with Buddhist icons attributed to Kose no Kanaoka and Hirotaka, Hanshan and Shide attributed to the medieval Zen painter Kaō, a triptych of Manjusri with pine and plum by Kei Shoki, a peony and eight views hanging scroll attributed to Sōami, Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang by Sesson, Unkoku Tōgan’s Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Motonobu’s landscape scrolls, Eitoku horses and paintings of rice cultivation, a Kano Tsunenobu triptych of a figure flanked by landscapes, Fuji paintings attributed to Sesshū and Tan’yū, Lu Ji’s Lotus with Crabs and Fish, Ogata Kōrin’s chrysanthemums, Ōkyo’s Dragon and Tiger, numerous works by Shen Nanpin, the Hikone Screen again (attributed to Matabei and labeled an ippin, or outstanding work), Hanabusa Itchō’s Asazumabune (Asazuma Dancer in a Boat), screens of Mts. Fuji and Tsukuba by Tani Bunchō, and a Tokugawa family bird and flower triptych by Kano Isen’in Naganobu. Isen’in, who had died in 1828, figured as one of the most recent noncontemporary artists in the exhibition, along with Tani Bunchō (d. 1840) and Sakai Hōitsu (d. 1828). Any curator today would be hard pressed to match this lineup, but the 1884 Competitive Painting Exhibition a year and a half later managed to secure the 194

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Nara-­period portrait of Shōtoku Taishi from the imperial collection, along with the Legends of Kiyomizudera (Kiyomizudera engi), the Miracles of the Kasuga Shrine Deity (Kasuga gongen genki-­e),32 and a number of works that were photographically documented: the Miraculous Origins of the Taima Mandara (Taima mandara engi), Legends of Kitano Shrine (Kitano engi), Ishiyamadera engi, Sesshū’s Long Scroll, Broken Ink Landscape, and bird and flower screen, the Hatakeyama family gold leaf Motonobu screen pair, the Daikon attributed to Muqi, a Tagasode (Whose Sleeves?) screen then attributed to Sōtatsu and a Flowers and Grasses screen thought to be by Kōrin, and Muqi’s Chestnut and Six Persimmons, as well as animal paintings by Shen Nanpin and Maruyama Ōkyo. Some of these objects were on view for as little as six days, and the Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun announced highlights from the rotations daily. In fact, although both Domestic Competitive Exhibitions were predominantly contemporary art events with only supplementary galleries of ancient paintings, newspaper coverage of the ancient painting displays was far more visible and consistent than that for the main portion of the event. Several notable characteristics emerge from these two exhibitions. First, the listing of contributions hierarchically by donor underscores the power of the new government—­and by extension the imperial household—­in inducing religious and regional authorities to display their treasures on the government’s terms, a practice with parallels in the medieval court and the shogunal government, which had used its status to pressure the owners of fine works to temporarily part with them. Given the wealth of historical precedents, this practice would clearly have resonated with Meiji viewers.33 Second, by way of nuancing modern scholarly emphasis on the recentness—­and even the foreign origins—­of Japan’s artistic canons, it is remarkable to see that many of the objects selected for presentation are still regarded as indisputable masterpieces. Nor were Buddhist icons neglected, although the lack of specificity in titling makes it difficult to identify which sculptural icons were exhibited. (In some other subgenres, such as handscroll paintings, specific masterworks are much easier to identify.) Finally, it is interesting to see the extent to which Chinese paintings of the Ming and Qing dynasties—­as well as the works of relatively recent Japanese masters such as Bunchō, Hōitsu, and Isen’in—­were valued and presented alongside more ancient works. Much more deserves to be said about the contents of the displays—­although the challenge of identifying specific masterworks presents an obstacle to carrying out a detailed analysis. In the present chapter, therefore, I will focus on just one aspect of the government-­sponsored antiquities exhibitions of the 1880s: their stated rationale. In his opening address at the first Domestic Competitive Exhibition of Painting in 1882, the minister of trade and agriculture, Shinagawa Yajirō, declared: The fine arts of our country are superior among nations . . . yet in recent years our painting techniques have declined; they are losing the spirit transmitted from the past [koden no seishin] and running the course of the times so that now, if we do not 195

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rescue them, our fine arts will ultimately become extinct. It is for this reason that we have hosted the present event and seek to promote painting. We have also placed a number of old paintings on exhibition hoping that [painters] will broaden their knowledge and use these paintings to supplement their own designs.34

The exhibitions were part of a response to observations from both within and outside Japan that Japanese painting and other arts that had been produced in the Edo period were losing ground in Meiji society and perhaps were in danger of disappearing altogether. The remedy involved more than just providing money and institutional support. It was hoped that making the arts of previous eras visible would encourage Japanese painters and artisans to study them and thereby ensure the continuation of what Shinagawa called “the spirit transmitted from the past.” In accordance with this desire, the exhibit of ancient paintings was officially known as the “reference room” (sankōshitsu). This was a familiar term in competitive industrial or agricultural exhibitions throughout the Meiji period and suggested outside objects, usually from the West, that Japanese viewers could study in order to learn how to make or improve their own objects.35 But while Western things, such as clocks and spinning machines, were offered as models for industrial equipment and manufactures, Japanese antiquities were sought to play a comparable role for the production of new Japanese paintings (shinga) and other handcrafted objects. Even more noteworthy, this process was undertaken with a consciousness of the European and American “use” of Japanese art in the production of industrial and handmade manufactures. As Iida Yuzuru (1838–­1889) stated in 1883, after returning from France, “The American [designer] Tiffany . . . says that Japan’s ancient arts are far superior to its modern ones . . . [and] is engaged in applying the ancient arts of our country to his own works. Japan’s ancient paintings are today in the process of being stolen away by him!”36 Utilizing past art to produce new objects was an act in which foreigners were already seen to be engaged, even to the extent of being perceived as “stealing away” the secrets of Japan’s premodern arts and making a profit on what should rightly belong to Japan. Japanese administrators also noted the example of the South Kensington Museum in London, the product of a mindset that regarded all historic and geographic styles as equally available for use by contemporary designers and objects.37 On the one hand, then, Japanese artistic designs were seen as blueprints that were available to all creators, much in the way that Western-­based technological innovations were. On the other hand, Japanese painting and craft knowledge were seen as a series of living transmissions passed on through generations of Japanese creators. A Tokyo nichi nichi reporter in 1882 was one of many who reflected this manner of thinking. “The painting methods [of our country],” he wrote, “having been transmitted from master to pupil over the course of a thousand years, have somehow survived to this day even as everything around them is Westernized.”38 We have already seen that commerce minister Shinagawa Yajirō perceived Japanese art as 196

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preserving “the spirit transmitted from the ancients” (koden no seishin), and in 1884, on the occasion of the Second Domestic Competitive Exhibition, he again relied on this familiar logic of transmission in the course of worrying that Western artists and manufacturers would become the inheritors and keepers of the very methods passed down across generations of Japanese artisans: Westerners admire the ancient [art] methods of our country; [since they are] inquiring into the roots of our ancient transmissions, there may be some who have already come to master the ways [arui wa koden o saguri sude ni sono michi o eru mono aru ni itari]. . . . If we do not quickly inquire into the old methods and reverse their decline, not only will we alone be unable to express the beauty of the ancients in our art [hitori onko no bi o arawasu atawazaru], but furthermore, the fine arts of Japan will ultimately end up in the hands of foreigners.39

Shinagawa here presents painting not as a series of objects but as a body of skills “transmitted from master to pupil” across generations, a conception that allows one to envision foreigners “stealing away” these lineages to generate their own authentically Japanese objects. This perception was hardly specific to Japan or East Asia. In his study of Western artistic modernity, philosopher Gregg Horowitz points out that the understanding of visual art as a transgenerational transmission of forms, techniques, and semantic content essentially defined art mediums up until the mid-­to late nineteenth century.40 In other words, art was seen mainly as the bearer of styles and forms across generations and not as a repudiation of the past. As Horowitz puts it: Even as recently as the nineteenth century, during art’s great era of crisis, the deepest thinkers about art—­Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, Nietzsche—­never broached the question of art’s definition in abstraction from its transmissive purpose. It is only in [the twentieth] century that the idea has come to consciousness that art might be different in kind from other cultural practices—­in particular, that it might not be essentially transmissive.41

Within the modern period, when art came to be defined abstractly and theoretically rather than through the context of its use, it experienced a “transmissive crisis,” “a crisis of the relation of past and future” in which artists experienced a “failure to inherit,” a yearning for, but failure to connect with, the great art of the past.42 In the words of Daniel Herwitz, the moderns found “that they were incapable of inheriting not only past tradition and achievement (past genius and all that it wrought) but—­ relatedly—­of bringing the past to a proper burial, of dispensing with it, overcoming it, mourning it, getting past it once and for all.”43 The art antiquities exhibitions of the 1880s reflected this worldwide philosophical transmissive crisis and compounded it with economic factors particular to the 197

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imbalances faced by Japan in the early to mid-­Meiji period. In his important analysis of the “economics of japonisme” (japonisumu no keizaigaku), Satō Dōshin once noted how the policies of Meiji arts administrators were motivated by the desire to replace the deleterious outflow (ryūshutsu) of antiquities with the potentially profitable export (yushutsu) of new art manufactures. Should they succeed, they would be able to reverse the colonialist vector of japonisme, which was ordinarily about Western collectors using their superior purchasing power to separate Japanese temples and other disadvantaged owners from antiquities. Meiji officials reasoned that if they could coax Western buyers to purchase an endless supply of new works rather than a limited supply of antiquities, they could harness the economic potential of japonisme while keeping antiquities in Japan.44 The Dragon Pond Society, the Kan Kobijutsu Kai, and the reference room of the Domestic Competitive Exhibition sought to inspire the production of new works based on the great art of the past, literally replenishing the stock of art antiquities that were leaving Japan. Fenollosa’s Kangakai appeared to be engaged in a similar endeavor, but as described in chapter 3, it functioned to facilitate the removal of Fenollosa’s antiquities collection from Tokyo while redirecting Japanese popular interest toward the creation of new art, a process that selectively used antiquities and can even be understood as an effort to “regenerate” them. Thus, while the 1880s presented a number of unparalleled opportunities to view premodern Japanese art in Tokyo, the motives behind these displays were rooted in the desire to produce new pieces that would make up for and ultimately replace the outflow of antiquities to the West. Turning on the realization that the supply of past art was finite while the potential to generate new pieces was unlimited, it was an economically informed solution to the structurally Orientalist notion that Japanese art, once it had all been bought up by Western collectors, would surely go extinct.

Antiquities and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting Thus far we have surveyed the political and philosophical motives behind the display of art antiquities in mid-­Meiji Tokyo, but such concerns were only indirectly joined to the problems that confronted contemporary Japanese painters. How was a Japanese artist to confront the Western prognosis of Japanese art’s supposed decline and extinction, particularly when a number of Meiji Japanese commentators were also speaking of a decline? The preceding chapters have considered some of the ways in which Kano Hōgai and other painters confronted concrete problems of picture-­ making in the process of producing works to display at exhibition. While the notion of the reference room was striking, there was certainly nothing new or unusual about the practice of using existing works as the basis for new ones. In fact, as seen in chapter 1, almost everything we know about the production of Japanese art in the Edo period points to the importance of precedents. In the cases of the Kano schools, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Ike no Taiga, and Itō Jakuchū, the 198

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range and nature of paintings to which an artist and workshop had access played a large role in determining the identity of the resulting products. Other schools, like the Unkoku in Western Japan, literally framed themselves as the self-­assigned descendents of Sesshū and strove to transmit his legacy. Painters trained in the late Edo period, such as Kawanabe Kyōsai and Kano Hōgai, meanwhile, used precedents to generate some of their most widely acclaimed works; the most widely known example of this type of historical borrowing from the first half of the Meiji period might be Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon of 1888. In each case, the artist treated the composition as a structure that could be modified piecemeal in order to fit particular needs, or as an idea whose virtuosity lay in the execution rather than in the originality of the conception. In such cases, the practice of making new art based on existing models was not simply a working method meant to assist the artist; it also presumed that these older paintings were meaningful to their audiences thanks to a shared knowledge of certain canons. In the Edo period it was likely part of the artist’s job to spread and recreate these canons for the benefit of viewers, whether in painted emulations or woodblock-­printed manuals.45 Still, even at their most widely disseminated, such canons and masterworks were known by relatively few. The antiquities exhibitions of the 1880s and the publication of artworks in journals and books in the latter half of the Meiji period greatly expanded the visibility of certain masterpieces among artists and audiences, especially since early modern Japan had more restrictions on the publication of the affairs and possessions of elite members of society and hence had no exact counterpart to the more democratically minded “paper museums” of old masterworks in Europe, which were made possible by the early modern through nineteenth-­century culture of the black-­and-­white reproductive print.46 This expanded visibility had two major effects. First, it made historically important works—­indeed, masterpieces—­available to a much wider range of artists and viewers than ever before. This was an unambiguously positive development, but it accompanied a more complex result: art exhibitions and publications fundamentally altered the way in which famous compositions were known and transmitted because they established the status of the original in a new way, especially when photomechanical engraving and other reproductive technologies became widespread. By 1897 the art world in Japan and beyond could appreciate the Hikone Screen in the form of a color woodblock-­printed reproduction and in black-­and-­white photography. These illustrations were accompanied by a series of scholarly articles in the journal Kokka that broke new ground by taking the Hikone Screen away from its traditional attribution to Matahei, the semimythical founder of ukiyo-­e genre painting of the pleasure quarters, and arguing that the screen could only have been executed by a high-­ranking Kano artist, someone in the service of the early seventeenth-­century elite. These arguments were the result of a thorough review of documentary sources and rigorous comparison of images. Writers emphasized that although it depicted a 199

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brothel, the Hikone Screen was elegant and refined based on its artistic qualities, such as the cerebral composition, the miniature screen painting, and the figures’ expressivity. Moreover, it took up the respectable, time-­honored East Asian painting theme of the four gentlemanly accomplishments, showing painting, calligraphy, music, and gaming all in one scroll.47 In one sense, this scholarship marked the beginning of the modern scholarly legacy of engagement with the Hikone Screen that continues to this day. Yet in another, it essentially marked the demise of a mythic and imaginary image of the Hikone Screen, one that grew and changed over time in the form of successive copies. The new culture of public exhibition and photographic reproduction supplanted the imaginary version of the Hikone Screen and with it the mysterious figure of Ukiyo Matabei, who had represented the ideal of a figure who was simultaneously of the people and culturally sophisticated. Zeshin’s own engagements with the Hikone Screen developed in the middle of these changes. One of his renditions of the famous painting was reproduced in color woodblock form in the journal Kokka in 1897, seven years after his death, and in the same issue that reproduced panels from the original Hikone Screen.48 His biographer, the painter Kawasaki Chitora (1837–­1902), had little to say about Zeshin’s work but noted that he had been modest, filial, imbued with a strong sense of patriotism, and that his painting after the Hikone Screen was noble (kōshō) and elegant (yūga). The author’s emphasis on the nobility of Zeshin’s painting precisely mirrors the recuperation of the Hikone Screen to the notion of fine art.49 As Fenollosa would later note, “It was sent to the Exhibition of 1900 at Paris by the Japanese Government, which is said to have insured it for [the substantial price of ] 30,000 yen.”50

Nihonga and the Globalization of Japanese Art History Precisely from the 1880s, the age of the public exhibition and photographic reproduction of Japanese artworks, we see a number of paintings and craft objects that take every opportunity to call attention to the act of displaying art and to the self-­ referential qualities of the artwork, as Zeshin did when he produced works based on the Hikone Screen. Instead of devising wholly new objects to imbue with self-­referentiality, many mid-­Meiji artists appeared to sift through the history of East Asian art, reclaiming older objects and myths that gave expression to ideas about social class and painting style that, if anything, had become more urgent with the abolishment of the Tokugawa status system in the early 1870s. Thus, a weaver of Japanese figured satin pictures at the world’s fairs used as his pictorial model an image that was already about the premodern display of fine robes and recalled the Whose Sleeves? (Tagasode) screen paintings of robes from the seventeenth century (fig. 6.13). An intricately painted vase reproduced all of Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, and a pair of maki-­e lacquer boxes presented an exuberantly three-­dimensional illusion of painted screens on its cover (see figs. 2.11–­12). 200

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6.13  Sasaki Seishichi, Antique Robes Hanging beneath a Tree,

The tension between the will to extend Japanese painting and craft objects as an unbroken transmission into the present and the need to establish originality vis-­à-­

1894. Figured satin. Nishijin Textile Museum. Exhibited at the 1895 Domestic Industrial

vis the increasingly available masterpieces of the past would follow nihonga artists and artisans into the twentieth century. Some of the most compelling nihonga works, even to the present day, contain strong echoes of precisely those types of past art

Exhibition.

that continue to be important to viewers. Hishida Shunsō’s famous Fallen Leaves (Ochiba, 1909; fig. 6.14), for example, compositionally borrows from two Rinpa works closely associated with Okakura Kakuzō. Okakura served as Shunsō’s mentor while the young painter was at work in Izura as a member of the Japan Art Institute, the artists’ group that Okakura founded in order to nurture future nihonga painters. Fallen Leaves appears to draw on the Chinese Black Pine and Maple screen attributed to Kōrin in the collection of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where Shunsō studied, and on the Spring and Autumn Flowers and Grasses screen pair in the style of Watanabe Shikō, which Okakura acquired for the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, just three years prior to the creation of Shunsō’s Fallen Leaves.51 Part of the complex legacy of figures like Okakura and Fenollosa has to do with the fact that they worked to shape art historical canons and contemporary events simultaneously, occasionally blending two separate registers of time into one, as when they positioned their own nihonga protégés at the conclusion of their histories of East Asian art. Such maneuvers seem manipulative today, yet they also reflected the fluid positionality of a time when it was still plausible that contemporary artists 201

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6.14  Hishida Shunsō, Fallen

might repair the sense of rupture with the artistic transmission of the past. At the

Leaves (Ochiba), 1909. Ink and

same time that he advocated his particular vision of the future of Japanese painting,

color on paper; pair of six-­fold screens. Eisei Bunko Museum. Exhibited at the third Ministry

for example, Fenollosa wrote longingly of the potential revival of American art. “As art, and not nature, is the seed of a new art,” he wrote, “we cannot . . . study too pro-

of Education Exhibition

foundly the traits of the great painters whom we distinguish as the ‘Old masters.’”52

(Bunten), 1909.

The beginning lines of Okakura’s 1890–­1892 lectures, as collected in his History of Japanese Art (Nihon bijutsushi), likewise suggest that the hope for a smooth transmission between past and present remained ardent in the Meiji period: People look upon history as [nothing more than] a record of past events; in short, they take it to be lifeless. But this is a grave mistake. History lives inside our bodies and is always active. What old people wept and laughed about is the source of our own tears and laughter. . . . Similarly, the paintings of Kanaoka and Sesshū are the source of our own. While we cannot know why the Hōryūji murals or the Medicine Buddha of Yakushiji were made, or even the means by which this was done, the works nonetheless benefit us as the Fujiwara style. Had there been no Sesshū, no Sōami, our Japanese art of today would not be the same.53

To a far greater extent than once expected, nihonga works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are quite literally intertwined with specific premodern artworks in museum collections. These circumstances are consistent with Okakura and Fenollosa’s overlapping identities as historians, curators, collectors, and contemporary art critics in the age of exhibitions. Nihonga’s close relationship 202

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6.15  Shibata Zeshin, Elegant Pastimes (detail), ca. 1880s. Ink, color, and gold on paper; folding screen pair. Clark Collection, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

with past art, therefore—­whether as an expression of longing, political strategy, or revisionism—­must be understood as central to the conditions that generated it and not simply dismissed as a failed quest for originality. Caught at the boundary between different ways of defining a painting, the works can be appreciated through a form of triangulation similar to that which emerges from Zeshin’s skillfully folded screens within a screen (fig. 6.15). The images have us caught in the folds between a single object, a larger corpus of objects, and our freely revised memory images from painting history.

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The public is a prescience or a phantasy within the work and within the process of its production. It is something that the artist himself invents, in his solitude—­ though often in spite of himself, and never quite as he would wish. —t. j. clark (1982)1

There are many ways of phrasing the transition between early modern and modern. When it comes to explaining the profound changes in Japanese artistic production from the 1860s through the 1890s, though, few factors are as decisive as the emergence of a new sort of public: diverse, international, competitive, reflective of the imbalances and injustices of the late nineteenth-­century world order. The emergence of an international audience was particularly significant for visual art. This was because, as Karatani Kōjin once wrote, “the Japanese [literary] classics could not be read abroad,” nor, one might add, could they be purchased, packed into a steamer trunk, and put on display in London or Philadelphia as easily and effectively as visual art.2 With their appeal to the visual, art objects didn’t only give the appearance of universal accessibility; they slipped across linguistic borders—­though never quite as their makers or curators might have expected. The success of Japanese painting and craft objects on the world stage owed to their visual, material nature. The preceding chapters have been particularly concerned to explain how these objects functioned visually and how visual traits interacted with the objects’ shifting verbal and environmental frames. The demand that Japanese art be produced for foreign sale and exhibition led to a number of 205

artistic developments, beginning with the foregrounding of illusionism and technical intricacy and the move toward a dramatically larger scale. Additionally, objects did double duty as art and technical display, selected and reframed existing iconography based on contemporary relevance, and reiterated past Japanese art through metapictorial commentary. Other objects reached out to Western viewers but did so through distinctly nineteenth-­century Japanese notions of Western preference. Finally, domestic Japanese concerns about the “low” aspects of popular art provoked attempts to police and articulate style. These developments reveal how paintings changed once painters became aware of a larger, more diverse audience in Japan and abroad. The change was most noticeable in the case of painters like Hōgai, who lost their existing circles of patronage and appreciation and were obliged to respond to new initiatives such as the call for submissions to domestic and foreign exhibitions and even to the requests of foreign patrons in Japan. The audience for these works was phantasmic in T. J. Clark’s sense of the word. It was conjured in the artist’s mind and informed by a variety of factors: the artists’ own interests and concerns, newly available images from the West, the input of foreigners like Fenollosa and Gonse, a desire to satisfy Meiji government officials, and the ideas of cosmopolitan Japanese elites such as Sano Tsunetami and Kuki Ryūichi.

A Crisis of Viewership Born in the tension between these different audiences, parameters, and ambitions, the exhibition art of the early to mid-­Meiji period did not always look radically different from earlier art, but it incorporated a fundamental ambiguity not often seen in the arts of the preceding period. In his essay “The Problem of Change in Literary History,” Hayden White writes, “Writers may experiment with different genres, with different messages, even with different systems of encodation and decodation. But a given product of such experimentation will find an audience ‘programmed’ to receive innovative messages and contacts only if the sociocultural context is such as to sustain an audience whose experience of that context corresponds to the modes of message formulation and conveyance adopted by a given writer” (italics in original).3 In other words, even innovation, to be recognized as such, will conform to an audience’s horizon of expectations. White continues: Literary innovation may be presumed to be going on all the time. . . . But historically significant literary innovation is possible only at those times in which the potential audience for a given form of literary work has been so constituted as to render unintelligible or banal both the messages and the modes of contact that prevailed in some preceding era. Periods of genuine “crisis” in literary history, consequently, must be seen as those in which new systems of encodation and transmission of messages are being constituted, as times when language itself has 206

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fallen under question, and none of the conventional modes of message formulation and transmission appear to be adequate. (italics in original)4

In the Meiji period, the rapid expansion of Japanese art’s audiences and the introduction of new, Western understandings of painting and craft objects led to a kind of expressive crisis in which art became detached from its ordinary circles of viewership and was suspended between domestic and foreign audiences and expectations. This led some mid-­Meiji artworks to a state of alienation in which the image and its audiences were only tenuously connected, for they lacked a shared, stable means of communication. This helps to explain the homeless nature of the more radical Kangakai paintings, such as Niō Seizing a Demon (see fig. 3.12) or Kano Hōgai’s eerie and puzzling Scenes along a River (figs. 7.1, 7.2). Scholars have suggested that this latter painting, which is framed, draws on Sesson, Yuan Yao, and even J. M. W. Turner.5 Starkly outlined and pitted mountain forms push against each other like soft bulges of fabric. Tiny clusters appear to have been added to the landscape, but they are so small that they oblige a reassessment of the painting’s entire sense of scale: hills become mountains, while curved shorelines become vast bays. A fine brush created 7.1  Kano Hōgai, Landscape:

pale, thin outlines, hatchmarks, and pitting, but these marks have little in common

Scenes along the River, 1880s.

with the conventional named texture strokes of Chinese painting history; instead,

Ink on paper, 61.6 × 136.7 cm;

they bear affinities with the conventional marks used to effect shading in the me-

framed. Fenollosa-­Weld Collection, Museum of Fine Arts,

dium of Western engraving. The image appears caught between the conventions of

Boston. Photograph © 2014,

traditional ink-­painting eccentricity, of Western reproductive engraving, and of the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

artist’s own exploration of the medium. As a result, Scenes along a River distances

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7.2  Detail of figure 7.1.

viewers through its unfamiliar forms. Physically, too, the painting remained in isolation: it was taken to America shortly after its creation and had little impact in Japan. A similar thing happened with the painting Niō Seizing a Demon: a technical tour de force that continues to dazzle viewers today, it mixes high and low genres of visual culture, while its rainbow spectrum of colors (possibly inspired by Fenollosa and Okakura’s self-­described artistic experiments with prisms) flouts the conventional painting palettes of both Japan and the West.6 Yet while some early to mid-­Meiji exhibition objects seem to have lost touch with familiar codes and audiences, other works proved remarkably effective at exploiting past thematic and stylistic forms that were familiar and meaningful—­ Suzuki Chōkichi’s Incense Burner with Peafowl, for example, or the Kannon and child 208

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of Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon (figs. 2.10, 6.1).7 In such objects, large numbers of viewers found something that was praiseworthy, accessible, and significant. Yet that something was not necessarily the same thing for each viewer. By appropriating familiar themes and effects from past art, these works were able to unite audiences who saw different things in the same form. That outcome would be important for the functions that art objects from the Meiji era onward were expected to fulfill: not images that satisfied a single patron or spoke to a group of viewers with similar backgrounds and interests, as was common in the Edo period, but public art addressing viewers of different backgrounds and convictions. As consensus-­building images, they tended to feature forms and iconography with multiple meanings.

Export Art This background helps to account for the pervasive sense of strangeness that lingers today around the Meiji exhibition art shown at the Japanese domestic exhibitions and the world’s fairs. An object produced in Tokyo or Yokohama amid one set of assumptions shifts physical and interpretive contexts once or even several times, rendering meaningless the idea of an original or authentic context. These pieces were often caught between different codes and expectations for art and, furthermore, tended to combine the qualities of existing Japanese art with those of Western industrial showpieces, whose easy, saccharine appeal and ornamentation were meant to please crowds at exhibition (fig. 7.3).

7.3  Paris Exposition: Royal Manufactory of Porcelain, German Porcelain Exhibit, Paris, France, 1900. Colored lantern slide. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Collection, S03i2043l01_SL1.jpg.

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Evidence of the interrelatedness of foreign and domestic objectives in this period has suggested that it would be simplistic to categorize these pieces exclusively as export art, with the sense of pejorative difference that the term has traditionally implied. The situation becomes even more complex when export art is also exhibition art. As Clare Pollard has shown in the case of the pottery of Makuzu Kōzan (1842–­1916), for example, Japanese viewers at the 1877 and 1881 Domestic Industrial Exhibitions were as admiring of Kōzan’s intricate high-­relief vessels as were Western viewers, even though Captain Frank Brinkley would later denounce the works as “degraded” and a “complete prostitution [to Western tastes].”8 That said, the history of value judgment inherent in the term “export art” is central to understanding how the legacy of art-historical bias against Meiji art relates to the sudden expansion of audiences for Japanese art in the mid-­to late nineteenth century. Export art is art made in one community for sale in another, usually far distant one—­as in the case of African tourist art or Meiji craft wares for the world’s fairs. A piece of export art has value for the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century consumer precisely because of the relative remoteness of the community that produced it; its primary attractions are not technological ingenuity or the fulfillment of any practical need so much as the embodiment of the exotic culture from which it came. This means that export art’s success, as it were, depends on the persistence of a gulf between producers and consumers: if the producers and consumers were brought into regular contact, the object would cease to bear the exotic appeal that the consumer demands. In other words, typical export art is founded on unclosable cultural and knowledge gaps between producer and consumer. But knowledge is power, and as Arjun Appadurai notes, the gaps that sustained nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century export art hurt the producer: “Large gaps in knowledge of the ultimate market by the producers are usually conducive to high profits in trade and to the relative deprivation of the producing country or class in relation to the consumers.”9 Such gaps are endemic to the world of global trade, yet the case of export art is peculiar in that any producer who succeeds in bridging the gap through knowledge of consumers and their preferences is likely to fail once the consumer decides that the new, more informed piece of export art is no longer an authentic reflection of the so-­called native culture.10 As we have seen, this voyeuristic desire for the cultural groundedness of the object and for the non-­Western culture that is unaware of its Western spectators is of a piece with the general desire for exhibition art that is oblivious to the viewer and to the fact of its public display.11 Yet here is where the situation takes a further turn: Japanese painters, craft makers, and arts officials became intensely aware both of the history of Japanese painting and of the need to visualize Japaneseness. The result was the category of artistic production that became known as nihonga.

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The Beginnings and Ends of Nihonga The category of nihonga did not solidify until after Hōgai’s death, although I have been arguing that its formative period was in the 1880s. After that point, the representational anarchy and ambiguity of viewership dispersed, and nihonga became in large part dedicated to the representation of Japaneseness for Japanese audiences. Nihonga stabilized visually and materially too, moving away from the chaotic experimentation of works such as Landscape: Scenes along the River. From the 1890s on, being a nihonga painter meant working primarily in certain historically Japanese techniques and materials, especially ground mineral pigments blended with shell white and applied with animal glue.12 In fact, the desire to stabilize nihonga’s identity was so strong that the attempt to use precious pigments as the category’s defining feature can be described as an effort to allow nihonga to have an unambiguous, suprahistorical, even scientifically verifiable identity.13 Against this trend, however, there were always those who contested the dominant visual and conceptual definition of nihonga, including that of its supposed oppositionality to yōga, “Western painting.” Among the most famous of these was the painter Hishida Shunsō. After his screen painting Fallen Leaves (1909) (see fig. 6.14) was criticized by a rival nihonga faction as being “not nihonga,” Shunsō published an essay in several newspapers, stating, “It may not be right away, but I believe the day will come when all painting, both the oil and watercolor painting that are currently called yōga and the nihonga that we are making, will together be called nihonga, to the extent that both are conceived in Japanese minds and produced by Japanese hands.”14 What appeared as the threat of dissolution for some functioned as the ultimate dream for others: the ideal that modern art would become fully naturalized in Japan, regardless of its pigments or techniques. Like the concepts of authenticity and cultural purity that Didier Maleuvre has profiled in late nineteenth-­century Western thought, nihonga was constituted in an age of Orientalism by fears of the loss of the very thing it named: Japanese painting.15 Yet, as we have seen, the desire to ensure that Japanese art would continue to exist was based on Orientalist assumptions about the extinction of “authentic” Japanese art. Furthermore, because it was constantly in the position of articulating its relation to East Asian painting of the past, it provoked contention over which portions of the past were most suitable. Finally, nihonga was called on to adapt to modern conditions of display and reception, but it was precisely its success in doing so that prolonged the sense of a tragic break with tradition, the impossibility of ever achieving a reunification with the arts of the Edo period and earlier. The symbolic origins of modern Japanese-­style painting and craft objects in the political, economic, and terminological instabilities of Hōgai’s age return us to the questions that emerged in Hishida Shunsō’s 1910 commentary: today, more than one hundred years after Shunsō predicted its demise, why does a separate category called nihonga continue to exist apart from contemporary art in general? Now artists 211

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from around the globe transmit and experiment with methods and mediums from the past and from a range of cultures, not to mention the extraordinary work being done in the research and preservation of historical methods and materials of East Asian art and architecture as a field of conservation science. The fear that traditional Japanese painting will be lost forever, as the japonistes once predicted, can now be fully historicized. And for that matter, pre-­Meiji objects have no monopoly on loss: from a present standpoint, the threat of losing touch with the methods employed by experimental nihonga artists in the immediate postwar era, such as Yamazaki Takashi (1916–­2004), is arguably no less pressing, as recent scholarship shows.16 Nihonga was born out of the moment in which viewers first became conscious of the end of Japanese art as a conceptual construct. It is ironic and telling, therefore, that the vision of its demise or abolishment has also been raised, with both positive and negative implications, at almost every key juncture in history: following the Russo-­Japanese War in 1905; as a sort of excommunicatory threat to late Meiji and Taishō (1912–­1926) artists who were deemed too experimental; in the immediate postwar years, during the “death of nihonga” debates (nihonga metsubō ron); and finally today, when a number of visual artists have launched visual critiques of the category from within and without.17 In a 1999 speech to the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin), scholar and critic Kitazawa Noriaki, too, implies that nihonga today is not so much a glorious extension of the Japanese painting of the ancient past as a mournful extension of the late nineteenth-­century academic and social conditions that created it. It is in this context that nihonga has meaning, he suggests, and it will continue to exist so long as nihonga memorializes its own historical roots, however marred by the nineteenth-­century world order they may be. This idea is not as illogical as it first seems: as Horowitz has pointed out in Sustaining Loss, this is what much of our culture actually does. Furthermore, this understanding of art as engaged with its own past through a need to reflect and mourn provides a model for understanding nihonga’s motivations apart from simply proclaiming that nihonga paintings are “invented traditions”—­calculated, modern reformulations of the past. Nihonga is undeniably a modern reformulation of past images, but following Stephen Bann, I would argue that it is misguided to see nihonga in the light of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s influential historical anthology, The Invention of Tradition. Endeavoring to distinguish his own approach to the imaginative creation of history, Bann writes: Implicit in [Hobsbawm and Ranger’s] approach is the view that “tradition” embodies a kind of false consciousness. It has been “invented” in the pejorative sense of the term, that is to say, got up out of nothing to serve strictly functional purposes—­as with the tartan kilts which (we are reminded in Hugh Trevor-­Roper’s splendid essay) were devised by an English Quaker. . . . Against this invented “tradition,” or falsified history, the discourse of the contributors stands evidently as

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history in the proper sense: the history which magisterially discriminates between what is wrong and what is right.18

Calling for an approach that includes history writing within the purview of modern invention without pinning the inventors under the spell of a false consciousness, Bann quotes Hayden White’s analysis of Victor Hugo: “Hugo . . . appears to have recognised that it [his work] was less a matter of coming to terms with ‘the past’ than of using the aporias of historicity to remake the individual’s past in terms conformable to a desire for a future reconciliation of the individual with the new society taking shape in the present.”19 If this is true in Hugo’s case, it is all the more so in the case of mid-­Meiji Japan, when the notion of tradition (dentō) had yet to solidify, and interlocutors still phrased their understanding of the past in terms of transmission (iden, koden). While tradition is easily reified, seen as an autonomous and outwardly confirmable entity, the notion of transmission recognizes that a subject, object, or text must transmit elements of the past if they are to survive and be utilized in the present. This leads to various ways of drawing the relation between past, present, and future. Born of an age when a revolutionary temporality of action was just being formed in the process of proposing new relations between the past, present, and future, nihonga became the ongoing exploration of Japanese painting’s long-­transmitted themes and techniques. As such, it will likely continue in a productive vein for quite some time. That said, relinquishing our attachment to this term and concept amounts to a letting go of the biased assumptions and power imbalances that structured the world of painting in Hōgai and Fenollosa’s day, a very long time ago.

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notes

The abbreviation MBKS refers to Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, ed., Meiji bijutsu kiso shiryō shū (1978).

introduction 1. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1902), 337. Also cited in Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003), xvi. 2. “Kaiga kyōshinkai no ki” (Article on the Competitive Painting Exhibition), Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, October 9, 1882. 3. Eustace G. Cecil, “An Autumn Visit to Japan,” Nineteenth Century 142 (December 1888): 862. 4. See, for example, Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 106, 113–­15. 5. “Bashidun hakurankai” (Boston Exhibition) Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 1 (November 1883), 18. 6. The word nihonga appears extremely sporadically in the Edo period to refer mainly to the imaging of local Japanese (as opposed to Chinese) scenery and customs. The word in the sense described here first appears in print discourse in the late 1870s or 1880s, although it arguably does not become a fixed category until the turn of the century. On the early usages of the word, see Kitazawa Noriaki, “‘Nihonga’ gainen no keisei ni kansuru shiron” (An Essay on the Formation of the “Nihonga” Concept), in Meiji Nihonga shiryō (Source Materials for Meiji Nihonga), ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1991), 469–­537. The term appears intermittently in Ernest Fenollosa’s speech Bijutsu shinsetsu (The True Meaning of the Fine Arts), published as a pamphlet in 1882. The phrase nihon gajutsu (painting methods of Japan) appears multiple times in Gottfried Wagener, Dokutoru Waguneru shi Meiji jūnen naikoku kangyō hakurankai hōkokusho (Doctor Wagener’s Report to the Domestic Industrial Exhibition) (Tokyo, 1877), in MBKS, 237. Other early uses of the word nihonga appear in the journal Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō around 1883. See, for example, Shimizu [no given name listed], “Mondō,” Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 1 (November 1883): 21–­22, and 215

“Pari hakubutsukan no nihonga,” Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 14 (December 11, 1884), reprinted as Kindai bijutsu zasshi sōsho 1, ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 1990), 93. During this decade, the word nihonga appears interspersed with nihon kaiga (Japanese painting), honpō no ga (the painting of our [nation] Japan), wagakuni no ga (our country’s painting), and so forth. 7. Murakami Hōichi, Naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai kaijō hitori annai (A Self-­Directed Guide to the Domestic Painting Exhibition) (Tokyo: Murakami Hōichi, 1884), 1–­2. The word hozon appears in sources beginning with Wagener’s 1877 report (see note 6 above). 8. While nostalgia for a vanishing Old Japan was a major trend in European and American japonisme, it certainly was not the only trend: particularly from the 1890s onward, japonisme in elite Western circles would play a role in shaping avant-­garde projects. See, for example, Christopher Bush, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 9. My title engages with two other recent titles in Japanese art: Alica Volk’s In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), which chronicles the work of Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–­1927), and Timon Screech’s Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), which accounts for artwork at the crossroads of a patron or buyer’s demand, a viewer’s expectation, and an artist’s creative processes. 10. For a historical overview, I recommend Ellen P. Conant, with Steven D. Owyoung and J. Thomas Rimer, Nihonga, Transcending the Past: Japanese-­Style Painting, 1868–­1968 (New York: Weatherhill, 1995). While my study focuses mainly on Tokyo and on the central government’s art policies, the case of Kyoto is vital to our understanding of Meiji art. See Conant, Nihonga, 17–­24, 41–­43; Morioka Michiko and Paul Berry, Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions: Nihonga from the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). Further examinations of the region are under way in the forthcoming work Kyoto Renaissance: Cultural Revival in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Alice Tseng and Morgan Pitelka. As Conant underscored (14), the Tokyo art world has at times been misleadingly presented as a representation of modern Japanese art as a whole. I am keen to avoid reproducing this confusion, and I hope that my work contributes to an understanding of how and why it came about. Elsewhere I have referred to Fenollosa and Okakura’s self-­canonization efforts, as they used central government patronage and English-­language publications to further their protégés’ careers and literally write them into their histories of Japanese art (Foxwell, “Merciful Mother Kannon and Its Audiences,” Art Bulletin 92, no.4 [December 2010]: 326–­47). 11. The are a few pre-­Meiji cases of the term, most notably those of ukiyo-­e painters, beginning with Nishimura Shigenaga (1697?–­1756), who signed themselves Nihon gakō (Japanese painter); see Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen,” for details. 12. As Ellen P. Conant points out, these individual master-­pupil relationships not only continued into the twentieth century; they also bore responsibility for training “the second generation, born in the 1860s and 1870s, and the third generation, born in the 1880s, of Meiji masters.” Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–­2000, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 53. 13. For further historigraphic analysis, see my introduction to Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 1–­27. 14. The term kokusui gained prominence in the context of a bid to “preserve national essence” in the journal Nihonjin (The Japanese) in 1888–­1889; significantly, one of its key writers, Miyake Setsurei, had been a student of Fenollosa. Sōgō Masaaki and Hida Yoshifumi, eds., Meiji no kotoba jiten (Dictionary of Meiji Words) (Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 1986),163–­64. 15. Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 50, 54. 16. Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Kikuchi Yōsai to Meiji no bijutsu (Tokyo: Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1999); Satō Dōshin, Kawanabe Kyōsai to Kikuchi Yōsai, Nihon no bijutsu, no. 325 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1993); Rosina Buckland, Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to

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Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Hirota Takashi, Takeuchi Seihō: Kindai nihonga no genryū (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 2000). 17. In English, see Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004). 18. Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji.” 19. Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen.” 20. The 1884 article “Pari hakubutsukan no nihonga,” cited above, exemplifies this tendency, its author describing the exhibition and reception of Japanese paintings in Paris. Kitazawa writes, “When did the word nihonga first come to be widely used in the art world? . . . The impetus was most likely the transcription of Fenollosa’s lecture Bijutsu shinsetsu [The True Meaning of the Fine Arts].” Kitazawa Noriaki, Nihonga no ten’i (The Translocation of “Nihonga”) (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2003), 10. While the word did emerge around the time of Fenollosa’s famous lecture in 1882, which circulated widely through the art world in the form of printed Japanese transcripts, it is difficult to prove that Bijutsu shinsetsu played such a definitive role in its establishment. The word nihonga appears in the Japanese transcript, though not prominently and not as the only manner of designating “Japanese painting.” Kitazawa’s broader point, however, is well taken. 21. Goseda Hōryū, [untitled newspaper submission], Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper), September 22, 1876, 4. 22. Satō, Modern Japanese Art, in which see also the Foxwell introduction. 23. Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 43–­52. 24. Seki Chiyo, “Naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai” (The Domestic Painting Exhibitions), in Meiji bijutsu kiso shiryō shū (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 1975), 25. 25. Seki, “Kōkyo sugido-­e ni tsuite” (Cedar Door Paintings of the Meiji Palace). Bijutsu kenkyū 264 (July 1969): 1–­32; Satō, Modern Japanese Art. 26. Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 49–50, 57. The exclusion of oil painting was overturned in 1896 with the painting department’s separation into Japanese and Western painting sections, the latter headed by Kuroda Seiki (1866–­1924). 27. John Clark has analyzed the nihonga and yōga concepts as functioning in tandem. Clark, “Yōga in Japan: Model or Exception? Modernity in Japanese Art 1850s–­1940s: An International Comparison,” Art History 18, no. 2 (June 1995): 260. 28. Anonymous, “Sengo no Nihonga: Bō taika no danwa,” (Japanese Painting after the War: A Conversation with the Masters), Kaiga sōshi 121 (September 1905), 3. 29. See Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-­Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 3–­76; Buckland, Painting Nature for the Nation. 30. Seki Chiyo, “Naikoku kangyō hakurankai,” in Meiji bijutsu kiso shiryō shū, 20. This event is typically described as marking the beginning of oil painting’s “winter period” in Japan. See also Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden (1989), 90–­94; Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Meiji chūki no yōga (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1988); and Emiko Yamanashi, “Western-­Style Painting: Four Stages of Acceptance,” in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–­2000, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 20, 22. On Meiji oil painters as social elites, see Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 70–­84. 31. Amagai Yoshinori, “Kōbu bijutsu gakkō setsuritsu mokuteki ni tsuite,” Bigaku 55, no. 3 (2004): 50. 32. Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 246–­47. 33. Hakurankai Jimukyoku, “Shuppinbutsu no gaiyō” (An Overview of the Exhibits, c. 1872), reprinted in Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki Shuppan, 1973), 2:165. The Japanese exhibit at Vienna did contain oil paintings by Takahashi Yuichi (1828–­1894) and Kamei Chiichi (1843–­1905), as well as over forty framed panel paintings with ink and color on silk by renowed painters, mainly from Tokyo, including Shibata Zeshin, Shiokawa Bunrin, Noguchi Yūkoku, Taki Katei, Kunichika, and Hōgai’s teacher Kano Shōsen’in Masanobu. See Tokyo

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Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyūjo Bijutsubu, ed., Meijiki bankoku hakurankai bijutsu shuppin mokuroku (Art Catalogues from the Meiji-­Period World’s Fairs) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1997), 188–­90. 34. See Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 35. Gregory Irvine and Anna Jackson, “‘The Finest Piece of Bronze Which an Artist’s Hand Has Ever Produced’: The Life and Times of a Japanese Incense Burner,” Apollo 465 (2000): 18–­23. See also chapter 5. Many of Edo-­Tokyo’s “realistic” sculptors were likely trained in the popular entertainment industry. See Kinoshita Naoyuki, Bijutsu to iu misemono: Abura-­e chaya no jidai (A Spectacle Called Fine Art: The Age of the Oil Painting Tearooms) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1999); Minamishima Hiroshi and Honda Yoshiko, Iki ningyō to Edo no yokubō: hankindai no gyakushū II (Kumamoto: Kumamotoshi Gendai Bijutsukan, 2006). 36. Hakurankai Jimukyoku, “Shuppinbutsu no gaiyō.” 37. Hokusai and his daughter Ōi were among the artists to produce such works in the late Edo period. Kobayashi Tadashi and Julie Nelson Davis, “The Floating World in Light and Shadow: Ukiyo-­e Paintings by Hokusai’s Daughter Oi,” in Hokusai and His Age, ed. John Carpenter et al. (Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2005), 93–­103. On the mixed media of oil painting in early Meiji, see also Tokubetsuten Goseda no subete: Kindai kaiga e no kakehashi (All about the Goseda Studio: A Bridge to Modern Paintings in Japan) (Yokohama: Kanagawa Kenritsu Rekishi Hakubutsukan, 2008). 38. Philippe Burty, “Le Salon Japonais,” La République Française, June 25, 1883. 39. Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenorosa: Nihon bijutsu no sen’yō ni sasageta isshō (Ernest Francisco Fenollosa: A Life Devoted to the Advocacy of Japanese Culture) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1982), 1:175–­76. An annotated version of the Japanese Bijutsu shinsetsu text can be found in Nihon kindai shisō taikei (Anthology of Modern Japanese Thought), ed. Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), 17:35–­65. The speech survives only in the form of the Meiji Japanese transcript, and the English translation offered here, “The True Meaning of the Fine Arts,” is only a suggestion. It is taken from lectures of different content that survive among Fenollosa’s papers; Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS 1759.2 (57) and (92). The extant untitled English lecture closest in content to Bijutsu shinsetsu is transcribed and analyzed as follows: Murakata Akiko, “Fenorosa no ikō to Bijutsu shinsetsu” (Fenollosa’s Lecture and Bijutsu shinsetsu), Eibungaku hyōron 49 (December 1983): 45–­76. See also J. Thomas Rimer, “Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art,” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. M. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 97–­108. Fenollosa, “Lecture on Art delivered before the Tokio Artists. Lecture I. April 10th 1881,” MS, Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am1759 (1). 40. British critic Marcus Huish responded that this idea of Fenollosa’s was, in the words of his compatriot John Leighton, “so ludicrously unphilosophical that I am surprised you should find it worth refuting.” Huish, “Is Japanese Art Extinct?,” Nineteenth Century, no. 113 (March 1888), 355. 41. Mabuchi Akiko, Japonisumu: Gensō no nihon (Japonisme: The Imaginary Japan) (Tokyo: Brücke, 2004); Elisa Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1982). 42. Here I draw on Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen.” 43. Twentieth-­century narrators appreciated Hōgai’s connection to Okakura and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, his loyalist Chōshū connections, and his Kano (samurai) status and attendant sense of duty, first to his home daimyo and next to “Japan” as a nation (sentiments which, however, can only be inferred, as Hōgai left no written testament). Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 309–23. 44. “Kano Hōgai shi shikyo” (Death of Kano Hōgai), Yomiuri shinbun, November 7, 1888. 45. Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen”; Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, review of Nihonga: Transcending the Past, by Ellen P. Conant, Stephen D. Owyoung, and J. Thomas Rimer, Journal of Japanese Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 163–­65. 46. On Okakura’s complicated feelings toward bunjinga and toward Kyoto artists, see Kinoshita Nagahiro, Okakura Tenshin: Mono ni kanzureba tsui ni ware nashi (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2005), 44–­46; 92–­94. See also Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji,” 53, and Christine 218

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Guth, “Meiji Response to Bunjinga,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-­ Century Japanese Art, ed. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 197–­226. 47. Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Adrian Favell, Before and after Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art, 1999–­2011 (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher, 2012). 48. Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen”; Buckland, Painting Nature, 2–8, 100.

chapter 1 1. Frederic Harrison, “A Few Words about Picture Exhibitions,” Nineteenth Century 137 (July 1888): 31–­33. 2. Okakura Kakuzō, “Kano Hōgai,” in Okakura Tenshin zenshū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993), 3:70. Originally published in Kokka, no. 2 (November 1889). 3. Frances Turner Palgrave, “The Decline of Art,” Nineteenth Century 131 (January 1888): 71. 4. Art Journal, June 1, 1855, 169–­70. Cited in Stephen Jones, Christopher Newall, et al., Frederic, Lord Leighton: Eminent Victorian Artist (New York: Harry N. Abrams; London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 107. 5. The full title is Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence; in front of the Madonna, and crowned with laurels, walks Cimabue himself, with his pupil Giotto; behind it Arnolfo di Lapo, Gaddo Gaddi, Andrea Tafi, Niccola Pisano, Buffalmacco, and Simone Memmi; in the corner Dante. 6. Roman Jakobson, “The Speech Event and the Functions of Language,” in Jakobson, On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-­Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 69–­79. 7. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. 8. In the Western case, I am thinking of Michael Fried’s historical analysis of The Ex-­Voto (1860) by Alphonse Legros (Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 196–­224) or late nineteenth-­century British discussions of Leighton’s Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna. For translation and interpretation of Okakura Kakuzō’s Japanese writings on art in the 1880s and early 1890s, see the special issue of Jōsai Review of Japanese Culture and Society 24 (2012), edited by Noriko Murai and Yukio Lippit. 9. Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and The Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), exemplifies the former approach. Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), provides a model for the latter. 10. Constantine Vaporis, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008); Nakada Setsuko, Edobito no jōhō katsuyōjutsu (Tokyo: Kyōiku Shuppan, 2005). 11. Previously, finely made objects were described according to their genre, e.g., shin shoga (new paintings and calligraphy), koga (old painting), karamono (Chinese [or foreign] things), dōgu ([tea] utensils), okimono (small carvings, bronzes, and other items for display), kobutsu (antiques), and so forth. On the origins of bijutsu, see Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden: “Bijutsu” juyōshi nōto (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1989); Satō Dōshin, “Nihon bijutsu” tanjō: Kindai nihon no kotoba to senryaku (The Birth of “Japanese Art”: Verbal Tactics in Modern Japan) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996); Satō, Modern Japanese Art; Segi Shin’ichi and Katsuragi Shiho, eds., Nihon bijutsu no shakaishi (Tokyo: Ribun Shuppan, 2003), 303–­8. On collecting, display, and object categories, see Christine Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 12. On the interrelation of these terms, see Alice Tseng, The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 18–­38. 13. Fuchibe Tokuzō, Ōkō nikki (Journal of the Journey to Europe) (1862), in Kengai shisetsu nikki sanshū (Collected Official Diaries of Diplomatic Envoys), ed. Ōtsuka Takematsu (Tokyo: Nihon Shiseki Kyōkai, 1930), 2:50. 219

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14. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiyō jijō (Tokyo: Keiyō gijuku shuppankyoku, 1870), 1:43–­44. Prior to its appearance in Conditions in the West, the word hakurankai (glossed “exhibition” in English) also appears in the journal of Fuchibe Tokuzō, a shogunal emissary sent along with Fukuzawa on a mission to England in 1862. See note 13. On early uses of the word hakurankai, see also Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 103–­4. 15. On the relation between pre-­Meiji and Meiji exhibition practices, see Furuta Ryō, “Nihon no bijutsu tenrankai: Sono kigen to hattatsu,” Museum 545 (December 1996): 29–­56, and Peter Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Exhibitions and Their Precursors,” Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 167–­96. 16. A number of writings on Edo painting have emphasized elements of modern visuality, artistic identity, and historical consciousness. Examples include Julie Nelson Davis, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), exhibition catalogs such as Yasumura Toshinobu and Sasaki Eriko, Ayakashi to tsuya: Bakumatsu no jōnen (Ayakashi and Tsuya: The Passsions of the Bakumatsu Period) (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 2003); Imahashi Riko, Edo no kachōga: Hakubutsugaku o meguru bunka to sono hyōshō (Birds and Flowers: The Representation of Natural History during the Edo Period) (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995); Tamamushi Satoko, Toshi no naka no e: Sakai Hōitsu no egoto to sono efekuto (Painting Born in the Urban Environment of Edo: The Art of Sakai Hōitsu and His Followers) (Tokyo: Brücke, 2004); Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-­Century Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002) and The Shogun’s Painted Culture: Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760–­1829 (London: Reaktion, 2000); and Hay, Shitao. 17. See Kinoshita Naoyuki, Bijutsu to iu misemono: Abura-­e chaya no jidai (A Spectacle Called Fine Art: The Age of the Oil Painting Tearooms) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1999). 18. Fujioka Sakutarō, Kinsei kaiga shi (History of Recent Painting, 1903) (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1983), 198. 19. The term is taken from Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-­Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 20. Sasaki Jōhei and Sasaki Masako, Maruyama Ōkyo kenkyū (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1996). 21. Fujioka, Kinsei kaiga shi, 198. 22. Okakura Kakuzō, Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1903), 200. When he wrote these words at the turn of the twentieth century, Okakura saw the descendents of this “modern Kyoto School of Realism” (203) as the primary opponents of his Tokyo-­based protégés. 23. Ibid., 204. Okakura’s Tokyo partisanship leads him to criticize the Kyoto artists as “fail[ing] to catch the truly national element in art” (203). 24. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30–­31, 162–­63. For applications of Bourdieu in Japanese art history, see Masaaki Morishita, “The Iemoto System and the Avant-­Gardes in the Japanese Artistic Field: Bourdieu’s Field Theory in Comparative Perspective,” Sociological Review 54 (2006):288–­94, and Quitman E. Phillips, The Practices of Painting in Japan, 1475–­1500 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 41, 37. 26. Miriam Wattles, The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchō, Artist-­Rebel of Edo (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 2. 27. On the Tokugawa government’s motives in attempting to make profession hereditary, see David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-­Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7–­13, 20–­78. On secret or oral transmissions and the iemoto system, see Robert J. Smith, “Transmitting Tradition by the Rules: An Anthropological Interpretation of the Iemoto System,” in John Singleton, ed., Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan (Cam220

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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23–­33; Bernhard Scheid and Mark Teeuwen, eds., The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion (New York: Routledge, 2006); Maki Isaka Morinaga, Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Mode of Knowledge (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); and Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons and Tea Practitioners (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 28. For more on this practice, see Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 212–­30. 29. Vaporis, Tour of Duty, 223. 30. Ibid., 223, 230. 31. Matthew McKelway, “Sakai Hōitsu and the Discovery of Ogata Kōrin,” in McKelway, Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761–­1828) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 14–­17. 32. Ike no Taiga, for example, relied on on mentors and patrons for access to recent Chinese paintings and woodblock-­printed images. Yoshida Eri, “Ike Taiga hitsu Dōtei hekiseki zukan no hyōgen to shōgan no ba” (Ike no Taiga’s Lake Dongting and Red Cliff Handscroll: Its Sites of Expression and Appreciation), Bijutsushi 53(1): 188–­204. 33. Lawrence E. Marceau, Takebe Ayatari: A Bunjin Bohemian in Early Modern Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004); Stephen Addis, Kameda Bosai: The Calligraphy, Poetry, Painting and Artistic Circle of a Japanese Literatus (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984). 34. Screech, Lens within the Heart. 35. One example of such works is the Hundred Flowers handscroll (1795) by Yu Song, a painting that was offered to the Kangxi emperor but found its way to Japan, where it circulated among several daimyo houses. Tamamushi Satoko, “Jo Shō hitsu hyakka zukan” (The One Hundred Flowers Handscroll by Yu Song), Kokka, no. 1135 (1990): 23–­31. 36. Itakura Masaaki points out that Kano Tan’yū was also familiar with the more recent Chinese works of his time. However, he did not overtly cite them in his works. 37. Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 38. See Joshua A. Fogel, “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-­Period Japan, ed. Elizabeth Lillehoj, 155–­59 (Warren, CT: Floating World Editions, 2007). 39. Screech, Shogun’s Painted Culture; Foxwell, “The Painter and the Archive: Models for the Artist in Nineteenth-­Century Japan,” in The Artist in Edo, ed. Yukio Lippit, Studies in the History of Art, no. 80 (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, forthcoming, 2015). 40. Isozaki Yasuhiko, “Matsudaira Sadanobu to Tani Bunchō: Tani Bunchō, Ishiyamadera engi dai roku to shichi o hokan su” (Matsudaira Sadanobu and Tani Bunchō: Bunchō’s Replacements to Volumes 6 and 7 of the Ishiyamadera engi), Fukushima daigaku jinbun hattatsu bunkagakurui ronshū 10 (2009):107–­16. 41. Frank Chance, “In the Studio of Painting Study: Transmission Practices of Tani Bunchō,” in Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting, ed. Brenda Jordan and Victoria Weston (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 60–­85; Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Tani Bunchō to sono ichimon (Tani Bunchō and His School) (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 2007). 42. McKelway, Silver Wind, 17–­22. 43. See Satō Dōshin, Kawanabe Kyōsai to Kikuchi Yōsai, Nihon no bijutsu, no. 325 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1993); Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Kikuchi Yōsai to Meiji no bijutsu (Tokyo: Nerima Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1999). 44. While Hōitsu did know Bunchō, Tamamushi Satoko suggests that Hōitsu’s relationship with Kōrin’s paintings developed in a more gradual, piecemeal way. It is true that his works came to exhibit Rinpa characteristics only once he reached the age of about forty, before which he had followed styles as disparate as those of Utagawa Toyoharu (1735–­1814) and Sō Shiseki. It is tempting to see Hōitsu as a historian in the modern sense, or to envision his work in the early nineteenth century as representing a forerunner to modern scholarship. Tamamushi urges us to resist such a conclusion: “For Hōitsu, the search for historical authenticity (kōshō) was not a research tool to be used in exposing the truth, but a popular form of design or behavior.” 221

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Tamamushi, Toshi no naka no e, 507. In other words, Hōitsu’s research into past customs and his patrons’ demands for such images were part of a larger, often politically motivated trend, among Confucians and nativists alike, toward investigation of ancient courtly customs that emphasized a return to historically accurate origins and the preservation of disappearing practices. 45. It is important not to think of these meanings and options dogmatically: the use of Sesshū, for example, could have one meaning for the shogunally patronized patriarchs of the Kano school in Edo and another for the regional Unkoku school of Hagi, which from its founding until the presentation of the Long Scroll in Edo to be copied by Kano artists at the behest of the shogunate, enjoyed exclusive access to Sesshū’s famous original (see Lippit, Painting of the Realm, 40–­ 66). Meanings also came and went: the idea that a certain political overtone could be overlooked or denied was equally crucial to the production and circulation of these images. 46. Kōno Motoaki, “Edo Kano zakkō” (Notes on the Edo Kano School), Kobijutsu 71 (1984): 33. Lists of painters who submitted to the 1881, 1882, and 1884 exhibitions are reprinted in MBKS. 47. Kobayashi Tadashi, “Kano Seisen’in no Yamato-­e Fukkō” (Kano Seisen’in’s Yamato-­e Revival), Yamato bunka 83 (1990): 30–­39; Yasumura Toshinobu, “Yamato-­e o kaeta mosha mania: Kano Osanobu” (The Copying Mania that Changed Yamato-­e: Kano Osanobu), in Kanō-­ha kettei ban, Bessatsu Taiyō, no. 131, 130–­35; and Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Kanō Seisen’in Osanobu no zenbō (The Many Faces of Kanō Seisen’in Osanobu) (Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1995). 48. Yasumura Toshinobu, Kano-­ha zenzuroku (Complete Catalogue of Kano Paintings) (Tokyo: Itabashi Museum of Art, 2006), 135. The commission is recorded in Seisen’in’s diary, which has been transcribed as follows: Ikeda Hiroshi, “Kano Seisen’in Kōyō nikki ni miru shosō” (The Multiple Facets of Kano Seisen’in’s Diary of Official Business), Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan kiyō 28 (1992): 105–­499. 49. Yoko Woodson (“Traveling Bunjin Painters and Their Patrons: Economic Life Style and Art of Rai Sanyō and Tanomura Chikuden” [PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1983], 35–­59) notes that literati painters based in Kyoto and Osaka frequently traveled to prosperous cities in Western Japan, especially around the Seto inland sea, in order to cultivate patrons. In Shimonoseki, both Rai San’yō and Tanomura Chikuden were hosted by a wealthy soy-sauce merchant and visited his poetry circle. Lacking the official patronage of a domain lord, itinerant literati painters relied on the support of wealthy merchants and agriculturalists for their income. 50. The Kano were one of four painting houses that received stipends from the lord of Chōfu in the late Edo period. The others were the Morokuzu 諸葛, Watarai 度会, and Sasayama 篠山 (Tenpo jūgonen tatsu jūnigatsu aratame gokachū bungenchō, MS, d. 1844, Chōfu Rekishi Hakubutsukan). According to Furuta Ryō (Kano Hōgai Takahashi Yuichi: Nihonga mo seiyōga mo kisuru tokoro wa dōitsu no tokoro [Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2006], 14), the Watarai and Morokuzu schools were rumored to represent yamato-­e and literati painting, respectively, but both can be traced back to the Kano school. The Sasayama were a branch of the Unkoku school. 51. Kyoto National Museum, ed., Kyoto gosho shōhekiga (Sliding Door Panels of the Kyoto Imperial Palace) (Kyoto: Kyoto National Museum, 2007). 52. The decorative program and assignment of rooms to specific painters in the Otsune Goten (the imperial residence) were carefully correlated to established distinctions of room status, degrees of privacy, and associations of either wa or kan (Japanese or Chinese). Overall, the sliding doors in the more public, exterior rooms and the most important private quarters were executed by the imperially supported (Kyoto) Kano, Tosa, and Tsurusawa schools. The other rooms were executed by painters from Kyoto’s most established private studios, the Maruyama, Shijō, Hara, and Kishi schools, all of which can be traced back to Maruyama Ōkyo. In a situation strangely homologous to the exclusion of bunjinga from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts curriculum in the mid-­Meiji period, literati painters were excluded; in general, notes Sasaki Jōhei, their studio practices diverged from the standard academic model, and they presumably lacked the means or inclination to coordinate disciples in the production of large-­scale wall painting programs. Sasaki Jōhei, “Kyoto gosho to jûkyûseiki no Kyoto gadan,” in Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto gosho shōhekiga, 8–­14. 53. See Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Ch’ing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 222

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54. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 407. Related points are made in Morishita, “Iemoto System.” 55. Morishita, “Iemoto System,” 292; See also Nishiyama, Iemoto no kenkyū. 56. The artist today known as Kano Kazunobu, who trained with an exterior Kano studio, did not use the Kano surname in life but was instead known by his wife’s family name, Henmi, and by his style name, Ken’yūsai. See Kano Toshinobu, Honchō gaka jinmei jisho ([Tokyo?]: Ōkura Hogorō, 1893), 1; Yasumura Toshinobu, “Kazunobu no denki to gaseki,” in Kano Kazunobu Gohyaku Rakan zu sakuhin kaisetsu, 74–­83; and Patricia Graham, “The Ascetic as Savior, Shakyamuni Undergoing Austerities by Kano Kazunobu,” Register (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas), Summer 2010, 5. 57. On Kyōsai, see Timothy Clark, Demon of Painting: The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai (London: British Museum, 1993); Yamaguchi Seiichi, “Kawanabe Kyōsai to bijutsu tenrankai” (Kawanabe Kyōsai and Art Exhibitions in His Day), Kyōsai 26 (July 1985), 31–­44; Brenda Jordan, “Potentially Disruptive: Censorship and the Painter Kawanabe Kyōsai,” in Inexorable Modernity: Japan’s Grappling with Modernity in the Arts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 17–­48; and Yasumura Toshinobu, Kawanabe Kyōsai: Kisō no tensai eshi. Bessatsu Taiyō (Toyo: Heibonsha, 2008). 58. Kano Toshinobu, Honchō gaka jinmei jisho; Graham, “Ascetic as Savior.” 59. By the time of the paintings’ completion shortly after Kazunobu’s death in 1863, the political and economic situation was such that a building to house them was not completed until 1878. Kazunobu also produced designs for a set of wooden sculptures of arhats for the temple of Shinshōji at the popular Eastern pilgrimage site of Mount Narita, where he had earlier completed a ceiling painting in the Sakyamuni Hall. 60. Ryōei, abbot of the Gangōin subtemple, later wrote that he commissioned the Five Hundred Arhats and recounted his process of traveling to inspect various painted and sculpted precedents with Kazunobu. Yamashita Yūji, “Zōjōji hizō no butsuga Kano Kazunobu hitsu Gohyaku Rakan zu ni tsuite,” in Kano Kazunobu Gohyaku Rakan zu sakuhin kaisetsu, 12. 61. Bakumatsu no ayashiki butsuga: Kano Kazunobu no gohyaku rakan zu (Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum, 2006). While they were not installed until the Meiji era, Kazunobu’s paintings became an urban attraction throughout the Meiji period and remained so until World War II; few patrons or connoisseurs appear to have been unaware of them. Fenollosa cited them as an example of the tasteless Westernization of Japanese painting, but few paintings could have been more widely known among Meiji painters and viewers. 62. Kawai Masatomo, “Kano Kazunobu hitsu ‘Gohyaku rakan zu’ ni tsuite” (On the Five Hundred Arhats by Kano Kazunobu), in Minato-­ku bunkazai hōkokusho Kano Kazunobu hitsu Gohyaku rakan zu (Minato Ward Cultural Preservation Report: The Five Hundred Arhats by Kano Kazunobu) (Tokyo: Minato-­ku Kyōiku Iinkai, 1983), 121–­23. 63. “Kanren shiryō”, in Minato-­ku bunkazai hōkokusho; Okimatsu Kenjirō, “Kaisetsu,” Bakumatsu no ayashiki butsuga, 55; Matsushima Masato, Kano Kazunobu. Nihon no bijutsu, no. 534 (Tokyo: Shinbundō, 2010–­2011). 64. Timon Screech, “The Strangest Place in Edo.” Monumenta Nipponica 48, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 407–­28. 65. Shiragi Naoko, “Henmi Kazunobu hitsu Gohyaku rakan zu to Zōjōji gakusō no kairitsu shisō: Kesa to Jūhachibuts no kanten kara,” presentation delivered at the Bijutsushi Zenkoku Taikai, May 2014. 66. Matsushima (Kano Kazunobu, 36) notes the similarity between one of Kazunobu’s figures and a seated Sakyamuni from vol. 2 of the Hokusai Manga (1815). 67. My use of the term “public sphere” derives from Habermas, Structural Transformation. Habermas introduces the rise of art criticism in mid-­eighteenth-­century cities such as Dresden and interprets them as a form of “preliminary” public sphere: the “lay judgment of a public” becomes relevant, and “the same process that converted culture into a commodity (and in this fashion constituted it as a culture that could become an object of discussion to begin with) established the public as in principle inclusive.” He assumed that all people “could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion” (41, 37). While this analysis is apropos to the growth of the art market and of viewing publics in late Edo Japan, the shogunal government’s limits on public assembly and on the publication of matters connected with the 223

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ruling elite means that the evolution from art criticism to a democratic political sphere that Habermas proposes is less stark in Japan. Such evolutionary language was one of the causes behind assumptions about the belatedness of non-­European modernism. Thus, while I utilize Habermas’s conceptual frameworks I do not want to imply an evolutionary link. 68. Although, as Screech notes, the process of commissioning a painting was complicated by “repeated contacts, sometimes through intermediaries; there were discussions and false starts.” Further, there were delicacies of status and personality to be negotiated, as some producers deemphasized the commodity status of their paintings (Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan [Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012], 83; see also 33–­67 and 135–­63 for further details about commissions). Lillehoj, Acquisition (Warren, CT: Floating World Editions, 2007). 69. Kano and Sumiyoshi painters devoted their energies to palace room decoration, screens for the bridal trousseaux of shogunal daughters, and screens sent as diplomatic gifts to Korea, Holland, and, later, the Western treaty powers. More casual paintings included those to be bestowed on vassals at the New Year. Ikeda Hiroshi, “Kanō Seisen’in Kōyō nikki ni miru shosō” (Factors Visible in Kano Seisen’in’s Diary of Official Work), Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan kiyō 28 (1992): 105–­499; Sumiyoshi Hirotsura, Oku go’yō nikki (Diary of Official Work in the Inner Palace), in Tōyō bijutsu taikan, ed. Ōmura Seigai, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Shinbi Shoin, 1909). 70. On shrine and temple airings, see Gregory P. A. Levine, Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005) 223–­86. 71. See Donald F. McCallum, Zenkōji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 72. Jas Elsner, “On Green Curtains and Picture Covers,” in Intersubjective Encounters: Re-­ examining the Work of Adrian Rifkin, ed. Dana Arnold (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming). 73. Timothy Clark, “The Jakuchū Memorial Exhibition of 1885,” in The Artist in Edo, ed. Yukio Lippit, Studies in the History of Art, no. 80 (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, forthcoming, 2015); Aimi Shigeichi, “Higashiyama no shogakai (Minagawa Kien no kōrō narabi ni Rosetsu, Chikudō no koto)” (The Higashima Painting and Calligraphy Meetings), Shoga kottō zasshi 88 (October 1915): 310. 74. The events took place at restaurants or temples; while many were parties that centered around the production of paintings on the spot (sekiga), the Higashiyama Exhibition of New Paintings and Calligraphy (Shin shoga tenkan) was more like a true exhibition, with submissions from painters working in a variety of different modes. The 1797 event took place at the temple Kiyomizudera. See Shōfūtei Yūsen, Higashiyama shin shoga tenkan (Kyoto, 1797) (Waseda University Library). On sekiga, see Alexander Hofmann, Performing/Painting in Tokugawa Japan: Artistic Practice and Socio-­Economic Functions of Sekiga (Paintings on the Spot) (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2011). 75. Sugimoto Tsutomu, Edo no hakubutsu gakushatachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006); Doi Yasuhiro, Hakubutsu gakusha Hiraga Gennai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2008); Arthur B. Chandler, “Expositions of the July Monarchy, Paris: 1834, 1839, 1844.” 76. Okakura, Ideals of the East, 200. 77. Kōno Motoaki notes that several artists published compendiums of Kano works in the eighteenth entury; while such acts were supposedly punishable, he found no evidence of repercussions. Kōno, “Funpan to Mosha,” 128–29. 78. On the status system, see Howell, Geographies of Identity, 7–­13; 20–­78. Howell (54–­55) describes the increasing strain that economic and social change was placing on the Tokugawa status system by the end of the Edo period. For Howell, the late Edo boundary between commoners and samurai was “porous” yet “meaningful” (57). 79. Fukuzawa, Seiyō jijō, 1:43–44. 80. Kinoshita, Bijutsu to iu misemono, 17. 81. Beikoku hakurankai hōkokusho (Tokyo: Beikoku Hakurankai Jimukyoku, 1877), 4. On the relation between pre-­Meiji and Meiji exhibition practices, see Furuta Ryō, “Nihon no bijutsu tenrankai: Sono kigen to hattatsu,” Museum 545 (December 1996), 29–­56, and Peter Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Exhibitions and Their Precursors,” Monumenta Nippon224

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ica 49, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 167–­196. On shogakai, see Robert Campbell, “Tenpōki zengo no shogakai” (Painting Gatherings circa the Tenpō Period [1830–­1844]), Kinsei bungei 47 (November 1984): 47–­72; Kobayashi Tadashi, “Edo jidai no shogakai” in Edo to wa nani ka 1 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1985), 166–­177; and Andrew Markus, “Shogakai: Celebrity Banquets of the Late Edo Period,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (1993): 135–­67. 82. There were, of course, exceptions. Edward Sylvester Morse generally took a more positive, pragmatic view of Meiji policies and of the hakurankai. See Morse, Japan Day By Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 41–­42. 83. Charles Wirgman, “The Japanese Exhibition,” Illustrated London News, October 19, 1872. 84. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 1. 85. On the art object as embodiment of loss and mourning, see Michael Ann Holly et al., “Interventions: The Melancholy Art,” Art Bulletin 89, no. 1 (March 2007): 7–­44, and Horowitz, Sustaining Loss. 86. In addition to drawing on Horowitz, this argument is deeply indebted to the work of Michael Fried, particularly Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and Manet’s Modernism. 87. Rutherford Alcock, Art and Art Industries in Japan (London: Virtue and Co., 1878), 259. 88. Gusoku oiwai (display and celebration of the armor) was a new year’s festivity at the shogunal palace and in many domains. Koji Ruien Kankōkai, ed., Koji ruien (Encylopedia of ancient matters), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Koji Ruien Kankōkai, 1936). I thank Katō Hiroko for this reference. 89. The point is made by Furuta, “Nihon no bijutsu tenrankai”; Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Value”; and Kinoshita Naoyuki, “Daigaku nankō bussankai ni tsuite,” in Gakumon no arukeoroji (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997). 90. Tseng, Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan, 44–­52. 91. Kitazawa, “‘Nihonga’ gainen,” 505–­34; Kagesato Tetsurō, “Yōga” (Western painting), in MBKS, 14–­20. 92. See Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (June 1991): 174–­208. 93. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 94. For example, Furuta, “Nihon no bijutsu tenrankai”; Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values.” 95. See Jordan Sand, “Was Meiji Taste in Interiors ‘Orientalist’?” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 637–­73.

chapter 2 1. Iida Yuzuru, “Ryūchikai kiji” (Speech to Ryūchikai), Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 2 (December 1883), 4. 2. John La Farge, letter dated August 12, 1884, in An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Century: 1890), 129. 3. Mabuchi Akiko, Jyaponisumu: Gensō no nihon (Tokyo: Brücke, 1997), introduction; Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 4. See Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): 177. 5. My use of the English word “craft” is roughly equivalent to the late nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Japanese term kōgei. In the late nineteenth century, such objects were also known in English as applied arts, utilitarian arts, decorative arts, art manufactures, and art industries. 6. “Hakurankai, Kyōto Nishi Honganji Ō Shoin ni oite tō jūgatsu tōka yori jūichigatsu jūichinichi made seiu ni kakawarazu” (A Hakurankai [Exhibition] in the Ō Shoin Building of Nishi Honganji, Kyoto, This 10.10 to 11.11, Rain or Shine), woodblock-­printed advertisement 225

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reproduced in Ōtsuki Takashi, Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai shiryaku (An Abbreviated History of the Kyoto Exhibition Association) (Kyoto: Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, 1937), 10. See also Kudō Yasuko, “Meiji shoki Kyōto no hakurankai to kankō” (The Early Kyoto Exhibitions and Tourism), in Kyōto Kōka Joshi Daigaku Kenkyū Kiyō 46 (2008): 79, and Maruyama Hiroshi, “Meiji shoki no Kyoto hakurankai” (The Kyoto Exhibitions of the Early Meiji Period), in Bankoku hakurankai no kenkyū (Studies of the International Exhibitions), ed. Yoshida Mitsukuni (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1986), 228. As detailed in the foregoing sources, the Kyoto hakurankai was a private initiative begun by three Kyoto merchants; after the exhibition’s successful (and profit-­netting) conclusion, the Kyoto governor pledged to “provide what he could to support the creation of a Hakurankaisha [exhibition association].” The resulting association was staffed by city government officials and private residents. Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, ed., Kyōto hakurankai enkakushi (Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, 1903), 1–­3. 7. In the fifth month of 1871, in advance of both the Kyoto and Tokyo exhibitions but several months after the government received word of the Austrian fair, the Bussankyoku (Bureau of Raw Materials and Products) of the government’s Daigaku Nankō (heir to the shogunal Bansho shirabedokoro [Institute of Barbarian Books] and precursor to the Ministry of Education) mounted an exhibition at the Tokyo Shōkonsha in Kudanzaka (the precursor to the Yasukuni shrine). Documents in the National Archives (reprinted in Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi [Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki Shuppan, 1973], 2:572) reveal that while originally conceived as a hakurankai, it was smaller than anticipated and ultimately billed as a bussankai. Kinoshita Naoyuki, “Daigaku nankō bussankai nit suite” (in Gakumon no arukeoroji [Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997]), suggests that the title bussankai and the timing of the exhibition were chosen to appeal to crowds gathered for a festival and fireworks display at the government’s war memorial shrine, Shōkonsha. See also the helpful chart in Shiina Noritaka, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime (The Origins of Meiji Museums) (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1989), 55. Shortly after the 1871 bussankai, the Daigaku was abolished and replaced by the Ministry of Education. The Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku) was founded under its jurisdiction in the ninth month of 1871, replacing the Bussankyoku. 8. Japan received its notification from the Austrian ambassador in the second month of 1871. Maruyama, “Meiji shoki,” 225. 9. Slightly modified from Peter F. Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Exhibitions and Their Precursors,” Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 184. Original text reproduced in Kornicki, “Meiji gonen no Wakayama hakurankai to sono shūhen” (On the 1872 Wakayama Exhibition), in Bankoku hakurankai no kenkyū, 254. According to Maruyama (“Meiji shoki,” 225), the official solicitation of exhibits for Austria was handed down from the central government to the prefectures in January of 1873. 10. Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 58–­59. The domestic fairs played a crucial role in stimulating Japanese submissions to the world’s fairs. Early solicitations for the world’s fairs in London (1871) and San Francisco (1872) received virtually no response when they were circulated, as people were undoubtedly reluctant to hand over their treasures or take up costly initiatives. Ill informed about the nature of the fairs, they also lacked sufficient financial and administrative support. Maruyama, “Meiji shoki,” 223–­25. 11. Dan Shunpei, ed., Naigai hakurankai shuppin kokoroe (Osaka: Nisshin Shosai, 1880). 12. See the discussion of shokusan kōgyō (the encouragement of industry and manufacturing) in Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: the Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 47–­51, 103–­24. Satō (115) describes the relationship between domestic and foreign exhibitions as “synergistic” and notes that the former functioned as “mass media events” from the Meiji government aimed at Japanese spectators. 13. While the term hakurankai (as opposed to hakubutsukan, or museum) was most commonly used for this space prior to its move to Yamashita, the indoor display hall was called a hakubutsukan as early as 1872, and after the formal period of the hakurankai had closed, the displays remained available for public inspection several times a month. Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 2 (shiryō hen):147, 271. 14. Ibid., 147, 271. 15. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–­27. 16. Satō Hidehiko, “The Legacy of Dr. Dresser in Japan,” in Christopher Dresser and Japan (Kuri226

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sofā Doressā to Nihon), ed. Widar Halen et al. ([Japan]: Kurisofā Doressā to Nihon Ten Katarogu Iinkai, 2002), 60–­67. 17. Ibid., 60–­63. 18. The first leader of the Exhibition Bureau was Tanaka Yoshio, who had been serving as the head of the Products and Manufactures Bureau (Bussankyoku). The roots of these two words, hakubutsu and bussan, as well as Tanaka’s joint appointment, reveal the bureaus’ roots in late Edo exhibition practices, which focused on pharmacology (yakuhin; honzōgaku), regional products (bussan), and the study of natural history (hakubutsugaku). In 1873 the Exhibition Bureau was merged into the Bureau of Overseers of the International Exhibitions (Hakurankai Jimukyoku), which had been founded in preparation for that year’s Vienna International Exhibition. The same year saw the founding of the Yamashita museum as a more or less permanent extension of the Yushima exhibition. From 1875 to 1881, the Yamashita museum operated under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry. In the spring of 1882, it opened in its new building in Ueno Park and, along with the Exhibition Bureau, came under the direction of the newly founded Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. As Satō Dōshin points out in Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, 44–­51, these administrative changes are symptomatic of the government’s general struggle to define the meaning and purpose of the exhibitions it sponsored and of art policy—­whether it should be outward-­directed, toward the enrichment of Japan’s export economy and world image, or inward-­directed, toward the education and enrichment of the people of Japan. With the establishment of the Diet and cabinet system in 1889, the museum was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Imperial Household Ministry, which had gradually deepened its involvement in the support and patronage of Japan’s cultural past. The following year the museum was renamed the Imperial Museum (Teikoku hakubutsukan), suggesting both the imperial household’s transfer of some of its cultural holdings to the museum and the use of cultural heritage as a means of legitimizing Japan’s imperial ambitions and ideologies. At the time of the museum’s transfer, the Exhibition Bureau remained under the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, but it was then consolidated to become the Exhibition Department (Hakurankai ka) of the same ministry’s General Bureau (Sōmukyoku). See Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 1:41–­42, 243–­46; Tseng, The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan, 39–­44. 19. Beikoku hakurankai hōkokusho (Tokyo: Beikoku Hakurankai Jimukyoku, 1877), 4, 9. 20. Ibid., 4. Gottfried Wagener (1831–­1892) was a German engineer and material scientist who came to Japan in 1868 and served the Meiji government as a consultant on the Vienna and Philadelphia international exhibitions and the 1877 and 1881 Domestic Industrial Exhibitions. He remained in Japan until his death in 1892. 21. Kuni Takeyuki notes that at the first Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, visitors responded to the atmosphere of Western-­style objects and architecture by wearing whatever articles of Western clothing they had been able to acquire. Kuni, Hakurankai no jidai (The Age of Exhibitions: The Exhibition Policies of the Meiji Government) (Tokyo: Iwata Shoin, 2005), 60. The comment about the Champs de Mars appears in Inoue Kumajirō, ed., Dai gokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai annaiki (Guide to the Fifth Domestic Industrial Exhibition) (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1903), 22. 22. Edward Sylvester Morse, Japan Day by Day: 1877, 1878–­79, 1882–­83 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 1:254–­55. 23. Kuni, Hakurankai no jidai, 57–­58. 24. Each domestic exhibition was administered by the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Jimukyoku, a special office under the administration of the Interior Ministry in 1877 and subsequently the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. 25. Kuni, Hakurankai no jidai, 168–­74. 26. Ibid. 27. This represented a departure from the more relaxed stance of the Kyoto 1871 exhibition and other early exhibitions, in which objects submitted by Japanese collectors—­mainly antiquities, handcrafted objects, natural historical specimens, and other curiosities—­had been presented under the familiar tripartite division of “Japanese” (wa), “Han [Chinese]” (kan), and “Western” (yō). 227

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28. Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai sōsetsu hakurankai annai (Tokyo: Kinkōdō, 1903), 64–­ 65. Participation was extended to “foreigners who are involved in procurement, production, and manufacturing inside the country [of Japan].” Here the segregation of foreign submissions (with the exception of some large machinery in the Machinery Hall) in the sankōkan was justified by the explanation that foreign participation was “unprecedented.” 29. Morse, Japan Day by Day, 1:259–­60. 30. James Jackson Jarves, A Glimpse at the Art of Japan (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1876), 15. 31. Judith Snodgrass, “Exhibiting Meiji Modernity: Japanese Art at the Columbian Exposition,” East Asian History 31 (2007): 75–­100. 32. Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1863), 1:245. 33. Rev. W. Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: D. Bogue, 1852), 17–­19. 34. Arthur Chandler, “Empire of Autumn: The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867,” http:// web.archive.org/web/20060212102003/http://charon.sfsu.edu/publications/PARISEXPOSITIONS/ 1867EXPO.html. 35. R. Mallet, ed., Record of the International Exhibition, 1862 (Glasgow: William Mackenzie, n.d.), 590. 36. Arthur Chandler, “Expositions of the July Monarchy, Paris: 1834, 1839, 1844,” http://web. archive.org/web/20080515235723/http://charon.sfsu.edu/publications/ParisExpositions/JulyMonarchyExpos.html (accessed August 1, 2013). 37. Chandler (ibid.) has observed that no two French domestic fairs had exactly the same classification system, and this can probably be said of the world’s fairs as well. 38. Fukuda Takanori, “Meiji jūyonen dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai daisanku hōkokusho” (Report from the Third Section of the Second Domestic Industrial Exhibition of Meiji 14), MBKS 344: “The European and American nations . . . call Japan ‘a nation of artists’” The phrase is written良工国民 and glossed nēshon obu āchisuto in katakana. 39. Tanaka Yoshio, “Kaiga o mite kan ari” (Thoughts on Painting), Ryūchikai hōkoku, no. 26 (July 1887), 16–­18. 40. Tanaka Yoshio, “Kaiga o mite kan ari,” part 2, Ryūchikai hōkoku, no. 27 (August 1887), 25. 41. See Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 42. In his lecture draft “The Duty and Opportunity of Japan toward the Whole World,” which he wrote in preparation for his return to Japan in 1896, Fenollosa encouraged listeners to “look . . . away from the small jargon of artists and schools, from the limited tastes of any one people, or of any one age . . . to consider the more important and universal values of art.” MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS 1759.2.23. Intellectually, this is an extension of his argument in Bijutsu shinsetsu and other lectures from circa 1882, that art can and should be appreciated according to universal formal critera, and not only according to culturally specific characteristics. See the discussion in succeeding chapters. 43. The mingei (folk art/folk craft) movement during Japan’s colonial era is another telling example in which the pursuit of a universal aesthetic sharply reinforced the existing power dynamic. See Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Jordan Sand, “Was Meiji Taste in Interiors ‘Orientalist’?” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 637–­73. 44. Tellingly, too, Japan would soon change its focus away from the goal of hosting a world’s fair to the practice hosting of colonial exhibitions in the archipelago and in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. 45. Ernest F. Fenollosa, “Proposals for a New Fine Arts School,” n.d. [ca. 1888?], MS, Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, BMs AM 1759.2. 46. Fenollosa clarified that subject matter was still important, but rather than evaluating the literary or moral content of the subject, he suggested that its success be measured on formal terms: “Subject must lend itself as a helper in expressing beauty of form, and . . . form must contribute its aid in the expression of subject, until there is such an absolute marriage between the 228

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2 that a change in a single part of either would destroy the artistic value of both. Thus the art of representational painting may be accurately defined as the representation of so much of subject and in such manner that it enters into complete union with synthetic needs of the lines, notan, and color, in terms of which it is expressed.” Ibid. 47. Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 51. 48. Ernest F. Fenollosa, “[Lecture to the] Bijutsu Kiokwa-­Uyeno,” dated October 28, 1896. MS, Fenollosa Papers, bMS AM 1759.2 (12). 49. Fenollosa, “The Duty and Opportunity of Japan toward the Whole World . . . ,” n.d. [1896?], MS, Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am1759.2 (23). 50. Elisa Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1982). 51. Fenollosa, “Lecture on Art delivered before the Tokio Artists,” MS, Fenollosa Papers, bMS AM1759 (1). 52. As noted by Christopher Benfey, Fenollosa was also a social and cultural outsider in American intellectual circles. Benfey, “The Boston Tea Party,” in The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003). 53. Marcus Huish, “Is Japanese Art Extinct?” Nineteenth Century, no. 113 (March 1888), 340–­59. 54. Ibid., 355. 55. The intricate classificatory systems for international exhibitions were intended, Rachel Teukolsky notes, to discipline “the lustful, unruly body” of the fairs while simultaneously guiding the minds of “working-­class and provincial viewers . . . whose only previous analogous experience might have been a visit to the country fair” and who were therefore “uncultivated in the sublimity of the [nude] Greek models.” Teukolsky, “This Sublime Museum: Looking at Art at the Great Exhibition,” in Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, ed. James Buzard, Joseph Childers, and Eileen Gillooly (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 90. The last quotation is from Charles Wentworth Dilke, Gallery of the Arts: From the Great Exhibition of All Nations, 1851 (London: Read, 1851), 110. See also Lara Kriegel, “After the Exhibitionary Complex: Museum Histories and the Future of the Victorian Past” (review essay), Victorian Studies 48 (Summer 2006): 681–­704; Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73–­102. 56. Japanese paintings and other art objects were not included in the Hall of Fine Arts until 1893 in Chicago, and even then only by special request. See Conant, “Japan ‘Abroad’”; Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Umi o watatta meiji no bijutsu: Saiken! 1893nen Shikago Koronbusu sekai hakurankai (Another Look at Meiji Art that Went Overseas: the Chicago Columbus Exposition of 1893) (Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum, 1997). Nonetheless, the Japanese paid close attention to these category divisions in order to understand how art was socially defined in the West. See, for example, the speech by Sano Tsunetami transcribed in the journal Kōgei sōdan 1 (1880). 57. Christopher Dresser, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882) (London: Kegan Paul, 2000), 319. As noted by Michael Fried, in 1860s France the notion of the sketch, or esquisse, was used to criticize oil paintings that were judged to have been submitted to exhibitions without an appropriate degree of finish. Fried, Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 214, 302–­8. 58. Rutherford Alcock, Art and Art Industries in Japan (London: Virtue and Co., 1878), 15, 103. 59. Ibid., 103. 60. Kitazawa Noriaki, “‘Nihonga’ gainen no keisei ni kansuru shiron” (An Essay on the Formation of the “Nihonga” Concept), in Meiji Nihonga shiryō (Source Materials for Meiji Nihonga), ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1991), 469–­537. 61. “Dai Ikkai naikoku kangyō hakurankai no yōsoku,” reproduced in Oka Isaburō, “Naikoku kangyō hakurankai enkaku,” MBKS, Kaisetsu, 3–­5. 62. Centennial Board of Finance, Visitors’ Guide to the Centennial Exhibition and Philadelphia: May 10th to November 10th, 1876 (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1875), 13. 63. Elaine Levin, The History of American Ceramics 1607 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 44–­59. 229

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64. My comments on this topic should be read in conjunction with Satō Dōshin’s parsing of the distinctions between e and ga. Satō, “Nihon bijutsu” Tanjō: Kindai Nihon no “kotoba” to senryaku (The Birth of “Japanese Art”: Language and Strategy in Modern Japan) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996), 41–­50. See also Satō, Modern Japanese Art, pt. 2, sect. 1. 65. Ellen P. Conant, “Japan ‘Abroad’ at the Chicago Exposition, 1893,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-­Century Japanese Art, ed. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 266–­73. 66. Tokyo National Museum, ed., Arts of East and West from World Expositions 1855–­1900: Paris, Vienna, and Chicago (Seiki no saiten bankoku hakurankai no bijutsu). Tokyo: NHK and Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 2004. 67. The word ema means “pictured horse” and refers to the roots of the tradition of offering a painted votive plaque or other in-­kind offering as a stand-­in for a live horse, which would become the property of the shrine. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, ema featured almost every imaginable subject, from the Chinese landscapes of the literati painter Ike no Taiga to figures from kabuki and popular Chinese and Japanese legends; as rarities in the Edo period, even oil paintings were donated to shrines and temples. While intended for otherworldly merit, they were often visible to the public, a fact on which artists and donors alike capitalized. Both Ike no Taiga and Shibata Zeshin, for example, are known to have augmented their reputations as painters through the production of compelling votive plaques that became attractions in themselves. Goke Tadaomi, Shibata Zeshin, Nihon no bijutsu, no. 93 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1974), 27–­29, and Yabumoto Kōzō, “Taiga hitsu rantei zu hengaku to sōkō” (Plaque with Painting of the Poetry Gathering at Lanting by Taiga, and Its Draft), Kobijutsu 44 (April 1974): 52–­55. 68. While most ema were painted, some lacquer panel ema survive from the late sixteenth century, particularly in the Tōhoku region. For example, a black lacquer ema with gold makie figuration from Hitotsumiya Jinja in Yonezawa bears the date 1579; similar examples are associated with Chūsonji in Hiraizumi, Tamura Jinja in Kōriyama, and other sites. On Shintō and lacquer in this period, see Anton Schweizer, “The Ōsaki Hachiman Shrine in Sendai and the phenomenon of lacquered architecture in Momoyama Japan” (PhD diss., Heidelberg University, 2009). 69. The third and last chapter of an early nineteenth-­century compilation of poems on paintings, titled New Poems on a Forest of Paintings (Hualin Xinyong畫林新詠). Catherine Stuer, “Medium and Materiality in Carved Lacquer Painting.” Unpublished manuscript. 70. On lacquer and “oily painting” in the context of the beginnings of Japanese oil painting, see Yukio Lippit, “Suspended in Oil: Takahashi Yuichi’s Texture,” unpublished paper delivered at Heidelberg University, June 25, 2009. 71. This mode of thinking is exemplified by an anonymous comment that appeared in the journal Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō in 1883: “Kōrōku-­hō [outline method] is the prevailing method in Japanese painting. . . . But some people say that oil painting doesn’t employ this method because real things in the natural world [tennen no jitsubutsu] are of course not surrounded by distinct black outlines; thus they maintain that Japanese painting is false because it does not imitate nature.” Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 1 (November 1883), “Mondō” (Questions and answers), 21–­22. Reprinted as Kindai bijutsu zasshi sōsho 1, ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 1990). 72. Japanese technicians and world’s fair officials viewed Austrian demonstrations of oil-­ based lacquer and other materials during a study period following the fair’s close. See Tanaka Yoshio and Hirayama Narinobu, Ōkoku hakurankai sandō kiyō (Tokyo: Moriyama Shun’yō, 1897),149–­53. 73. On the recognition of Zeshin in 1877, see Manaka Keiko, “Shibata Zeshin saku Onshitsu bonsai makie kaku ni tsuite: Daiikkai naikoku kangyō hakurankai no hyōka o megutte,” Joshi bijutsu daigaku kiyō 33 (2003): 157–­63. 74. For Wagener’s report, see MBKS. See also Kindai yogyō no chichi Gottofurito Waguneru to bankoku hakurankai (The Father of Modern Ceramics: Gottfried Wagener and the International Expositions) (Seto: Aichiken Shiryōkan, 2004). 75. Kikuchi Hideo, “Dai nikai Pari Bankoku haku shuppin ukiyo-­e kankei shiryō (Materials Concerning the Ukiyo-­e Submitted to the Second Paris Exposition Universelle), Museum, no. 89 (August 1958), 25–­28; no. 90 (September 1958), 29–­33; no. 91 (October 1958), 28–­30. 230

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76. While the documentation of different segments of the population was not a familiar aim of Edo-­period ukiyo-­e, eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century examples typically showed female beauties in the guise of each class and profession. While they were sometimes distinguished by realistic social observations, their documentary quality was playfully countered by the fact that each sitter was an idealized beauty. See Julie Nelson Davis, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). 77. Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-­Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 105–­32. 78. Shioya Jun, “Zuhan kaisetsu: Wīn Bijutsushi Bijutsukan shozō gajō,” Bijutsu kenkyū 379 (March 2003): 150–­77. 79. Eunyoung Cho, “The Selling of Japan: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics in the American Art World, 1876–­1915” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1998), 82–­83: “Considering the conventional condescending attitude toward ukiyo-­e artists at that time, this exceptional choice by the government indicates its awareness of the Western audience’s preference for ukiyo-­e over traditional Japanese paintings.” Contemporaneous French documentation for the albums is cited in Phylis Floyd, “Japonisme in Context” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1983), 1:112. 80. See Chelsea Foxwell and Anne Leonard, eds., Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2012). Although Japanese prints are today noted for having attracted the notice of painters such as Whistler and Van Gogh, at the time Japanese prints and books were absorbed within the gentlemanly European hobby of book and print collecting, where they were admired for their paper, binding, and print technologies. The deluxe European printing and reproductive technology mobilized for Gonse’s L’art japonais (1883) can itself be understood to have been inspired by an admiration of and sense of competition with Japanese prints. 81. Nancy Berliner, “The ‘Eight Brokens’: Chinese Trompe L’oeil Painting,” Orientations (February 1992), 45–­59. 82. Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 83. The dolls can be viewed in Herbert Fux, ed., Japan auf der Weltausstellung im Wien, 1873 (Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst, 1973). For more on the roles of dolls across the Edo-­Meiji transition, see Marguerite V. Hodge, “Enigmatic Bodies: Dolls and the Making of Japanese Modernity,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 12, no. 1 (Spring 2013), http:// www.19thc-­artworldwide.org/index.php/spring13/hodge-­enigmatic-­bodies (accessed September 1, 2013). 84. Alice Tseng analyzes similar tendencies in museum architecture in The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). See also Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum” A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. Michael F. Marra, 43–­52 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 85. Hayashi Tadamasa, “Le Japon,” Paris Illustré (May 1, 1886), 66. 86. These items appeared at the 1862 Great London Exhibition, when the British diplomat Rutherford Alcock and a group of British expatriots sent Japanese objects in order to represent that nation at the fair. The resulting display provoked angry reactions by members of the visiting shogunal delegation. For details, see Angus Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition, 1867–­1970.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000. 87. Fenollosa, “On Preventing the Sale by Priests of Rare Temple Art,” MS, Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am1759.2 (70). 88. In the summer of 1879, the British surgeon and collector William Anderson presented a lecture on the arts of Japan at a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan in Yokohama. Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenorosa: Nihon bijutsu no sen’yō ni sasageta isshō (Ernest Francisco Fenollosa: A Life Devoted to the Advocacy of Japanese Culture) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1982), 1:106. A notebook discovered in Boston and dated December 1880 was found to reveal a “Complete Catalogue of Specimens of Japanese Pictorial Art including notes and commentaries and references to other note books belonging to the Collector/Ernest Francisco Fenollosa.” The title and date could have been added later. MS, private collection, Japan. The circumstances surrounding the notebook’s discovery in 231

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1933 are recounted, with a reproduction of two pages, in Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:121–­24. See also Kuriyama Shin’ichi, Fenorosa to Meiji bunka (Fenollosa and Meiji Culture) (Tokyo: Rikugei Shobo, 1968). 89. Isono Naohide, “Dōbutsugaku kyōshitsu no umi no oya, Mōsu” and “Yureaiki no dōbutsugaku kyōshitsu,” in Gakumon no arukeorojī (University of Tokyo, 1997), http://www.um.u-­tokyo. ac.jp/publish_db/1997Archaeology/03/30300.html#text8. One record of Fenollosa and Morse’s lecturing together with Fukuzawa Yukichi, Toyama Shōichi, and others is recorded in “Myōgo Asakusa no Ibumura rō,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 15, 1878, 1. 90. Tomonobu trained at the shogunal institute for the study of Western culture, the Kaiseisho, from 1863 to 1865, and later with the oil painters Kawakami Tōgai and Charles Wirgman. See Yamada Kumiko, “Kano Tomonobu no Meiji: Oku eshi kara kindai Nihonga kyōshi e” (Kano Tomonobu’s Meiji Period: From Interior Kano Painter to Nihonga Instructor), Kindai gasetsu 9 (2000): 148–­67. 91. “Myōgo Hatsuka Asakusa,” Yomiuri shinbun, April 18, 1879, 1. 92. Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 1:92–­93. 93. For more on the role of photography in Fenollosa’s expeditions and its impact on the Meiji government’s own surveys, see Murakado Noriko, “Meiji-­ki no kobijutsu shashin: Kinai hōmotsu chōsa torishirabe o chūshin ni” (Ancient Art Photographs in the Meiji Period: Centering on the Fine Arts Expedition to the Kinai), Bijutsushi 153 (2002): 146–­65. 94. See Stanley Abe, “Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 95. Ernest F. Fenollosa to Edward S. Morse, September 27, 1884 (Peabody-­Essex Museum, Salem, MA). Cited in Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:201–­3. 96. Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:203. 97. These details are discussed in Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:247–­66, and in Fenollosa’s document “The History of Kangwakai,” MS, Fenollosa Papers. See also Satō Dōshin, “Kangakai,” in Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunenshi (The Hundred-­Year History of the Japan Art Institute), ed. Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunen Hensanshitsu, vol. 1, pt. 1, 441–­77 (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu, 1989); Satō Dōshin, “Kangakai saikō” (Kangakai Reconsidered), Bijutsu Kenkyū 340 (1987): 1–­27. 98. In so doing, he obeyed the supply and demand flows of what Satō Dōshin has called the economics of japonisme. Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 96–152. 99. Fenollosa, “Lecture on Art delivered before the Tokio Artists.” Lecture I. April 10th 1881. bMS Am 1759 (1). 100. Fenollosa, “The Fine Arts Commission to Europe and America,” c. 1888, MS, bMS Am 1759.2 (28); emphasis in original. 101. See Kinoshita Nagahiro, Okakura Tenshin: Mono ni kanzureba tsui ni ware nashi (Tokyo: Minerva Shobō, 2005). 102. Harootunian, Toward Restoration. 103. Fenollosa, “Can Japanese Art Be Revived?” MS, Fenollosa Papers,Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1759 (2). 104. Rutherford Alcock stated that “Mr. [W. G.?] Palgrave says . . . that the only living schools of decorative art in existence must be sought in India, China, and Japan.” Alcock, Art and Art Industries in Japan, 147. The notion that Western decorative art was already dead reflected the same mindset that had seen the South Kensington Museum established in order to “revive” British design through world examples.

chapter 3 1. Yokoyama Kendō, “Kano Hōgai,” in Okakura Kakuhei [Shūsui] et al, eds., Hōgai iboku taikan (Collected Works by Master Hōgai) (Tokyo: Shichijō Yasushi, 1917), 12–­13. 2. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 16–­17. 232

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3. Michele Bambling, “The Kongō-­ji Screens: Illuminating the Tradition of Yamato-­e ‘Sun and Moon’ Screens,” Orientations 27, no. 8 (September 1996): 70–­82; Bettina Klein, “Japanese Kinbyōbu: The Gold-­leafed Folding Screens of the Muromachi Period,” adapted and expanded by Carolyn Wheelwright, Artibus Asiae 45 (1984). 4. H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 142; Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790–­1864 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 5. Chōfu Mōri-­ke, ed., Mōri kajō, vol. 15, fascicle 44 (Shimonoseki: Bōchō Shiryō Shuppansha, 1975), 8. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. 国体ヲ協正シ万世万国ニ亘テ不耻是第一義, “Kokutai o kyōsei shi bansei bankoku ni watarite hajizu kore dai ichi gi.” in Mōri kajō, vol. 15, fascicle 43, 6–­7. 8. 将職ニ居テ政柄ヲ執ル是天地間有ル可カラサルノ理ナリ宜シク侯列ニ帰シ翼戴ヲ主 トスヘシ, “Shō shoku ni ite seihei o toru kore Tenchi no aida aru bekarazaru no kotowari nari. Yoroshiku kōretsu ni ki shi yokutai o omo to subeshi.” Ibid. 9. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-­Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-­Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: 1986), 13ff. 10. Mōri kajō, vol. 15, fascicle 43, 6–7. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Ibid. 13. Yokoyama, “Kano Hōgai,” 31. See also Mori Daikyō, Kinsei meishō dan (Masters of the Early Modern Period) (Tokyo: Shun’yōdō, 1900), 1. 14. The details of Hōgai’s travels between Edo and Chōfu are unclear. It is likely that he returned home to his domain around 1855 (or slightly earlier), at which point he likely produced his portrait of the domain councilor (karō) Katsura Yoshitatsu (桂義辰 1786–­1857). A shrine plaque of a tethered horse, which was donated to Iminomiya Shrine, Chōfu, in the fifth month of Ansei 3 (1856), bears Hōgai’s signature: Kano Shōkai Fujiwara Tadamichi hitsu. In the second month of Ansei 4, however, Hōgai executed his True View Sketches (Shinkei shukuzu) while on the road from Edo to Chōfu. This suggests that he had gone to Chōfu but returned to the Eastern capital at some point after the spring of 1856. The dated letter describing the Harris audience shows that by late 1857 he was again in Edo; this letter asks Tahara to look after “O-­Yoshi,” Hōgai’s wife and Tahara’s daughter. The lack of honorific after Yoshi’s name suggests that by the autumn of 1857 the two were married. Seki Chiyo, “Kenkyū shiryō Kano Hôgai no shojō: Jūichigatsu muika (Ansei yonen) fu” (Research Materials: A Letter by Kano Hōgai Dated 6 November [Ansei 4]), Bijutsu Kenkyū 311 (October 1979): 29–­34. 15. Ijichi Heikurō was a retainer of domain councilor (rōjū) Ijichi Uzen. Furuta Ryō, Kano Hōgai Takahashi Yuiichi: Nihonga mo seiyōga mo kisuru tokoro wa dōitsu no tokoro (Kano Hōgai and Takahashi Yuichi: Nihonga and Yōga Have the Same Point of Origin) (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2006), 17. 16. Shioya Jun, “Kano Shōsen’in Tadanobu Tatsutazu byōbu, Juneibu Bauaa Korekushon” (Kano Shōsen’in Tadanobu’s Tatsuta screen in the Baur Collection, Geneva), Bijutsu kenkyū 388 (February 2006): 351. 17. By the late Edo period, “official painters” (goyō eshi) to the Tokugawa shogunate were divided into four studios of “interior painters” (oku eshi), descended from the great Edo Kano studios of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sixteen “exterior painters” (omote eshi). The former were modeled on the rank of “interior physicians” (oku ishi), who could be authorized to be within the presence of the shogun. Attendance at the shogunal palace was part of the monthly duties of an interior painter. Physicians also attained the titles of Eye of the Law and Seal of the Law, and this could further determine their attendance at important shogunal events. For example, shogunal documents note that physicians of the hōgen and hōin ranks were permitted to attend Townsend Harris’s audience in 1857. Though he is not listed, Kano Shōsen’in, also of hōin rank, appears to have been included. Seki, “Kenkyū shiryō Kano Hōgai no shojō,” 30. For details on the history of the interior painters, see Kōno Motoaki, “Edo Kano zakkō,” Kobijutsu 71 (1984): 4–­36. 233

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18. Kano Hōgai to Tahara Toshisada 田原俊貞, 1857.11.6, MS. Reproduced and transcribed in Seki, “Kenkyū shiryō Kano Hōgai no shojō.” 19. “Saki banji buji no yōu ni gozashisōro shikashinagara yukuyuku wa Nihon no konkyū to mōsu hyōban ni gozashisōrō.” Ibid. 20. On Shōsen’in’s screens currently preserved in Europe, see Shioya, “Kano Shōsen’in Tadanobu.” Shōsen’in’s Genji screens (Shimonoseki Museum of Art), which feature the Eawase and Kochō scenes (chapters 17, 24) are reproduced in Kyoto National Museum, ed. Botsugo hyakunen kinen tokubetsu tenrankai: Kano Hōgai, kindai nihonga no senkusha (Kano Hōgai: A Special Exhibition in Memory of the Centenary of His Death: Forerunner of Modern Nihonga, 1989) (Kyoto: Kyoto National Museum, 1989), cat. 7. In theme and treatment they resemble a lavish pair of meter-­high Genji screens (koshi-­byōbu; Hatakeyama Memorial Museum) produced by Seisen’in in 1841 for the marriage of Takazukai Arihime to the future thirteenth shogun Iesada. See Kobayashi Tadashi, “Kano Seisen’in hitsu Genji monogatari ne no hi zu byōbu” (Kano Seisen’in’s Tale of Genji screens with New Year’s Themes), Kobijutsu 71 (July 1984): 37–­42. 21. See note 14. The Chōfu Kaei Ansei bungenchō (Stipend Record for the Period 1848–­1857) lists “Kano Shōkai” along with his father Seikō as stipended painters in waiting but indicates that Hōgai was to receive a reduced stipend while he was in Edo, an indication that he was engaged in a significant amount of work for the Kobikichō studio. Reproduced in Yamaguchi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Seitan hyakugojūnen Kano Hōgai: Kaikan kinen tokubetsu ten (Kano Hōgai: Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of His Birth) (Yamaguchi: Yamaguchi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 1979), 228. 22. The presence of a number of portrait commissions and votive plaques executed by Hōgai in Chōfu from the final years of the Edo period obliges us to seriously question the conclusions of early twentieth-­century biographers that Hōgai, in contrast to his father Seikō, was unpopular in his home region. Portraits and shrine plaques are of particular value because they can often be dated and provide information on who commissioned the work. No portraits by Seikō survive, but it seems possible that Hōgai made new contributions to this genre and was particularly valued for his skill. Merging new conceptions of intimate, naturalistic portraiture seen in Bunchō and Kazan with a more conservative treatment of the figure from a distance along with the marks of his status and affiliations, Hōgai captures facial likenesses of domain officials, the daughter of a former daimyo, his friend and mentor Mimura Seizan, a Noh performer, and even a blind shamisen player. This experience made Hōgai well qualified to execute the Dog-­Chasing Screens for the Shimazu house in the early Meiji period. 23. Kōno Motoaki, “Edo Kano zakkō” (Notes on the Edo Kano School). Kobijutsu 71 (1984): 4–­36.; Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-­Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Tamamushi Satoko, ed., Goyō eshi no shigoto to Kii Kano (Tokyo: Musashino Bijutsu Daigaku Bijutsu Shiryō Toshokan, 2006); Takeda Yōjiro, Eguchi Tsuneaki, and Kamata Junko, eds., Kinsei goyō eshi no shiteki kenkyū (Historical perspectives on early modern painters in waiting) (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 2008). 24. Satō Dōshin, “Kano-­ha saigo no kōyō: Ishingo no Kano-­ha to Hōgai” (The Last Glimmer of the Kano School: Hōgai and the Kano School After the Meiji Restoration), in Kyoto National Museum, Botsugo hyakunen kinen tokubetsu tenrankai, 208–­13. Portions of this research are translated and reproduced in Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011). 25. See Hilary Snow, “Ema: Display Practices of Edo Period Votive Paintings” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010). 26. The verso inscription reads “Genji gannen kinoenedoshi chūtō kichijitsu O-­okusama gohōnō” (Auspicious Day, Midwinter [=11th month], First year of Genji, Kinoenedoshi, Honorably Donated by the Wife [of the Lord of Chōfu]) 元治元年甲子年  仲冬吉日  御奥様御奉納. 27. Shimazaki Tōson, Before the Dawn, trans. William Naff (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 324. 28. Ibid., 203. 29. See Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 234

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30. Hōgai sensei iboku zenshū, vol. 1, cat. 49; Kimoto, “Jiseki kara mita Hōgai,” 198. 31. Furuta, Kano Hōgai Takahashi Yuichi, 152. 32. For example, Kimura Ritsugaku, Snowy Landscape, mid-­1880s, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (11.34898), and Hishida Shunsō, Landscape with Cattle, 1893, Shinano Museum of Art, Nagano. For details, see Taki Seiichi, “Hōgai Gahō o ronzu,” Kokka, no. 434 (January 1927), 28, and Foxwell, “New Art and the Display of Antiquities in Mid-­Meiji Tokyo,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 24 (December 2012): 148–­49. On Kangakai, which can also be rendered as the Painting Appraisal Society, see also Satō Dōshin, “Kangakai saikō” (Kangakai Reconsidered), Bijutsu Kenkyū 340 (1987): 1–­27. 33. Jika no kijo o idasu koto o yurusazu. Fujioka Sakutarō, Kinsei kaiga shi (History of Early Modern Painting, 1903) (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1983), 369. 34. Ibid. 35. The sources of Fujioka’s account are unknown and almost certainly include hearsay, but his depiction of the Kano hierarchy accords well with Hashimoto Gahō’s 1889 criticism of the school. Gahō, Kobikichō edokoro. 36. Yokoyama, “Kano Hōgai,” 12. 37. Lippit, Painting of the Realm, 40–­66. 38. Kageyama Hideo, “Sesshū, Sesson to Kano Hōgai,” Tenkai toga 5 (2004): 43. 39. Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Kano Seisen’in Osanobu no zenbō (The Many Faces of Kano Seisen’in Osanobu) (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1995). 40. Ellen Conant discusses this painting in “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji,” in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–­2000, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 40–­41. 41. Sekine Kaori, “Kano Hōgai hitsu, Meiji Jūnendai no Jurōjin zu ni tsuite: Sesshū gakkushū no seika to ōyō,” Bijutsushi ronshū (Kobe Review of Art History) 11 (2011): 59–­86. 42. Yamamoto Yoshiya, “Kano Hōgai hitsu Jurōjin zu ni kansuru kōsatsu” (An Investigation of the Figure of Shoulaoren by Kano Hōgai), Shizuoka Kenritsu Bijutsukan Kenkyū Kiyō 3 (September 1985): 59–­75. 43. Mōri Terumoto (1553–­1625) inherited the Long Scroll from the Ōuchi and loaned it to the warrior and painter Hara Jihei. Under the new name of Unkoku Tōgan (1547–­1618), Hara copied the Long Scroll in 1593 and was instated as Sesshū’s successor in the Hagi region. 44. The words “Hōgai Kano” (upper right) and “Tadamichi hitsu” (lower left), along with the raised Kanpo貫甫 seal with a square enclosure, appear on the votive plaque Han Xin Crawling through His Adversary’s Knees (Iminomiya Shrine, Shimonoseki). This work is undated but was likely painted between 1864 and 1868, based on stylistic grounds and according to the fact that its subject matter appears to reflect the difficult and humiliating circumstances in which Chōshū found itself in the years leading up to the Restoration; it is quite possible that it dates to 1867 and thus may have been signed “Hōgai” after Seikō’s death. There is a chance, however, that the inscription is a later addition by Hōgai or another hand; it resembles Hōgai’s signature but appears unsteady. There is another shrine plaque with the same painting style and inverted signature (“Hōgai Kano”): Yu Rang (Sumiyoshi Shrine, Shimonoseki; date unverified). This plaque bears an inscription in a separate hand with the date Meiji 18 [1885].8.15 and an indication in the lower left that it was dedicated by Fujishima Tsuneoki, a friend of Hōgai and former pupil of Hōgai’s father Seikō. Stylistically, however, the painting resembles Hōgai’s other shrine plaques of Chinese figures from the 1860s. Overall, it is difficult to use the inscriptions on these plaques to determine the year in which the painter began to sign himself “Hōgai.” 45. These are an intricately painted devotional image of the eight-­armed Benzaiten, goddess of music and good fortune (fig. 3.9); a picture of Confucius, executed when Hōgai was thirteen; a portrait of Katsura Yoshitatsu, a powerful domain official; a true view landscape of Shimonoseki; and the votive plaque of Takeuchi no Sukune discussed above. 46. Mōri kajō, vol. 15, fascicle 44, 7–­21. The thirteenth daimyo Motokane (元周)would typically be pronounced Motochika, but the idiosyncratic reading distinguished him from his ancestor Motochika (元親). 47. Within this context, it seems logical to propose that Hōgai had produced the Landscape 235

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Screens for his regular patrons, the Mōri, and not for the anonymous restaurateur who was listed as the screens’ patron in the 1910s and 1920s, when the work first surfaced in Tokyo. Motokane was succeeded by his cousin Mōri Motohisa (1849–­1908), who served as the last daimyo before serving briefly as the domainal governor (han chiji). 48. Sesshū’s inscription read, “Bunmei jūhachinen kaheijitsu tentō zen daiichiza Sesshū sō Tōyō rokujūshichi sai hitsuju” (文明十八年嘉平日天童前第一座雪舟叟等楊六十有七歳筆受; by Sesshū Tōyō, sixty-­seven years of age, formerly first rank, Tiantongsi [Temple], Bunmei 18 [1486], kaheijitsu.) Transcribed). As Kageyama Hideo has noted, the word hitsuju (transcribed, noted, recorded) was typically used by those who transcribed or translated the sutras or other Buddhist documents; it emphasized the idea that the writer was “passing on” rather than creating the sacred words. The implication may have been that “The Long Landscape Scroll . . . was made in order to express the dharma through the borrowed medium of landscape.” Kageyama, “Sanzui chōkan no denrai to mohon, soshite chōkan e” (The Transmission and Copies of the Long Landscape Scroll), Tenkai toga 28 (1998), 40. 49. In a separate article, Kageyama Hideo proposes that Hōgai, in his eagerness to imitate Sesshū’s signature on the Long Scroll, may have misused the word kaheijitsu in the Landscape Screens, for the inscription clearly states that the paintings were finished in the summer rather than the twelfth month. Kageyama, “Sesshū Sesson to Kano Hōgai.” 50. Kimoto, “Jiseki kara mita Hōgai,” 198. 51. Satō Dōshin, “Kano Hōgai sansuiga kō”(On the Landscape Paintings of Kano Hōgai). Bijutsushi gaku 4 (1982): 1–­30. 52. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, 142. 53. Koschmann, Mito Ideology, 169. 54. Ibid., 162–­65. 55. Sekine, “Kano Hōgai hitsu,” 59–­86. 56. “Seng Guan Xiu,” fascicle 3 of Xuanhe hua pu (Xuanhe Painting Catalog, purportedly twelfth century), annotated by Yu Jianhua (Suzhou: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 2007), 100. Also see the comments of Huang Xiufu (ca. 1006) as reproduced in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, ed. Susan Bush and Shih Hsio-­yen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 105. 57. Tsuji Nobuo, Kisō no keifu: Matabei-­Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1970). English translation: The Lineage of Eccentrics: From Matabei to Kuniyoshi, trans. Aaron Rio (New York: Kaikai Kiki, 2012). 58. According to a later account by a fellow Shimonoseki resident, Hōgai’s name was modeled on a Zen axiom, Hō ni hairite hō no soto ni deru (By entering into the law, emerging outside of the law), and the alternate characters were provided by his brother-­in-­law, the kangakusha Toriyama Shigenobu. Uemura Shunpei, “Hōgai iboku tenrankai o mite,” Shinbi 6–­6 (1920). Furuta, Kano Hōgai Takahashi Yuichi, 38–­39. Hōgai’s family mortuary temple was a Zen temple, Kakuonji, and Hōgai produced two portraits of the Shimonoseki Zen master Rinryo Nyotaku (1805–­1883), one dated to autumn of 1868. Botsugo hyakunen kinen ten, p. 103. 59. “Yōsai ga i,” 290. Muhō no tokoro shizen no hō ari. Muryū no tokoro shizen no ryū ari (無法の ところ自然の法あり、無流のところ自然の流あり). I am grateful to Helen A. Findley for her help with the translation. 60. Shimada Shūjirō, “Ippin gafū ni tsuite,” Bijutsu kenkyū 161 (March 1951), reprinted in Shimada, Chūgoku kaigashi kenkyū (Research on Chinese Painting History) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1993), 3–­44; translated by James Cahill as “Concerning the I-­p’in Style of Painting,” Oriental Art 6, no. 2 (Summer 1961); 8, no. 3 (Fall 1962); 10, no. 1 (Spring 1964); Jonathan Hay, “Culture, Ethnicity, and Empire in the Work of Two Eighteenth-­Century ‘Eccentric’ Artists,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 35 (Spring 1999): 201–­23; Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michele Matteini, eds., Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (Zürich: Museum Reitberg Zürich, 2009). 61. See John M. Rosenfield, “Introduction,” in Extraodinary Persons: Works by Eccentric, Nonconformist Japanese Artists of the Early Modern Era (1580–­1868) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1999), 1:23–­37. 62. I thank Kameda Kazukuni for providing sources on Seiju and the Kamiryō lineage. 236

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Kameda Kazukuni, “Koishi Genshun no suigunjutsu denju to sono shūhen” (Research on the Naval Warfare Strategy of Koishi Genshun and Related Issues), Nihon ishigaku zasshi 54:4 (December 2008): 325–­37. 63. Kano Hōgai, undated letter to Kamiryō Seiju, ca. 1877–­1878 (whereabouts unknown). Reproduced in Okakura Shūsui, ed., Hōgai sensei iboku zenshū (Tokyo: Saitō Shobō, 1921), vol. 1, plate 57. Transcribed in Kyoto National Museum, Botsugo hyakunen kinen tokubetsu tenrankai, 221. 64. An underglaze handpainted Asahi ware dish from the Tokyo kilns of Gottfried Wagener (1831–­1892) suggests the type of work being executed by Kano painters during these years. While the painter of the dish is unknown, the design was clearly executed in the Southern Song–­ inspired mode of the Muromachi Kano school, with its bold outlines, dramatically inked rock faces, and measured sense of recession. Kindai yōgyō no chichi Gottofurito Waguneru to bankoku hakurankai (The Father of Modern Ceramics: Gottfried Wagener and the International Expositions) (Seto: Aichiken Tōji Shiryōkan, 2004). 65. Rosina Buckland, Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), chap. 2. Ellen Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Visual Arts, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 34–­65. 66. Satō, “Kano-­ha saigo no kōyō”; Foxwell, “Ishin o koeta yamatoe: Sumiyoshi Hirokata to Fenorosa” (Yamato-­e across the Edo-­Meiji Transition: Sumiyoshi Hirokata and Fenollosa), in Kinsei yamatoe saikō, ed. Shimohara Miho (Tokyo: Brüecke, 2013). 67. On Kano Ōshin, see Kawashima Shōtarō, ed., Nihon bijutsu gaka retsuden (Tokyo: Shinseidō, 1902), 30. 68. Shioya, “Kano Shōsen’in Tadanobu,” 351–­56. 69. Iijima Kyoshin (Hanjūrō), Kawanabe Kyōsai ō den (The Life of Kawanabe Kyōsai; undated MS, ca. 1900) (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1984), 130. 70. Taki Seiichi, “Hōgai Gahō o ronzu” (On Hōgai and Gahō). Kokka (January 1927), 28. 71. Hōgai did have one occasion to submit work to the imperial household. Shortly after his arrival in Tokyo in the late 1870s, he was retained by the Shimazu family, former lords of Satsuma, for a salary rumored to be around twenty to thirty yen per month. Having conducted a demonstration of the mounted archery sport of dog-­chasing (inuōmono) before the emperor in 1879, the former domain lord Shimazu Tadayoshi (1840–­1897) sought to mark the occasion with the production of paintings, a commission that Hōgai satisfied by producing two standing screens (tatejitomi), which were inscribed by members of the Shimazu family and presented to the imperial household. He also produced several additional inuōmono paintings that incorporate portraits of individuals who participated in the event. It appears early on in Mori, Kinsei meishō dan, 6. In fact, Hōgai’s Kano credentials and considerable skill in portraiture, discussed below, made him an excellent candidate for the job. On Hōgai’s legacy, see Satō, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), pp. 72. On demons and protest in the late Edo period, see Melinda Takeuchi, “Kuniyoshi’s ‘Minamoto Raikō’ and ‘the Earth Spider’: Demons and Protest in Late Tokugawa Japan,” Ars Orientalis 17 (1987): 5–­38; Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Katsuya Hirano, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 73. See Lippit, “Birth of Japanese Painting History.” Other early students of East Asian painting, particularly William Anderson and Louis Gonse, learned the history and masterpieces of the field through Edo-­period illustrated woodblock-­printed sources such as the Wakan meihitsu kingyoku gafu (1771), Wakan meiga en, Shoga shūran (1835), and Kachō sansui zushiki (1866), which they cited matter-­of-­factly as histories and image sources. The books of these European authors also liberally culled illustrations from printed Edo albums (gafu) in order to provide samples of paintings and other artifacts they had never seen in person, such as medieval sculpture and architecture or the works of “Kose no Kanaoka,” Motonobu, and Kōrin. While current scholars are surely correct in acknowledging books such as L’histoire de l’art du Japon (in Japanese, Kōhon teikoku nihon bijutsu ryakushi), which was compiled and published by the Japanese for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, as the first European-­style (or shall we say, nineteenth-­century 237

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style) histories of Japanese art, it is interesting to note that European and American scholars in the late nineteenth century were quite willing to regard Edo-­period works as fully legitimate “histories” in their own right. On the recentness of the nineteenth-­century conception of illustrated cultural histories, see especially Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-­Century Britain and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On L’histoire . . . , see Kojita Yasunao, “Kōhon Nihon teikoku bijutsu ryakushi no rekishiteki ichi” (The Historical Position of the Histoire de l’art du Japon”), in Kōhon Nihon teikoku bijutsu ryakushi: Nashonarizumu to bi (Histoire de l’art du Japon: Nationalism and Aesthetics), ed. Kojita Yasunao (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2003). 74. In a letter to his mentor Edward S. Morse (1838–­1925), Fenollosa spoke with obvious pride about the receipt of his own Kano name from Eitoku, whom he acknowledged as the school’s current patriarch. Fenollosa to Morse, April 26, 1884. Cited in Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenorosa: Nihon bijutsu no sen’yō ni sasageta isshō (Ernest Francisco Fenollosa: A Life Devoted to the Advocacy of Japanese Culture) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1982), 1:246–­47. Fenollosa would later attest that he was particularly attracted to Hōgai’s distinctive style: “I first saw a picture of his, painted for the first modern art exhibition, that of 1882. ‘Who is the painter of that?’ I asked of my fellow judges. ‘O, an old crazy man from the country,’ they replied. ‘Crazy or not,’ I said, ‘he has sent the greatest work of the show.’ They gave him a second prize on the strength of my words” (Fenollosa to Charles Lang Freer, October 27, 1902; Charles Lang Freer Papers, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art). In the same letter to Freer, an American collector, Fenollosa attempts to sell Hōgai’s works in order to shore up his difficult financial situation. The statement that Hōgai was awarded a prize at the first Domestic Painting Exhibition of 1882 is most likely false. According to the list of awardees in the official records (MBKS, 594) and repeated in newspapers and art journals of the time, Hōgai received no prize in that exhibition; in the second he received one honorable mention. According to Yamaguchi, Fenollosa did serve as a consultant to the judges’ panel for the Domestic Painting Exhibition in 1882. This is likely true, though I have been unable to find any mention of Fenollosa in the official records of the exhibition, for Gottfried Wagener is recorded as serving in a similar capacity at the first two Domestic Industrial Exhibitions. 75. See Christine Guth, “Meiji Response to Bunjinga,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-­Century Japanese Art, ed. Ellen P. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 197–­226. 76. See Chelsea Foxwell, “Merciful Mother Kannon and Its Audiences,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 326–­47. 77. Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:233–­35. 78. Mori, Kinsei meishō dan, 16; Honda Tenjō et al., Hōgai iboku (Posthumous Paintings by Hōgai) (Tokyo: Gahōsha, 1902), 1:5. 79. Mori, Kinsei meishō dan, 16, 22, lists the wage as twenty yen per month in both cases. The account by Hōgai’s disciples suggests that Hōgai received thirty yen per month from the Shimazu but only twenty from Fenollosa. Honda Tenjō et al, Hōgai iboku (Tokyo: Gahōsha, 1902), 1:5–­6. 80. Fenollosa to Freer, October 27, 1902, 4. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives. 81. Ki (奇) refers to the strange or eccentric, and chin (珍) evokes excellence and rarity, while myō (妙) points to the wondrous. See chapter 2. Original text reproduced in Kornicki, “Meiji gonen no Wakayama hakurankai to sono shūhen” (On the 1872 Wakayama Exhibition), in Bankoku hakurankai no kenkyū, 254; Ōtsuki Takashi, Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai shiryaku (An Abbreviated History of the Kyoto Exhibition Association) (Kyoto: Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, 1937), 10. 82. Key details of Fenollosa’s early involvement with Kangakai appear in Ernest F. Fenollosa to Edward S. Morse, September 27, 1884 (Peabody-­Essex Museum, Salem, MA). Cited in Yamaguchi, Fenorosa, 1:201–­3. On Bigelow, see Christopher Benfey, Great Wave, 66–­67, and Akiko Murakata, “Selected Letters of Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow” (PhD diss, George Washington University, 1971). 83. Nōtan was a word that Fenollosa continued to use in his English writings to describe gradations of shading. 84. Fenollosa, “Lecture,” reproduced in Murakata Akiko, “Fenorosa no ikō to Bijutsu shinsetsu” (Fenollosa’s Lecture and Bijutsu shinsetsu), Eibungaku hyōron 49 (December 1983): 63. 238

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85. Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō 38 (August 1886), reproduced in Nihon Bijutsuin hyakunenshi (The Hundred-­Year History of the Japan Art Institute), ed. Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunen Hensanshitsu, vol. 1, pt. 1, 477 (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu, 1989). 86. Okakura Kakuzō, “Kano Hōgai,” in Okakura Tenshin zenshū 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993). Originally published in Kokka, no. 2 (November 1889), 21–­22. 87. Fenollosa, “Can Japanese Art Be Revived?” In referring to a “movement” Fenollosa was apparently not referring to his own Kangakai but in general to efforts to support painting in established mediums and find an institutional, conceptual, and financially viable home for them within the new regime. 88. Charles Hartman, “Literary and Visual Interactions in Lo Chih-­ch’uan’s ‘Crows in Old Trees,’” Metropolitan Museum Journal 28 (1993): 129–­67. 89. Satō Dōshin called attention to the currency of illusionistic and eccentric Yuan school paintings for late Edo and early Meiji artists, using visual evidence to suggest that Hōgai studied Yuan school paintings. Satō, “Kano Hōgai sansuiga kō”(On the Landscape Painting of Kano Hōgai), Bijutsushi gaku 4 (1982): 1–­30. Okakura Kakuzō also took an interest in paintings of this school, purchasing a monumental landscape by Yuan Yao (active 1740–­1790) for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1906 (.08.93–­.104). 90. Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Ch’ing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 150, 149–­51. See also James Cahill, “Yüan Chiang and His School Part II,” Ars Orientalis 6 (1966): 191–­212. 91. Hay, “Culture, Ethnicity, and Empire,” 206. 92. Taki Seiichi, “Hōgai Gahō o ronzu,” Kokka, no. 434 (January 1927), 28. 93. David Der-­wei Wang, Fin-­de-­siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–­ 1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 94. Ibid., 20–­21.

chapter 4 1. Inoue Kaoru, Dai sankai naikoku kangyō hakurankai Inoue fuku sōsai narabi ni Kuki shinsa kanchō enjutsu (Third Domestic Industrial Exhibtion: The Lectures of Vice-­Overseer Inoue and Head Juror Kuki) (Tokyo: 1889). 2. Shinagawa Yajirō, [Opening Ceremony Address], “Naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai,” Tokyo eiri shinbun, October 3, 1882. 3. Kitazawa Noriaki, “‘Nihonga’ gainen no keisei ni kansuru shiron” (An Essay on the Formation of the “Nihonga” Concept), in Meiji Nihonga shiryō (Source Materials for Meiji Nihonga), ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1991), 469–­537. 4. Seimiya Hidekata, Un en ryakuden, 2 vols. (Tokyo: 1874). 5. The category system of the first two industrial exhibitions was largely based on that of the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition of 1876. “Paintings and calligraphy” (shoga) were included as one category within the division of the “fine arts” (bijutsu). They were judged by Exhibition Bureau officials and presented equitably as one portion of a market for salable “art manufactures” (bijutsu jō no seihin) that also included ceramic and lacquer vessels, furniture, and three-­dimensional objects made of wood, bamboo, silver, bronze, ivory, and other materials. On the supplanting of the term shoga by kaiga (painting) and the separation of calligraphy from painting, see Satō Dōshin, “Nihon bijutsu” tanjō: Kindai nihon no kotoba to senryaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996), 41–­44. 6. The second of the two events was cosponsored by the Imperial Household Ministry. On the significance of this move, see Seki Chiyo, “Kōkyo sugido-­e ni tsuite” (Cedar Door Paintings of the Meiji Palace), Bijutsu kenkyū 264 (July 1969): 1–­32. Following the end of this venture, the term Kaiga kyōshinkai (competitive painting exhibition) continued to be used by private groups who sought to continue the legacy of a national exhibition of Japanese painting. 7. Henry D. Smith II, “The Edo-­Tokyo Transition: In Search of Common Ground,” in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, ed. Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 347. 239

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8. Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, ed., Kyōto hakurankai enkakushi (A History of the Kyoto Hakurankai) (Kyōto Hakuran Kyōkai, 1903), 1–­3. 9. Although popular writers, illustrators, and patrons tended to represent the commoner class, their support and networking depended on the sponsorship of shogunal officials or others whose livelihoods were connected with the government. Tsuchiya Momoko, Edo to Meiji o ikita gesakusha: Sansantei Arindo Jōno Saigiku Sanjin (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 2009), 49–­51. 10. Oka Isaburō, “Naikoku kangyō hakurankai enkaku,” in MBKS, Kaisetsu, 1–­5; Miwa Yoshio, Tanaka Atsushi, and Yamanashi Emiko, “Kaidai,” in Naikoku kangyō hakurankai: Bijutsuhin shuppin mokuroku (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1996), unpaginated front matter. 11. Untitled [Anata no dai hyaku kyū gō ni Matsunoya], Yomiuri shinbun, June 9, 1875: 2. 12. “Jimu hōkoku” (1882), Cited in Seki Chiyo, “Naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai” (The Domestic Painting Exhibitions), Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, 25. 13. Dai gokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai shuppin shinsa gaikyō daijūbu: Bijutsu oyobi bijutsu kōgei (Inspectors’ Overview of Submissions to the Fifth Domestic Industrial Exhibition, Section 10: Fine Arts and Crafts), reprinted in Meiji zenki sangyō hattatsushi shiryō: Kangyō hakurankai shiryō, ed. Fujiwara Masato (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankō Kai, 1973), 8:127. 14. Ibid. 15. Kyokugaisei [pseud.], “Kaiga kyōshinkai hyōban,” pt. 7, Yomiuri shinbun, November 28, 1897, 1. 16. Mushokusai Shujin [pseud.], “Yanaka Bijutsuin Kanga Hihyō” (A Critic’s Remarks on Seeing the Paintings of the Art Academy in Yanaka,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 26, 1898, 3; Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004); Eriko Tomizawa-­Kay, “Meiji ki no ‘nihonga’ ryūtsū no arikata: Hishida Shunsō (1874–­1911) to taishū no kankei o chūshin ni” (On the Circulation of Meiji-­era Nihonga: Hishida Shunsō and His Connection with Mass Audiences), in Aruzasu nichi ō chiteki kōryū jigyō Nihon kenkyū seminaa Meiji hōkokusho (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2010), http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/intel/exchange/organize/ceeja/report/09_10/meiji.html. 17. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 178–­89. 18. “Dokutoru Waguneru shi Meiji jūnen naikoku kangyō hakurankai hōkokusho,” reprinted in MBKS, 237–­38. 19. Ibid. 20. On dharma lineage in painting, see Lippit, Painting of the Realm, 164–­69. For the idea of the secret transmission in early modern art and craft production, see Morgan Pitelka, “Back to the Fundamentals: ‘Reproducing’ Rikyū and Chōjirō in Japanese Tea Culture,” in The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives, ed. Rupert Cox (London: Routledge, 2008), 130–­38; Victoria Weston, “Institutionalizing Talent and the Kano Legacy at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, 1889–­1893,” in Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japan, ed. B. Jordan and V. Weston (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 147–­77. 21. Fukuda Takanori, “Nihon gadō no kigen,” in MBKS, 345. 22. Ibid., 343–­44. 23. Atsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). On social stratification and the notion of “uplift”, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 58–­89. 24. Fukuda, “Meiji jūyonen dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai daisanku hōkokusho, ” in MBKS, 344. 25. Tsubouchi Shōyō, “Introduction,” in The Essence of the Novel, trans. Nanette Twine, http:// archive.nyu.edu/html/2451/14945/shoyo.htm (accessed August 1, 2011). On Fenollosa and Tsubouchi, see Ueda, Concealment, 50–­51. 26. Fukuda Takanori, “Meiji jūyonen dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai daisanku hōkokusho” (Report for the Third Division, Second Domestic Industrial Exhibition, 1881), in MBKS, 344. 27. Ibid. Notably, Inoue Kaoru also grounded the notion of good taste in a dual opposition to ukiyo-­e and to a Japanese art that has become “mixed up with the Western style.” See chapter 2. 240

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28. The wildly famous raconteur San’yūtei Enchō (1839–­1900) was a supreme collector of such works and used them in his storytelling performances,such as the performance of ghost stories (yūreibanashi) advertised in “Nigatsu jūichinichi ni,” Yomiuri shinbun (January 28, 1875), accompanied by a display of “copious pictures that he has assembled.” Some of the pictures he used are preserved at Zenshōan. Yūrei meigashū: Zenshōan zō San’yūtei Enchō korekushon (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1999). 29. See the discussion of shadows in Maki Fukuoka, “Between Knowing and Seeing: Shifting Standards of Accuracy and the Concept of Shashin in Japan, 1832—­1872” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006). 30. MBKS, 155. 31. Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Jimukyoku, ed., “Meiji jūnen Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Shinsa hyōgo,” pt. 2, in Hyōgo Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Egakareta rekishi: Kindai Nihon ni miru densetsu to shinwa (Pictured History: Myths and Legends of Modern Japan) (Hyōgo and Kanagawa: Egakareta Rekishi Ten Jikko Iinkai, 1993); Yamanashi Toshio, Egakareta rekishi: Nihon kindai to “rekishiga” no jiba (Pictured History: Japan’s Modern Period and the Magnetic Field of History Painting) (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2005). 32. One such play was Chikamatsu Monza’emon’s Nihon furisode hajime (puppet play, 1718; kabuki, 1719; also performed in 1809 and 1858, and revived in the Meiji period). On the modern iconography of Japanese deities, see Chiba Kei, “Amaterasu = Meiji tennō no shinborizumu: Meiji shoki ni okeru minshin shūran no seijigaku” (The Symbolism of Amaterasu = the Meiji Emperor: The Politics of Capturing the Hearts of the People in the Early Meiji), Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002): 96–­126; Chiba Kei, “Ametsuchi no Motohashira no zuzō purōguramu,” Bijutsushi, no. 166 (2009): 235–­49. 33. As Timon Screech underscored in his famous study The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 34. Metalwork chargers or large plates were not a typical Japanese form but became part of the repertoire of Meiji metalwork that was highly appraised by Western collectors such as William and Henry Walters, who displayed Japanese metalwork with metalwork from China, Renaissance Europe, and the ancient world. See William R. Johnston, William and Henry Walters: the Reticent Collectors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The Meiji chargers bear a stylistic relation to the so-­called Veneto-­Saracenic category of metalwork chargers, objects with intricate inlaid designs that were once thought to have been made by Islamic craftsmen in fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century Italy. 35. Bakumatsu no ayashiki butsuga: Kano Kazunobu no gohyaku rakan zu (Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum, 2006); Kawai Masatomo, “Kano Kazunobu hitsu ‘Gohyaku rakan zu’ ni tsuite” (On the Five Hundred Arhats by Kano Kazunobu), in Minato-­ku bunkazai hōkokusho Kano Kazunobu hitsu Gohyaku rakan zu (Minato Ward Cultural Preservation Report: The Five Hundred Arhats by Kano Kazunobu) (Tokyo: Minato-­ku Kyōiku Iinkai, 1983), 121–­23. The scrolls were not actually exhibited until 1878, when the hall built to house them was finally completed. 36. The paintings were recently featured in the Masters of Mercy exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arther M. Sackler Galleries. 37. Fukuda, “Meiji jūyonen.” 38. Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Jimukyoku, “Meiji jūnen,” in MBKS, 156. 39. Ibid., 155. 40. Kuki Ryūichi, Dai sankai naikoku kangyō hakurankai Inoue fuku sōsai narabi ni Kuki shinsa kanchō enjutsu (Tokyo, 1889). Kuki and others hastened to acknowledge that foreign taste in Japanese art had become much more “noble and refined” since the initial interest in “actors and sumo wrestlers” and other “low” subjects in woodblock prints Iida Yuzuru, [Speech to Ryūchikai], “Ryūchikai kiji,” Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 2 (December 1883), 4. 41. William Michael Rossetti, “Japanese Woodcuts,” reproduced in Fine Art, Chiefly Contemporary: Notices Re-­Printed, with Revisions (London: Macmillan, 1867), 386–­87; originally published in The Reader, 1863. 42. Theresa M. Kelley, “Keats and ‘ekphrasis,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 170–­85. 241

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43. Foxwell, “Dekadansu: Ukiyo-­e and the Codification of Artistic Values in Modern Japan, 1880–­1930,” Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal 3 (2007): 21–­44. 44. Kishida Ryūsei, “Dekadansu no kōsatsu” and “Tōyō no hikinbi ni tsuite,” in Kishida Ryūsei zenshū, 3:111–­15. 45. Saitō Tetsutarō, “Ronsetsu: Kāru fon rettsō jutsu Nihon bijutsu ron senhappyaku hachijūsannen shigatsu kankō Pari-­fu Bijutsu shinpō shachō Rui Gonsu shi,” Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 11 (September 1884), 1–­4. The Japanese essay is a report on a three-­part review of L’art japonais by Carl von Lützow: “Die japanische Kunst,” Österreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient 1 (January 1884): 1–­6; 2 (February 1884): 44–­49; 3 (March 1884): 73–­77. I thank Anton Schweizer for his assistance in locating the original article. 46. Louis Gonse, L’art japonais (Paris: Quantin, 1883), 1:306. 47. These themes are explored in detail by Mai Yamaguchi in her University of Chicago BA thesis. 48. Satō Dōshin, “The Formation of the Historical Evaluation of Kawanabe Kyōsai,” in Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 324–­42. 49. Tsuchiya Momoko, Edo to Meiji o ikita gesakusha, 49–­51. 50. See John Mertz, Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870–­88 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003); Ibi Takashi, Edo no bunjin saron: Chishikijin to geijutsukatachi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2009). Tsuchiya Reiko, Taishūshi no genryū: Meijiki koshinbun no kenkyū (Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2002). 51. Brenda Jordan, “Potentially Disruptive: Censorship and the Painter Kawanabe Kyōsai,” in Inexorable Modernity: Japan’s Grappling with Modernity in the Arts, ed. Hiroshi Nara (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 27–­48. 52. See Josiah Conder, Paintings and Sketches by Kawanabé Kyōsai (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1911). 53. See Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 324–42. 54. Between 1880 and 1888, Hōgai’s salary reportedly ranged from about twenty to thirty-­five yen per month. Mori Daikyō, Kinsei meishō dan, 16, 23. 55. In fact, the first Domestic Industrial Exhibition was held from August through the end of November in this year. 56. Government records prove that the painting was actually submitted at the second Industrial Exhibition in 1881. 57. Kawanabe Kyōsai and Baitei Kinga, Kyōsai gadan, gaihen (Tokyo, 1887), 2:22. 58. The “winter crow” (kan’a, kangarasu 寒鴉) was a seasonal word (kigo) that commonly appeared in poetry and in painting titles. 59. Iijima Kyoshin (Hanjūrō), Kawanabe Kyōsai ō den (undated MS, ca. 1900) (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1984), 111–­12. 60. Jordan, “Potentially Disruptive.” 61. The submission of Snake Encoiling a Pheasant is documented in Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Jimukyoku, Dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai shuppin mokuroku, part 1, reproduced in MBKS, 263. The crow painting is listed in Idem, Dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai shuppin mokuroku, part 3, in MBKS, 303. The jury for the fine arts section of the first two Domestic Industrial Exhibitions was comprised of prominent Exhibition Bureau and Dragon Pond Society members rather than of artists and artisans. 62. Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai Jimukyoku, Dai nikai Meiji jūyonen naikoku kangyō hakurankai shinsa hyōgo, in MBKS, 2:328. Translation adapted from Jordan, “Potentially Disruptive,” 36. For another discussion, see Yamaguchi Seiichi, “Kawanabe Kyōsai to bijutsu tenrankai” (Kawanabe Kyōsai and Art Exhibitions), Kyōsai 26 (July 1985): 31–­44. 63. As early as the eleventh or twelfth century in China, this familiar member of the Zen pantheon was reinterpreted as a bringer or protector of children, and a host of energetic toddlers was insinuated into his bulbous sack of belongings. On the history of the motif, see Yamamoto Hideo, “Nanzan Shiun hitsu Hotei karako zu,” Kyōto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 27 (May 2005): 85–­90.

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64. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds., Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 23. 65. The painting appeared on the cover of the Takashimaya exhibition catalog in 1949. 66. “Kaiga kyōshinkai no ki,” Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, October 13, 1882. 67. Ibid., October 11, 1882. 68. Tsubouchi, “Essence of the Novel,” chap. 5, trans. Twine. 69. Sannomaru Shōzōkan, ed., Maboroshi no shitsunai sōshoku: Meiji kyūden no saigen o kokoromiru (Tokyo: Kunaishō, 2011). 70. “Kaiga kyōshinkai no ki,” Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, October 9,1882. 71. Shinagawa, [Opening Address], Tokyo eiri shinbun, October 3, 1882. 72. “Dai nikai kaiga kyōshinkai manhyō,” Jiji shinpō, April 26, 1884. 73. “Kaku ha sōron” (General Discussion of Each School), in Nōshōmushō Hakurankai Gakari, Meiji Jūshichi nen Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai shinsa hōkoku (Jurors’ Report of the Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibition, Meiji 17) (Tokyo: Nōshōmushō Hakurankai Gakari, 1884), in MBKS, 792. 74. Minami Shinji, “Hara ga tatsu inakamono,” Tokyo eiri shinbun, May 27, 1884. 75. “Kaiga kyōshinkai no ki,” Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, October 9, 1882. 76. “Dai nikai kaiga kyōshinkai manhyō.” 77. Minami Shinji, “Hara ga tatsu inakamono.” 78. Ibid. 79. In this sense, it was close to Maeda Ai’s famous distinction between active, collective, vocalized reading, on the one hand, and silent, private, immobilized reading, on the other. Maeda Ai, Kindai dokusha no seiritsu, Maeda Ai Chosakushū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1989), 2:108–­51. 80. W. J. T. Mitchell critiques the tendency of Othering these more powerful responses to images by attributing them to children, indigenous peoples, or ancient civilizations. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 7–­8. 81. Ueda, Concealment, 28–­44. 82. Noguchi Takehiko, “Hyōbanki kara hihyō e” (From [Theater] Ratings to [Literary] “Criticism”), in Nihon kindai hihyō no anguru (The Angles of Modern Japanese Literary Criticism) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1992), 9–­25. 83. On the octopus print, see Danielle Talerico, “Interpreting Sexual Imagery in Japanese Prints: A Fresh Approach to Hokusai’s Diver and Two Octopi,” Impressions: Official Publication of the Ukiyo-­e Society of America 23 (2001): 23–­41. 84. Several scholars have introduced early modern shrine and temple picture halls for votive plaques (emadō) as precursors to an art exhibition space. See Takashina Shūji, Jukyūsseiki no bijutsu: Higashi to nishi no deai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 25–­29; Shiina Noritaka, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime (The Origins of Meiji Museums) (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1989), 12. 85. See Craig Clunas, “The Work of Art in the Age of Woodblock Reproduction,” in Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 134–­49. 86. Arthur Davidson Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (London: T. F. Unwin, 1915), 257. 87. Ibid., 253. 88. Fukuda, “Meiji jūyonen dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai daisanku hōkokusho,” 344. 89. Arthur Davidson Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (London: T. F. Unwin, 1915), 258–­59. 90. “Dai san kan kobijutsu kai,” Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, May 25, 1882. The quotation is from an event announcement from the Dragon Pond Society. Such announcements were usually composed by the society and simply reprinted by the newspapers. 91. In this sense, the passage further supports Satō Dōshin’s now famous claim that “Japanese (fine) art” (and thus Japanese art history) was “born” in the Meiji period, even as it backs the counterargument that Japanese or East Asian art and art history had been framed as an entity already in the seventeenth century. See Yukio Lippit, “The Birth of Japanese Painting History: Kano Artists, Authors, and Authenticators of the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003), 12–­24, 96–­100. 92. See Chelsea Foxwell, Dekadansu.

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chapter 5 1. Hōgai no ga wa shasei yori shuppatsu shitaru mono nari. Yokoyama Kendō, “Kano Hōgai,” in Okakura Kakuhei [Shūsui] et al., Hōgai iboku taikan (Collected Works by Master Hōgai) (Tokyo: Shichijô Yasuji, 1917), 3. 2. Oka Fuhō, Shinobugusa (Tokyo: Nichieisha Insatsu, 1910), 37–­38. Shinobugusa, the hare’s foot fern, is an actual plant but also refers to nostalgic remembrance. Peter McMillan, One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Hyakunin isshu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), note 98. 3. The previous chapter, for example, cited jurors’ 1903 claim that “Nihonga has fully broken down the ramparts of the various hereditary schools [ryūha] and has finally succeeded in creating designs that, overall, take the study of nature [shasei] as their foundation.” Dai gokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai shuppin shinsa gaikyō daijūbu: Bijutsu oyobi bijutsu kōgei (Inspectors’ Overview of Submissions to the Fifth Domestic Industrial Exhibition, Section 10: Fine Arts and Crafts), reprinted in Meiji zenki sangyō hattatsushi shiryō: Kangyō hakurankai shiryō, ed. Fujiwara Masato (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankō Kai, 1973), 8:127. 4. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Japan at the Dawn of the Modern Age (2001), 20. 5. Kathlyn M. Liscomb, Learning from Mt. Hua: A Chinese Physician’s Illustrated Travel Record and Painting Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68–­69. 6. Mid-­to late nineteenth-­century painters such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kazunobu, and Yasuda Raishū emulated the shadowy effects of European and American copperplate and wood engravings, often infusing these reproductions of oil paintings with dark, eerie elements that were not present in the original Western prints. See, for example, Oka Yasumasa, “‘Akō gishi hōshū zu’ no genzu o megutte” (On the Source Painting for The Revenge of the Akō gishi) Kokka 113, no. 1 (2007): 3–­17. 7. As a lonely autumn and winter theme, battered, old or withered trees (古木, 枯木) were well known in Song and Yuan painting. The early modern Japanese association with Liang Kai is exemplified by Withered Trees (Koboku zu, historically attributed to Liang Kai), an album painting included in the Hand-­Mirror of Chinese Paintings: Hikkōen (Kara-­e tekagami hikkōen, thirteenth to seventeenth centuries) in the Tokyo National Museum (TA-­487). A circular fan painting of old trees bearing a Liang Kai signature was given by Denman Waldo Ross to the Harvard Art Museums (1924.88). Charles Hartman, “Literary and Visual Interactions in Lo Chih-­ch’uan’s ‘Crows in Old Trees,’” Metropolitan Museum Journal 28 (1993): 129–­67; Ping Foong, “Guo Xi’s Intimate Landscapes and the Case of ‘Old Trees, Level Distance,’” Metropolitan Museum Journal 35 (2000): 87–­115; Richard M. Barnhart, Wintry Forests, Old Trees: Some Landscape Themes in Chinese Painting (New York: China Institute in America, 1972); Shimada Shūjirō, “Ra Chisen Sekkō ho zu ni tsuite” (On Luo Zhichuan’s River Inlet in Winter), Hōun 22 (June 1938): 41–­52. The work that Shimada introduces is now housed in the Tokyo National Museum (TA-­340); its old, broken trees bear comparison with Hōgai’s. 8. Hartman, “Literary and Visual Interactions,” 149–­57. Kawanabe Kyōsai’s Winter Crow on a Bare Branch (Koboku kan’a, fig. 4.7) also fits within this thematic category. 9. A similar feature is found in the painting Shōki and Demons (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) by the painter Aoki Toshio. See Foxwell, “Crossings and Dislocations: Toshio Aoki (1854–­ 1912), A Japanese Artist in California,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 3 (Fall 2012), http:// www.19thc-­artworldwide.org. 10. Fenollosa, “Lecture on Art delivered before the Tokio Artists. Lecture I. April 10th 1881” and “The Duty and Opportunity of Japan toward the Whole World,” MS, Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS 1759 (1) and bMS 1759.2 (23), respectively. 11. See Murakata Akiko, “Selected Letters of Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1971). 12. Fenollosa, untitled MS [Lecture to Kangwakai], c.1885, Fenollosa Papers, bMS 1759.2 (52). 13. Chelsea Foxwell, “Ishin o koeta yamato-­e: Fenorosa to Sumiyoshi Hirokata,” in Kinsei yamato-­e saikō, ed. Shimohara Miho (Tokyo: Brücke, 2014), 193–­217. 14. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chi244

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cago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–­13. 15. “Kangakai dai ikkai taikai,” in Nihon bijutsuin hyakunenshi (The Hundred-­Year History of the Japan Art Institute), ed. Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunen Hensanshitsu (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsuin, 1989), vol. 1, part 1, 468. 16. Cited in Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–­1101) to Tung Ch’i-­ch’ang (1555–­1636) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 15. Modified from the original translation in William Acker, Some T’ang and Pre-­T ’ang Texts on Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1954), 1:149–­50. 17. For an analogous investigation in Japanese intellectual history, see Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). While modernity was “defined as the antithesis of nature” in intellectual terms (Thomas, ix), I have been arguing that Meiji artistic discourse followed Western art in celebrating naturalisitic depiction or life sketching (shasei) as evidence of modern Japanese painting’s successful modernization. One of the key expectations of art, especially modern Japanese-­ style painting, was that it should serve as an antidote to the ills of modernity. In this sense, art and one of the most common understandings of nature in early twentieth-­century Japan were on similar footing. 18. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” (L’effet de réel), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell: 1986): 141–­48. 19. Cited and translated in Timon Screech, The Shogun’s Painted Culture: Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760–­1829 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 169. 20. Ibid., 167. 21. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 7. 22. Screech, Shogun’s Painted Culture, 178. Rai San’yō’s criticism of Ōkyo as lacking “the spirit of antiquity” (koki) or even lacking the status of painting as such appears in Seimiya Hidekata (1809–­1879), Un’en ryakuden (Tokyo, 1874), 2:44. 23. Timon Screech, “The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture,” Archives of Asian Art 47 (1994): 58; Yi Song-­mi, “Artistic Tradition and the Depiction of Reality: True-­View Landscape Painting of the Choson Dynasty,” in Arts of Korea (New York: MMA, 1998), 330–­65. 24. See, for example, Yoshiaki Shimizu, “Workshop Management of the Early Kano Painters, ca. A.D. 1530–­1600,” Archives of Asian Art 34 (1981): 32–­47, and Quitman E. Phillips, The Practices of Painting in Japan, 1475–­1500 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 25. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 7. 26. The term sha’i (写意, transmitting the idea) often referred to literati painting in Edo Japan, which was based on transmitting a poetic idea or the idea of things, rather than their form likenesses. See Kōno Motoaki, “Edo jidai shasei kō” (Considering the Concept of Shasei in the Edo period), in Nihon kaigashi no kenkyū (Studies in the History of Japanese Painting), ed. Yamane Yūzō Sensei Koki Kinenkai (Tokyo:Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1989), 389–­427; Tsuji Nobuo, “Shasei to shai: Edo jidai kachōga kō” (Shasei and shai: An Investigation of Edo-­Period Bird and Flower Painting), in Kachōga no sekai (Tokyo: Gakken, 1983), 7:86–­95; Satō Yasuhiro, “Ike Taiga hitsu Rihaku shi’i zu fusuma (kenkyū shiryō)” (Sliding Door Paintings on a Poem by Li Bai, by Ike Taiga [Research Materials]), Kokka, no. 1095 (July 1986), 43–­48; and Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-­Century Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 27. A type of expressive brushstroke associated with the individualist literati painters of the Yuan dynasty. 28. Fujioka Sakutarō, “Ueno no tenrankai o mite nihonga no shôrai o omou” (Pondering the Future of Nihonga: On Seeing the Exhibition in Ueno), Chūō bijutsu 23, no. 11 (November 1908), reprinted in Meiji Nihonga shiryō (Source Materials for Meiji Nihonga), ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1991), 114–­15. 29. Ibid., 106. 30. Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun (September 3, 1873), cited in Matsumoto Shinko, Meiji zenki engeki ronshi (Tokyo: Engeki Shuppansha, 1974), 32. 31. Ibid. 245

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32. See Yokomizo Hiroko, “Uīn bankoku hakurankai shuppin no dōsei ôkôrô ni tsuite” (On the Large Incense Burner Exhibited in the Vienna International Exhibition), Museum 506 (May 1993): 30–­34; Yokomizo, “Craft Design Guidance by the Meiji Government: Matters Related to the Seihin Gazu-­gakari and Onchizuroku,” Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan Kiyō 34 (1999): 4–­111; and Yokomizo, “Kindai nihon ni okeru kinkōka kyōiku ni kan suru ikkōsatsu: Teishitsu gigeiin to Tokyo bijutsu gakkō o chūshin ni” (An Investigation of the Education of Modern Japanese Metalworkers: The Imperial Artists and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts), Ibaraki Daigaku Izura bijutsu bunka kenkyūjo hō 13 (1991): 21–­46. 33. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Paris and the Arts, 1851–­1896: From the Goncourt Journal, ed. George Joseph Becker and Edith Philips (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 138–­39 (entry from January 22, 1875). 34. Similarly, the American collectors William and Henry Walters added Japanese and Chinese pieces to their transnational and transhistorical collections of bronzes, armor, and so forth, categorizing the objects according to medium rather than culture of origin. They evaluated East Asian works against a canon of existing “high”-­art metal sculpture that began with the bronzes of antiquity, continued through Renaissance statuary, and culminated in modern academic pieces. See Johnston, William and Henry Walters. 35. Goncourt and Goncourt, Paris and the Arts, 138–­39. 36. The long-­legged tripod is loosely based on Qing emulations of ancient bronzes of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Chinese copies and detailed studies of ancient bronzes were first made during the Northern Song dynasty, around the eleventh century. While many copies were so accurate as to be mistaken for the originals, the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries also saw the production of imaginative antiquarian pieces that took great liberties with the original archaic designs, altering both the shape and ornamentation to create new, fanciful forms. See James C. Y. Watt, “Antiquarianism and Naturalism,” in Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, ed. Wen Fong and James C. Y. Watt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 219–­22. See also National Palace Museum, Taipei, Through the Prism of the Past: Antiquarian Trends in Chinese Art of the 16th to 18th Century (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1992). On monumental bronzes in the Meiji period, See Joe Earle, Splendours of Imperial Japan: Arts of the Meiji Period from the Khalili Collection (London: Khalili Family Trust, 2002). 37. Gregory Irvine and Anna Jackson, “‘The Finest Piece of Bronze Which an Artist’s Hand Has Ever Produced’: The Life and Times of a Japanese Incense Burner,” Apollo 465 (2000): 19–­20. 38. Advocates of the sport had long favored the highly trainable ōtaka, or northern goshawk. See Rachel Saunders, “Pursuits of Power: Falconry in Edo Period Japan,” Orientations 36, no. 2 (March 2005): 82–­92; Maki Hirozō, Nihon no washi taka (Hawks and Eagles of Japan) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1998), 29–­35. 39. On auspicious images, see Timon Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012). The sound of the character taka was homophonous with the adjective taka(shi), lofty, just as in China the same character, pronounced ying, was a homophone with the word for bravery. For the case of the eagle and hawk in China, see Sung Hou-­mei, Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 7–­38. 40. Like the animal portraits that were popular in eighteenth-­century England, they showed the birds as an extension of the property and tastes of their wealthy and powerful owner. Alex Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: The Politics of Animal Picturing,” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990), 14. 41. For Tan’yū’s Hawk and Eagle Studies, see Nihon Keizai Shinbun, ed., Seitan yonhyakunen kinen Kano Tan’yû ten (Tokyo-­to Bijutsukan, 2002), cat. no. 69 (private collection). For Soga school paintings, which represented the locus classicus of sorts of Kano-­style hawk and eagle painting for Fenollosa and the mid-­Meiji artists, see Saunders, “Pursuits of Power.” For eagles, see Imahashi Riko, Edo no kachōga: Hakubutsugaku o meguru bunka to sono hyōshō (Birds and Flowers: The Representation of Natural History during the Edo Period) (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995), 292–­310. The ue minu washi subject was also taken up by Jakuchū, from which point it continued into the Meiji era. 42. Variations of the ue minu washi theme were also painted by Hokusai and his school, and 246

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these were presumably used as source material by Kyōsai. Given our knowledge of Jakuchû’s working methods and his access to some of Kyoto’s temple treasures through local connections, it is probable that his washi are also based on Ming and Qing Chinese prototypes. The character read taka in Japan (read ying in Chinese; see above, note 34) also encompasses the larger, more powerful birds that we would call eagles and in Japan would classify as washi. The Chinese character for washi (jiu) appears to denote birds that fed more exclusively on carrion, such as vultures and buzzards. 43. A skyward-­gazing hawk (taka) on a pine branch appears in the Hokusai shashin gafu (Picture Book of Realistic Paintings of Hokusai, ca. 1814) (Art Institute of Chicago, 1939.1177);on a fan print with a mount Fuji seal (Edo Tokyo Museum, 91200306); and juxtaposed with cherry blossoms in a diptych print (British Museum, 1961,0408,0.6). A painting of a skyward-­gazing fighting cock attributed to Hokusai is in a private collection. 44. For example, the Yomiuri shinbun of January 10, 1880, notes that a falcon was seen standing next to his prostrate falconer for some length of time. It was adduced that the former was waiting for the latter to awake from his inebriated sleep. Both were temporarily taken into custody and released. By contrast, newspaper stories about washi are more prevalent in the mid-­to late Meiji period and record such incidents as washi swooping down on someone’s property and stealing their domesticated animals or washi being shot or captured on private property and in some cases donated to the zoo. Hayashi Jôji, Tōkyō o sawagaseta dōbutsu tachi (The Animals That Made a Stir in Tokyo) (Tokyo: Yamato Shobō, 2004). 130–­37. 45. See Ian Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 46. Louis Gonse, L’art japonais (Paris: Quantin, 1883), vol. 1, plate 32, “Aigle se mirant dans une cascade.” 47. Hashimoto Gahō, Eagle on a Tree, ca. 1880s, ink and color on paper; purchased by William Sturgis Bigelow, 11.8738. 48. Salon Annuel des Peintres Japonais, deuxième année, preface by S. Bing (Paris: Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, 1884). 49. Gregory Irvine, catalog entries 112–­13, in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson, general editors (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 267–­69; Irvine and Jackson, “The Finest Piece of Bronze.” 50. I thank Timon Screech for this observation. 51. Predation themes by George Stubbs, Barye, and others referenced sculptures of classical antiquity (via their Renaissance and Baroque emulations) in addition to Edmund Burke’s well-­ known notion of the sublime (1756). The nineteenth-­century works are distinctive in their portrayal of a “wild” nature governed by “natural laws.” See Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild.” For Western natural history imagery in the construction of empire, see Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 52. The review appears in Kaiga sōshi (July 12, 1894). 53. Kaiga sōshi (June 25, 1894), cited in Nihon bijutsuin hyakunenshi, vol. 1, pt. 1, 505. 54. I use “metaphor” to describe an individual relation of similarity or substitution and “allegory” to describe a more sustained representation that “says one thing and means another” via the coordination of several signs meant to work together (Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964], 2). I use “symbolism” more pragmatically to describe general instances in which, as in the case of the cherry blossom, a signifier potentially has a number of different signifieds. 55. Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild,” 20. 56. Yamaguchi Seiichi, “Kawanabe Kyōsai to bijutsu tenrankai” (Kawanabe Kyōsai and Art Exhibitions in His Day), Kyōsai 26 (July 1985): 35. 57. Fletcher, Allegory, 10. 58. Philippe Burty, “Le Salon japonais,” République française, June 25, 1883. 59. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 123. 60. Such, at least, was reported by Oka Fuhō in 1905, in an article for the journal Taiyō, 247

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eventually reprinted in Longing Grass, yet given the painting’s long history of preservation at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the story may represent wishful thinking. The article was accompanied by a memoir prefaced by another Hōgai biographer, Mori Daikyō, and marked as “a conversation with Kawase Hideharu,” statesman, entrepreneur, and former chairman of the Dragon Pond Society. While Kawase is a more reliable source than Oka, the fact that both of these texts were published by Oka and Mori Daikyō suggests the likelihood of fabrication in order to enhance Hōgai’s reputation. If the painting was in fact given to Itô, its return to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts is unexpected and calls the rest of the story into question. Unfortunately the museum’s original accession logs were lost during or before World War II. 61. These are today in the collection of the Tokyo University of the Arts. 62. Oka, Shinobugusa, 19–­21. 63. Shioya Jun, “‘Risōga’ e no dōtei: Hashimoto Gahō Ryūko zu igo” (The Road to ‘Ideal Painting’: After Hashimoto Gahō’s Dragon and Tiger),” Bijutsu Kenkyū 377 (February 2003): 1–­29. 64. Compare, for example, Suzuki Kason, Eagle and Monkey, 1898 (ink and color on silk, 124.3 × 34.1 cm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with Suzuki Chōkichi, Eagle on a Stump, ca. 1885 (cast bronze with tree stump, 56 in. wide, 49 in. diameter; George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield Museums; exhibited at the Nuremberg Exposition, 1885); Okada Baison, Eagle, ca. 1903 (reproduced in Nihon bijutsu; whereabouts unknown); and Incense Burner in the Shape of a Sea-­Eagle (originally attributed to Myōchin Muneharu), ca. 1860 (fig. 5.10). 65. See Kigi Yasuko, Hayashi Tadamasa : Ukiyoe o koete Nihon no subete o (Hayashi Tadamasa: From Ukiyo-­e to All of Japan) (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2009). 66. Hayashi Tadamasa, “Remarks,” The Twelve Bronze Falcons Exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition by Hayashi Tadamasa (Chicago, 1893). 67. Yomiuri shinbun, March 11, 1893, quoted and translated in Hayashi, Twelve Bronze Falcons, n.p. 68. Yūbin hōchi shinbun, March 11, 1893, quoted and translated in Hayashi, Twelve Bronze Falcons.

chapter 6 1. Reprinted in Shioda Shin, ed., Kōgei sōdan (Crafts Digest) 1, 1880, 7–­8. 2. Aeba Kōson, “Kaiga no shinpo (dai ichi)” (The Progress of Painting, Part 1), Yomiuri shinbun, May 23, 1883, 1. 3. For more on this and subsequent generations of nihonga painters, see Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004); John D. Szostak, Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-­Century Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Ellen P. Conant, with Steven D. Owyoung and J. Thomas Rimer, Nihonga, Transcending the Past: Japanese-­Style Painting, 1868–­1968 (New York: Abrams, 1996). 4. Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 130–­31. 5. Bijin yūgi zu (Beauties at Their Amuseuments) is the earliest title that I have located for this series of works. It dates to February 1897, when one of the paintings was reproduced in issue 97 of Kokka. The same painting and title were published in volume 2 of Zeshin ō gakan (Mirror of Zeshin’s Paintings) (Tokyo: Gahōsha, 1908); the Clark Collection (Minneapolis) screen pair is reproduced in the first volume as Konchi Genroku jinbutsu zu (Figures of the Genroku Era on Gold Ground). 6. In fact, the earliest mention of a “public” in the context of art can be traced to these years. For example, Kangakai soshiki (The Structure of Kangakai, 1885), a pamphlet published for Fenollosa’s group, declares the importance of “submitting old paintings to public inspection (kōshū no tenran ni kyō shi).” Compare Fenollosa, “History of Kangwakai [undated],” Fenollosa papers, bMS Am1759.2 (35). See also Ōmuka Toshiharu, Kanshu no seiritsu: Bijutsuten, bijutsu zasshi, bijutsushi (The Birth of a Viewing Public: Art Exhibitions, Art Journals, Art History) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2008). 248

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7. Shinagawa Yajirō, [opening address], Tokyo eiri shinbun, October 3, 1882. 8. Meiji jūshichinen naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai shinsa hōkoku (Tokyo: 1884), reprinted in MBKS, 791. 9. Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, no. 10 (August 1884), 4. 10. “If, as dealers say, ‘they’re not making it anymore,’ that is because the societies that formerly produced it have increasingly become part of the global economic system. The process of market globalization has consequences that result in a dwindling supply of ‘authentic primitive art.’” Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 7. 11. Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Meiji dezain no tanjō: Chōsa kenkyū hōkokusho “Onchi zuroku” (The Birth of Meiji Design: Research Report on the Onchi zuroku) (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1997). 12. For the budget, agendas, and activities of Ryūchikai, see the journals Kōgei sōdan, Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō, and Ryūchikai hōkoku. See also Satō Dōshin, “Kan Kobijutsu Kai kaisetsu” (On the Kan Kobijutsu Kai), in Kindai Nihon āto katarogu korekushon (Modern Japan Art Catalog Collection) (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2001), 4:365–­71. 13. Satō, “Kan Kobijutsu Kai kaisetsu.” 14. For further details on the painting, see Chelsea Foxwell, “Merciful Mother Kannon and Its Audiences,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 326–­47. 15. Foxwell, “Merciful Mother Kannon”; see also Martin Collcutt, “The Image of Kannon as Compassionate Mother in Meiji Art and Culture” in Challenging Past and Present, ed. Ellen P. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 197–­226. 16. Matsuo Bashō, poem 118, reprinted in Imoto Nōichi and Hori Nobuo, ed. and annotators, Matsuo Bashō shū, vol. 1, Zen hokku (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1995), 70. 17. Timothy Clark, Demon of Painting: The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai (London: British Museum, 1993), 147: “After this incident Kyōsai became known especially for his crow paintings and prints, repeating the subject frequently and even having seals cut with readings such as ‘Gratitude to the crow’ (drawing of a crow and the character on), “Flying over many lands’ (Bankoku tobu [flanked by crows]), etc.” In using the frenzy of public attention over the hundred-­yen painting to create the crow as his “brand image,” Kyōsai seems to be taking advantage of an Edo mode of self-­publicity and branding that had already been established by Hanabusa Itchō in the seventeenth century. See Miriam Wattles, The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchō (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 18. Takao Akira, “Kokuhō Hikone byōbu no denrai to Shibata Zeshin” (Shibata Zeshin and the Provenance of the Hikone Screen), Hikone jō Hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 16 (2005): 54–­77. 19. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35–­82; Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 20. Yukio Lippit, “The Birth of Japanese Painting History: Kano Artists, Authors, and Authenticators of the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003), 4–­5. 21. Helen Nagata, trans., “Yoshiwara koi no michibiki,” 172. In Nagata, “Reading a Pictorial Narrative: A Study of the Illustrations attributed to Hishikawa Moronobu in Yoshiwara Koi no michibiki” (A Guide to Love in the Yoshiwara, 1678) (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000). 22. Saitō Ritsudō, “Matabei,” Kokka, no. 106 (July 1898), 190; [author unknown], “Hikone byōbu,” Kokka, no. 101 (February 1898), 85–86. On Metabei’s background, see Tsuji, Lineage of Eccentrics, 32ff. 23. Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 2:183–­84. 24. Goke Tadaomi, Shibata Zeshin, Nihon no bijutsu, no. 93 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1974). 25. Aimi Shigeichi (Kōu), “Zeshin ten byō” (Sketches of Zeshin, 1938), reprinted in Takao, “Kokuhō Hikone byōbu,” 52–­53. 26. Ibid., 53. 27. See Okudaira Shunroku, Hikone byōbu: Mugongeki no enshutsu (The Hikone Screen: The Production of a Silent Drama), E wa kataru 10 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1996). 28. Zeshin made copies of fourteenth-­century Japanese arhat paintings by Ryōzen in the 249

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collection of Tofukuji and later acquired the works, which were later purchased by Charles Lang Freer (F1904.295-­311). Zeshin’s copies of this series (F2012.5a–­e) are now also in the Freer Gallery of Art. 29. The first annual exhibition was held at the Exhibition Bureau’s Ueno site, while the subsequent events were hosted by Tokyo shrines and temples in Asakusa, Hibiya, and Tsukiji. For an overview, see Satō, “Kan Kobijutsu Kai kaisetsu.” 30. Kan Kobijutsu Kai Shūei (Outstanding Selections from the Kan Kobijutsu Kai Exhibition), preface by Kurokawa Mayori (Tokyo: Hōkokusha, 1880). 31. One of the most prominent lenders to the exhibition was the Kiritsu Kōshō Kaisha, a government-­subsidized company formed with the mission of selling Japanese craft objects in Europe. 32. As Christine Guth points out, the Hōryūji hōmotsu had recently been offered to the imperial household in exchange for a sizable “donation” to the maintenance and upkeep of the temple, while the Kasuga gongen genki-­e had been purchased by the Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku) for 40 yen. Guth notes that a number of medieval Japanese handscrolls changed hands in the early 1880s for similarly modest prices. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 33. This practice was widespread. See, for example, Takagishi Akira, “The Muromachi Shogunate and Emaki,” in Archaism and Antiquarianism in Korean and Japanese Art, ed. Elizabeth Lillehoj (Chicago: Center for the Art of East Asia, 2013), 74–85; Takagishi, Muromachi ōken to kaiga: shoki Tosa ha kenkyū (Power and Painting in Muromachi Japan) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004), 65–­119; Karen L. Brock, “The Shogun’s ‘Painting Match,’” Monumenta Nipponica 50, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 433–­84; and the case of the Sesshū Long Scroll described in Lippit, Painting of the Realm, 35, 59–­64. 34. Shinagawa Yajirō, [opening address], Tokyo eiri shinbun, October 3, 1882. 35. This usage appears, for example, at the first Domestic Industrial Exhibition (Naikoku Kangyō Hakuranaki) in 1877. That the reference room objects were intended as models to be copied was clear from the fact that European countries and manufacturers complained of trademark violations that resulted from putting the items on view. Kuni Takeyuki, Hakurankai no jidai: Meiji Seifu no hakurankai seisaku (The Age of Exhibitions: The Exhibition Policies of the Meiji Government) (Tokyo: Iwata Shoin, 2005), 60–­63. 36. Iida Yuzuru, [speech to Ryūchikai], “Ryūchikai kiji” (Record of the Dragon Pond Society Meeting), Dai nihon bijutsu shinpō (Great Japan Fine Arts Bulletin) 2 (December 1883): 4. 37. See Tim Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project,” in Colonialism and the Object, ed. Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 11–­27. 38. Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, October 9, 1882. 39. Shinagawa, [opening address], Jiji shinpō, April 12, 1884. 40. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 12. 41. Ibid., 14. 42. Ibid., 6. 43. Daniel Herwitz, “The Consolations of Art: Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 52. 44. Satō Dōshin, “Japonisumu no keizaigaku” (The Economics of Japonisme), Kindai gasetsu 4 (1995): 25–­51; Satō, Meiji kokka to kindai bijutsu: bi no seijigaku (The Meiji State and Modern Art: The Politics of Aesthetics) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1999), 105–­7. 45. Kōno Motoaki, “Funpon to mosha,” in Kōza nihon bijutsushi, ed. Itakura Masaaki (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005), 2:103–­32. 46. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–­1800, exh. cat. (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005). 47. “Hikone byōbu [Author unknown,]” 85–86. 48. Kawasaki Chitora, “Zeshin,” Kokka, no. 96 (February 1897), 3–­6. 49. Ibid. 50. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 2:184. 250

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51. Foxwell, “New Art and the Display of Antiquities in Mid-­Meiji Tokyo,” Jōsai Review of Japanese Culture and Society 24 (December 2012): 150–­51. 52. Fenollosa, “The Century Gallery of American Masters.” bMS 1759.2(15), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 53. Okakura Kakuzō, Nihon bijutsushi (A History of Japanese Art) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 10–­11.

conclusion 1. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 15. 2. Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 45. 3. Hayden White, “The Problem of Change in Literary History.” New Literary History 7, no. 1 (1975): 108. 4. Ibid., 108. 5. Satō Dōshin, “Kano Hōgai banki no sansuiga to seiyō kaiga” (The Late Landscapes of Kano Hōgai and Western Painting), Bijutsu kenkyū 329 (September 1984): 1–­30. The work’s Japanese title has been transmitted as Kōryū hyakuri zu (The Myriad Miles of the [Yangtze] River). 6. Satō Dōshin, “Kangakai saikō” (Kangakai Reconsidered), Bijutsu Kenkyū 340 (1987): 1–­27; Nakatani Yuri, “Kano Hōgai hitsu Niō sokki zu no shudai: Yōmeiki no bijutsu tenrankai ni okeru gadai no mosaku” (The Subject of Kano Hōgai’s Niō Seizing a Demon: The Conception of Subjects at the Earliest Art Exhibitions), presentation delivered at the annual conference of the Bijutsushi Gakkai, Tokyo, May 18, 2014. 7. Chelsea Foxwell, “Merciful Mother Kannon and Its Audiences,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 326–­47. 8. Clare Pollard, “Early Meiji Export Ceramics: Marvels or Monstrosities?” symposium in memory of Doctor Oliver Impey, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, May 31, 2006. 9. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43. 10. Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 11. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 87, drawing on Nietzsche. The characterization of Nietzsche’s hostility toward history (Use and Abuse of History, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as tied up with voyeurism proceeds from Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966), 116: “History [according to Nietzsche] promoted a debilitating voyeurism in men, made them feel that they were latecomers to a world in which everything worth doing had already been done, and thereby undermined that impulse to heroic exertion that might give a peculiarly human, if only transient, meaning to an absurd world.” 12. For an overview, see Furuta Ryō, Yuragu kindai: Nihonga to yoga no hazama ni (Modern Art in Wanderings: In between the Japanese-­and Western-­Style Paintings) (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2006). 13. These efforts were consolidated in the postwar period after a more experimental prewar period. John Szostak, Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20thCentury Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 5–6, 41–55. In recent years, conservation scholars have analyzed Kano Hōgai’s late paintings to determine if he used imported Western colorants. Arai Kei, “Kano-­ha no gijutsu kara kindai nihonga no gihō e: Kano Hōgai hitsu Niō Sokki zu no gihō saigen mosha o tōshite” (PhD diss., Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, 2004). 14. Hishida Shunsō, “Gakai mangen” (Idle Words on the Painting World), Jiji shinpō, pt. 1, March 7, 1910; pt. 2, March 8, 1910. Reproduced in Meiji nihonga shiryō (Historical Sources for Meiji Nihonga), ed. Aoki Shigeru (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1991), 281. 251

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15. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 16. Manabe Chie and Matsuda Yasunori, “Pan Riaru Bijutsu Kyōkai shoki sakuhin gun gihō zairyō kenkyū” (Painting Materials and Techniques of the Early Works of the Panreal Art Group), Annual Review of Tohoku University Art and Design 10 (2003): 52–­73. 17. See Foxwell, “The Painting of Sadness? The Ends of Nihonga Then and Now,” ARTMargins 4, no. 1 (February 2015). 18. Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 7. 19. Quoted ibid., 14.

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Notes to Conclusion

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index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

academic studio master, 27 academic workshop painters, 21, 26–­27, 31–­32 Aeba Kōson: “The Progress of Painting,” 172 Aimi Kōu, 188, 189 Aizawa Seishisai: Shinrōn (New Theses) of 1825, 78–­79 albums, 61–­62, 68; as ethnographic representations of Japanese topography and society, 62; as industrial and artistic samples of Japanese print technology, 61–­62, 66, 67; literati albums, 62 Alcock, Rutherford, 8, 36, 51, 56, 59, 60, 232n104 Anderson, William, 55, 69, 231n88, 237n73 Andō Hirochika, 71, 99, 104 Andō Jūbei Workshop (attributed to): Mt. Fuji Panel, 60 Ansei purge, 24 Aoki Toshio: Shōki and Demons, 244n9 Appadurai, Arjun, 210 arhat paintings, 31, 93, 250n28; Kano Hōgai’s Arhat with a Dragon, 102; Ken’yūsai (Kano) Kazunobu’s Five Hundred Arhats, 29, 30, 31, 120, 223n60; Komai Company’s Dish with Arhats, 119, 120 Ariga Nagao, 69 art antiquities (koga, kobijtsu, or koki kyūbutsu): 269

exhibitions reflecting transmissive crisis, 197–­98; rationale of government-­ sponsored exhibitions, 195–­96; venues for display in the 1880s, 192–­98 “artistic Japan,” 53, 56 Asahi ware dish, 237n64 Asai Chū, 111 Asazuma Boat motif, 20, 194 atmospheric perspective, 22, 25, 30, 59, 87, 96, 185 Audubon, John James: Golden Eagle, 163, 164

Baitei Kinga, 124 Ban Dainagon emaki (Tale of Major Councillor Ban), 24, 194 Bann, Stephen, 212–­13 Baron Ii, 188 Barthes, Roland: Writing Degree Zero, 74, 165 Barye, Antoine-­Louis, 163, 247n51 Benzaiten, 90, 235n45; Hashimoto Gahō’s Benzaiten, the Goddess of Music and Good Fortune, on a Dragon, 99, 100; Kano Hōgai’s Seated Eight-­Armed Benzaiten, 97, 98 Bigelow, William Sturgis, 99, 104, 143–­44, 149

bijutsu (art or fine art), 6, 14, 17, 18, 32, 34, 114, 115, 141 bijutsu seihin (art manufactures), 177 Borden Condensed Milk Company: The Story of an Eagle (promotional pamphlet), 165, 166 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 Brinkley, Frank, 210 bronzes: Chinese copies of, 246n36; custom-­ made Meiji bronzes exported to foreign markets, 163; two categories of, 163 Bryson, Norman, 153 Buddhist icons, hidden or concealed (hibutsu), 32 bungaku (literature), 40 bunjinga, 22, 23, 108 Burke, Edmund, 247n51 Burty, Philippe, 8, 59, 165 bussankai, 45, 226n7

cedar door paintings, for Meiji Imperial Palace, Tokyo, 6 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 1 Chan thought, 93 Chen Hongshou, 22 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, 57, 110–­11; Chōkichi’s Twelve Falcons, 169; first inclusion of Japanese paintings in Hall of Fine Arts, 229n56 china-­painting, 57 Chinese ink painting, 85 “Chinese” (kanga) style, 3, 25 Chiyo, Seki, 6 Chōfu, 26, 77, 78, 79; incorporated into Yamaguchi prefecture, 84, 91; under Tokugawa political order in eighteenth and first half of nineteenth centuries, 81 Chōfu painters: in late Edo period, 222n50; pro-­ Tokugawa symbolism, 81 Chōshū, 77–­78, 79 chromolithography, 7 Chung, Anita, 105 Clark, T. J., 205, 206 “cold forest” (kanrin), 148 Commission for the Vienna Exhibition (Ōkoku Hakurankai), 44 Conant, Ellen P., 4, 216n12 Confucius, images of, 90, 235n45 craft wares (kōgei), 173, 225n5 Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, 51, 52

daimyo patronage, 19, 20 Daoist thought, 93 270

Index

Darwin, Charles, 69 Date family, 193 decadence: and dissent, 138–­41; rhetoric of, 131–­35; Western notion of degradation of Japanese art, 121–­22, 134 Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) of 1882 and 1884, 6, 7, 92, 98, 108–­9, 110, 120, 135–­36; antique paintings reference room, 177, 192–­93, 193–­94, 194–­95, 198; devoted to painting in Japanese materials, 109; expectations of artists submitting works, 131–­34; and Kano Hōgai, 127–­31; request that submissions be framed, 149; stimulation of Japanese submissions to world’s fairs, 226n10; submission guidelines specifying “new paintings” (shinga), 176. See also hakurankai (exhibitions) Domestic Industrial Exhibitions, 5, 8, 45, 108–­10, 210; Art Gallery, from Dai Nikai Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai shashin chō, 58; Art Gallery at, 38–­39; and birth of Meiji exhibition art, 48–­51; categorization of “painting,” 56–­57, 239n5; foreign submissions segregated in reference halls, 49, 177, 228n28, 250n35; Hiroshige III, Interior Display at Art Gallery, 38–­39, 40; and Kyōsai’s Winter Crow on a Bare Branch, 124–­26, 247n42; microcosms of modern Japan, 48–­49; objects prepared for Western audiences at world’s fairs, 47–­48; submission guidelines specifying “new paintings” (shinga), 176; wearing of Western clothing by Japanese visitors, 227n21. See also hakurankai (exhibitions) Dong Yuan mode, 27 Dragon Pond Society, 173, 176, 177, 193, 198, 243n90 Dresser, Christopher, 45–­46, 56, 60; Sea Urchin Double-­Spouted Vessel, 46

Eagle, ironwork, late nineteenth century, 168, 169 eagles (washi), 157; abandonment of motif in Japan after 1920s, 171; cast as villain or interloper, 160–­61; depictions in the 1880s, 161–­63, 171; in export metalwork, 161–­62, 168, 169; Meiji readings of “fierceness” and “strength,” 164; motif in response to prominence of eagles in the West, 163; theme in “low” genres in early eighteenth century, 159; ue minu washi (the eagle that never looks upward), 159, 160, 246n41, 247n42

East Asian ink painting, eccentric tradition in, 105, 148 East Asian painting theme, four gentlemanly accomplishments, 200 Edo: cultural hub in late eighteenth century, 20; loss of half of population in 1860s, 109 Edokko (Edo-­born commoner), 123 Edo-­period art: academic painting in late period, 25–­32; bussankai exhibitions, 33; consolidation of Kano hegemony in early to mid-­period, 19; diversity of painting schools in mid-­to late period, 19–­20; hakurankai (exhibitions) and history of art across Meiji transition, 17, 18; heterogeneity and merging of schools in early to mid-­period, 20–­23; historical inquiry in, 23; importance of precedents, 198; literati painting, 21, 152; misemono, 34; modernity of images, 17–­18, 41, 220n16; negotiation between elite patrons and the crowd, 28–­ 32; okimono, 156; painting as self-­directed project, 24–­25, 31–­32; practice of making new art based on existing models, 199; predation themes in, 160; private or semiprivate spheres for painting in, 32–­34; private workshops of dominant painters during Meiji transition, 95; public sphere for painting in, 32–­34; “Southern school” painting, 21; special airings (bakuryō), 32 Egi Takato’o, 69 Eiko Ikegami, 27 Eitarō Confectionary, 124, 125, 127 Elsner, Jas, 32 emadō (hall for votive plaques), 59 enamel-­painting, 57, 59 Evett, Elisa, 9 Exhibition Bureau (Hakubutsukyoku), 7–­8, 45, 46–­47, 53, 56; exhibition guide for Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 47; hosting of Domestic Painting Exhibitions, 108–­9; onko chishin (look to the past in order to know the future), 177 exhibitions: art antiquities (koga, kobijtsu, or koki kyūbutsu), 192–­98; Higashiyama Exhibition of New Paintings and Calligraphy, 33, 224n74; of Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society), 102, 149, 150–­51; Kyoto exhibitions of 1871 and 1872, 35, 36, 44, 227n27; Yushima Shrine exhibition, 44, 45. See also art antiquities (koga, kobijtsu, or koki kyūbutsu); Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) of 1882 and 1884; Domestic Industrial Exhibitions; hakurankai (exhi271

Index

bitions); Meiji exhibition art export art, 156; dependence on gulf between producers and consumers, 210; as exhibition art, 210; history of value judgment inherent in, 210 Exposition Universelle, Paris, 5, 45, 52, 61, 156; albums of woodblock prints, 61–­62, 66, 67; Royal Manufactory of Porcelain, 209

falconry (takagari), 158 Fan Kuan, 145–­46, 153 Fenollosa, Ernest, 3, 4, 5, 87, 206; as advocate for documentation and preservation of Japanese antiquities, 70; as advocate for government support for the arts and cultural preservation laws, 70–­71; artistic experiments with prisms, 208; association of social unrest with decadence of late-­Edo visual culture, 140–­41; attempts to control Japanese painting, 9, 10, 201; Bijutsu shinsetsu (The True Meaning of the Fine Arts), 8–­9, 68, 70, 114, 115, 215n6, 217n20, 218n39; challenge to current painters to engage with ancient paintings, 97; collection of “Specimens of Japanese Pictorial Art,” 69; development of Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society), 71; dislike of Japanese painting’s incorporation of elements of Western painting, 97; dissatisfaction with elite painting in 1880s, 97; dissatisfaction with showing at 1882 and 1884 Domestic Painting Exhibitions, 149; effort to establish universal parameters for Japanese art, 166; emphasis on unity and interrelation, 99; encouragement of experimentation and revivalism, 99, 176; Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 69, 97; formalism, 68, 98–­ 104, 228n46; four pictorial elements and three qualities of excellence, 99; on the Hikone Screen, 188; “idea” of nature, 145; interior of home in Tokyo with framed Japanese paintings, 150; Kangakai as platform for “revitalization” of current painting, 177; Kano name, 238n74; language of revival and progressivism, 72, 202; A Mass of Broken Statues and Interesting Refuse, ca. 1880, 69, 70; nōtan, 239n83; as patron to Kano Hōgai, 10, 97–­98; public presentation on “economics and social progress,” 69; receipt of government support for excavations, 71; repudiation of realism as fundamental requirement of painting, 68; sale of collection, 71; search for specimens

Fenollosa, Ernest (continued) of premodern Japanese art, 68–­73; speech on demise of Japanese art, 71–­72; study of painting and painting history and theory, 69; vision of Japan’s role in future development of Western art, 55; on Western illusionism, 120; words for Japanese artists and administrators, 54–­55 Ficke, Arthur Davidson, 139–­40, 140 Five Dynasties, 184 flora and fauna, painters of, 11, 22 Franz Joseph I, 62 Freedom and Popular Rights movement, 123 Freer, Charles Lang, 98, 238n74, 250n28 Fried, Michael, 229n57 Fuchibe Tokuzō, 220n14 Fujioka Sakutarō: History of Painting from Recent Times, 19, 85, 153, 154, 178 Fukuda Takanori, 53; and exclusion of popular culture from exhibitions, 115–­16; The Origins of the Way of Japanese Painting (Nihon gadō no kigen), 114–­15, 140, 141; on Western illusionism, 120 Fukui Kōtei: Eagle with Cherry Blossoms, 164 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 69; Conditions in the West, 17, 34 Furuta Ryō, 84, 178

ghost stories, 116 globalization of Japanese art: and conflicting domestic and international images of Japan, 2, 10; demand for foreign sale and exhibition, 5–­7, 10, 205–­6; European and American “use” of in industrial and handmade manufactures, 195; in Meiji period, 5, 76, 249n10. See also Western/Orientalist discourse Golden Pavilion, Kinkakuji, 63 Goncourt, Edmond de, 156 Gonse, Louis, 5, 61, 206, 237n73; L’art japonais, 122, 161, 231n80 graduated scale reduction, 25, 30 graphic arts, 8 Great London Exhibition of 1862, 231n86 Guan Xiu, 93 Guth, Christine, 250n32

Habermas, Jürgen, 20, 223n67 hakubutsukan, 226n13 hakurankai (exhibitions), 6, 34; decontextualization, 16, 18; early uses of word, 220n14; effect on Japanese artistic production, 272

Index

16; effect on Japanese-­style painting, 17; “exhibition art,” 43; and framing of modern Japanese painting, 35–­41; and history of art across Edo-­Meiji transition, 17, 18; relation between domestic and foreign practices, 43, 44–­45; rise of, 108–­10; symbolic relation to openness and equality, 35; two-­tiered system of exhibition in 1870s and 1880s, 10–­12, 43–­48; Western notion of as negative force, 41; woodblock prints and photographs of, 37–­41. See also Domestic Competitive Painting Exhibitions (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) of 1882 and 1884; Domestic Industrial Exhibitions; Meiji exhibition art Hanabusa Itchō, 20, 249n17 handscrolls, 25, 31, 86; changing of hands in early 1880s, 250n32; Yu Song’s Hundred Flowers, 221n35 hanging scrolls, and world’s fairs’ classification of painting, 44, 56, 58, 59 Hara Zaishō: fusuma-­e sliding door paintings for Yueyang Pavilion, 28, 29; work on Kyoto Imperial Palace, 27 Harootunian, H. D., 92 Harris, Townsend, 80 Harrison, Frederic, 16; “A Few Words about Picture Exhibitions,” 14 Harunobu, 184 Hasegawa Tōhaku: Pine Grove screens, 146 Hashimoto Gahō, 91, 95, 96, 104, 131; Arhat, 102; Benzaiten, the Goddess of Music and Good Fortune, on a Dragon, 99, 100; Bulls, 100, 102; Doves and Bamboo, 96; Elder, 102; painting of eagle, 161; Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain, 102 hawk and eagle representations, early to mid-­Meiji, 157–­61; allegorical overtones, 163–­69; blurring of taka and washi distinction, 171; in Meiji export wares, 161–­63; symbolized power and prestige of Western buyers, 166–­67. See also eagles (washi); hawks (taka) hawks (taka), 157; depiction with sport of falconry (takagari), 158; large-­scale screen and sliding-­door images of, 158; as New Year’s decorations, 158, 160 Hayashi Jōji, 160 Hayashi Tadamasa, 68; Twelve Falcons (designer), 169, 170 Heian models, 26–­27 “hemp-­fiber” strokes, 27 Herwitz, Daniel, 197 hiden (secret transmissions), 20

Higashiyama Exhibition of New Paintings and Calligraphy, 33, 224n74 Hikone Screen, 62, 183–­86, 184; canonized as National Treasure, 188; in color woodblock–­ printed reproduction and black-­and-­ white photography by 1897, 199; copying of, 188–­92; first publicly visible at Kan Kobijutsu Kai in 1880, 192; Kano Tanshin Morimichi’s The Four Accomplishments, a Copy of the Hikone Screen, 189, 190–­91; modern scholarly engagement with, 200; recuperation of as fine art, 199–­200; traditional attribution to Ukiyo Matahei or Matabei, 184, 185, 199; Zeshin’s variations on, 12, 173, 182–­88, 200 Hishida Shunsō: Fallen Leaves (Ochiba), 12, 201, 202, 211 Hishikawa Moronobu, 185, 186, 187 Histoire de l’art du Japon, 237n73 history painting (rekishiga), 6 Hobsbawm, Eric, 212 hōgen (Eye of the Law), 29, 80, 96 hōin (Seal of the Law), 80 hokkyō (Bridge of the Law), 29 Hokusai, 22, 31, 72, 115–­16, 117, 218n37, 247n42; Ehon sakigake (Famous Warriors of China and Japan), 121; predation theme, 160; variations of ue minu washi theme, 247n42, 247n43; Washi, 160, 161 Hokusai school, 31 Hōnen shōin eden (Illustrated Biography of the Priest Hōnen), 24 horizon lines, 25 Horowitz, Gregg, 16, 197; Sustaining Loss, 212 Hōryū, Goseda, 5 Hosoda Yasubei, 124 Howell, David L., 224n78 Hōyo Ryōei, abbot, 29, 31 Hugo, Victor, 213 Huish, Marcus: “Is Japanese Art Extinct?,” 218n40; Japan and Its Art, 55

iemoto (house) system, 19, 27 Iida Kyoshin, 96 Iida Yuzura, 42, 196 Ii family, 193 Iijima Kyoshin, 124–­25, 127 Ijichi Heikurō, 80 Ike no Taiga, 19, 198 illusionism, 8, 9, 118, 206; hallmark of Kyoto-­ based Maruyama and Shijō schools, 188; Ken’yūsai (Kano) Kazunobu’s Five Hundred Arhats, 120; Western-­style, and 273

Index

nineteenth-­century popular art, 7–­8, 118–­19 Illustrated Legends of Ishiyamadera, 23 Illustrated Mirror of Falconry (Ehon taka kagami), 29, 160 Imao Keinen, 163 Iminomiya shrine, 81, 82 Imperial Museum, 227n18 Incense Burner in the Shape of a Sea-­Eagle (formerly attrributed to Muneharu), 162, 163 Industrial Revolution, 51 ink painting: Chinese, 85; East Asian eccentric tradition in, 105, 148; Kano Hōgai’s style, 104; Yuan, 85, 105 Inoue Kaoru, 106, 110, 241n27 Invention of Tradition, The (Hobsbawm and Ranger), 212 ippin models, 148 Irvine, Gregory, 157 Itō Hirobumi, 167 Itō Jakuchū, 163, 198, 247n42 ivory carvings, 8 Iwakura Mission, 91 Iwasa Matabei, 185

Japan Art Institute, 4–­5, 9, 201, 212 Japan Day by Day, 48 Japanese art: domestic trope of decline, 131–­35; elite commentary about limiting popular imagery, 120; emergence of style as national discussion, 108; interchangeability of picture (e) and painting (ga), 57; painting and craft knowledge as intergenerational transmissions, 195–­97; problem of novelty versus continued transmission from past, 134; schools and lineages (shoryūha) in pre-­Meiji era, 3; and state of country in pre-­Restoration years, 77–­79; tension between artistic particularity and art as unifiying human pursuit, 53–­54. See also Edo-­period art; globalization of Japanese art; Meiji art; nihonga Japanese art, modern: antiquities and, 198–­ 200; location in Edo-­period art, 17–­18, 40, 41, 220n16; and Meiji exhibition art, 68; narrative of involving East Asian tropes of artist’s biography in earlier times, 145; and naturalistic depiction, 245n17; rhetoric of modern origins in study of nature, 143; “transmissive crisis,” 197; two approaches to origins of, 17 Japanese Fine Arts School, 72 Japan Fine Art Association exhibtion of 1898, 111

Japan Young Painters’ Association, 164 japonisme, 9, 73, 122; “economics of japonisme,” 198, 232n98 Jingū, Empress, 82, 83 Jōmon settlement, 69

kabuki prints, 33 kabuki theater: foreign understanding of, 154–­ 56; shaping of pre-­Meiji public sphere for art criticism, 137 Kageyama Hideo, 236n49 kaika (openness, enlightenment), 40 Kamei Chiichi, 217n33 Kamiryō Seiju, 95 Kanagaki Robun, 123 Kaneko Kentarō, 69 kanga (Chinese painting), 3, 25 Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society), 11, 99, 161, 198; adoption by members of Kano Hōgai’s style, 85, 104; facilitation of Fenollosa’s antiquities collection from Tokyo, 198; first Exhibition, 1885, 149, 150–­51; radical paintings, 207; second Exhibition, 1886, 102; venue for art antiquities in 1880s, 193 Kangakai soshiki (The Structure of Kangakai), 248n6 Kan kobijutsu kai (Exhibition for Ancient Art), 177, 192, 193–­94, 198 Kano Akinobu: Beauty, 186, 187 Kano Dōhaku, 28 Kano Eitoku, 62, 69, 96 Kano “exterior” studio (omote eshi), 28, 122 Kano Hōgai, 4–­5, 31, 41, 73; Arhat with a Dragon, 102; and Chinese literati tradition of ink-­ painting eccentricity, 104–­5; choice of the name “Hōgai,” 93; copies of works in the Kano collection, 80; copy of Sesshū’s Long Scroll, 80, 84, 90; and discourse of shasei (sketching from nature), 144; dog-­ chasing (inuōmono) paintings, 237n71; and Domestic Exhibition of 1882, 127–­31; in early post-­restoration years, 92–­94; Fudō Myōō, 104, 112; Fukurokuju, 88, 89; Great Eagle, 167, 167–­69; grotesque as form of exploring limits of representation, 88, 96; Han Xin Crawling through His Adversary’s Knees, 90, 235n44; Hotei with Children, 107, 127–­31, 128, 129, 179; images of hawks and eagles, 11; ink sketches of eagles as compositional studies, 167–­68; and invocation of “nature,” 153; journeys between Chōfu and Edo, 79, 80; Jurōjin (ca. 1881–­1885), 93, 274

Index

94, 148; and Kano orthodoxy, 5; Landscape: Scenes along the River, 104, 207–­8, 211; Landscape Screens, 75, 76, 80, 84–­85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 97, 236n47; Landscape with Chasm, 167; linking of past and present in paintings, 76–­77; local affiliations as painter from Chōfu, 88–­92; negotiation between different viewing communities and social codes, 11, 76, 79; Niō Seizing a Demon, 100, 101, 102, 104, 207, 208; patronage of Fenollosa, 5, 9, 10, 76, 97–­98; personal identity formed between Kano school of Edo and Chōfu, 85233n14; personal ink style, 104; physical tension or arrested motion in paintings, 99–­100; portraits of local personages in Chōfu, 90, 234n22; portraits of Zen master Rinryo Nyotaku, 236n58; as regional painter, 79–­81; “return to old fashioned ways,” 86; role in development of “traditional” Japanese painting, 9; Seated Eight-­Armed Benzaiten, 97, 98; serious study of Sesshū, 85–­86; served ruling elite in Chōfu in 1860s, 81–­84; Sesshū’s style as foundation of his own, 85; “strange and new” style, 104–­5; study of Sesshū, 85–­86, 88, 92; submissions to domestic and foreign exhibitions, 206; Takeuchi no Sukune Throwing the Pearl, votive shrine plaque, 81–­83, 82, 90, 91; Tokugawa-­era official commissions, 81; Tokugawa-­era self-­fashioning in emulation of medieval painters, 85; in Tokyo, 91, 94–­96; True View Sketches (Shinkei shukuzu), 233n14; Two Dragons, 102, 103; use of circular shape, 99; Valiant Steed beneath the Cherry Blossoms, 100, 101; versions of Sesshū’s Jurōjin, 88. See also Kano Hōgai, Hawks in a Ravine; Kano Hōgai, Merciful Mother Kannon Kano Hōgai, Hawks in a Ravine, 143, 144, 146–­48, 147, 178; addressing both Japanese and foreign audiences, 150, 166; Bigelow’s acquisition of, 149; and Chinese painting genre of winter birds and old trees, 104–­5, 157; exhibition of, 148–­51; first exhibited under title Eagles (Gunshū zu), 150–­51; as heroic narrative allegory 165–­66; official Japanese title (Valiant Flight across the Ravine), 165, 171 Kano Hōgai, Merciful Mother Kannon, 9, 12, 98, 112, 143, 173, 174, 178, 179, 199; circular shape, 99; exploitation of past themes and styles, 208–­9; handmade copies of, 178; maternal or parental link between Kannon and child, 102–­3, 178, 179; seminal moment, 100

Kano house system (iemoto), 19, 25, 81 Kano interior studios (oku eshi), 96 Kano Isen’in Naganobu, 85, 96 Kano Kazunobu, 223n56, 223n59, 244n6 Kano Motonobu, 145, 183 Kano Ōshin, 95 Kano painters: bureaucratic positions with Meiji government, 95–­96; caught between habits of old and new regimes, 84; employment as drawing instructors, 95; exporting of ceramics after downfall of Tokugawa shogunate, 95, 237n64; hereditary painters in waiting to Tokugawa shogunate, 89–­90, 234n21; and notion of personal style, 152; sketching and appraising past masterpieces in shogunal era, 188–­89 Kano school, 3, 5, 19, 21, 23, 26, 92, 108, 151, 222n45, 224n69, 235n35 Kano Seikō, 25–­26, 31, 79–­80, 84, 86, 234n20, 234n22; Fukurokuju, 88, 89 Kano Seisen’in Osanobu, 23, 25, 31, 32, 79; Falconry screens, 25, 26 Kano Shōsen’in, 80, 95, 233n17; screen pair with motifs from Tale of Genji, 80; sketch produced at shogunal audience, 80; work on reconstruction of Edo castle, 80 Kano Sosen Toshinobu, 29 Kano Tanshin Morimichi: The Four Accomplishments, a Copy of the Hikone Screen, 189, 190–­91 Kano Tan’yū, 159, 221n36 Kano Tomonobu, 69, 95, 98, 99, 104, 232n90 Kano Tsunenobu, 85 Kasuga Gongen genki-­e (Miraculous Legends of the Kasuga Shrine Deity), 24 Katō Hiroyuki, 69 Kawai Gyokudō, 91 Kawai Masatomo, 30 Kawanabe Kyōsai, 31, 104, 199; crow as “brand image,” 249n17; Crow on a Plum Branch in Moonlight, 181; Eagle Attacking a Mountain Lion, 159, 160; Eagle Carrying Away a Marcassin, 161; and emergence of nihonga style through exclusion, 122; in exterior (omote eshi) Kano studio, 28; paintings on silk of eagles and their prey, 161; A Pictorial Mirror of Falconry (Ehon taka kagami), 158, 159; reputation through popular print and book illustration, 122–­23; Snake Encoiling a Pheasant, 126, 127, 165, 242n61; status between high and low culture, 123; Winter Crow on a Bare Branch, 107, 123–­27, 124, 179, 180, 181 275

Index

Kawasaki Chitora, 200 Kawase Hideharu, 177 Kawashima Jinbei: Procession to Nikkō Shrine, 67 Kawatami Mokuami, 123 Keisai Eisen, 139 Kenkō Shōkei, 104 Ken’yūsai (Kano) Kazunobu, 28, 29–­31, 72, 122, 223n60, 223n61; Five Hundred Arhats, 29, 30, 31, 120, 223n60 Kikuchi Dairoku, 69 Kikuchi Yōsai, 21, 61, 93; Ghost before a Mosquito Net, 116; illustration depicting the painter Kose no Hirotaka, from Ancient Customs of Past Sages, 24 Kimura Ritsugaku (Ryūgaku), 31, 99, 104 Kiriu Kōshō Kaisha, 116, 120, 250n31 Kishida Ryūsei, 122 Kishi school, 3 Kitagawa Utamaro, 22, 186; Moonlight Revelry at Dōzō Sagami, 186 Kitazawa Noriaki, 5, 110, 212, 217n20 Kitō Dōkyō: Kannon, 130–­31 Kiyonaga, 139, 184 Kobayashi Eitaku, 99 Kobayashi Tadashi, 218n37 kobijtsu (old art), 192 Kobikicho-­Kano studio, Edo, 85, 95, 96, 234n21 kofū (“old-­school” Japanese painting), 7 koga (old painting), 192, 219n11 kōgei (craft), 173, 225n5 koki (old vessels), 192 Kokka, 178, 184, 199 kokugaku (nativist) tradition, 92 kokusui, 216n14 kokutai, 78 Komai Company: Cabinet Modeled as a Shrine (signed Nakagawa), 63, 119; Dish with Arhats, 119, 120 Kōno Motoaki, 224n77 Korean “true view” landscapes, 22 Kōrin school, 3, 108, 134 Kornicki, Peter F., 44 Kosaka Shōdō: The Edge of the Field, 111, 112; Small Spring, 112 Koschmann, Victor, 92 Kose school, 134 Kuki Ryūichi, 43, 120, 122, 206, 241n40 Kuni Takeyuki, 227n21 Kuroda Seika, 217n26 Kyōsai gadan (Kyōsai on painting), 123, 124 Kyoto academic painting, 26–­27 Kyoto exhibitions of 1871 and 1872, 35, 36, 44, 225n6, 227n27 Kyoto painters, 10, 19, 96, 123

lacquer pictures: display at world’s fairs, 59; double duty as Japanese and Western objects, 61 La Farge, John: An Artist’s Letter from Japan, 42 Lan Ying, 22 Leighton, Frederic, 55; Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 15, 16 Leighton, John, 218n40 Liang Kai: association with motif of “old trees,” 148, 244n7; Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain, 102 Li Cheng, 146 Lippit, Yukio, 85, 184 literati painting, 10, 21, 23, 92, 95, 108; in Edo Japan (sha’i), 245n26; itinerant painters, 222n49; of Yuan dynasty, 245n27 London International Exhibition of 1862, 17, 51, 52 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St, Louis, 165

Mabuchi, Akiko, 9 Machida Heikichi, 71 Maeda Ai, 243n79 maki-­e lacquer boxes, 60, 65, 66, 200 maki-­e panels, 60 Makuzu Kōzan, 210 Maleuvre, Didier, 211 Maruyama Ōkyo, 19, 21, 72, 108, 151; Pine Trees in Snow, 152 master builder (daiku), 38 Matsudaira family, 193 Matsudaira Sadanobu, 23; Ten Types of Ancient [Objects], 25 Matsui, 120 Matsumura Goshun, 21 Matsuo Bashō, 181 McMicken School of Design, Cincinnati, Ohio, 57 Meiji art: aesthetic response and audience for painting, 135–­38; availability of masterpieces to artists and viewers, 199; early craft objects, 119; Eurocentric bias in judgments of art, 40; extension of category of painting or picturing beyond brush painting, 59; and globalization of Japanese art, 5, 76, 249n10; incorporation of past designs, 177; metalwork, 241n34; new metalanguage for art and exhibitions, 17, 18; new standards of accuracy in reproduction, 192; problem pictures, 117–­21; public art addressing viewers of different backgrounds, 207, 209; qualities of most 276

Index

successful painters, 96; tablets, 59; tension between elite and popular modes, 118–­19. See also hakurankai (exhibitions); Meiji exhibition art Meiji exhibition art: albums, 61–­62; attention to painted images, 107; combination of qualities of Japanese art with those of Western industrial showpieces, 7–­8, 68, 209–­10; crisis of viewship, 206–­9; double identity of works, 60–­66, 206; exhibition of Japanese images, 66–­68; exploitation of past thematic and stylistic forms, 208–­9; ideal audience as “the people,” 112; ideal client as government, 112; naturalism, 165; paintings of washi as popular theme, 161–­ 63; repurposing of existing forms based on perceived expectations of Westerners, 63, 66; shinki, 99, 104. See also hakurankai (exhibitions) Meiji government: official aesthetic for Japanese painting, 141; prejudice against ukiyo-­e, 141; relationship with painters and viewers, 127; restriction of meaning of art to conservative Western notions, 141; struggle to define meaning of exhibitions, 227n18; support for art and craft exports and exhibits to world’s fairs, 2, 198; use of visual representation as part of self-­ representation, 84 metal plate engraving, 7 metalwork chargers, 241n34 metalwork dragons and hawks, 8 metapictures, 185, 186–­87, 206 Millet, Elizabeth Goodhue, 69 Minagawa Kien, 33 Minami Shinji, 135 Minchō, 97, 148 Ming Buddhist painting, 31 mingei (folk art/folk craft) movement, 228n43 Ming literati painting, 21, 25 misemono, 34 Mitford, A. B, 162 Mito Tokugawa family, 25 Miyake Setsurei, 216n14 Mori Daikyō, 79, 98 Mōri family, 78, 81, 83, 90, 193 Mōri Hidemoto, 78, 82–­83 Mōri kajō (History of the Mōri House), 78, 79, 91 Mori Kansai: Crow on a Bare Tree in Winter, 180 Mōri Motohisa, 91, 236n47 Mōri Motokane, 90–­91, 236n47.92 Mōri Takachika, 81, 83 Mōri Terumoto, 235n43 Morse, Edward Sylvester, 68, 69, 149, 225n82,

238n74; evaluation of Japanese objects by comparison to Western art, 50; experience at Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, 48–­50, 57; Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, 49 Motonobu mode, 25 Motoori Norinaga, 151 Muromachi Kano school, 237n64

Nabeshima, 95 Nagasaki painting, 21 Naigai hakurankai shuppin kokoroe (Guidelines for Submitting to the Domestic and International Exhibitions), 45 nanga, 22, 108 Napoleon Bonaparte, 33 Nara region, 69 national essense (kokusui), 3 national schools, Western concept of, 5, 6 naturalism: insistence upon in Japanese art by Western viewers until 1890s, 144–­45; Kyoto “naturalist” painters, 10; and Meiji exhibition art, 165; and modern Japanese art, 245n17; as rhetorical strategy, 145–­46; tension with “ideal painting” (risōga), 168; as transparent means of representation in Meiji era, 153–­56; in the West and Japan, 151–­53 nihonga, 110–­12; aspiration to national school, 9–­10; beginnings and ends of, 211–­13; constituted in age of Orientalism, 211; contested status, 7–­9, 12; and continuation of past artistic methods, 111, 145, 178; critiques of by visual artists, 212; “death of ” debates, 212; denoting painting in manner of and materials distinctive to Japan, 2, 3–­5, 6, 9, 211; distinction between Western forms and existing Japanese forms, 6; divide between liberal and conservative factions, 134–­35; domestic audience by 1912, 110; emergence of, and rise of public art criticism in Japan, 107, 211; emergence of as modern “traditional style” painting, 2–­3; exclusion of oil painting, 6; financial success, 110; first appearance of word, 215n6; and foreign demand, 5–­7, 10; and globalization of Japanese art history, 200–­ 204; as inverse of ukiyo-­e, 137, 141; joined from words for “Japan” and “painting,” 6; large-­scale works, 112; as painting in translation, 5; presentation of countryside as site of stable class and gender identities, 112; progressively less concern with 277

Index

audiences outside Japan, 171; relation to public exhibitions, 28; representation of Japaneseness for Japanese audiences, 211; rise of government funding for at expense of oil painting, 4, 28; roots in nineteenth-­ century Western-­centric worldview, 12; standard accounts of rise, 3; supposed oppositionality to yōga, 6–­7, 11, 110, 211; symbolic separation of Meiji-­era painting from past painting, 2; tensions between innovation and preservation, 173, 201; in twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, 176 Nikkō Shrine, 67, 83 Nishimura Shigenaga: Ue minu washi (The Eagle Does Not Look Up), 159 Ni Zan, 22 Noriaki, Kitazawa, 3 novel (shōsetsu), 115 nude (ratai), 6

Ōba Gakusen, 21 Ochiai Yoshiiku, 123 Oda Kaisen, 21 Ogata Kōrin, 23, 151; Chinese Black Pine and Maple screen (attributed to), 201 oil painting: exclusion of from painting department of Tokyo School of Fine Arts, 6, 217n26; government support for in 1870s, 7–­8; in Japanese exhibit at Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, 217n33; loss of Meiji government support for, 4, 6, 28; Western notion of threat of oil painting to Japanese art, 112–­13; yōga (Western painting), 3, 11 Ōjin, Emperor, 78 Oka Fuhō: Shoinobugusa (Longing Grass), 142, 145, 153, 168, 248n60 Okakura Kakuzō, 3, 4, 16, 19, 32, 33, 41, 55, 69, 91, 102, 178, 201, 239n89; artistic experiments with prisms, 208; attempts to control Japanese painting, 9, 10; collaboration with Fenollosa on establishment of Japanese Fine Arts School, 72; History of Japanese Art, 202; “Kano Hōgai,” 14; partisanship, 220n22, 220n23; work to shape art historical canons and contemporary events simultaneously, 201 Okakura Shūsui, 91, 161 Okamoto Toyohiko, 131 Ōkubo Toshimichi, 45 Okuhara Seiko, 4 Ōkyo school, 3 “old trees,” 104–­5, 148, 157, 244n7

Ōmori shell mound, 69 onko chishin (look to the past in order to know the future), 177 Orientalism. See Western/Orientalist discourse Ōtagaki Rengetsu, 4 Otsune Goten, decorative program, 222n52 Ōuchi Norihiro, 91 outline method (kōrōku-­hō), 230n71

painter in waiting (on’kakae eshi), 23, 33, 89–­90, 234n21 Palgrave, Frances Turner: “The Decline of Art,” 15–­16 Paris Salons of Japanese Painters of 1883 and 1884, 161 patronage, Edo period, 19, 20, 31; iemoto (house system), 19, 25, 27, 81. See also Tokugawa status system Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, 239n5; art submission categories for, 56, 57 photography, 7; reproduction, 200; role of in Fenollosa’s expeditions, 232n93 political dissent, and decadence, 138–­41 Pollard, Clare, 210 Potts, Alex, 165 predation theme, 160, 163, 247n44, 247n51 public parks, 34 public shrine or temple picture hall (edono, emadō), 138 “public sphere” for art, 32–­34, 137, 223n67, 248n6

Qing dynasty: courtly painting, 27; culture, 7; landscapes, 105; literati painting, 21, 25; painting, 22, 25, 31

Rai San’yō, 152 Ranger, Terence, 212 reference rooms, 49, 177, 192–­93, 194–­95, 196, 198, 228n28, 250n35 Reizei Tamechika, 24 “renewal” (ishin), 134 revival (fukkō), 134 Rinpa works, 201 Ross, Denman Waldo, 244n7 Rossetti, William Michael, 121–­22 Russo-­Japanese War, 212 Ryōzan: Vase with Scenes from Hiroshige’s “Fifty-­ Three Stations of the Tokaidō,” 65

278

Index

Sakai family, 193 Sakai Hōitsu, 21, 23; relation to Kōrin’s paintings, 221n44; Tenth Month (Black Bird on a Persimmon Tree), 179, 180 samurai stipends, 32, 84, 109, 234n21 Sano Tsunetami, 163, 172, 173, 176, 177, 206 Sansantei Arindo, 123 San’yūtei Enchō, 241n28 Sasaki Jōhei, 222n52 Sasaki Seishichi: Antique Robes Hanging beneath a Tree, 200, 201 Satake Shozan, 23–­24 Satō Dōshin, 6, 73, 95, 227n18, 239n89, 243n91; “economics of japonisme,” 198, 232n98 Satsuma Rebellion, 45 Satsuma-­Tosa alliance, 78–­79 Screech, Timon, 151, 224n68 Seimiya Hidekata: Un’en ryakuden (Brief Accounts of Clouds and Mist), 108 seiyōga (Western painting), 5 self-­directed painting, 24–­25 Sesshū Tōyō, 87, 97, 148; followed model of Buddhist or Daoist attainment, 93; importance of to Kano school, 85, 92; Jurōjin beneath a Plum Tree, 87, 88, 93; and limits of representation, 92–­93; Long Landscape Scroll, 75, 84, 91, 222n45, 236n48; served the Ōuchi, 89; Unkoku studio, 89; Winter Landscape, 93, 148; work outside of dominant network of taste and style, 94 Sesson, 148, 207 shashin, 108 Shen Nanpin, 3, 22, 23; Deer and Cranes, 25 Shiba Kōkan, 72, 152 Shibata Zeshin, 123, 131; Bell Crickets and Full Moon with Autumn Grasses, 50, 60; copies of fourtheenth-­century arhat paintings by Ryōzen, 250n28; Demon Hag, 131, 132; Eagle with a Baby Monkey, 61; Elegant Pastiimes, folding screen pair, 182, 183, 203, 204; The Four Accomplishments, 175; hanging scroll diptych of eagle gazing at his reflection in a waterfall, 161; The Hothouse for Bonsai, 60; illusionism, 188; lacquerware, 188; Screen with Copies of Famous Masters, 192; special recognition in Vienna in 1873, 61; variations on Hikone Screen, 12, 173, 182–­88, 200; Waterfowl and Stream, 132–­33 shibi ornament, 38 Shijō mode, 185 Shimazaki Tōson: Before the Dawn, 83 Shimazu, 87, 92, 93, 98

Shimonoseki, 31, 76, 77; incorporated into Yamaguchi prefecture, 84; temporary occupation of, 83 Shimōsa, 28 Shinagawa Yajirō, 176, 196–­97 shinga (new Japanese paintings), 196 shinki, 99, 104 Shiokawa Bunrin, 61; 1864 landscape screens, 146; Summer and Winter Landscapes, 86–­87 shogunal patronage, 19, 20, 31 shoryūha (schools and lineages), 3 Shōsai Ikkei: The 1872 Exhibition at Yushima Shrine, 37, 38, 40; Thirty-­six Playful Selections of Famous Places in Tokyo: The Exhibition at the Former Shōheizaka, 136, 137 shrine plaques, 81–­83 shūkyō (religion), 40 Shunshō, 184 Sino-­Japanese War, first, 164 sliding-­door painting, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 158 Smith, Henry D., 109 Snodgrass, Judith, 51 Soga school, 159 Soga Shōhaku, 104 Song genre, 184 Sō Shiseki, 22 Southern Song dynasty: Jian ware teabowls, 193; style, 105, 146, 237n64 South Kensington Museum, London, 161–­62, 163, 195, 232n104 special airings (bakuryō), 32 Spring and Autumn Flowers and Grasses screen pair, in style of Watanabe Shikō, 201 Story of an Eagle, The (Borden Condensed Milk Company), 165, 166 Stubbs, George, 247n51 Stuer, Catherine, 59 suitai (decline), 109 Sumiyoshi Hirokata, 32, 62, 69, 97 Sumiyoshi Hiroyuki, 23 Sumiyoshi school, 3, 19, 21, 224n69 Suzuki Chōkichi: bronze eagle at Chicago Exposition, 163; Bronze Incense Burner with Peafowl, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 156, 157; Incense Burner Crowned with an Eagle, 162, 208; Twelve Falcons, 161, 169–­71, 170 Suzuki Nanrei, 131

Tahara Yoshi, 80 Taishō artists, 212 Takahashi Yuichi, 217n33 Takeuchi no Sukune, 78, 90

279

Index

Takeuchi Seihō: Chained Monkeys and Penned Rabbits, 154–­55 Taki Katei, 4 Taki Seiichi, 96, 105 Tale of Genji, 62 Tamamushi Satoko, 221n44 Tanaka Kichinosuke, folding screen with bird-­ and-­flower paintings (oshie byōbu), 120 Tanaka Totsugen, 23 Tanaka Yoshio, 53, 54, 68, 227n18 Tang genre, 184 Tani Bunchō, 19, 23, 25, 86 Tan’yū mode, 25, 86, 92, 145, 151 Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō), 7 Tengu insurrection, 92 theater criticism, as first body of “art criticism” in Japan, 137 Tokugawa family, 193 Tokugawa-­Meiji transition, 11, 17, 18 Tokugawa shogunate, 2; attempt to use words and images to secure reality, 83; bakuhan system of shogunal and daimyo rule, 81; economic effects of collapse of, 109–­10; social and political relations, 27; 1860s overthrow of, 37, 77–­79 Tokugawa status system, 33–­34, 158, 200, 224n78 Tokyo National Museum, Ueno, 150, 163 Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo bijutsu gakkō), 4, 9, 55, 91, 167; exclusion of literati painters from, 222n52; exclusion of oil painting from painting department, 6, 222n52; founding of, 3 Tokyo University of Fine Arts, 111 Torii school, 159 Tosa school, 21, 134, 151 Tōshōdaiji, temple of, 69 Toyokoto Shrine, 78, 79, 82 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 78 transmission from the past (denrai, koden): painting and craft knowledge as intergenerational transmissions, 195–­97; pursuit of by elite Japanese officials and some foreign commentators, 135; in 1880s discourse, 173, 213; “transmissive crisis,” 197–­98 transparency: natural phenomena as governed by “natural laws,” 164; natural phenomena as transcriptions of reality, 164; and paintings of nature as mediated acts, 165; in search of, 156–­57; transparent image as ideal, 143 trompe l’oeil representations, late Qing and Edo, 65

Tsubaki Chinzan: Nandina and Sparrows, 22 Tsubouchi Shōyō: Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui), 115, 131, 137, 139 Tsuji Den’bei, 123 Tsuji Nobuo, 93 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Dai Nihon meishō kagami, 119; Susanoo no Mikoto, Two-­Sided Screen with, 117, 117–­19, 118 Tsunenobu mode, 25 Turner, J. M. W., 207

Ueda, Atsuko: The Concealment of Politics, the Politics of Concealment, 138–­39 Ueno Park, Tokyo, 38, 48, 109, 227n18 Ueno Zoo, 161, 167 Ukita Ikkei, 24 ukiyo-­e images, 28, 33, 61, 123, 151, 184, 231n76; attempts of Meiji officials to purge from artistic production, 137, 141; late Edo popular style, 138, 139; metapictorial screens, 186; nihonga as inverse of, 137, 141; tension between low and high in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century works, 185, 206; and washi, 159, 161; Western audience’s preferences for over traditional Japanese painting, 231n79; woodblock prints, 131 Ukiyo Matabei, 200 Unkoku school, 19, 21, 92, 199, 222n45; house of painters in service of Chōshu, 90 Unkoku Tōgan, 89, 235n43 unoutlined (mokkotsu) method, 147 urushi-­e (lacquer pictures) on paper, 61 Utagawa Hiroshige, 22; Fifty Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, 65, 200; Hawk, Pine, and Rising Sun, 158 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 28, 104, 122, 198, 244n6; The Earth Spider Slain by Raiko’s Retainers, 138 Utagawa school, 137

Van Gogh, Vincent: Japanese Courtesan (after Eisen), 139 Vasari, Giorgio: Lives of the Artists, 16 Victoria, Queen, 15 Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, 114, 156; Japanese exhibit showing framed paintings alongside hanging scrolls, 44, 58, 59; oil paintings, 217n33; wooden dolls, 67 votive plaques (ema), 32, 59, 81–­83, 82, 118, 230n67, 230n68, 243n84

280

Index

Wagener, Gottfried, 5, 47, 59–­60, 68; comments on decline of Japanese art, 134; critique of framed lacquer panels, 116; report on art at first Domestic Industrial Exhibition of 1877, 112–­13, 215n6; use of phrase nihon gajutsu, 215n6 Wakai Kanesaburō (Kenzaburō), 120 Walters, William and Henry, 241n34, 246n34 Wang, David Der-­wei, 105, 138 Wang Hui, 22 Wang Meng, 22 Watanabe Kazan, 21, 24 Watanabe Seitei, 61 Watanabe Shikō, 201 Wattles, Miriam, 20 Weld, Charles Goddard, 71 Western art: conventional limits of in nineteenth century, 121; presumed universality, 153; viewed as bearer of styles and forms across generations until mid-­ nineteenth century, 197 Western/Orientalist discourse, 41; “artistic Japan,” 53, 56; assumption of representational fidelity as criterion for painting, 60, 68; concern about Japanese corruption by Western audiences, 50; discourses on demise of Japanese art, 110, 176, 177, 198, 211; disparaging of hakurankai, 35–­36; on Japan’s decadent aesthetic, 121–­22, 134; notion that Japanese painting needed to be preserved, 134; supposed threat of oil painting to Japanese art, 112–­13; treatment of Japanese art as foil to modernization, 9, 17, 55–­56 “Western” (ranga) style, 3 Whewell, Reverend W., 51–­52 White, Hayden, 40, 213, 251n11; “The Problem of Change in Literary History,” 206–­7 Whose Sleeves? (Tagasode), screen paintings of robes from seventeenth century, 195, 200 William III, King of Netherlands, 80 Wirgman, Charles, illustration of 1872 Exhibition in Kyoto, 35, 36, 37 woodblock prints, 19, 40, 138, 231n80; albums of, 61–­62, 66, 67; as histories and image sources, 237n73; post-­Kiyonaga, 139–­40; printed books, 119; seen as decadent by early twentieth-­century Europe and America, 121 wood carvings, 8, 117–­19 Woodson, Yoko, 222n49 world’s fairs: “Art” and “Industry” as epistemological bases of, 51, 66; classificatory schemes, 56, 229n55; destabilization of

oil painting by Japanese lacquer, enamel, and ceramic pictures, 59; exhibition of Japanese images, 66–­68; Japanese objects as both Japanese and Western works, 61; presentation of “artistic Japan” as primitive foil to West, 43; unstable position of art prior to 1890s, 51–­52

Xuanhe huapu (The Xuanhe Painting Catalog), 145–­46

yakuhinkai, 45 Yamaguchi Seiichi, 6, 238n74 Yamana Tsurayoshi, 99 Yamashita museum, 45, 46, 227n18 yamato-­e, 3, 19, 21, 24, 25, 80, 92, 97, 134 Yamazaki Takashi, 212 Yasuda Raishū, 244n6 Yasuda Rozan, 23

281

Index

yōga (Western, or oil painting), 3, 11 Yokohama, 121 Yokoyama Kendō, 79, 85; “Kano Hōgai,” 74, 142 Yorozu Tetsugorō, 53–­54 Yosa Buson, 21, 181 Yoshimune shogun, 33 Yoshiwara brothel district, Edo, 141 Yuan ink painting, 85, 105 Yuan Jiang, 27, 105 Yuan school, 239n89 Yuan Yao, 105, 207, 239n89 Yueyang Pavilion, 27 Yukio Lippit, 61 Yushima Hall, 37 Yushima Shrine exhibition, 44, 45 Yu Song: Hundred Flowers handscroll, 221n35

Zen thought, 93 Zhang Yanyuan, 151