Mirroring the Japanese Empire: The Male Figure in Yōga Painting, 1930-1950 (Japanese Visual Culture) 9789004227675, 9004227679

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mirroring the japanese empire

japanese visual culture Volume 14 Managing Editor John T. Carpenter

Mirroring the Japanese Empire The Male Figure in Yōga Painting 1930–1950

by Maki Kaneko

Leiden – Boston 2015

Published by BRILL Plantijnstraat 2 2321 JC Leiden The Netherlands brill.com/jvc Design SPi, Tamilnadu, India Studio Berry Slok, Amsterdam (cover) Production High Trade BV, Zwolle, The Netherlands Printed in Slovakia ISBN 978-90-04-22767-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947271

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill | Hes & De Graaf, Brill | Nijhof and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Subvention for the publication of this volume was generously supplied by the AAS First Book Subvention Program. Cover image: Miyamoto Saburō, Hunger and Thirst, 1943. Oil on canvas. Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo.

To my parents

Contents Acknowledgements

.............................................................................................................................

1

introduction .....................................................................................................................

2

“japanese” men on display: fujita tsuguharu’s campaign-record paintings ...................................................................

1 Framing Japanese “War Art” ..................................................................................................................... 4 New Studies on “War Art” after the 1990s ............................................................................................. 7 The Male Figure in Yōga ............................................................................................................................. 11 The “Men’s World” of Yōga in the 1930s ................................................................................................ 16 Chapter Organization ............................................................................................................................... 19

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ A “Japanese” Artist in Bohemian Paris .................................................................................................. Fujita’s Return to Imperial Japan ............................................................................................................ Campaign-Record Painting as Battle for Yōga Artists ........................................................................ Representation of the Japanese Male Body ........................................................................................... Fujita’s Deathly Battle Pictures in the Last Phase of the Japanese Empire ...................................... In/Visibility of the Racial and Sexual “Other” ....................................................................................... Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................

3

modern portraiture as the site of battle: yasui sōtarō’s male portraits and the shirakaba school ........ Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ Yasui’s “Atypical” Male Portraiture in the 1930s and 40s ................................................................... Kojima Kikuo: Art Historian, Critic, and Arts Administrator .......................................................... Kojima’s Evaluation of Yasui’s Portraiture ............................................................................................. Yasui as an Artist of Male Portraits ......................................................................................................... Negotiation and Formulation of Male Alliance through Portraiture ............................................... Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................

4

ix

artists as madmen: yamashita kiyoshi and matsumoto shunsuke’s “disabled” bodies ................................................................ Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ Yamashita Kiyoshi and Wartime Society .............................................................................................. The Discourse of “Insanity” and Art in Prewar Japan ......................................................................... Art and “Health” Policy in the 1930s ...................................................................................................... “The Living Painter”: Matsumoto Shunsuke ...................................................................................... Matsumoto Shunsuke’s Resistance to “Abnormality” in Militant Japan ........................................ Matsumoto’s Bodily Representation of “Health” and “Manhood” ................................................. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. vii

23 23 26 32 37 41 47 51 57

61 61 64 67 71 75 82 87

91 91 93 97 101 105 110 116 122

contents

5

conclusion: male icons of japan’s “long postwar”

............................... 127 The Persistence of Modernity: Yasui Sōtarō ....................................................................................... 129 The Resurrection of Wartime Memory: Yamashita Kiyoshi ............................................................ 135 The Reconciliation with the Past: Fujita Tsuguharu .......................................................................... 140 The “Discovery” of the Lone Protester: Matsumoto Shunsuke ...................................................... 146

Endnotes .............................................................................................................................................................. Selected Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... Illustration Credits ....................................................................................................................................................................................... Index .....................................................................................................................................................................

viii

154 176 190 192

Acknowledgements

I

University of the Arts London as my external dissertation examiner. Without his pioneering scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese visual arts, and the wealth of advice that he has given me until today, I would not have been able to pursue my career in the history of modern Japanese art. With a twelve-month Research Fellowship from the Japan Foundation in 2011, I had the opportunity to conduct research in Tokyo, and that research became the foundation for this book. I am deeply grateful for this financial support from the Japan Foundation, and I also thank the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, which kindly agreed to be my host institution in Japan during the term of my fellowship. The staff and librarians at the institute, despite the particularly difficult year that they were having due to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that had hit the northern part of Japan in March, provided me with immense support. In particular, Professor Emiko Yamanashi, who had offered me the invaluable opportunity to touch upon the history of modern Japanese art, probably for the first time in my life, when I was an undergraduate student, kindly became my mentor and guided my research, not only during the term of my fellowship, but through the years and decades. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Shigeo Sasaki, who generously donated his large collection of war-art documents and materials to the institute and allowed me to use them. His collection was one of my chief resources in writing this book. I must also acknowledge my huge indebtedness to a number of scholars, curators, and institutions in Japan. Professor Masatomo Kawai has guided me since I was a master’s student in the UK, and provided me with the important opportunity to participate in the Seventh International Workshop on Japanese Art History for Graduate Students (JAWS). Through this workshop, I established

could not have written this book without the encouragement, stimulation, support, and friendship of a number of scholars and institutions. First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my teachers in Japan and the UK: Yūji Yamashita and Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere. Until I took a class with Professor Yamashita at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, I was not at all interested in Japanese art and rarely visited a museum. But his passion for, and fascinating lectures on, Japanese art history opened my eyes to the field. He also encouraged me to continue my studies at the graduate level in the UK when no one, including myself, expected me to pursue a career in the field of academia. In the UK, I was extremely fortunate to study with Dr. Rousmaniere at the University of East Anglia and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC). Dr. Rousmaniere’s vigorous activities as a teacher, scholar, curator, and director of SISJAC were truly inspirational. Thanks to her magnetic personality and gift for attracting friends and collaborators, I had countless opportunities to meet and create a network of scholars, collectors, and artists all over the world, which turned out to be crucial for my career and the completion of this book. SISJAC also provided me with a generous Hyūga Postgraduate Studentship to support my graduate study, and the staff—Dr. Simon Kaner, Akira Hirano, Hiromi Uchida, and Kazuko Morohashi—always created a very supportive and warm academic environment for me. I also thank the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and faculty members Dr. Timon Screech and Dr. Meri Arichi, and the British Museum and its staff, Dr. Timothy Clark and Dr. Rosina Buckland, who kindly gave me access to their classes, lectures, events, and collections. I was also extremely fortunate to have Professor Toshio Watanabe of the ix

acknowledgements

friendships with several other students, many of whom are now professional scholars in the field (and named here). Professor Akihisa Kawata, who pioneered the study of Japanese war art, inspired me and led me to develop a number of the key arguments that I present in this book. Having the opportunity to learn about the studies of Professors Shinobu Ikeda, Tomoko Kira, and Reiko Kokatsu was another important source of inspiration and motivation for me. Their insightful approaches to the visual arts from the perspective of gender, as well as their kindness in sharing their scholarship and other materials with me, motivated me to work on the topic of war, representation, and the male figure. A number of museums allowed me access to their collections and materials. Reita Hirase of Himeji City Museum of Art, Ikuma Hirota of Kōbe City Museum, Yoshiya Hashimoto of Setagaya Art Museum, and Tsutomu Mizusawa of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, in particular, not only gave me the opportunity to learn about the collections at their respective museums, but also shared their own studies and new discoveries with me through our individual meetings as well as their stimulating exhibitions. At the University of Kansas (KU), I thank Professor Sherry Fowler, my benevolent mentor; Professor Linda Stone-Ferrier, Chair of the Kress Foundation Department of Art History; Dr. Kris Ercums, Curator of Global Contemporary and Asian Art at the Spencer Museum of Art (SMA); and all of my colleagues in the department, SMA, the Art & Architecture Library, and Visual Resources. I have also benefitted greatly from support from the Center for East Asian Studies, the East Asian Library, and the Hall Center for the Humanities at KU. In particular, Michiko Itō, the Japanese Studies Librarian, and Dr. Akiko Takeyama, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, helped me with my research and encouraged me throughout this book project. Having graduated from universities in Japan and the UK, I was utterly unfamiliar with the academic

environment of the USA when I moved to the country in 2007. Warm support, patience, and encouragement from my wonderful colleagues at KU helped me in settling down, surviving, working, and writing a book in this new academic and living environment. I would also like to thank the following scholars and individuals for advice, assistance, support, and friendship: Doctors Bert Winther-Tamaki, Asato Ikeda, John D. Szostak, Louisa Aya McDonald, Ming Tiampo, Mikiko Hirayama, Noriko Murai, Yui Suzuki, Alicia Volk, Reiko Tomii, Midori Yoshimoto, Julie Nelson Davis, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Paul Berry, Tamaki Maeda, Mayu Tsuruya, and many others. My special thanks goes to Dr. John Carpenter, one of my teachers in the UK as well as managing editor of the Japanese Visual Culture series, who has supported me throughout my career. I also thank Brill editors Inge Klompmakers and Anna Beerens for their understanding and patience, and two anonymous readers for their very constructive, considerate, and insightful comments on my book manuscript. The Association of Asian Studies provided me with crucial financial support for this publication. I also must acknowledge my manuscript editor, Melanie Klein, and proofreaders, Eriko Akaike and Judith Daniels. Without their wonderful work and understanding, my book could never have been completed. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents, deceased grandparents, and Masaki for their love, support, understanding, and patience with me over many years. My grandparents (who, unfortunately, did not live to see this book), while surprised that their granddaughter chose to study outside her home country, always supported my decision. I cannot express enough thanks to my parents, who have been so encouraging and cooperative about my study and career over the years and decades. Most of all, my mother and Masaki were always with me whenever I needed them. Their incredible patience, understanding, and love kept me going throughout this project. This book is dedicated to my precious family members.

x

1 Introduction

pro-war messages are undeniably woven into the narrative and the portrayal of the main characters. My concern here, however, is not whether this is a pro- or anti-war film, but the image of a painter that Kinoshita crafted and used in the characterization of Tomekichi. The art-school graduate and oil painter, the self-proclaimed profession of Tomekichi before his realization of his true identity as a Japanese national, seems to function in this film as the signifier of Tomekichi’s outsider status in the society at war. The film scholar Fujita Wataru points out that Tomekichi was played by the handsome and most nanpa (soft) star of the Shōchiku Film Company, Uehara Ken, who was among the Shōchiku actors described at the time as “decadent without any toughness … hard to tell whether he was a man or woman … and [a man who] could by no means become a [good] soldier.”1 Fujita argues that the profession of oil painter was chosen as the protagonist’s fake identity in order to emphasize his nanpa character and “effeminacy.”2 Notably, Kinoshita Keisuke himself was often regarded as “effeminate” and was known for his foppery; his films frequently featured highly emotional and weepy male protagonists.3 Whether it was accompanied by a positive or negative connotation, the profession of oil painter was adopted here to express “deviancy” from the social and gender norms of Japanese men at war. Against such a “deviant” or “effeminate” image of the painter, what may be considered the countertype was also addressed during the war by artists

Once born as a man and having chosen painting as my profession, I always wanted to go through a war. —Mukai Junkichi, “Private Conversation of a War Painter,” 1938

I

n the 1943 film Hanasaku minato (The Port of Flowers), one of the protagonists, Katsumata Tomekichi (played by Uehara Ken; 1909–1991), is a con man who proclaims himself to be a painter (fig. 1). On the eve of the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, Tomekichi visits a small fishing village in Kyūshū, in the southern part of Japan. Together with his buddy Nonagase Shūzō (played by Ozawa Eitarō; 1909–1988), Tomekichi tries to trick the villagers, who had been expecting to welcome the son of an entrepreneur who had once attempted to bring prosperity to the village through the establishment of a shipyard. Pretending to be the entrepreneur’s sons, the two con men eventually become involved seriously with the shipbuilding business for the sake of the country at war, and bond with the villagers through their shared sense of patriotism. At the end of the film, the two men come clean and deliver themselves into the hands of the law, after seeing a ship to completion. As the debut film of the director Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–1998), The Port of Flowers is hailed today as a great human comedy, despite the fact that ultranationalistic and

Mukai Junkichi, A Scene on April 9, 1942, Bataan Peninsula, 1942, detail of fig. 26.

1

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1

Still from Hanasaku minato (The Port of Flowers), 1943. Shōchiku Film Company.

themselves. For ambitious male artists, the most direct way to enact their masculinity and counteract their “effeminate” image was through engagement with the military. In fact, even before the military developed its oppressive cultural policy, so many artists sought to enlist as war propaganda painters or correspondents that places could not be found for all of them. The oil painter Mukai Junkichi (1901–1995) was one such eager volunteer.4 Mukai was then a mid-career artist who had served as a first private in his youth. When the war against China erupted in July 1937, Mukai sought employment at the Military Information Bureau as a war correspondent. Although his request was ultimately denied, between October and November 1937, Mukai made his way to the front in China at his own expense. Based on his experiences on the

front lines, Mukai presented the oil painting Totsugeki (Charge Ahead) in the autumn of 1938, along with several of his essays (fig.  2). Featuring five Japanese soldiers with fierce facial expressions dashing toward the viewer, Charge Ahead strongly asserts the aggressiveness and even brutality of these men. This work was not intended as a faithful representation of a battle scene that Mukai had witnessed, but according to the artist himself, “This is a record [of my travel to the front] as well as my self-portrait.”5 This book investigates the various manifestations of the male figure created, consumed, and/ or performed by Japanese male oil painters and artists of yōga (Western-style painting) amidst the enormous political turmoil of Japan’s colonial expansion, war, and defeat between the 1930s and 2

introduction

2

visual culture from the immediate postwar years until the present day. This study attempts to contribute to this large pool of scholarly debate over war art with the hope of further complicating our current understanding of the hierarchical nature of the art community of the 1930s and 40s and the mobilization of artists through the re-reading of certain iconic male figures created by yōga artists of the time. As will be discussed, the 1930s and 40s witnessed the proliferation of male figures, particularly in the field of yōga. This study focuses especially on such yōga artists as Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), Yasui Sōtarō (1888–1955), and Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912–1948), all of whom achieved iconic status for their images of men either during or after the AsiaPacific War. Yasui was an extremely well established artist who worked on commissioned portraits for his wealthy (male) patrons; he is believed to have remained entirely aloof from contemporary politics. Fujita, an internationally acclaimed artist, was closely associated with the military, and produced a large number of paintings featuring vigorous soldier figures during the AsiaPacific War. Matsumoto was only a moderately successful artist with a hearing disorder who came to be widely known in the post-1945 years for his courageous protests against militarism through his self-portrait paintings. In approaching these artists and their male figures, issues of gender, class, disability, and ethnicity/race are foregrounded as defining factors of the forms taken by the participation of male artists in Japanese imperialist projects and the war effort, as well as by their art. In current scholarship on the subject, such factors are very often sidelined vis-àvis the artists’ political beliefs or intentions, resulting in the classification of artists into the rather monolithic categories of military collaborators and innocent civilians. As illustrated by the aforementioned cases of Kinoshita Keisuke and Mukai Junkichi, however, the ever-expanding scope of such policies as conscription and mass-mobilization generated a new social standard of manliness. For each individual male artist, this new standard, along

Mukai Junkichi (1901–1995). Charge Ahead, 1938. Oil on canvas. Presumed lost.

40s. The majority of the yōga paintings discussed in this book are frequently found under the category of “war art” (sensō bijutsu). “War art” is most commonly referred to and tentatively defined here as the visual arts made for the sake of promoting Japan’s war machine roughly between the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (Nitchū Sensō) in July 1937 (followed by the Pacific War in 1941) and Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945; the conflicts of this period are termed the Asia-Pacific War (Ajia Taiheiyō Sensō) in this book. “War art” is also used in a slightly more generic sense to encompass the arts made in response to contemporary political conditions during the above “wartime” period. Laden with heavy political responsibilities (much like “Nazi art”), war art has been one of the most hotly debated genres of twentieth-century Japanese 3

mirroring the japanese empire

with his political beliefs and position, forced or invited him to reconsider, rearticulate, and display his professional identity. This book argues that such attempts by artists to adapt to, comply with, or possibly resist the new social standards of “male normalcy” largely conditioned the capacities and forms of their participation in Japanese imperialist endeavors. Through an examination of multiple manifestations of the male figure, produced not only as a consequence of top-down control but as attempts by these yōga artists to respond to the new and ever-changing social criteria of “normalcy,” this study hopes to explore the crucial roles played by the politics of gender, race, and the body in late Imperial Japan in conditioning the forms of these men’s involvement with contemporary politics. In so doing, the book ultimately aims to illuminate an array of male artists’ contributions to the Japanese imperialist enterprise and war machine that is more multifaceted than currently supposed, in which the multilateral reciprocity of male artists of various sociopolitical standings, rather than a model of unilateral control, largely constituted the very foundation of the Japanese Empire’s visual regime.

of suicidal attacks by the Japanese military, mass and forced suicides at the Battle of Okinawa (1945), and the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945). These decades were characterized by not only an unprecedented level of physical devastation, but also the ever-increasing control of the government over social and cultural activities. The military steadily increased its power throughout the 1930s, and all possible material and human resources, both within mainland Japan and in its colonies, were to be mobilized for the war effort. Art was no exception. Especially after the outbreak of war against China, a considerable number of artists—whether under duress or as volunteers—joined the war effort, if not as soldiers or factory workers, then as the designers   of war memorials, producers of visual propaganda, or members of cultural missions sent to colonized areas, and overall as the retainers of superior Japanese cultural and spiritual values. Those who could not or would not contribute to the war, on the other hand, faced severe discrimination and sanctions, which in many cases seriously affected, or even terminated, their artistic careers and lives.7 Given the extremely oppressive sociopolitical environment, and the physical, moral, and cultural devastation of the country, an investigation of war art and the responsibility of artists in the war effort was launched immediately after Japan’s acceptance of unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945. A series of intensive discussions included such questions as, how have artists been co-opted by the oppressive military government to become propaganda makers? Was this the result of the government’s coercive tactics, or the artists’ loss of subjective autonomy? How did those who successfully distanced themselves from or resisted the military manage to do so? Should artistic and political values be separated or inseparable? While these questions were most intently pursued by leftist, liberal, and pacifist art critics and artists mainly between 1945 and the 1970s, they also were tightly linked with the nationwide Japanese effort to reconstruct Japan’s national identity and international reputation after the surrender, with the

framing japanese “war art” In the decades between 1930 and 50, the Japanese found themselves surrounded by social unrest and political turmoil.6 In 1931, the Japanese Empire seized the three historic provinces that made up Manchuria, out of which it founded the puppet nation of Manchukuo in 1932. This move drove Japan into international isolation, while instability in domestic politics also deepened, epitomized by two attempted coups that took place on May 15, 1932, and February 26, 1936. War against China (the Second Sino-Japanese War) broke out in July 1937 and expanded into the Asia-Pacific War with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. A huge number of casualties resulted from such atrocities as the Nanking massacre (1937), a series 4

introduction

determination most famously expressed by the words inscribed on the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: “for we shall not repeat the evil.”8 The pursuit of war responsibility and, by extension, the study of war art in Japan were thus pierced by a sense of deep regret of the past and a strong urge for achieving peace. Yet such efforts were by no means politically innocent or neutral. Japan’s defeat was followed by the Allied (but solo American, in practical terms) Occupation of Japan until 1952, which largely set the tone for the scope, emphasis, and foundational framework for understanding and remembering Japan’s imperialist war(s). As the historian Yoshikuni Igarashi and many others have explored, the strong political alliance between Japan and the United States that was formed in the immediate postwar years defined the war as a conflict fought only between two countries, or the Axis and Allied powers, with little voice given to Asians and Pacific Islanders.9 According to Igarashi, in the course of the American Occupation, Japan’s war and defeat were re-narrated as a sort of melodrama in which Japanese citizens were rescued by the United States from the manipulation and nightmarish tyranny of the military. In this drama, the Japanese emperor, Hirohito (r. 1926–89), played the key yet somewhat “feminized” role, making the “divine” decision to accept the superior/masculine United States (as embodied by General Douglas MacArthur; 1880–1964) and thereby rescuing the Japanese people.10 Igarashi argues that this narrative (or “foundational narrative,” in his words) was popular in both countries, and maintained its power of persuasiveness until the collapse of the Cold War system brought a shift in global politics in the late 1980s. Although they had to perform the role of the helpless heroine, the Japanese people considered the foundational narrative ultimately acceptable as a means of reconciling their past with the new political reality of the postwar era. It absolved the emperor and the populace from political responsibility as agents of war, and allowed them to fashion themselves as victims of militarism. This narrative thereby helped the Japanese to avoid facing their own fierce aggressions against other Asian nations,

as well as the suppression of political, ethnic, and sexual minorities within mainland Japan. The majority of studies on war art have also responded well to the “foundational narrative.” Postwar inquires into artists’ responsibility in the war effort have very often focused exclusively on the time from the late 1930s to the first half of the 40s, while art made in response to the earlier Japanese imperialist wars, or as a result of Japan’s exploitation of Asia, has rarely been included in the scope of these investigations. Also, the pursuit of artists’ war responsibility has tended to revolve only around artists’ relationships with the military, the foremost perpetrator in the foundational narrative. Accordingly, studies of war art have been framed largely by two preconceived and rather monolithic political categories for artists: as collaborators with the military or as “internal émigrés.” In many cases, however, drawing such a clear line between military collaboration and internal resistance has proved unfeasible, due to the facts that the majority of people had to engage with the war effort in some form in order to survive, and that organized resistance and opportunities to go into exile were generally lacking. The debate over war responsibility thus has often devolved into endless discussions of how “voluntarily” or “unwillingly” each artist collaborated with the military. More importantly, this dichotomized categorization has often functioned to mask the diverse patterns of participation in, or resistance against, Japan’s imperialist projects and the war effort, patterns that were largely conditioned not only by each individual’s political standing vis-à-vis the military, but also by various social factors such as age, class, ethnicity/race, and gender. Especially in the last two decades, the arbitrariness or appropriateness of imposing such a clear distinction between collaborators and “internal émigrés,” and the significant absence of Japanese colonialism in the dominant narrative of war, have been questioned. Yet the lingering effect of the foundational narrative as the determining and most convenient framework for war art seems to persist today. This is clearly visible, for example, in the display of 5

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Chapter Four) is now remembered as one of a very few “courageous” artists who publicized his deep concern toward the military’s oppressive cultural policies in the middle of the Asia-Pacific War. Matsumoto’s colleague, the surrealist painter Ai-Mitsu, refused to engage in producing propaganda, and was sent to the front in China, where he died from illness in 1946. Kazuki also participated in the war as a soldier and was later interned in a Siberian labor camp until 1947. His terrible experiences in Siberia became the source of his postwar works, which reveal the inhumane conditions of the labor camps and were meant to serve as an homage to his fellow prisoners who never returned home alive. Although intended to evoke a strong sense of the tragedy that resulted from the cruelty of militarism and severity of warfare, this display of war art resonated in many respects with the foundational narrative, and thus embraced its omissions as well. The contrasts between the campaign-record paintings, most of which follow a rather conventional academic style, and the latter “humanist” group, done in modes inspired by Surrealism or modernism, physically affirmed the clear and unbridgeable separation of the pro- and anti-war camps in our understanding of war art. Few works in this room (or elsewhere in the museum) indicated the trajectory of Japan’s imperialist, expansionist, and colonization efforts conducted prior to this “wartime,” thus failing to address the country’s geopolitical connections with Asia and other regions and effectively limiting Japan’s “dark” period strictly to the years between the late 1930s and early 40s. Along with this disregard of Japan’s colonial past, another significant imbalance (if not a complete omission) was seen in the configuration of gender. The room was filled with figures of soldiers, workers, impaired returnees, self-portraits, and people in kyodatsu (a state of exhaustion), the majority of whom were male, created by male artists. While female figures were not entirely absent from the display, the domination of males both as a subjects and creators was palpable, as if war, resistance, defeat, and art-making were the territory of Japanese men. The multiple roles played by women

the permanent collection at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The museum has an intimate connection with Japan’s wartime past, housing 153 campaign-record paintings (sakusen kirokuga). As discussed further in Chapter Two, campaign-record paintings were commissioned by the Military Information Bureau for the purpose of recording Japan’s military campaigns in Asia and the Pacific Islands conducted between 1938 and 45. Those artists who were involved in the production of these paintings—and who thus enjoyed various privileges during the Asia-Pacific War—became the foremost targets of criticism as inexcusable military collaborators in the postwar years. Regarded as “shameful” evidence of artists’ proximity to militarism, campaign-record paintings were confiscated by the Occupation forces and brought to the United States in 1951, in part as a response to a request made by the Japanese people themselves. The paintings were returned to Japan and placed in the National Museum of Modern Art in 1970, but only as an “indefinite loan” (eikyū taiyo), as they still officially belong to the U.S. Government. Since their return from the United States, the display of these works has been one of the most contested issues for the museum, often stirring controversy and provoking emotional reactions from the public.11 From 2002 until the most recent renewal of the gallery space in October 2012, two or three campaign-record paintings were regularly on display at the National Museum as part of their permanent collection in a room on the third floor.12 This room was devoted to “Art During and After the War,” roughly covering the period from the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 through the American Occupation. Campaign-record paintings were displayed, with almost no exceptions, on the right wall of the room, facing works by such artists as Matsumoto Shunsuke, Ai-Mitsu (1907–1946), and Kazuki Yasuo (1911–1974) hung on the left wall. The artists featured on the left wall are generally regarded as victims of war or those artists who, according to the text panel, “created works that aim to leave evidence of humanity.”13 As mentioned above, Matsumoto Shunsuke (the main focus of 6

introduction

Japanese art history as a whole by instigating a new scholarly trend, as summed up concisely by Chino Kaori, one of the organizers of the event: “taking art history, which tends to comfortably settle in the ‘sanctuary of beauty,’ out to the external world.”15 Around the time of the symposium or soon thereafter, numerous publications and exhibitions raised questions about the dominant framework for war art and Japan’s wartime past. One of the conspicuous elements in the studies on war art that proliferated around and after the 1990s was the painstaking excavation of official documents, artists’ diaries, testimonies, and forgotten works, often by a younger generation of Japanese curators. The exhibitions and discoveries made by these curators, who were relatively free from the guilt and burden of war responsibility, helped bring to the surface a far more complicated view of the state of wartime art communities and patterns of artists’ engagement with the military than presumed in the previous decades. The Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, for example, held a retrospective exhibition of the works of Shimizu Toshi (1887–1945), an active war propaganda painter, in 1996–97.16 Shimizu, who was trained in the United States in the 1910s and 20s, worked in close association with the military as early as the beginning of the 1930s. While the sense that the artist was driven by patriotic feeling and determined to support Japan’s war(s) was palpable, the exhibition addressed the need for a nuanced reading of Shimizu’s political position by exploring a fuller picture of his oeuvre, which included two seemingly incompatible types of painting: rather somber pictures featuring war refugees illustrated in a semi-abstracted manner, and campaign-record painting made in the academic style (figs. 3, 4). Similarly, the letters of Koiso Ryōhei (1903–1988), one of the most prolific propaganda painters, as uncovered and publicized by the curator of Koiso Memorial Museum in 2007, have again blurred the rigid boundary between military collaborators and “internal émigrés.” In a letter written in 1944 to his artist-friend, Uchida Iwao (1900–1953), Koiso made critical comments about his and his colleagues’ campaign-record paintings in a strong tone.17

or female artists within or for Japan’s imperialist agenda and political order thus gained little recognition in this display. This significant homogeneity in terms of gender, ethnicity/race, and nationality, and the unequivocal distinction made between military collaborators and humanists, inform us of the lasting power of the foundational narrative, which aggregated the multifaceted constituencies and dimensions of the Japanese imperialist enterprise, colonialism, and wars into the homosocial melodrama of Japanese struggle, conversion, and rescue, performed exclusively by two male protagonists: Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur.

new studies on “war art” after the 1990s The use of the foundational narrative as the dominant framework for war art has been challenged by a number of art historians both inside and outside Japan. From the late 1980s, and particularly during the 90s, several international and domestic events required the revisiting of Japan’s colonial past and war effort, and their repercussions on post-1945 society. These events included the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989, the end of the Cold War, and the 1991 testimony of Korean women who were forced to be “military comfort women” (jūgun ianfu) during the Asia-Pacific War. In response to these political events, as well as through the influence of theories and perspectives introduced by the “new art history,” the study of war art has significantly expanded and diversified in scope, focus, methodologies, and motives. This shift was perhaps demonstrated most explicitly by the forty-seventh annual assembly symposium of the Japan Art History Society (JAHS) held in May 1994, for which “War and Art” (Sensō to bijutsu) was chosen as the main theme.14 At the time, the choice of such a “political” topic as war for the theme of JAHS, arguably the most “authoritative” art historical venue in Japan, was highly unconventional. The symposium became an important milestone in not only the study of war art, but also the discipline of 7

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production of campaign-record paintings and Japan’s war against the Allied nations. In addition to the aforementioned JAHS symposium, two pioneering historical surveys on the theme of war in modern Japanese art—Nihon no sensōga (Japanese War Painting; 1985) by Tanaka Hisao, and Imēji no naka no sensō (War in Images; 1996), co-authored by Tan’o Yasunori and Kawata Akihisa—have conspicuously employed a broader historical framework covering Japan’s earlier imperialist wars from the late nineteenth century onward.18 The former, driven by Tanaka’s personal experience of being moved by campaign-record paintings in his youth, traces the genealogy of Japanese war painting in order to decipher the magical elements that provoked the “frenzy of passion” (gekijō) among the Japanese during the Asia-Pacific War.19 Rather than focusing exclusively on the age of the Asia-Pacific War, however, Tanaka delineates the intimate relationship formed between state authorities and artists since the late nineteenth century, leading up to the proliferation of war imagery in the late 1930s and early 40s. Although perhaps not the author’s primary purpose, Tanaka’s inquiry into the origin of campaign-record paintings at the time of the foundation of the modern Japanese nation-state served to question the dominant scholarly tendency to single out the late 1930s and early 40s as a “deviation” from the course of Japanese modernization and modernity. The latter study, inspired by the post-Cold War and post-colonial world order as well as the JAHS symposium (for which Tan’o also served as an organizer and Kawata participated as a panel speaker), has expanded the scope of both “war” and its “art” to a significant degree. Again employing a longer historical framework, the book not only discusses the tableau paintings featuring scenes of combat, surrender, and pacification that were characteristic of campaign-record paintings, but also covers painting subjects that were hardly ever discussed under the rubric of “war art” before, such as Asian women, Mongolian landscapes, Beijing cityscapes, and, perhaps most surprising to us today, pictures of Mt. Fuji and the

Shimizu Toshi (1887–1945). Refugees, 1941. Oil on canvas, 162.1 130.3 cm. Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya.

Considering that even personal correspondence was subject to censorship, Koiso’s fairly straightforward criticism of the military-oriented art project was quite bold, indicating that a significant shift in the psyche or political views of the artist had occurred toward the end of the war. Both cases require the reconsideration not of artists’ collaboration with the military per se, but of the pro- and anti-military framework that was not flexible enough to fully salvage any middle ground, and the  complexity of the power structure that supported wartime society, the art community, and mass-mobilization. Beyond such individual cases, the historical and political framework for war art has also been challenged in light of the corruption of the Cold War political order and the reintroduction of Asia into Japan’s historical consciousness. At this stage, the scope of war art has finally expanded beyond the 8

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Shimizu Toshi. Charge, 1943. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 162.2 cm. Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya.

rising sun, all made and eagerly consumed during the interwar and “wartime” periods. By contextualizing these seemingly “innocent” representations of Asia in the Japanese imperialist enterprise, this study has revealed the ways in which many visual materials functioned to bolster Japan’s perceived superior position vis-àvis the rest of Asia, in terms of culture, art, and aesthetics. By doing so, the book addresses the far more diverse ways in which Japanese artists, purposefully or inadvertently, contributed to Japan’s nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and war machine. The scope of war art and the inquiry into the political responsibility of artists have thereby been extended into a much larger body of Japanese visual and material culture, a wider range of artists and geopolitical regions, and a longer time span covering the last one hundred

and fi fty years of the history of the Japanese Empire and militarism.20 Among the studies on war art that proliferated from the 1990s onward, it is arguably a group of feminist scholars that has most critically approached, re-scrutinized, and counteracted the foundational narrative. Chino Kaori’s study “Nihon bijutsu no jendā” (Gender in Japanese Art), published in 1994 (the same year that she organized the “War and Art” symposium), was the watershed, introducing feminist theory and the concept of gender to the field.21 Since then, such scholarly associations as the Image and Gender Research Group (Imēji & Jendā Kenkyūkai; 1995–present) have spearheaded the cultivation of this new field of inquiry, exploring the activity of female artists and foregrounding those who were marginalized and kept invisible within Japanese society and the 9

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Japanese Empire, and examining the gender and racial politics that are embedded in Japanese visual culture, art history, and exhibition, as well as issues of sexuality and the body in relation to identity politics.22 Although Chino and these other scholars have not necessarily focused on twentieth-century Japanese visual arts as their primary field, with the new debates and controversies sparked by the testimony of the former “military comfort women” beginning in the early 1990s, gender and sexuality politics in war has become a common concern shared by feminist art historians. By embracing gender and sexuality as an analytic category, as well as collaborating with artists and researchers outside Japan, the scholars associated with the Image and Gender Research Group, among others, have counteracted the totalizing male- or Japan-U.S.– centered foundational narrative in a number of ways.23 While their approaches, methods, and areas of focus are diverse, feminist art historians’ most significant contribution to the study of war art is found in their basic contention that gender and sexual politics comprised the essential system of imperialism, militarism, and mobilization, as well as their representation. Wakakuwa Midori (another panel speaker at the JAHS symposium), in particular, strongly asserted that patriarchal gender relations alone were one of the main causes of war and militarism.24 Through the examination of a wide range of visual materials, Wakakuwa not only illuminated the significant contributions of women (who previously tended to be portrayed simply as “victims”) to Japan’s imperialism and full-fledged war effort, but also revealed how the dichotomized “masculine” and “feminine” values (such as “bravery” and “motherly love”) that supported the patriarchal order predisposed societies to war and conflicts. With this conviction, she continued to call for the dismantling of the patriarchal system and the prevention of any further violence until her death in 2007. Spearheaded by Wakakuwa’s studies, the field of feminist art history, often employing an intersectional approach, has explored operations of power in the system of Japanese imperialism,

militarism, and military mobilization that are far too complex to be fully understood just by looking at the apparatuses of the state and economic factors, or by remaining within the framework of the collaborator-victim dichotomy; instead, this exploration has illuminated a set of gender ideologies and practices that pervaded daily life during both “war” and “peace” time. Perceiving the visual arts as one of the most compelling sites in which gender ideologies were manifested, these studies highlight the imperative need for (re-)examining war art not merely as a “reflection” of the government’s policies or an artist’s political beliefs, but as a product of power relations and systematic social inequalities based upon the constructed categories of gender, sexuality, class, disability, ethnicity/race, and nationality.25 This book hopes to follow the lead of these recent studies (and especially the efforts of feminist art historians), which have complicated our understanding of war art with an acute consciousness of gender politics as well as other social inequalities as the essential system that supported Japanese imperial rule and the full-fledged war machine. In order to do so, this study focuses mainly on a subject to which feminist art historians have been less attentive: the male figure and male artists, especially those that gained iconic status either during or after the AsiaPacific War. While a number of the aforementioned studies have revealed the ways in which the politics of gender and sexuality have contributed to the massive mobilization and maintenance of the modern nation-state as a war machine, they have focused largely on the notion of femininities, the regulation of women’s sexuality, sexism against women, and images of women. In contrast, many of the male figures found in twentieth-century Japanese visual arts in general, and war art in particular, either have not yet been studied or have been treated rather monolithically as representations of “human” figures, thereby often escaping critical examination. This predominant focus on the male figure and canonical works of war art may appear to be completely reactionary, risking the furthering of binary thinking about the male/female, or inadvertently 10

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re-emphasizing the canonized works and thereby reinforcing the narrative of “great masters” in current art historical discourse. Yet, acknowledging the crucial role played by the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and the body in the operation of Japanese imperialism and mass-mobilization as well as the configuration of visual representations, a corresponding inquiry into the study of war art, with specific focus on the male figure and male artists, and with feminist aspirations, is also needed. In her 1993 article, Ogino Miho points out that, while feminism has foregrounded the constructed nature of femininity, the female body, and sexuality, the male counterpart has rarely been scrutinized through such a critical lens. This is because, she argues, the equation or naturalization of “man” with “human” (to which “man” as the exclusive bearer of gaze should be added) has been inadvertently internalized, preventing us from examining “man” as a subject of investigation.26 In this study, following the social constructivist conception of gender and the body as well as the contributions of feminist art historians to the study of war art, the male figure is approached as neither a “natural” construction nor simply a carrier of each artist’s political beliefs, but as a kind of tabula rasa on which various sets of cultural codes and political significations are inscribed.27 The reexamination of canonical male figures through this critical lens will bring a deeper understanding of the politics of Japanese imperialism, mass-mobilization, art, and gender.

The publication of such pioneering works of the field as Datsu dansei no jidai: Andorojinasu o mezasu bunmeigaku (The Era of Demasculinization: Enlightenment Studies for the Androgynous) in 1986 showcased this evolution.29 It was only after the full corruption of the “Bubble Economy” around the mid- to late 1990s, however, when the “crisis of masculinity” was foregrounded in Japanese society, that “men,” both those who used to be in dominant social positions and those who had been largely marginalized under the heteronormative social order, became an important subject of academic inquiry. The trajectory and repercussions of men’s and masculinities studies in or about Japan to date have already been closely delineated in several recent publications, such as Danseigaku no shintenkai (New Directions in Men’s Studies; 2009) and Recreating Japanese Men (2011).30 Yet, it is necessary to emphasize that, while the newly institutionalized fields of men’s and masculinities studies, together with women’s studies, gender studies, LGBT studies, and queer studies, have greatly contributed to the enrichment of our understanding of gender and sexual configurations in contemporary Japanese society, the inclusion in this research of historical representations of men, especially those produced and consumed in the realm of fine art, is still extremely rare. Art historians, on the other hand, have begun to integrate the male figure, male sexuality, and the notion of masculinities into their analysis of visual arts, especially in the last decade. Such topics as male-male love in the Edo period (1615–1868), the body politics of emperors, and those contemporary artists who explicitly address the issue of gender and sexuality have been taken up by art historians.31 Following the accomplishments in these areas, a critical examination of male figures in yōga and war art would be particularly fruitful, not only because the privileged status of “men” must be challenged for the sake of a fuller understanding of the operation of gender politics (as Ogino contends), but also because, as briefly mentioned above, the increasing visibility of the male figure is one of the most obvious and yet least acknowledged tendencies in yōga

the male figure in yōga In contrast to the rich literature on images of men in Euro-American societies and the representation of the female body in Japanese visual culture, “Japanese” “men,” either as representations or lived persons, have rarely attracted scholarly attention until very recently.28 The fields termed dansei mondai, or men’s problems; and danseigaku, or men’s and masculinities studies, evolved around the mid-1980s in Japan, inspired by—as well as reacting against—the women’s lib of the 1970s. 11

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of the 1930s and 40s.32 While each individual expression of a male figure has been examined mainly through stylistic analysis or as a visual text informing us of the intentions of the artist or the military, few studies have paid attention to the significance of the proliferation of male figures per se, which must have corresponded to various political and cultural imperatives engendered by Japan’s colonial expansion, full-fledged war effort, and eventual defeat. It will be useful at this stage to clarify the term yōga, a specific genre of art that originated in Europe, and to provide a brief overview of the ways in which it dealt with the male figure as it developed  its own identity as a Japanese art form. Yōga (an  abbreviation of Seiyōga, Western painting) is generally translated as “Western-style painting.” This category of painting was developed in the course of Japanese modernization from the midnineteenth century, when European art techniques—initially introduced not for their cultural value, but for practical uses such as making maps and drawing plans—were officially institutionalized by the newly established Meiji government (1868–1912). With a strong awareness of the West as the model (as well as a “superior” rival), the newly introduced techniques, styles, and values of European painting were eventually recognized as a counterpart to those of the painting schools that existed in Japan prior to the age of Westernization. In the course of the 1880s, the latter were selectively collected into the painting school called Nihonga, or “Japanese-style painting,” while the former were termed yōga, referring most frequently to oil painting but also embracing various  values of Western art and culture beyond any specific medium, style, or technique.33 At its inception, yōga thus was closely associated with practical and political values, and formed an integral part of the nationwide project of modernization. During the first two decades of the Meiji period, when the practice of yōga was inseparable from the national polity, the human form was among the important subjects or motifs that yōga artists were required to master. This was not only because anatomical knowledge and the solid modeling of human forms were essential in the art academies of

Europe, but also because the visualization of the male and female figures in an “appropriate” manner, according to Western standards of aesthetics and gender, was of crucial importance for the modernization and nationalization of the Japanese populace. The emperor’s body, and slightly later that of the empress, too, was one of the most contested grounds on which to articulate this “appropriate” body and gender role. As the head of the Japanese “family state” (kazoku kokka), akin to the head of the national family, the emperor became increasingly visible, and his physical body was “masculinized” after the model of the European monarchs. As clearly shown in the official portrait, or goshin’ei (literally, “venerable true shadow”), from 1888 of the Meiji Emperor (r. 1867–1912) by the Italian artist Edoardo Chiossone (1833–1898) and the Japanese photographer Maruki Toshihiro (1854– 1923), the emperor is dressed in full Western military costume, equipped with a saber, short hair, a mustache, and beard, and exhibits a well-built physique that is widely known today to have been based on the body of Chiossone himself. According to Osa Shizue, such a portrayal of the emperor with clear marks of “masculinity” (and of the empress with “femininity,” and their pairing) was quite rare before the Meiji period.34 Taking the image of the semi-legendary Empress Jingū (3rd century) as an example, Osa argues that, in many cases, gender was not the primary concern in the visualization of emperors/empresses, and the significant shift in their corporeality seen in Meiji visual culture was a response to the government’s institutionalization of the neat binary opposition of men and women based on their biological sexes and gender roles as the core of Japanese nationhood. Although all visual media played a role in this modernization and gendering of Japanese bodies, yōga, together with photography, was an officially sanctioned visual tool for lending a convincing materiality to the Japanese body with a sense of scientific accuracy, the aura of “authenticity,” and the excitement of a new vision and aesthetics.35 From the late nineteenth century, around the time when modern art institutions and communities were 12

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Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924). Lakeside, 1897. Oil on canvas, 69 x 84.7 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

firmly established, however, the female figure was far more foregrounded in the practice of yōga. With a specific focus on Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), who is known today as the father of Japanese-art academicism, Wakakuwa Midori contends that, from the last decade of the nineteenth century onward, Kuroda and his followers primarily chose to illustrate female figures, especially those engaged in leisure activities in interior or “private” settings (figs. 5, 6).36 According to Wakakuwa, this choice of subjects corresponded well to the gender politics of that time, which increasingly segregated and enclosed women within the “domestic” sphere. Resonating with the doctrine of the “good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) that

was promoted intensively from the 1890s as the ideal for Japanese womanhood, Kuroda’s female images, Wakakuwa argues, were intended to serve as a “refuge” (hinanjo) or “comfort” (yasuragi) for those male artists and viewers who toiled to exhaustion in the “public” sphere.37 Approaching the subject from a different perspective, Norman Bryson also points to the increasing importance and visibility of female figures in the practice of yōga. Bryson argues that yōga artists who studied in Europe (including Kuroda) tended to choose the workshops run by the teachers who were famous for their depictions of women, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Raphaël Collin 13

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(1850–1916), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Rather than merely considering this choice as a consequence of the Japanese artists’ collective behavior, Bryson seeks the reason for the selection of these workshops in the function of the female body in bohemian Paris, and later in Tokyo. Bryson argues that the white female body served Japanese artists in Paris as a gateway to “the masculine camaraderie of the studio,” and by extension to the male- and Caucasian-centered European art community. The white female body of the nude model, the quintessential emblem of bohemian Paris, functioned to equalize and tie all men in the studio together through the arousal of their frank libidinousness.38 In Bryson’s words, the intimacy with and prerogative to have access to European women was “proof or credentials of cosmopolitan identity” entering “the masculine subject of vision” for Japanese artists.39 The female figure thereby became an important site where male yōga artists enacted their sense of modernity and masculinity, as well as the means to join (perhaps only partially) the cosmopolitan (male) community of artists beyond their national and racial boundaries.40 This certainly does not mean that the male figure was diminished in the practice of yōga, although its direct association with the national polity, as

Kuroda Seiki. Flowering Field, 1907–15. Oil on canvas, 126.5 x 181.2 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

seen in the example of the emperor’s portrait, became less pronounced after the late nineteenth century. Together with various female forms, the self-portrait became one of the most popular subjects among male yōga artists. At the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), the production of self-portraits by the all-male student body was popularized through the curriculum; students in the Western Painting Department were required to submit a self-portrait painting by the time of their graduation. The practice of the self-portrait, which was new to society as a specific genre of art introduced from the West (although not entirely absent before the Meiji period), thereby became the site where young, elite students of yōga contemplated and configured their artistic and possibly masculine identities through the lens, or in the mold, of European models.41 The generation of Kuroda’s students that became active around the first two decades of the twentieth century, and especially those who were closely associated with Shirakaba (White Birch; 1910–23), an extremely influential art and literature journal (discussed in Chapter Three), engaged actively in the production of self-portraits. These young artists, most of whom came from extremely privileged families and entered maturity after Japan had fully established itself as a modern 14

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nation state, strongly resisted the profound devotion to the country and emphasis on the Confucianderived ethics of shūyō (discipline) espoused by their fathers (many of whom were architects of the Meiji government). Instead, they and the intellectuals associated with Shirakaba (the so-called “Shirakaba School”) advocated the cultivation of the self through art and literature as the ultimate goal of their lives as well as of society, optimistically believing that each individual’s sincere pursuit of selfhood would ultimately contribute to universal humanism. These young yōga artists sought their role models in European avant-garde artists such as Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Rodin, who were romantically endorsed as autonomous individuals and artistic geniuses whose lives were colored by tragedy as a result of their uncompromised adherence to their own visions. As the prime means of pursuing selfhood, many artists, most notably Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929), obsessively produced self-portraits modeled after the styles, poses, and corporeality of works by the European artists that they admired, ranging from van Gogh, Renoir, and Rodin to Albrecht Dürer (1471– 1528). In contrast to the male figures created for Japanese nationhood in the previous decades, these self-portraits were introspective in nature, strongly emphasizing the sense of individuality of these artists in a self-contained space, the subject making direct eye contact with the viewer, or himself (fig. 7). Such a focus on individuality or the inner life of the subject embodied one of the archetypes of Japanese male yōga artists of this period, an archetype that maintained credibility at least until the mid-1930s, if not today. Still, both generations of artists crucially sought affirmation of their artistic and masculine identities through European models.42 While the emphasis on individuality maintained by the artists associated with the Shirakaba School was potentially a threat to the state’s collective ethics, their intensive pursuit of the self ultimately caused the retreat and alienation of these yōga painters from the political realm and the rest of society. Partly as a reaction against this introspective search for the true self and asocial attitude, a more socially

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Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929). Self-Portrait, 1913. Oil on canvas, 41.2 x 31.9 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

conscious and politically active group of avantgarde artists, baptized by anarchism, Dadaism, socialism, and Communism, arose in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923. Their repertoire included some provocative genderambivalent figures (such as cross-dressers) and male nudity, which they used to challenge the dominant social norms of the time.43 Yet these avant-garde artists of the mid-1920s, while some were graduates of art school, no longer adhered strictly to the medium of yōga; indeed, they challenged the category of yōga per se. Departing from the conventional materials and forms of oil painting, these socially minded and politically active artists largely shifted their focus to mixed media, theater productions, commercial design, illustration, and photography in order to reach a wider audience and seek more liberating venues. For these avant-grade artists, and eventually 15

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the mass audience as well, yōga and its representation of male and female figures was seen as an established genre that only carried the values of, and was enjoyed by, the limited segment of the elite and privileged.

known as “street exhibitions” (gaitō ten), and above all, artists’ passionate engagement with the war effort. The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 invited yet another debate over the social role and identity of artists, especially male yōga painters, in which the Shirakaba-derived image of artists as autonomous individuals was seriously contested. To be certain, the Japanese government maintained neither a coherent policy nor an appropriate organization for imposing comprehensive control over artistic activities until the very end of the war. In the late 1930s state intervention was still partial, focusing mainly on social and cultural fields that were seemingly useful for mass persuasion and the production of propaganda such as films, music, and newspapers. Exemption for artists from the mobilization program, however, did not permit artistic freedom. Significant social pressure to contribute to the war effort mounted through a number of wartime campaigns, most noticeably the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō) implemented from 1937 to 40. Under the three slogans of Kyokoku itchi (Unifying the Country), Jinchū hōkoku (Devotion to the Country), and Kennin jikyū (Untiring Patience), the movement aimed to instill a collective ethos into every social and cultural activity, and to persuade civilians to “voluntarily” support the war on the home front in the same way that soldiers were doing at the battleground.46 In this increasingly reactionary political climate, fine art lacked a clear social role and indeed became a target of criticism. For example, the novelist Nii Itaru (1888–1951) recalled that, in 1937, he was severely scorned by his friend on the way back from an art exhibition for being “so thoughtless that [he] can enjoy paintings idly [when Japan is at war].”47 Artists, too, expressed uncertainty and anxiety about their professional responsibilities and the raison d’être of fine art in a period of national emergency. Even Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958), who was a famous advocate of the value of Nihonga as an expression of the national spirit, made the following comment in November 1937:

the “men’s world” of yōga in the 1930s The predominance of women as a painting subject in mainstream yōga once again shifted in the 1930s. The image of the male yōga artist celebrated from the 1910s to early 20s also came under critical scrutiny from not only the avant-grade artists, but also those who were working within the established art venues. These shifts should be considered as a response to a number of sociopolitical imperatives, including the lingering economic recession that had begun in the late 1920s, the emergence of mass culture, and the reactionary political climate that accompanied Japanese colonial expansion, international isolation, and the rise of militarism. The art historian Kawata Akihisa argues that the 1930s witnessed a significant decline in the number of visitors to the Japanese National Art Salon (the Ministry of Education’s annual exhibition) and many other art exhibitions, as these were largely overshadowed by the new, mass-produced forms of media and entertainment, such as photography, advertising, films, radio, and revue theaters.44 Furthermore, the lingering effects of a series of economic recessions, coupled with the everincreasing number of aspiring artists (thanks to the widening of educational opportunities in the previous decades), created a serious shortage of venues, jobs, and the means to make a living through the arts.45 Kawata speculates that this lack of economic means, the social dismissal of the fine arts, and the desire of artists to reestablish the connection of art to the broader society underlay many artistic movements, trends, and exhibition formats particular to the yōga community of the 1930s, such as Social Realism, the mural-painting movement, the advent of small-scale group exhibitions 16

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In theory, art is important. But it would be truer to say that the majority of people at war cannot afford to pay attention to such a thing as art. If you [artists] can fight, go to the battlefield with a gun. If you cannot, just devote yourself to your own job. What else can we do?48

Artistic activities were under great scrutiny, and even artists like Yokoyama Taikan clearly relegated the value of artists vis-à-vis that of soldiers, who “can fight … [on] the battlefield with a gun.” Together with the reproach of fine art for its lack of a prominent social role, yōga painters also had to negotiate with the very origin of their art form around the time that Japan declared war against the Allied Powers. When war against the United States and Britain appeared to be inevitable, the Japanese government redefined the objective of the conflict as the release of Asia from the Western colonial powers and the formation of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken). Simultaneously the government began to promote intensive anti–Anglo-American campaigns. While Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Japan’s war was largely envisioned and propagated as a war against the “West” and its capitalist/ imperialist values. Within a political climate that became extremely hostile to the United States and certain European nations, many cultural forms that had originated in these regions came under critical scrutiny. For example, in 1943 jazz, which had already struggled since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, was completely banned and listed as “enemy music.”49 While yōga, which enjoyed a much longer history than jazz in Japan, never faced such rigid sanctions, yōga artists were required to expel the Anglo-American values embedded in the corpus of the genre. Particularly dismissed was the female figure, especially those types introduced and popularized by Kuroda and his followers from the late nineteenth century. Such popular subjects for yōga in the previous decades as the female nude and women engaging in leisure activities, although never banned from exhibitions, clearly lost favor, often becoming targets of criticism as the residue

8

Sugiura Yukio (1911–2004). “Purging One’s Head of Anglo-Americanism,” May 1942. Cartoon reproduced in Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/ Disembodiment in Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War,” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire 1931–1960, 128.

of (Western) capitalist values, a hedonistic, “unhealthy” culture, and “asocial” individualism. In his pioneering study on war art, Bert WintherTamaki introduces a cartoon published in 1942 entitled “Purging One’s Head of Anglo-Americanism,” which illustrates a woman trying to eliminate dandruff from her hair (fig. 8).50 Each piece of dandruff has a label: “luxury,” “selfishness,” “hedonism,” “liberalism,” “greed,” “materialism,” “individualism,” and “Anglo-Saxon thinking,” respectively. While Winther-Tamaki uses this image to indicate the considerable pressure that would have been experienced at the time by yōga artists, who were closely associated with Western values, the fact that the female body is shown here as carrying 17

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these bits of “dandruff” and needing to be cleansed is also significant. This cartoon demonstrates not only the increasing compulsion for yōga artists to reconsider their professional identities, as WintherTamaki points out, but also the exclusion or devaluation of women’s bodies as carriers of Western values in the visual politics of wartime, when the nation was at war against imperialist Euro-American countries. The male figure, on the other hand, seemed to resurface as an important subject for yōga painters. The militant male, in particular, was a privileged subject that only male artists of a certain social standing were allowed to paint and celebrate. As discussed further in Chapter Two, campaignrecord paintings, with few exceptions, were all-male theater, featuring exclusively soldiers and generals in action. The producers of these works were predominantly yōga artists (while some Nihonga painters and sculptors were also included), yet female painters were systematically and entirely excluded.51 Some female artists did attempt to engage with wartime society through their art, most noticeably the members of the Women Artists Service Corps (Jōryū Bijutsuka Hōkōtai) led by the yōga painter Hasegawa Haruko (1895–1967). Seeking the active participation of women in society and the war, Hasegawa organized the Women Artists Service Corps in February 1943 under the sponsorship of the Army, and engaged the group in a number of patriotic activities. For the most part, however, these female artists illustrated women supporting men from home, and the only male figures that they depicted were child soldiers, images intended to persuade mothers to willingly sacrifice their sons.52 Not even Hasegawa, who was the only female founding member of the Army Art Association (Rikugun Bijutsu Kyōkai), formed in 1939 as the largest patriotic artists’ organization, was appointed to produce a campaign-record painting.53 In short, gender segregation was strictly maintained and further reinforced within the realm of artists’ participation in the war effort; only male artists were allowed to engage in the production of the privileged subject of

male figures in general, and soldier figures in particular. Wakakuwa Midori pointedly called the militaryoriented art community, in this misogynistic state, “the man’s world” (otoko no sekai), and identified it as one of the key factors behind the inclination of male yōga artists toward the production of war paintings and soldier figures. Referring to Griselda Pollock’s much-cited study on nineteenth-century French art, Wakakuwa noted that the favorite subjects of Kuroda Seiki and his followers fell mainly into Pollock’s category of “the spaces of femininity”: images of female figures in dining and living rooms, on balconies or verandas, and at summer retreats. In contrast, many subjects that she categorized under “the spaces of masculinity,” such as modern industry, political or public institutions, and street scenes, were extremely rare in the practice of yōga for several decades. As Wakakuwa boldly asserted, the almost exclusive focus of yōga artists on “the spaces of femininity” made the business of art “trivial stuff to which [real] men were not supposed to devote their lives,” and promoted the impression of artists as “effeminate people who were ignorant about the real world and only lived by their sensitivities.”54 Wakakuwa thus explained male artists’ passionate engagement with war painting and soldier figures in the late 1930s as “where they found ‘the man’s world.’”55 While a more careful consideration of whether or not the focus of yōga painters on “the spaces of femininity” really “feminized” the entire field is necessary, at least around the time when Japan embarked upon war against the Allied Powers, the profession of oil painter—as Kinoshita’s portrayal of Tomekichi would inform us—indeed seemed at odds with the ideal of manhood that the nation promoted; such an uncertain gender identity, together with the dismissal of fine art, appears to have been one of the major factors that drove more than a few yōga painters to volunteer to serve at the front. Mukai Junkichi, for example, went to the front in large part to reimagine and rearticulate the identity of his own profession in line with the new political climate. In an article that he published in August 18

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world,” as Wakakuwa has suggested. But the increasing visibility of the male figure, and the rich variations in its portrayal, would also indicate that this “man’s world” or “the spaces of masculinity” was neither monolithic nor a synonym for the domain of military-oriented art. On the inside, “the man’s world” would have been as hierarchical and diverse as the Japanese Empire and society, in which each artist’s enactment of masculinity was largely conditioned by his age, class, educational background, race/ethnicity, physical and mental condition, and many other social factors. This book aims to explore the discursive nature of this “man’s world” by closely delineating the ways in which male yōga artists of various social standings and identities engaged with it through their rendering of male figures. In so doing, this study may illuminate the multifaceted and yet highly exclusive nature of “the man’s world” as a political force for mass mobilization and the maintenance of male domination over women and other social minorities, operating within the art community and, by extension, Japanese society before, during, and after the “wartime” period.

1938, after his return from China, Mukai explained his intent: Today’s Japanese artists lack the special talent and passion to engage with such a theme as war … It somehow became common among painters to disregard and dismiss the techniques, styles, and ideas necessary to meet the challenges of war themes. I wish to amend this narrow-minded, unfortunate situation.56

Mukai also recollected that, at the front, he had to first “correct” soldiers’ understanding of artists as “womanizers,” “lazy,” and “feeble” in order to become comrades-in-arms with them. He expressed his deep sense of satisfaction when his physical and mental strength finally reversed their “wrong” understanding of him; although an artist, he was always “ready to take his gun and shoot back” if his fellow soldiers got injured.57 The excessively aggressive image of Japanese soldiers that Mukai produced in Charge Ahead, which he described as a selfportrait, should be considered as part of Mukai’s efforts to cultivate a new image of the male artist and his significant social responsibilities equivalent to those of his comrades-in-arms fighting at the frontline. The re-contemplation of their professional and masculine identities, especially through the male figure, not only was carried out by such vigorous war painters as Mukai, however, but was also quite visible even in works made by the group of artists who are generally classified today as “victims” or “internal émigrés.” Additionally, the aggressive soldier was not the only male form eagerly promoted by yōga artists in the 1930s and 40s. The male figure—whether military or civilian, old or young, the artist himself or someone else, or “masculine” or “feminine”—became a major painting subject for a wide range of male yōga artists, perhaps more than at any other time since the official institutionalization of oil painting in Japan in the late nineteenth century. A number of male painters, whether commissioned by the military or for other purposes, chose to work on the male figure, which may have appeared for them as a gateway to “the man’s

chapter organization This book is organized around the following three Japanese male artists, who proactively responded to the political upheavals of the 1930s and 40s mainly through their presentation of the male figure: Fujita Tsuguharu (Chapter Two), Yasui Sōtarō (Chapter Three), and Matsumoto Shunsuke (Chapter Four). While the chapters are focused mainly on these individual artists, they are not meant to be monographic case studies. These three artists represent a certain male group based not only on artistic disposition or political belief, but also on age, economic status, physical and mental condition, and other social factors operating within the specific historical context of late Imperial Japan. As Marilyn Ivy argues, “a formation in which everyone knew his place” was one of the characteristics of fascism; the Japanese government indeed 19

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attempted to redefine and reorganize the entire citizenry according to gender, nationality, race/ ethnicity, age, occupation, and region, and this scheme became particularly evident around the time of the Asia-Pacific War.58 Japanese experiences of the war and war effort therefore varied to a significant degree, depending on which social group a given individual belonged to and how he or she formulated his or her identity vis-àvis the individual’s officially designated “place.” Especially for men, who were under mandatory conscription, their ages, educational backgrounds, and physical and mental conditions largely and immediately determined the course of their careers, and often their very survival during the AsiaPacific War. Following this introductory chapter, the next three chapters investigate the practices of the three yōga painters listed above, respectively, as well as their colleagues. Chapter Two focuses on Fujita Tsuguharu. Fujita was an international celebrity in Paris during the interwar years, and arguably the most acclaimed painter in the genre of campaignrecord painting during the Asia-Pacific War. While these paintings undoubtedly were made for promoting Japan’s military campaigns, the rendering of Japanese soldier figures by Fujita and the other official war painters is often considered “ambiguous” compared with that of their Euro-American counterparts, and is even sometimes read as “antiwar.” This chapter, with a specific focus on Fujita’s campaign-record paintings (and especially the highly aggressive male figures of his later war paintings), considers the ways in which Fujita and his fellow Paris returnees, such as Miyamoto Saburō (1905–1974), rendered Japanese male figures in relation to the gender and racial identities that they had formulated for themselves in the Caucasiancentered world of modern art. Through this avenue of inquiry, the seemingly “ambiguous” Japanese male figures produced by these artists will be considered both as their challenge against and embrace of a Western-centered art, gender, and racial hierarchy at a time when Japan waged war against “white” imperial supremacy.

Chapter Three focuses on Yasui Sōtarō and his supporters, collectively known as the Shirakaba School, a group of highly privileged elite intellectuals active from the first decade of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Yasui was one of the most well established painters of the 1930s and 40s, his paintings and activities during these two decades remain largely unexamined (beyond formal and technical analyses of his works). This chapter proposes to read the series of portraits of men produced by Yasui from the mid-1930s in relation to the Shirakaba School’s political standing, especially that of the art historian and critic Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950), the most ardent supporter and promoter of Yasui and his male portraits. Although they hailed from extremely privileged backgrounds, Kojima and many of the Shirakaba intellectuals, who were known as liberalists and elitists at the same time, found themselves at odds with the aesthetics and ideals of manhood promoted by the national art institutions and the military-oriented society of the 1930s. Kojima, in particular, strongly asserted the superiority of the Shirakaba School’s preferred aesthetics along with his promotion of Yasui’s male portraits throughout the 1930s and 40s. Clearly distinguishable from the militant images of men made by Fujita and the other official war painters, Yasui’s male portraits can be considered to represent the Shirakaba group’s selfassertion of its prominent and “masculine” presence as a response to the rise and decline of militarism. Chapter Four examines Matsumoto Shunsuke’s practices in the production of self- (and family) portraits between 1940 and 43; today these works are interpreted almost exclusively as manifestations of Matsumoto’s resistant stance against militarism. Particular attention is given to Matsumoto’s rather vicious reaction to Yamashita Kiyoshi (1922–1971), a painter with an intellectual impairment who attracted significant public attention from around the late 1930s. The two artists were labeled as “unfit” or “deviant” with respect to the wartime standard of normalcy; both Matsumoto and Yamashita were exempted from mandatory 20

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conscription, the former for his hearing disorder and the latter for his intellectual disability. Yamashita’s sudden rise to fame around 1939 as an “idiot savant” held enormous repercussions for the art community, especially as it fomented debate over the proximity of “insanity” to creative genius. It was Matsumoto who reacted most strongly against Yamashita, simultaneously devoting himself to the production of self- and family portrait paintings. By examining the impact that Yamashita made on the art community together with the production of Matsumoto’s self-portraits, this chapter explores how Matsumoto and other artists used the representation of an “unfit” or “deviant” male figure to reinforce or subvert the official concept of “healthy folk” (kenmin), while the Japanese government obsessively promoted its discriminatory “health” policies for the sake of the war effort. In the post-1945 period, the wartime practices and works of Fujita Tsuguharu, Yasui Sōtarō, and Matsumoto Shunsuke, as well as Yamashita Kiyoshi, all came to be canonized in the history of modern Japanese art, or gained iconic status in postwar society. The canonical status achieved by these figures in the postwar years, together with their

proactive presence in the 1930s and 40s, is another reason to select these artists as the subjects of this book. At different times and for different reasons during the post-1945 period, these artists regained public interest and became symbols of wartime or postwar Japan. The postwar evaluation or rehabilitation of the practices of Fujita, Yasui, Matsumoto, and Yamashita in the 1930s and 40s seems to mirror Japan’s efforts to somehow reconcile its own “shameful” past of imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, and reconfigure its gendered identity within the ever-changing geopolitical conditions of the Cold War system. Chapter Five touches upon the postwar evaluation of the wartime works and activities of these male artists, and considers by whom and in which sociopolitical contexts Fujita, Yasui, Matsumoto, and Yamashita were brought back into the art-historical record and the popular consciousness. In so doing, this last chapter explores the processes through which their varied wartime practices, experiences, and contributions to Japanese Imperialism and the war effort, as well as their diverse manifestations of the male figure, were re-inscribed into the dominant or foundational narrative of the war in the course of Japan’s postwar recovery.

21

2 “Japanese” Men on Display: Fujita Tsuguharu’s Campaign-Record Paintings sent to the front, where they made sketches, researched sites, and produced works of monumental size, mostly featuring Japan’s military campaigns on the Asian continent and Pacific Islands. While going to the front was surely accompanied by a number of risks, the artists appointed to this mission (hereafter referred to as official war painters) were offered various privileges and rewards. The works were displayed at war-art exhibitions sponsored by the military, and enjoyed an honorary “preview” by the emperor (tenran). Frequently backed by the major newspaper companies (Asahi, in particular), the official war painters always enjoyed significant media coverage, and exhibitions toured not only in mainland Japan, but also in Taiwan and Manchukuo as well. Moreover, when all art materials were under the government’s control due to the serious shortage of resources toward the end of the war, the official war painters were given priority in the allotment of art supplies.3 All in all, the top-rated official war painters attained a nationwide audience and prestige, official patronage, publicity, and certain economic advantages. This chapter examines the Japanese male figure as painted and performed by the yōga artists who engaged deeply with the production of campaign-record paintings, with specific focus on Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), the most prolific of the official war painters. Fujita established

A swarm of enemy soldiers, came out to see me … I guess they wanted to get a look at these funny-looking guys they’d caught. But when I saw them—Blond, silver, black, brown, red haired; blue, green, brown, black eyes; white, black, skin colors of every variety—I was stunned! I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform! —Kojima Kiyofumi, “In the Enemy’s Hands,” 1986

introduction While no single artistic ideology, style, or subject entirely dominated the Japanese art scene in the 1930s and 40s, the production of campaign-record paintings (sakusen kirokuga) was one of the most “celebrated” tasks endorsed by yōga painters during the Asia-Pacific War.1 Such paintings were sponsored by the Military Information Bureaus (both Army and Navy) for the purpose of “recording the reality of war accurately … and to permanently preserve [these records], which is, needless to say, important for national security … and as educational materials for our nation.”2 Between 1938 and 45, more than two hundred artists were Fujita Tsuguharu, Sacred Soldier to the Rescue, 1944, detail of fig. 28

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himself as a painter in 1920s Paris and traveled extensively through Europe and North and South America to Asia in the 1930s. When Japan was engaged in all-out war from the late 1930s to the early 40s, Fujita eagerly participated in the production of campaign-record paintings and other war efforts. Fourteen campaign-record paintings by Fujita survive today, the largest number made by a single artist. Appointed as a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Geijutsuin) in 1941, from 1943 Fujita chaired the Army Art Association (1938–45), the largest quasi-military art collective, and appeared in a number of media to call for his fellows to create art for their nation. He was also chosen to be one of three artists, together with Miyamoto Saburō and Koiso Ryōhei, to portray Emperor Hirohito in military costume in 1943.4 As stated in the previous chapter, the creators of campaign-record paintings became the foremost targets of criticism for their close collaboration with the military in the post-1945 years. Fujita, too, was accused of vigorous engagement with the military; this accusation is often cited as the major cause of his departure for Paris in 1949.5 While campaign-record paintings are without doubt stigmatized as evidence of such collaboration, however, the question of whether these paintings—and Fujita’s rendering of male figures, in particular— functioned fully as propaganda has often been raised. Art historians today generally agree that no equivalents can be found in Japanese wartime visual arts overall, and campaign-record paintings in particular, to Euro-American counterparts such as Nazi Germany’s aestheticized/homoeroticized male figure modeled after Greek ideals, or the hyper-masculine male workers of the Stalinist Soviet Union.6 As many art historians and critics have claimed, Japanese campaign-record paintings mainly visualized groups of anonymous soldiers, whose physicality often appears rather weak, less confident, or excessively brutal, thus seemingly lacking a clear mark of “manliness” from the standpoint of the contemporaneous Euro-American examples.

The paintings made by Fujita especially in the last two years of the war have inspired numerous discussions over their validity as propaganda and the artist’s underlying intentions. Literally known as shitō-zu (deathly battle pictures), Fujita’s works from 1943 until Japan’s surrender unabashedly feature the vicious suicidal attacks perpetrated by Japanese soldiers on an extremely darkened canvas (figs. 9–11). The art historian Kawata Akihisa describes the Japanese soldier figures in Fujita’s paintings as “ape-like,” displaying a dangerous proximity to the caricatured/de-humanized image of the Japanese ubiquitous in American propaganda of the time.7 Tanaka Hisao recollects his unease when he saw Fujita’s Attu Island Gyokusai (1943) during the Asia-Pacific War, as he could not figure out “whether the dead soldiers were Japanese or Americans” (fig. 9).8 The artist Nomiyama Gyōji (b. 1920), among many others, has gone so far as to say that “anti-war feeling” seems to lie beneath Fujita’s deathly battle pictures.9 This chapter revisits Fujita’s male figures by considering their perceived “ambiguity” or “deviancy” from the Euro-American standard for male images in relation to the official war painters’ racial and gender identities. As briefly sketched above, Fujita established himself as an artist in Paris, where he carefully cultivated his artistic identity in order to pursue his career within the Caucasian-centered art community. Through his rich experiences outside his home country, Fujita must have fully acknowledged Japan’s racialized and gendered positioning in the international geopolitical hierarchies. Such acknowledgement, along with strategies cultivated by the artist during his many years as an expatriate, had significant repercussions for the configuration of his “ambiguous” male figures, especially those of “Japanese” “men,” a main theme for Fujita only during the Asia-Pacific War. As many studies have concluded, the AsiaPacific War can be characterized as “a race war.”10 According to John W. Dower, the war was “fueled by racial pride, arrogance, and rage,” and for the “Japanese,” it was envisioned as the final battle against “white” supremacy in order to formulate an 24

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9

Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968). Attu Island Gyokusai, 1943. Oil on canvas, 193.5 x 259.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

“Asiatic” unity, namely the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.11 Given this characterization of the war and Fujita’s tireless efforts to take control of his self-image, the production of campaign-record paintings can be read as an attempt by Fujita (and his fellow artists, many of whom were also Paris returnees) to make an alternative claim on the Japanese body politic mainly vis-à-vis the perceived superiority of the West. The “ambiguity” present in the rendering of the Japanese male figure in such works may then indicate the dilemma faced by male yōga artists in achieving a superior Japanese body within the Caucasian-centered racial/gender hierarchy, which these artists embraced (either purposefully or unwittingly) in their expatriate lives and training in Europe.

Beginning with a consideration of the ways in which Fujita established his status in 1920s Paris, his negotiation with his home country in the 1930s is discussed in this chapter in order to articulate the artist’s conscious use of his racial and gendered identities in the ever-changing geopolitical circumstances of the early twentieth century. After outlining the campaign-record painting project and its political significance for Paris returnee artists (with specific reference to Miyamoto Saburō, another representative artist of this type of painting), the expression of Japanese soldier figures in Fujita’s deathly battle pictures is investigated. The whole collection of campaign-record paintings is then considered with particular focus on the racial and gender dynamics of the painting subjects. In so 25

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10

Fujita Tsuguharu. Fierce Fighting on Guadalcanal, 1944. Oil on canvas, 262 x 265 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

1919: all six of the works (two oils and four watercolor paintings) that Fujita submitted to the Salon d’Automne, an annual Paris art exhibition, were selected for display. In 1921, three works that he submitted to the salon, Self-Portrait, Nude, and My Room, cemented his fame in Paris (figs.  12, 13). In the following few years, Fujita became an international celebrity in Europe, enjoying several commissions, prizes, and prestige, as well as high visibility in both the European and Japanese media. While Fujita’s success was unprecedented, Paris had been the foremost destination for many Japanese artists, particularly yōga painters, since the late nineteenth century. Beginning with Yamamoto Hōsui (1850–1906), who studied in Paris between 1878 and 87, such painters as Kuroda Seiki, Kume Keiichirō (1866–1934), and Iwamura Tōru (1870–1917) went to Paris from the late 1880s and later gained important posts in the national art institutions in Japan. These artists contributed

doing, the intimate association between the racial and gender hierarchies of the colonial powers and Fujita’s long expatriate experience will be explored as a defining factor for his seemingly “ambiguous” male figures.

a “japanese” artist in bohemian paris Fujita Tsuguharu was one of a very few Japanese oil painters who fully established themselves as artists in Paris before doing so in their home country. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1905, Fujita (still virtually unknown in Japan) arrived in Paris in 1913. For the first few years of his stay, he struggled to achieve status as a professional painter. Due to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Fujita was not able to receive any monetary support from his family in Japan, yet he refused to return home. His breakthrough came in 26

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11

Fujita Tsuguharu. Fierce Fighting of Kaoru Paratroops after Landing on the Enemy’s Position, 1945. Oil on canvas, 194 x 259.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

sense of modernity and masculinity.14 As stated briefly in Chapter One, Bryson, in particular, focusing on the Japanese male painters who studied in Paris between the 1880s and 1910s, has revealed ways in which these artists negotiated with the new artistic environment and cultural barriers. He points to feelings of “intense empathy,” “friendliness,” and “ease” underlying the paintings of European women made by Kuroda and other yōga artists during their stay (Fig.14). Bryson reads this personal familiarity that Japanese art students presented with regard to European women, whether real or imaginary, as their expression of “proximity to and intimacy with the West.”15 Given that Japanese art students as well as their European

greatly to the elevation of Paris as the mecca of modern art by introducing the city’s flamboyant bohemian lifestyle, liberal atmosphere, and new artistic trends to their home country.12 Stimulated by their works, publications, and successes, many Japanese artists, including Fujita, fled to Paris in the next several decades. The number of Japanese artists in Paris steadily increased throughout the 1910s and reached its peak in the 1920s, when a few hundred Japanese artists were said to be there, comprising a large Japanese community.13 As studies by Norman Bryson and Imahashi Eiko have eloquently revealed, Paris was the site at which Japanese (mostly male) artists not only developed their artistic skills, but also enacted their 27

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Caucasian-centered racial, gender, and artistic hierarchy, in which Japanese or Asians normally ranked as “second-rate citizens.” The poet and sculptor Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956) expressed most explicitly the complex that he and many other Japanese art students must have developed in Europe. Takamura, an ardent admirer of Auguste Rodin, stayed in London and Paris between 1906 and 1909. In Paris, Takamura eventually developed a sense of despair, finding an unbridgeable gap between the capital city of modern art and his Japanese identity. In his essays and poems, this gap was always confirmed by his “Japanese” physical features. In the text “Kafe yori” (From a Café) presented in 1910 right after his return to Japan, Takamura narrated his experience after spending a night with a French woman whom he met at a café. He awakened happily in her apartment, but was soon disturbed by the “reality” that he saw in the mirror: 12

Fujita Tsuguharu. Self-Portrait, 1921. Oil on canvas, 99 x 80 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

When I was turning on the hot-water faucet, I didn’t mean to, no, I didn’t—but I looked up: standing there was an unfamiliar, dark man in a nightgown. An extreme

teachers focused predominantly on such female figures, Bryson argues that it was European female bodies rather than men (or anything else) that ensured the entry of Japanese male artists into Western society. Referring to nineteenth-century Bohemian Paris as “the European visual regime … centered squarely on the masculine subject of vision” and on “eros, and eros’ representative in art, the model,” Bryson contends that the libidinal currency provoked by female bodies in life class or art studios functioned as an equalizer of all men, generating fraternity and comradeship among male artists and students, including those from the distant land of Japan.16 As we will see, Fujita’s treatment of the white female body was indeed the key to his success in Paris. Yet it must be emphasized that, for Japanese artists, entry to the West or the world of modern art was often accompanied by an acute recognition of their position within the

unpleasantness, unease, and alarm simultaneously assaulted me. I looked closer, and it turned out to be a mirror. It was I who was in the mirror. “No, I am Japanese after all. I am a Japonais, Mongol, le Jaune!” a voice cried out in my head as if some mechanism, wound up too tight, had broken.17

Through the mediation of European women, Japanese male artists may have temporarily gained “masculine” status in the art studio or in European society in general, yet their position was temporal and elusive, as Takamura’s sudden realization of his “unpleasant” Japanese identity suggests. For many art students from Japan, Paris was the site where they became “men” and modern artists, as Bryson has argued compellingly. Yet the city was also the place where they could not avoid seeing themselves through the eyes of Westerners, and where they recognized their “unpleasant” position in the Caucasian-centered hierarchy, just as 28

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13

Fujita Tsuguharu. Nude, 1921. Oil on canvas, 72 x 115 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva.

14

Kuroda Seiki. Knitting, 1890. Oil on canvas, 48.7 x 59.2 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

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Takamura saw a “dark man” in his reflection in the mirror.18 Fujita, who arrived in Paris four years after Takamura’s departure from the city, would also have been acutely aware of his racial markings, yet rather than being distressed by them, he purposely inverted them for his own artistic and economic benefit. Fully conscious of the crucial importance of constructing a glamorous image of the artist and transforming himself into a saleable commodity in the modern market economy, Fujita frequently appeared in and fully used mass media to cultivate his “exotic” public persona. The strategy employed by Fujita can perhaps be explained as “inverted Orientalism”—in other words, Fujita made full use of his Japanese identity, racially marked body, and the Orientalist fantasies entertained by Westerners in order to ensure his position within European society. The primary reason for Fujita’s success in Paris is often said to be his invention of an original canvas ground. Using special techniques and ingredients that he kept secret throughout his life, Fujita transformed the canvas into a surface that could accommodate water-soluble Japanese pigments.19 His canvas was also distinct for its extremely smooth surface with a nuanced and shiny white color, which later came to be known as “silky white canvas” or “great milk white.” Applying the East Asian pointed brush (mensō fude) and natural pigments to this original ground, Fujita established his signature style: highly erotic female figures or still lifes illustrated with an extremely fine and detailed outline on a smooth surface. His pictures, which did not rely on the combinations and tones of the colors, but on the fine brushstrokes drawn upon the flattened surface of the canvas, were reminiscent of ukiyo-e prints or East Asian ink paintings for the European audience. With his cognizance of the cultural/ethnic implications that his painting materials and techniques provoked, Fujita’s selfportraits of the time almost always illustrated the artist with his pointed brush and other painting materials that originated in Japan or Asia, strongly emphasizing both his national identity and cultural origins (fig. 15).

15

Fujita Tsuguharu. Self-Portrait, 1929. Oil canvas, 61 x 50.2 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Yet Fujita did not simply foreground his “Japanese-ness” to appeal to the European audience. He also maintained an extremely fine blending of his “Japanese” origins with his mastery of “Western” manners, as well as elements of “femininity” and “masculinity” in the construction of his public image. Indeed, his works were not merely celebrated as “Oriental,” but according to Bert Winther-Tamaki, “l’amalgame des deux esthetiques d’Orient et d’Occident.”20 For example, the artist demonstrated his ability and willingness to cook and do needlework, which were not only common subject matter in his paintings, but also (according to the artist) important skills for taking care of his female partners, friends, and models. While these housework or craft skills may have functioned as credentials for his painting techniques (Fujita often argued that the dismissal of craftsmanship in modern art was wrong), such activities could easily have ended up reinforcing the stereotyped image of Asian men as “effeminate,” as could his 30

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occasional appearances in “feminine” or transgender guise.21 While performing as an “exotic” East Asian painting master and delicate Asian male, however, Fujita never forgot to stress his masculinity as both a Japanese person and a modern painter.22 One such embodiment of Japanese masculinity was Fujita’s practice of jūdō, a Japanese martial art that he had trained in since his youth. Fujita later stated that he created several scenes in Paris with his jūdō skills, such as his chastening of rogues, and he was even invited to teach jūdō to French police officers.23 The artist also bluffed that he was dating a café waitress with the money that he had earned from the jūdō lecture that he had presented to French men. In Paris, and after his return to Japan, too, Fujita frequently demonstrated his proficiency in jūdō, emphasizing his physical strength and respect for the traditional values of the Japanese martial spirit, which ensured Fujita the respect of European men and the physical (and economic) prowess to attract European women.24 The foremost element that secured Fujita’s “masculine” position in Europe was his command of portraying the white skin of French women. As Bryson argues and Takamura’s experience demonstrates, the white skin of women may have functioned to ensure, even just temporarily, the masculine status of non-Caucasian men in Bohemian Paris. Fujita’s aforementioned original canvas served not only to recall fine Japanese paper, but also as a metaphor for white European skin; the artist himself proclaimed his painting practice as “giving the canvas the actual feeling and touch of skin.”25 As if to emphasize this erotic allusion to his canvas, Fujita was almost always accompanied by Caucasian women in both his self-portrait paintings and publicized photographs. His primary model and companion was his French wife, Loucie Badoud (1903– ca. 1964), to whom he was married from 1923 to 31.26 Tellingly, Loucie was known as Yuki, meaning “snow” in Japanese, Fujita’s nickname for her that referred to the amazing whiteness of her skin. The presence and “whiteness” of his wife, who served as his model and sexual partner as well as

being equated with his original canvas ground (which could accommodate Japanese painting materials), enabled Fujita to demonstrate himself at once as a modern painter of Paris and as a Japanese man. His silky white canvas, Japanese ink, and the various Caucasian women who always accompanied Fujita both in public and private inform us of the complicated, and therefore undoubtedly attractive, image of the “Japanese” male artist that he skillfully crafted in Paris. Fujita appeared “Asian” or “exotic” (and thus not truly threatening to Caucasian men), but at the same time was unmistakably modern and “masculine.” To be sure, Fujita did not entirely reverse the image of Japan or Japanese men that was widespread at the time through his practices and performances in Paris. Yanagi Ryō (1903–1978), an art critic and friend of Fujita who also spent years in Paris beginning in 1925, remembered his disappointment when he found a French publication introducing Fujita’s success as “entirely feminine.”27 This episode indicates that Fujita, like many other non-Caucasian artists, did not escape completely from the stereotyped image of Japan as a “feminine” nation. Yet Fujita not only fully acknowledged how “Japanese” he appeared to European eyes, but also was skilled in transforming the racial/gender roles assigned to him and the distinctiveness of his nationality into a consumable form of spectacle for his own benefit, taking command of his own image in European society. The transformation of the “white” canvas ground into a medium that fully accepted watersoluble Japanese pigments, moreover, may be considered as “assimilate[ing] whiteness into his own culture sphere” (to borrow Vera Mackie’s words), and not vice versa.28 Fujita’s fame in Paris quickly gained him recognition among the Japanese, who saw his success in association with the growing power of Japan in international society; this linkage would be particularly foregrounded when Fujita resettled in Japan in 1933, a time of significant expansion for the Japanese Empire. After his resettlement, Fujita sought out and was assigned a specific role in Japan’s nationhood, colonial expansion, and negotiation with the 31

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Euro-American imperial powers. Fujita’s reentry into Imperial Japan and his increasing interest in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the 1930s, portended the artist’s more intensive engagement with the military and held significant repercussions for his male figures when Japan embarked upon war under the banner of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

oil and canvas did not comfortably fit into any existing artistic category or country of origin. Some found Fujita’s expression “inauthentic,” others saw clever tactics for cultivating the market in Europe, and others praised his originality for inventing a new painting technique based on Japanese traditions. Similarly, Fujita’s flamboyant behavior and “peculiar” fashion were at once abhorred as a deviation from Japanese manhood and celebrated as the successful absorption of Western modes. Whether condemned or praised, however, Fujita was of particular concern to the Japanese. Given his international status and selective use of images of “Japan,” Fujita seemed to serve as the site where the Japanese attempted to take control of their self-image in the eyes of Westerners, as well as test their mastery or understanding of “superior” Western culture. Fujita consciously responded to the Japanese media craze. In September 1929, he came back to Japan with Loucie for the first time in sixteen years, and stayed until January 1930. Although he never failed to give “lip service” to his nationality by emphasizing his unchanged Japanese identity, Fujita behaved mostly as a “French” painter during this temporary stay. He repeatedly indicated his determination to die in France, and did not hesitate to point out the conservatism of the Japanese art community, which appeared “peculiar” to his “French” eyes. The Japanese press, too, while remaining highly ambivalent about Fujita’s excessive self-Orientalization, was relatively tolerant of his “deviancy” from Japanese social norms. For example, Fujita’s (and especially Loucie’s) love affairs with various women (and men) were often at the forefront of Japanese media attention. While scandalously reported as a transgression of gender norms or moral codes, their affairs were ultimately deemed the stuff of “free livers of Montparnasse, who are quite distant from us.”31 When he returned again to Japan in 1933, however, Fujita’s ambiguous national and gender identities were reformulated to a significant degree. With his fourth wife, Madeleine Lequeux (1906–1936), he traveled through the Americas from October 1931 and eventually reached Japan in November 1933.

fujita’s return to imperial japan Even though Fujita did not return to Japan until 1929, he was a visible celebrity there as well as in Paris. After he sent two works that were highly acclaimed at the Salon d’Automne to the Japanese National Art Salon in 1922, the Japanese media reported tirelessly on such things as his international status, personality, lifestyle, and the women surrounding him. Although Japanese responses to Fujita’s works and performative actions were not always positive, many Japanese were clearly invested in Fujita’s international success, which was not simply accepted as his own personal achievement, but as the nation’s. For example, the artist Nakagawa Kigen (1892–1972) commented in 1922 that “we are proud to send such a fine contender to [the French Salon] from our country.”29 As Nakagawa’s choice of the word “contender” (senshu) clearly indicates, Fujita’s achievement was perceived as the nation’s victory on the stage of international competition. In 1929, the art critic Kawaji Ryūkō (1888–1959) went so far as to say that “[all of Fujita’s pictorial elements] are made with the purpose of rebelling against the traditions of Western painting … based on his Oriental spirit to resist the West, [Fujita] opened new frontiers of Japanese painting.”30 Fujita’s self-Orientalization, both of his persona and his painting, on the other hand, provoked bewilderment among the Japanese public. Many expressed puzzlement upon seeing Fujita’s paintings; their curious blending of certain “Japanese” pictorial elements with the European materials of 32

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On this second return, Fujita was determined to resettle in his home country. He accepted official membership in the Nika Society (founded 1914) in 1934, his first professional affiliation in Japan. He also entered a contract with the Nichidō Gallery (founded 1928) in Tokyo’s Ginza district, one of the few commercial galleries specializing in yōga.32 Soon after Madeleine’s tragic death in 1936, Fujita married Horiuchi Kimiyo (1911–2009), who became his lifelong partner. In the next year the couple moved to a new house and studio, said to be built in a pure “Japanese” style, in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo. Once he decided to resettle in Japan, Fujita dramatically transformed his public persona and artistic identity in tune with the increasingly reactionary political climate of the mid- to late 1930s. This shift was most evident in the artist’s autobiography, “Gaiyū nijūnenki” (Twenty Years of Travel Abroad), serialized in the monthly art journal Chūō bijutsu (Central Art) between 1934 and 35.33 While Fujita had already published his autobiography in 1929, this 1934 version was far more nationalistic and aggressive in tone, strongly stressing his fixed identity as Japanese. For example, he recalled his Paris period thusly:

French art world. In contrast, the 1934 autobiography repeatedly emphasized his Japanese identity as the crucial factor for his success, and his hardships in Europe were equated with those of the Japanese in the course of the nationwide Westernization experienced since the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1934 autobiography, Fujita also stressed his new ambition as a Japanese painter. Referring to his significant effort to bridge the gap between Japan and the countries of South America during his aforementioned travels, Fujita stated, Rapprochement would be achieved most easily through art. Painting is the common language of all nations. I sincerely hope that [more] Japanese artists will advance into foreign countries and introduce Japanese art to the world through their exhibitions. The nation can be strengthened only through the possession of both military and cultural power. The nation should sweep through the world and increase its prestige with art in times of peace, and with the military in times of emergency … I am thinking of departing [abroad again] in the near future.35

In contrast to the 1920s, when Fujita secured his status through the white female body mediated by his “Japanese” identity, now he began seeking a new position in Japan as a cultural ambassador bridging “East” and “West,” stressing both his international success and patriotic spirit. Due (at least in part) to this self-imposed mission and new public role, a dramatic shift in Fujita’s art was seen in the 1930s. The artist devoted himself to illustrating various ethnicities and races of Asia and the Pacific region, which eventually included the “Japanese.” Fujita’s paintings focused first on the peoples of Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, and once he had settled back in Japan, his interests eventually expanded to include China and rural parts of his own country, such as Okinawa, Sado, Niigata, and Akita (figs.  16–18). Simultaneously, his trademark “silky white canvas” gradually disappeared, and his painting came to rely on applications of bright colors, solid modeling, and extremely detailed descriptions of his subjects.

It was only me who persisted there without being infected by the so-called Paris School or Ecole de Paris. As long as I am an Asian and born as Japanese, I cannot be satisfied with Western paintings made by Europeans … Remaining faithful to my initial will, I continued to paint nature as seen through Japanese eyes and understood by a Japanese brain. From the interpretation of objects and method of expression to [painting] techniques, I fought against [Western modes] with my original works, created with my ideas that only I, Japanese, can attain.34

Although his earlier autobiography also contained certain critical commentaries about the racism that he met in Paris, these commentaries were among several anecdotes included to accentuate Fujita’s individual endeavors and endurance in a foreign land, largely premised upon the superiority of the 33

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Fujita Tsuguharu. Llama and Four Women, 1933. Watercolors on paper, 155 x 95 cm. Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Tsu.

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With a viewpoint perhaps best described as “ethnographic” or “Orientalist,” Fujita began to focus exclusively on the deurbanized areas, local customs, artifacts, folk crafts, and festivities of each country or region, which not only became the sources of his painting subjects, but also objects for his personal collection. While ethnic costumes, hairdos, and certain cultural habits were meticulously illustrated, little attention was paid in general to the inner lives of individuals or the specific historical/social conditions in which they lived. Placed on a blank background or “exotic” landscape, these figures appeared rather like specimens of various ethnicities and races.36 Indeed, in a 1935 newspaper article Fujita claimed that the motive behind this practice was the

Fujita Tsuguharu. A Ding-dong Party Bandman and a Maid, 1934. Watercolors on paper, 104 x 83 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama.

creation of “a racial encyclopedia of people around the Pacific” (Taiheiyōjin jinshushū), who might share the same bloodline.37 Once this was completed, the article concluded, Fujita planned to hold an exhibition of his visual mapping of the Pacific races in the “world-class art community” of Paris.38 Fujita’s self-proclaimed role as a cultural ambassador representing the Asia-Pacific region was indeed timely, responding well to the increasing demands made by the Japanese imperialist enterprise. By the mid-1930s, Japan’s international reputation had worsened dramatically due to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the subsequent foundation of Manchukuo (not incidentally, Japan’s declining reputation has been cited as among the 35

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propaganda came together in 1935. The Foreign Ministry sponsored the film Gendai Nihon (Contemporary Japan) in order to introduce various facets of contemporary Japanese society abroad. Fujita, who knew “the world,” was selected to direct the half of the film entitled “Fūzoku Nippon” (Picturesque Japan).41 He seemed absorbed in his directorial debut, showing his confidence by stating, “I lived in foreign countries for a long time, so I fully understand what interests foreigners.”42 In the next several months, Fujita traveled through Japan from Kagoshima in the south to Akita in the north with a significant budget provided by the Foreign Ministry. The parts of the film that Fujita directed, however, provoked a fierce response at the preview, and were severely criticized as a “national embarrassment” (kokujoku). As only a fragment of one portion that he directed, titled “Kodomo Nippon” (Child Japan), survives today, it is impossible to fully discern the reason for this controversy, yet one of the major factors seems to have been Fujita’s excessive “Orientalization” of Japan. In the article “‘Gendai Nihon’ mondai no yushutsubutsu” (The Problematic Export “Contemporary Japan”), appearing in the Asahi newspaper, “Child Japan” was dismissed for its portrayal of “children playing chanbara (sword fighting) … it is intolerable to watch one of the children with ugly make-up … perform ‘seppuku’ (suicide by disembowelment)”; while “Den’en Nippon” (Rural Japan), another part that Fujita directed, was criticized for “introducing strange people from around the area of Kyūshū, which may appear curious to foreigners, but does not even get close to the [real] life of the Japanese peasantry.”43 The deputy minister of the Home Ministry also expressed his disappointment over Fujita’s rendering of Japan by saying, “It would be unbearable if this landscape, which seems like inland Mongolia, is introduced as the face of contemporary Japan.”44 In the end, the Foreign Ministry decided not to release the parts directed by Fujita outside Japan. Similarly, Fujita’s “racial encyclopedia” scarcely received favorable responses from the Japanese

Fujita Tsuguharu. Guests in Itoman, Okinawa, 1938. Oil on canvas, 114.5 x 89.5 cm. Masakichi Hirano Art Foundation, Akita.

reasons why Fujita left Europe).39 These events, which failed to win international approval, ultimately resulted in Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. Given this series of diplomatic malfunctions and the resultant international isolation, the Japanese government acutely recognized the importance of cultural maneuvers as a means of diplomacy and negotiation. This political shift was epitomized by the establishment of several national or quasi-national institutions, such as the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai) in 1934, and the issuance of Nippon (1934–44), a propaganda magazine published in at least six different languages that was produced in collaboration with young, talented designers, photographers, and artists.40 Fujita’s efforts to cultivate his new role in Japan and the increasing demand for the production of 36

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male figure by other official war painters, must be discussed.

public. While his exploration of the new frontier and illustration of people through an “Orientalist” gaze were not necessarily at odds with the Japanese expansion over Asia in the 1930s, the crucial difference in Fujita’s approach from that of the Japanese colonizers or European explorers was the way in which he included his home country after his search for some kind of “exotic” subjects in the AsiaPacific region. Illustrating the “Japanese” without any traces of urbanization, industrialization, or Westernization alongside various “ethnic” peoples of the Pacific, Fujita’s portrayal of Japan appeared to have been made through the lens of colonizer/ Westerner to the Japanese elites. The artist Kimura Shōhachi (1893–1958), for example, criticized Fujita’s painting of geisha along with other works depicting Pacific peoples displayed in the 1934 Nika exhibition as “[painted from] outside” and “ contrary to the artist’s intention, falling into an unfunny caricature [of Japan].”45 In the 1930s, the presentation of Japan to other imperialist nations became the chief concern of both Fujita and the Japanese Empire. In the increasingly worsening diplomatic situation, Fujita had to leave Europe and reenter his home country, while the Japanese government desperately needed to regain control of its own image in international society. The significant attention paid to Fujita, and the huge controversy that he caused in 1930s Japan, attest to the unique role assigned to the artist (or self-imposed) in this specific geopolitical circumstance to produce a sort of mirror in which the Japanese could see their own legitimate portrayal in Westerners’ eyes. Fujita, however, failed to provide the ideal image of Japan as an urban, developed, and “masculine” imperial nation in relation to Asia or the Pacific region. Fujita soon returned to work for the state through the production of campaignrecord paintings, in which he attempted to secure the status of Japanese men again vis-à-vis the “West,” while his viewpoint on Asia remained quite ambiguous. Before exploring Fujita’s campaign-record paintings, however, such paintings and their political significance for yōga artists in the late 1930s, as well as the rendering of the

campaign-record painting as battle for yōga artists As seen in the case of the Foreign Ministry, from the mid-1930s the Japanese government increasingly became proactive in employing and mobilizing cultural figures for the sake of diplomacy and other political ends. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the scope of the government’s propaganda campaign came to include the edification of Japanese citizens, a move often characterized as a shift from “suppressive regulation,” with a focus on eliminating unfavorable thoughts, to “proactive regulation,” placing more importance on the integration of the populace into the state’s mobilization structure.46 While the field of fine art was not necessarily the state’s primary target for such efforts (as discussed in Chapter One), the Military Information Bureau, in order to ensure public support for military campaigns in China, became increasingly active in employing film directors, musicians, novelists, actors/actresses, and artists.47 The production of campaign-record paintings, organized and sponsored by the Military Information Bureau, was one of the most consistent and systematic means of mobilizing artists conducted by a state authority during the Asia-Pacific War. This project was first undertaken by the Information Bureau of Shanghai (Shanhai Jōhōkyoku), a local office of the Army Information Bureau, which recruited ten painters to record military campaigns in China. Artists were sent to Shanghai and nearby areas, where they sketched for six weeks in May and June 1938. By the spring of 1939, these sketches had been turned into formal paintings and were displayed in the First Holy War Art Exhibition (Seisen Bijutsuten) in the Tokyo Prefecture Museum (present-day Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum).48 Although it is not known if the military had planned to employ artists on an ongoing basis, or if it had 37

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value and durability. The military also requested that all campaign-record paintings be around two meters square, an unusually large size for paintings in twentieth-century Japan, and urged artists to study compositions suitable for a large format, focusing especially on multifigure arrangements.53 Although engagement with the war effort became more and more compulsory as the war progressed, more than a few artists did volunteer to produce campaign-record paintings, rather than being forced to do so.54 Kawata Akihisa points out two factors shared by the top-rated official war painters who enthusiastically engaged in this mission. The first was generational: these vigorous participants were mostly painters of middle standing, typically between their early thirties and midforties when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, with the notable exceptions of Fujita and Shimizu Toshi.55 Many of them were the well-educated elites within their artists’ circle, painters who had graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and were affiliated with prestigious art associations. Yet, under the prolonged periods of economic recession that began in the late 1920s, these artists, who were still developing their careers, experienced social and economic instability. For these well-educated mid-career artists, the military’s intervention into the art world was not necessarily ill fated, but appeared to promise a number of advantages that the majority of artists could not attain with the unstable capitalist economy, including official patronage and a nationwide audience, along with a strong sense of mission and engagement with the larger society.56 More important for the present study is the second shared factor: the majority of top-rated official war painters had the experience of studying in Paris prior to their engagement with the military. Kawata points to the surrender of Paris to German forces in June 1940, followed by the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, as the key moments after which “‘true war paintings’… recognizably conveying the meaning of the war” began to emerge.57 He argues that, as one of the catalysts for this shift, the surrender of Paris to Nazi

conceived of the Shanghai campaign only as a special case, the production of official record paintings (later known as campaign-record paintings) became customary from 1938 until Japan’s surrender in 1945, involving more than two hundred artists. The military lacked any sophisticated cultural theories or a well-coordinated aesthetic standard for the production of campaign-record paintings, and this lack is sometimes cited as one of the reasons for the absence of an iconic male figure in Japan equivalent to that of Nazi Germany or other totalitarian nations. The few surviving military documents do inform us, however, of the specific requirements for, and conditions under which, campaign-record paintings were made.49 According to documents that were distributed to the official war painters in 1943 and 44, the military authorities stipulated two particular purposes for the production of campaign-record paintings. One was the visualization of frontline battles in order to educate the general public, in both Japan and colonized areas. The other purpose was to create monuments for the military to inform future generations of its patriotic spirit. In order to fulfill these purposes, the primary requirements for the artists were the “accurate” depiction of the subject matter and a sense of reality in the finished works. The document issued in 1944, for example, specifically and meticulously required artists to depict the landscapes, weather conditions, human figures, and details of weaponry with “documentary realism.”50 For the same reason, abstraction or Surrealism was considered unsuitable for this specific type of work, although the true reason for the exclusion of these modes was probably their perceived subversive artistic and political standing, and their suspected connection with Communism.51 Another element particularly emphasized by the military was “monumentality.” The military planned to donate all of the campaign-record paintings to the imperial family to preserve them for eternity as national treasures.52 They thus required artists to create these records to withstand the passage of time, in terms of both transcendent artistic 38

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Germany required many Japanese painters to become “spiritual[ly] independent” from the home of modern art.58 Immediately after the surrender of Paris, a number of yōga artists presented their own commentaries on the future of Paris and its art. Despite the fact that Paris had served as the artistic home for yōga artists for several decades, only a few lamented the surrender. While some indicated their concern for their friends who remained in the city, and for the condition of art works during the war, many Japanese artists viewed the end of the French domination of modern art as inevitable, and the surrender as an opportunity to challenge the longstanding hegemony of Paris as the mecca of the art world. Miyamoto Saburō, who would be singled out as a master of campaign-record paintings, for example, went to study in Paris in 1938, and had to return to Japan in less than a year due to the outbreak of World War II. Immediately after his return, Miyamoto disclosed his new understanding that Paris was no longer the capital of art. He found that only established masters of modern art, such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954), were maintaining their artistic vigor, and did not recognize the advent of any new movement or talent after them. With such prospects (or the lack thereof), Miyamoto declared, “I have the impression that all of the movements and schools have reached their saturation [point],” and that “the Paris art community will generate nothing new.”59 By the time that Paris surrendered, Japan had already been engaged in all-out war against China nearly for three years. The Japanese government had initially been convinced of a swift victory in what began as a local skirmish, and therefore only when it became clear that Japan could not easily suppress the Chinese resistance did political leaders begin to search for an ideological justification for the war. On November 3, 1939, the Japanese government released an official statement that comprised the first notice to Japanese citizens of the objective of the war as the foundation of a New Order in East Asia (Tōa shinchitsujo). This objective, however, was still not convincing enough to justify

war against another Asian country, or at least not compelling enough, according to Kawata, for yōga painters to fully commit themselves to the production of campaign-record paintings.60 Once Japan embarked upon war against the United States and Britain, however, the conflict was conceived increasingly as that between “East” and “West,” and also was justified in racial terms. The Japanese government, especially after the signing of the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in October 1940, designated its enemy as the “Anglo-Saxons” of America and Britain who had colonized Asia and the rest of the world based on the values of capitalism and individualism; simultaneously, the ongoing battles in China were renamed the Greater East Asian War (Daitōa Sensō). The war was thereby perceived as the battle of all Asians against Western colonialism, and was even propagated as the righteous challenge of “non-white” peoples to centuries-long “white” domination. Such justification of Japan’s imperialist war held massive appeal for many Japanese, including a certain group of artists and cultural elites. It is known today that, with the news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, not a few artists, writers, and intellectuals, even including those who were known for their cosmopolitanism, expressed a deep sense of excitement as well as release. Quite tellingly, one of the artists who most passionately supported Japan’s war against “the Anglo-Saxon imperialists” was Takamura Kōtarō.61 With the outbreak of the Pacific War, Takamura, who had transformed from a devotee of Rodin to an ardent worshipper of the Japanese emperor, eagerly engaged in the war effort, presenting several poems that professed Japan’s divine mission to end the white exploitation of Asia. As mentioned above, Takamura’s experience of Europe in the first decade of the century was ambivalent, as he was forced to see his “Japanese” identity reflected in the eyes of Caucasians, a view that was incompatible with the ideals of manhood and artist-hood that Takamura wished to achieve in Paris. Steve Rabson contends that Takamura’s “intense feelings of alienation and antipathy” that resulted from the racial prejudice 39

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that he had experienced in Europe and the United States almost three decades earlier would have triggered his eager participation in the war effort.62 Referring to Yoshimoto Takaaki’s seminal study on Takamura, Rabson argues that the artist must have “found release from previously ambivalent feelings about [Europe and America]” with his proactive participation in Japan’s war against “places where … he had met with pleasant as well as unpleasant experience.”63 Perhaps it was not so surprising to find Fujita, self-fashioned as the solo Japanese artist battling against Europe as early as the first half of the 1930s, among the many artists who explicitly declared the end of Paris and supported Japan’s war against the “West.” Fujita was, in fact, in Paris right before the city’s surrender; he had suddenly departed Japan for Paris with Kimiyo in April 1939 for unknown reasons.64 In France, Fujita rented an apartment in Montmartre, and worked on female figures, Paris landscapes, and cats, reviving his time-honored “silky white canvas.”65 As with Miyamoto, however, Fujita’s stay was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, and the artist returned to Japan in July 1940. Once back in wartime Japan, Fujita declared, in a number of essays, the end of the French domination of art, and called for the formulation of a new world order. One of these essays proclaimed that the national character of the French, “longing for peace, loving their families, and wishing to live in freedom,” was the major cause of the country’s defeat.66 Having witnessed the decline of Paris in person, Fujita contended that “the complete defeat of France is a good lesson,” with which “I will dash [hopes for] the construction of a peaceful East Asian [alliance].”67 Simultaneously, Fujita cut his long hair—his trademark since his Paris period—into a militaristic crew cut, in order to, in the artist’s words, “throw everything away” in the face of the New Order.68 From this moment on, Fujita began again to effectively use mass media, disseminating his new artistic and national identity as neither a flamboyant Paris returnee nor a cultural missionary for rapprochement, but a patriotic painter fighting a battle

with his brush, together with the soldiers at the front (fig. 19). Under the increasingly oppressive political conditions of the time, the rather theatrical condemnation of Paris and celebration of new Asiatic unity by Fujita (and other artists) should not be taken entirely at face value. Also, any generalization of the official war painters’ individual experiences in Paris is not appropriate. Nonetheless, it seems that a sense of admiration and rivalry, and certain feelings (possibly of inferiority) about their national, racial, and artistic identities vis-à-vis Europe or the “West,” were shared by many Paris returnees. The surrender of Paris, and Japan’s subsequent declaration of war against the “AngloSaxon imperialists,” functioned as a catalyst for these yōga artists, most evidently Fujita, to re-contemplate and reconfigure the existing world order and the hierarchical relationship between art, race, and gender. In this specific geopolitical context and

19

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Photograph of Fujita Tsuguharu published in Shin bijutsu, no. 19 (February 1943).

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aged seventeen to twenty to undergo physical examinations; those found to have problems were required to go through training sessions or medical treatment.70 The government also fostered a series of campaigns and events—including sporting matches, exercise (taisō) gatherings, and outdoor leisure activities—to promote the nation’s health and improve its citizens’ physiques to a level compatible with that of their enemies.71 As an extension of this focus on health and the body, Japanese oil painting was often criticized for its lack of passion, dynamism, and solid “anatomy” (kokkaku). The bodily metaphor of “anatomy” was used here to refer mainly to the technical incompetence of Japanese artists, and especially their lack of academic skill in such areas as solid modeling and compositional tactics. To have solid “anatomy” in Japanese oil painting, however, was not just an artistic matter, but also closely associated with Japanese politics of the body and warfare, similar to the contemporaneous nationwide effort for improving the Japanese (male) physique. Because oil painting was introduced as part of the unequal power relationship between Japan and EuroAmerican nations in the late nineteenth century, mastery of this medium and absorption of its long tradition were a national concern, as evidenced by the Japanese fever for Fujita’s success in the French art community. The creation of a Japanese equivalent to European history painting in particular was considered vital not only because this was the timehonored genre in the European art academies, but also because the absence of classical foundations was considered the biggest obstacle to the full assimilation of European oil painting into Japan. The artist and art historian Suda Kunitarō (1891– 1961) famously described Japanese oil-painting practice as “cut-flower art” (kiribanateki geijutsu), meaning that without a classical foundation, none of the European art forms could take root in Japanese soil.72 Campaign-record painting was perceived by many as the foremost opportunity for yōga painters to construct the foundation or solid “anatomy” of Japanese oil painting, and thereby amend the

situation for art, Japan’s campaign-record painting project (ironically, or perhaps inevitably, modeled after French history painting) became the site where Paris returnees challenged the hegemony of the “West” and claimed their national, racial, gender, and artistic superiority.

representation of the japanese male body A seriously contested issue among the official war painters (as well as the entire Japanese nation at war) was how to come to terms with the perceived physical and, in the field of yōga, artistic superiority of Caucasians. Concerning the former, this problem was certainly not unique to the wartime period in Japan; since the early stages of Westernization in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of attempts had been made to assert the superiority of the Japanese physique within the rather fixed Caucasian-centered racial hierarchy. For example, interracial marriage was eagerly promoted in the late nineteenth century as a way for the entire Japanese nation to become “white.” The early twentieth century saw the emergence of the so-called “Japanese race as white” theory, which held that the bloodline of the Japanese race could be traced back to Greece.69 The perceived physical/racial inferiority of the Japanese, however, became a particularly contested issue during the Asia-Pacific War. Japanese superiority, not only cultural or spiritual but also physical, had to be proved or achieved urgently in order to secure the “human resources” necessary for the war against the Anglo-Saxons. The government endeavored to strengthen the nation’s physique and health for the success of the war effort throughout the 1930s and early 40s. Most significantly, in 1940 two important laws were passed by the Diet that placed the nation’s body and health under stricter regulation than ever before: the National Eugenics Law (Kokumin yūseihō) and the National Physical Strength Law (Kokumin tairyokuhō). The latter, concerning the strengthening of the physique, obligated all men 41

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Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), Miyamoto adopted the language of European academic paintings to celebrate Japanese battles and depict Japanese soldiers (fig. 20).75 In contemplating Japanese soldier figures through the production of campaign-record painting, Miyamoto seemed to maintain both his admiration for and confrontational standing against the long  tradition of European oil painting, and expressed a similar ambivalence toward the strong and “pleasant” physicality of the Caucasians that he  met on the battleground. Miyamoto visited Singapore for the preparation of campaign-record paintings between April and July 1942, where he saw a group of Australian POWs. He closely observed these Australians and reported his strong impressions:

hierarchical relationship between Japan and the “West” in politics as well as art. The art historian Kojima Kikuo, who was not an ardent supporter of the war or of political art, nonetheless found the First Holy War Art Exhibition to be “a meaningful project.”73 An expert on Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) who had studied art history in Europe, Kojima reportedly expected to see Japanese versions of grand-scale paintings of historic battles such as Battle of Poitiers (1830) by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) or Battle of the Amazons (ca. 1615) by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).74 Indeed, well before the military stipulated any specific standards for campaign-record paintings, a number of artists and art critics pointed to the European Old Masters and particularly the French academy painters, such as Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), and Théodore Géricault (1791– 1824), as possible models for the official Japanese   war painters. Given the sense of mission attached to campaign-record painting and the urgent need to present a superior Japanese body, many yōga painters were required to contemplate the “Japanese” “male” body in comparison with the Caucasian body or from the standpoint of European academic standards, probably for the first time. Miyamoto Saburō, Fujita’s younger colleague, was one of the artists who most eagerly engaged with this task. As mentioned briefly above, Miyamoto had gone to Paris in 1938, where he soon experienced the outbreak of World War II. While he dismissed the status of Paris as the capital of modern art, Miyamoto’s short stay in Europe was not in vain. With a self-proclaimed “mania for classicism,” he was deeply inclined toward the so-called European Old Masters, and eagerly attempted to absorb the long tradition of European oil painting by copying the works in the Louvre. He then traveled to England, Spain, Italy, and Greece to visit museums and churches. His study in Europe became the main source and motive for his production of campaign-record paintings. As seen most typically in his first such work, Attack on Nanyuan, Beijing of 1941, which was made with obvious reference to

Their white skin was entirely tanned to the color of red bricks. Also their bodies were well built, so they looked just like red demons. The scene in which these men (with their red-colored, well-built bodies) engaged in an orderly fashion with manual work, with a green jungle or rubber plantation as background, was spectacular, as if I were looking at an old Renaissance masterpiece of nudes …76

While calling them “red demons” (akaoni), Miyamoto accidentally found the ideal bodily form in his enemy’s physique as well built, ordered, and spectacular, a perfect model from the standard of European classical painting. The irresistible attractiveness that Miyamoto found in his enemy’s physique was also revealed in his sketches (fig. 21). Rather than a portrait of a defeated enemy or “red demon,” Miyamoto’s POW proudly displays the muscled physique of his upper torso and casts a strong gaze toward the viewer, an image that likely reflects Miyamoto’s awe and admiration as well as his effort to master the well-built Caucasian body. Adhering to European academic standards, “monumentality,” and the “documentary realism” required by the military, Miyamoto’s solution for compensating for the perceived inferiority of the Japanese physique was to Westernize the Japanese 42

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20 Miyamoto Saburō (1905–1974). Attack on Nanyuan, Beijing, 1941. Oil on canvas, 176.7 x 255 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

body to the maximum possible degree that could still maintain a sense of reality. The best-known work among Miyamoto’s oeuvre (and possibly the whole collection of campaign-record paintings) is The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival, presented in the First Greater East Asian War Art Exhibition (Dai-Ikkai Daitōa Sensō Bijutsuten) in 1942 (fig.  22). This highly praised work received the Second Imperial Art Academy Prize in 1943 and was introduced in the aforementioned military document as an icon of campaignrecord painting. Miyamoto’s The Meeting illustrates the scene of the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942, capturing the famous moment when Lieutenant-General Yamashita Tomoyuki (1885– 1946) asked Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest Percival (1887–1966) of the British Army to accept

the settlement’s capitulation to Japan by answering, “yes” or “no.” This was considered the historical moment of Asia’s victory over Britain, the foremost European imperial nation. Miyamoto illustrated this historic victory of his country through a physical representation of the superiority of the Japanese over the Anglo-Saxons, rather than the symbolic representation chosen by many other Japanese artists. In The Meeting, Miyamoto attempted to reverse the perceived corporeal superiority of Caucasians by foregrounding the well-built physique of Yamashita (who was widely known for his big body; thus the persuasiveness of this choice for the Japanese audience). While the final composition relied largely on a news photograph, Miyamoto’s adjustment of space and placement of each figure 43

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Miyamoto repeatedly referred, not only visually but also verbally, to the weakness of General Percival and the contrasting physique of Yamashita.  For example, Miyamoto found Percival an extremely nervous figure who “constantly blinked, and his face was twitching.”77 Concerning Yamashita, however, the artist stated, We should clear out the old-fashioned perception that foreigners’ bodies are bigger, and have a more sculpturesque physique than Japanese [bodies], so that they  are more suitable for the subject of art … How strong and daunting is the fine figure of General Yamashita at the center of this painting, glaring at the Anglo-Saxon!”78

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Miyamoto reclaimed the superiority of the Japanese body and challenged the hegemony of Caucasians by inverting the stereotyped perception of the physical differences between Asians and AngloSaxons, differences that the artist himself would have been acutely aware of through his experiences in Europe and encounters with his enemies on the battleground. Moreover, the painting reflected the popular perception of the rivalry between Japan and Europe in actual warfare as well as in art. The following comment by the artist Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958) most clearly demonstrates the significance of The Meeting for the Japanese nation and for yōga painters at that time:

Miyamoto Saburō. Captives, 1942. Pencil, crayon, and watercolors on paper, 43.5 x 27.8 cm. Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art, Kanazawa.

into a highly ordered Neo-Classical composition illuminate the contrast between the two groups of military officers with utmost clarity. Yamashita and the other Japanese officers are placed at the center of the painting, in direct opposition to the British army officers closer to the foreground. Yamashita sits up straight and strikes a dignified pose while looking at Percival, who leans forward on the table, avoiding eye contact with his Japanese counterpart. The static and immovable bodies of Yamashita and the other Japanese officers make a stark contrast to those of the British, the latter all showing their backs to the viewer with their faces slightly turned, so that their passive positions and troubled facial expressions at once become visible to the audience.

If we display this painting in Europe after the war, it will destroy the mistaken supposition of the superiority of white people by demonstrating that East Asians defeated the Anglo-Saxons. At the same time, Miyamoto’s painting demonstrates that Japanese oil painting has risen to the same level as European oil painting.79

In its successful integration of European NeoClassical elements for the representation of the surrender of British power, this work by Miyamoto attained emblematic status, signifying Japan’s victory in the artistic, political, racial, and physical senses. 44

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22

Miyamoto Saburō. The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival, 1942. Oil on canvas, 180.7 x 225.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

At the same time that he celebrated Yamashita’s physique, however, Miyamoto also created a seemingly provocative soldier figure that may inform us of the possible dilemma that he and many yōga painters faced in the configuration of Japanese figures in relation to Anglo-Saxons. A year after The Meeting won high acclaim, Miyamoto entered Hunger and Thirst into the Army Art Exhibition (Rikugun Bijutsuten) in 1943 (fig. 23). He made this work not on commission by the military, but for his own aspiration to create a “record painting of the spirit alongside  the official campaign-record paintings.”80

According to the artist, this is a scene from the Battle of Guadalcanal (August 1942–February 1943), a fierce campaign that ended with Japan’s withdrawal after a large number of casualties. The unusual theme of this painting  presumably came out of Miyamoto’s imagination: a heavily injured soldier is startled to find his desperate face in the reflection of a murky pool. While the intention behind this rather horrific image of a Japanese soldier is unknown, like Miyamoto’s other war pictures this may also be a reworking of certain canonical European paintings or subjects, possibly Narcissus (1597–99) or The Head of 45

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Miyamoto Saburō. Hunger and Thirst, 1943. Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo.

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Medua (1598–99) by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571–1610). Despite such a possible source, the figure of the Japanese soldier in Hunger and Thirst is quite compelling, considering that Miyamoto, at the time, was attempting to entitle the Japanese body with an ideal male form in line with European classicism. If, in the figure of General Yamashita, Miyamoto successfully provided the large Japanese audience with an ideal self-image through the constructed physical contrast between the Japanese and the British, then this “record painting of the spirit” seems to demonstrate the dilemma (or even the impossibility) faced by Miyamoto and possibly other official war painters in their attempt to find an ideal Japanese body among the standards of the European painting tradition, aesthetics, and manliness. Miyamoto’s injured soldier figure is surprised by the sight of his own face reflected in a pool of water, and presumably fails to find an ideal selfimage at a site of battle against the Euro-American forces. This soldier figure somewhat recalls the text by Takamura Kōtaro introduced earlier, expressing the shock of the sculptor/poet upon finding “a dark man” in the mirror during his stay in Paris. Rather than demonstrating triumph over the “West” through mastery of authentic European visual language and physicality, Hunger and Thirst seems to unwittingly confess the extreme difficulty of finding the ideal image of the Japanese male within the Caucasian-centered world order, an issue then faced by not only Paris returnees, but also Imperial Japan as a whole. The ambivalence seen in Miyamoto’s Japanese male figures—the superior physicality of Yamashita on the one hand, and the heavily injured anonymous soldier on the other—indeed corresponded well to the actual state of Japanese warfare and the politics of the body at the time. Due to the severe shortage of troops, the Japanese government had to lower the standards for conscription to a significant degree in 1943, and eventually called up those who had initially been exempted from service because of poor health and various physical “deficiencies.” Despite the government’s call for strengthening the Japanese (male)

physique to match that of its enemies, the actual bodies of Japanese soldiers at the front became weaker and more fragile as the war progressed.

fujita’s deathly battle pictures in the last phase of the japanese empire Next to Miyamoto’s The Meeting, the most acclaimed (as well as contested) imagery of Japanese soldiers belonged to Fujita’s so-called “deathly battle pictures.” Fujita was rather inclined toward Romantic artists for their intensive expressions of war, battle, massacre, and disaster, and such works as Delacroix’s Massacre of Chios (1842) and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) have been identified as the main sources of his inspiration. While clearly inspired by these European painters, however, Fujita’s rather horrific images of highly aggressive Japanese soldiers, and abundant illustrations of injured or dead bodies, were not simply an absorption or mastery of such European prototypes, but a more assertive approach to reclaiming the superiority of the Japanese body and art. In 1938, Fujita was already employed by the navy, visiting Shanghai and Jiujiang; he subsequently produced two campaign-record paintings, Attack on Nanchong Airfield (1938–39) and Forcing into Hankou (1938–40). These early campaignrecord paintings by Fujita, brightly colored (unlike his later signature works), were favorably accepted mainly due to his technical competence. Yet after 1940, especially in the last two years of the Pacific War, Fujita displayed and established his particular presence in society through his vigorous engagement with gruesome battle scenes and aggressive Japanese male figures. The first major war painting that Fujita produced after his return from Paris was Battle on the Bank of the Haluha, presented in the Second Holy War Art Exhibition in 1941 (fig. 24). Although the painting was a personal commission of LieutenantGeneral Ogisu Rippei (1884–1949), it was later accepted as a campaign-record painting. Ogisu 47

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24 Fujita Tsuguharu. Battle on the Bank of the Haluha, 1941. Oil on canvas, 140 x 448 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

now), Attu Island Gyokusai, was presented at the National All-Out Battle Art Exhibition (Kokumin Sōryoku Kessen Bijutsuten; fig.  9). In this work, Fujita displayed a far more aggressive image than that of Battle on the Bank of the Haluha, and even included many dead bodies, a sensitive theme for the military. The huge panel features a mass-suicide attack, known as gyokusai (literally, “gem-smashing”), by the Japanese against the American force on Attu Island of the Aleutian chain on May 29, 1943.83 Given the paucity of Japanese survivors, the image was composed largely from Fujita’s imagination. The foreground and middle-ground of the painting are flattened, creating a claustrophobic space of deadly battle, while the background is comprised of a dramatic tidal wave rising from the cold sea. The attack on Attu was led by the officer Yamazaki Yasuyo (1891–1943), who appears near the center of the panel shouting and leading the party with sword in hand. The Japanese soldiers occupying the upper part of the human group are illustrated as quite brutal and violent, some even baring their teeth and attacking American soldiers with their bayonets. In contrast to Miyamoto’s highly ordered group portrait, carefully cultivated in the Neo-Classical manner, Fujita’s Attu appears quite confusing even as a reworking of certain European Romantic paintings. The exhibition reviews of the time indeed indicate that many viewers first found Fujita’s expression of deathly battle quite startling and unusual, and some raised questions about the

commissioned this work on the theme of the Battle of Nomonhan, the military clash between Japanese and Soviet forces in July 1939, in order to commemorate the men under his command who died in the battle. This painting of significant size depicts a group of Japanese soldiers advancing to attack a Soviet tank in a wide panoramic view of grassland. Employing bright pigments and a clearcut composition with a strong sense of threedimensionality, Battle on the Bank of the Haluha is one of the most ordered and vibrantly colored campaign-record paintings created by Fujita, seemingly quite distinct from his later deathly battle paintings. Yet, as Bert Winther-Tamaki argues, this work already displays an important departure from Fujita’s earlier war imagery and may prefigure such later works. Three Japanese soldiers on the right side of the panel have reached the top of the tank, and two stick their bayonets inside. While the enemies remain invisible inside the tank, this is Fujita’s first major war painting in which Japanese soldiers perform the role of the aggressor with such a level of clarity.81 Given the aggressive stance of the Japanese with the invisible Soviet soldiers as victims, Winther-Tamaki contends that, at this stage, Fujita shifted the object of his brush from European female nudes or Asians to the Caucasian male body, a subject rarely portrayed by the artist before the war.82 A year after Miyamoto’s The Meeting, Fujita’s best-known campaign-record painting (then and 48

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close resonance with the contemporary political ideology.86 According to Winther-Tamaki, the deterioration of the body seen in Fujita’s images responded well to the desperate circumstances in which a final battle fought in mainland Japan seemed inevitable, and in which the government officially called for ichioku gyokusai (the shattering of the hundred million like a beautiful jewel), a mass-suicide attack by not only soldiers at the front, but all Japanese nationals.87 In this last phase of the war, when any optimism about Japan’s victory was scarce, the physical expression of a superior Japan and inferior enemy, as seen in Miyamoto’s work, lost its power of persuasiveness. With the government’s call for virtuous self-annihilation rather than shameful surrender, Fujita’s decomposing bodies, Winther-Tamaki argues, would have functioned as an authentic and subliminal expression of the Japanese body politic, which ultimately reached for “a grand transcendence of East/West rivalry.”88 Both Fujita’s personal disposition to see people through the lens of racial stereotypes, and his response to the dominant contemporary call for gyokusai, were surely integral components of his deathly battle pictures. Rather than an unintentional reinforcement of racial stereotypes or a “grand transcendence of East/ West,” however, Fujita’s rendering of soldier figures may indicate his attempt (conscious or not) to confuse and possibly invalidate the Caucasian-centered racial, gender, and artistic hierarchy with a strategy that was not so distant from those he used in 1920s Paris. While Fujita’s deathly battle scenes always embrace at least two groups (presumably “Japanese” and “Caucasians”), the racial markers of the figures are obscured significantly by his application of a dark brown color palette.89 In terms of the depiction of the soldiers’ physicality, too, the differences between Japanese and American or British are not always readily obvious. Although a closer look at each figure does offer certain information about his nationality, and thus distinctiveness is not absent here, the hierarchical relationship revealed through different physiques is wrapped in obscurity with nearly monotone shades of brown. Considering Fujita’s inclination toward the production of a “racial encyclopedia” in the 1930s as

ferociousness of the Japanese soldier figures. The artist Ishii Hakutei, who gave high praise to Miyamoto’s The Meeting, for example, expressed his reservations about Fujita’s Attu: One doubts how useful such paintings can be in drumming up war spirit … The brown tones of these nearly monochromatic scenes of fierce battle present an entanglement, such that it is hard to tell friend from foe … There is a danger that the viewer will sense evil before admiring the loyalty and bravery of the imperial troops … [previously] we exercised discretion by not showing dead bodies, although now the military [says] that a war without dead bodies is unthinkable … But it seems that the medicine has worked to excess and [now] raises the fear of evoking oppressive associations for bereaved families and others.84

As Ishii’s comment here clearly indicates, Fujita’s works appeared to deviate largely from the expectations of contemporary audiences, and possibly of the military as well. Despite being confusing or startling to some viewers, however, Fujita’s paintings were never removed from the exhibition or publication. Rather, Fujita solidified his status as the top-rated official war painter with Attu and a series of deathly battle pictures. The advent of such a brutal portrayal of Japanese soldiers in Fujita’s oeuvre (and the ultimate acceptance of this type of expression) has been variously explained. Kawata argues that this violent rendering of Japanese soldiers may be an unintentional result of Fujita’s disposition, as the artist was accustomed to seeing the “Japanese” through the eyes of Westerners.85 Pointing to the resonance between Fujita’s Japanese soldiers and American propaganda images of the Japanese as “ape-like,” Kawata contends that Fujita’s expression was perhaps the result of such a detached view of “Japanese,” “Asians,” or “Caucasians” according to the racial or national characters constructed under the racist agenda that the artist himself had embraced during his life in Europe. Bert Winther-Tamaki, on the other hand, reads Fujita’s deathly battle paintings in terms of their 49

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distinguishable, and none are individualized or named, much like the corpses located in the extreme foreground. Even for contemporary viewers, who could have made a distinction between friend and foe from their uniforms, weaponry, and other equipment with relative ease, a reading of Fujita’s Attu based on the presumed Japanese/American rivalry remained difficult and obscure, as evidenced by both Ishii’s comment on the painting and Tanaka’s recollection of unease and confusion upon first seeing the work. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Fujita’s pictures have sometimes been conceived as “antiwar,” demonstrating the universal tragedy of war beyond the distinction of enemy and friend. While friends and foes appear indistinguishable at first in the extremely dark images of Attu, however, a closer look reveals that only the Japanese soldiers take roles of active command, while the injured and/or dead are all enemies, or more precisely Caucasians. In his other deathly battle paintings, such as The Yasuda Unit’s Desperate Struggle: The New Guinea Front, the aforementioned Fierce Fighting on Guadalcanal, and Fierce Fighting of Kaoru Paratroops after Landing on the Enemy’s Position, all of which are even darker in their color schemes than Attu, the same pattern is reiterated (fig. 11). On the extremely darkened and nearly unintelligible canvas, the Japanese soldiers are unmistakably in full command of these deadly battles, slashing the bodies of Caucasian soldiers. As is widely known, Fujita always preferred representations of anonymous soldiers engaged in deathly battle scenes. For example, when it was decided that he would be dispatched to Bukit Timah, Singapore, for the production of campaignrecord paintings, the artist expressed his willingness to go to this site of carnage:

well as his known technical virtuosity, he would not have found it too difficult to illustrate the Japanese and Anglo-Saxons with far more recognizable physical characteristics. But instead of stressing the racial/ physical features and their hierarchal relationship, Fujita’s image seems to undermine the distinction between the two groups of enemies. The spatial configuration of the stage on which two groups of men perform a deathly battle also does not offer a clear sense of hierarchy or order. As is most evident in Attu and Fierce Fighting on Guadalcanal, Fujita’s pictures largely ignore the law of perspective and ordered spatial configuration.90 In Attu, the painting consists only of the extreme foreground, embracing a large group of soldiers, with the background of the seascape occupying the  upper third of the image. Due to the lack of a middleground in conjunction with the relatively solid sense of volume with which each soldier’s body is illustrated, the overall impression is of figures compressed into two-dimensional space, their bodies piled up from bottom to top. Guadalcanal, with its horrific thunderbolt in the background, again places the group of soldiers in the staged foreground (fig. 10). As the soldiers are depicted from different viewpoints but in the same relative proportions, their placement with regard to one another is not clearly defined, and all appear as if they are fighting on a steep hill or amidst a huge landslide. Although complex compositions with no apparent focal point do characterize certain European Romantic paintings, Fujita’s battleground seems to challenge the law of perspective per se, one of the foremost inventions of European art often contrasted with the two-dimensionality of Japanese art. The hierarchical relationship between the two groups that Miyamoto so carefully visualized/ reversed through his skilled compositional tactics and adjustment of each figure’s placement was markedly disturbed and flattened in Fujita’s Attu, Guadalcanal, and other deathly battle paintings. While Attu’s Yamazaki, located near the upper center of the canvas, would have been one of the few recognizable figures in the work, the rest of the Japanese and American soldiers are not easily

Bloodless surrender is a truly great and thankful thing for the military, yet for artists it is troublesome. The easy landing and surrender without any passion … is hard to deal with. In this sense, I couldn’t ask for anything better than [the subject] given to me at Bukit Timah, the fiercest battle.91

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Another famous anecdote shows the artist’s inclination toward the action of a fierce, muddy battle: standing next to his painting of Guadalcanal, showing off like a child in front of visitors, Fujita struck the same pose as the soldier illustrated at the center, singlehandedly fighting against three Americans. This episode, and Fujita’s investment in deathly battle scenes, would attest to his probable projection of himself onto the figures of anonymous Japanese soldiers, letting them perform the role of aggressor against Caucasians. Here, any dilemmas or psychological ambivalence that Takamura or Miyamoto expressed about capturing the Japanese male body in relation to the Caucasian seems simply to be absent. For Fujita, who had been using his “Japanese” body and skillfully manipulating his national, racial, and gender identities in order to enter into European society, this narcissistic performance of a Japanese male assault against “white” supremacy was perhaps not entirely a new challenge. While Miyamoto attempted to master the “Western” body and its visual languages in order to prove Japanese superiority, Fujita’s strategy can be considered more aggressive and subversive in its disturbance of the order of European painting and blurring of racial markings. In the 1920s, Fujita transformed a white oil-painting canvas (and white model) into a surface that would accept Japanese pigments and the pointed brush, thereby claiming his position within male-centered, eros-driven Bohemian Paris. In his deathly battle pictures of the 1940s, Fujita assailed, confused, and violated the time-honored European history painting in order to cultivate a new ground where Japanese male artists could not only claim their position, but possibly take aggressive command of the Caucasian male body.

politics of the body in alignment with Japan’s mobilization policy, the important question of whether these representations did, by any means, truly subvert the Western imperialist rulers and their racist agenda still remains. While Fujita produced a significant number of paintings during the war (not limited to his campaign-record paintings), two things are absent in his works, and in the entire collection of campaign-record paintings in general: a variety of races or ethnicities, and women. These omissions are quite conspicuous considering the nature of the Asia-Pacific War as a “race war,” and are equally as telling about the strategies employed by Fujita and other official war painters to reclaim the Japanese male body and its superiority as what has actually been represented. Concerning ethnic variety, what is almost entirely absent from Fujita’s campaign-record paintings, and effectively represented by only a few official war painters, are figures of Asian men as Japan’s allies. Considering that Fujita was so amenable to illustrating non-Caucasians up to around 1939, this absence should not be simply ignored as accidental. While intimate battles between Japanese and American or British soldiers were the dominant themes of a number of paintings by Fujita and his colleagues, such as Attu and The Meeting, no picture illustrated the Japan-Asia relationship with the same level of depth. To be certain, a few campaign-record paintings (and many other visual materials) on the theme of the formulation of a Japan-Asia alliance were produced, especially after Japan’s increasing efforts to fashion itself as the “liberator” of Asia from Western colonialism. Koiso Ryōhei’s Japan-Burma Treaty Signature Ceremony of 1944 is one such example (fig. 25). The painting illustrates a group of Burmese leaders, presumably led by Ba Maw (1893–1977), signing the “independence” treaty of Burma in August 1943. As in Miyamoto’s The Meeting, two groups of men face each other, yet their relationship remains ambiguous and no sense of drama is present. While the costumes of the Burmese clearly differentiate them from the Japanese, who wear Western clothes, it is otherwise hard to distinguish the two groups

in/visibility of the racial and sexual “other” While the male figures portrayed by Fujita, Miyamoto, and other official war painters can be considered as attempts to challenge or disturb the fixed racial hierarchy and claim an alternative 51

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Koiso Ryōhei (1903–1988). Japan-Burma Treaty Signature Ceremony, 1944. Oil on canvas, 191.5 x 254.7 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

by their physicality, gestures, or positioning. The relative equality of the groups in terms of the positions that they occupy in the image and the rendering of their physiques equates well with Japan’s justification of the war as the formulation of an Asian alliance; but despite this equality, the two groups of men give the impression of a somewhat distant relationship rather than a sense of friendship and alliance between them. The passion and intimate engagement that characterize images of the Japan-U.S./British encounter at the front are simply absent here. Although this cool mode of expression is due in part to Koiso’s personal painting style (the artist is known for his icy cold realism inspired by the nineteenth-century Neo-Classical

manner), it is nonetheless accurate to say that only a few images of Asian leaders or soldiers that indicate any passionate engagement with the subjects on the part of the Japanese artists are extant in the collection of campaign-record paintings.92 Similarly, the variety of races represented within the American, British, Australian, and Dutch forces have hardly ever been visualized in campaign-record paintings by Fujita or any other artist. With a few notable exceptions seen in preparatory drawings, Japan’s enemies, rivals, and POWs were exclusively illustrated as Caucasian. Yet racial differences did exist in visible form to Japanese eyes during the war. Unlike the privileged artists who had the experience of studying abroad, for the majority of Japanese, the 52

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propaganda visuals.94 While predominantly focusing on relations between Japan and the United States or Britain (and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Australia), figures of generals, soldiers, and POWs were almost always illustrated as “white,” with pale skin, fair or brown hair, and towering height, and without commentary on the variety of races or possible racism within the enemy troops (figs. 26, 27). The paucity of female figures is another very noticeable feature of campaign-record paintings. Although women of various nationalities and races were prevalent in sketches and other propaganda media, only six out of 153 campaign-record paintings include female figures.95 Because the production of such paintings was organized by the Military Information Bureau in order to promote the military’s campaigns, the dominance of male figures may be considered “natural.” Yet the military called for the entire population of the Japanese Empire to devote themselves equally to the war effort, and many women indeed served at the frontlines. For example, the very presence of “military comfort women” at the front was attested by sketches made by such artists as Yamashita Kikuji (1919–1986), a young painter who was sent there as a private.96

battleground became the first site where they actually encountered Euro-Americans. The text quoted at the beginning of this chapter is the recollection of Kojima Kiyofumi, a Japanese naval officer in the Philippines who surrendered to the Americans. Through his firsthand encounter with American soldiers at a POW camp, Kojima came to understand the gap between the actual appearances of these men and their stereotyped “evil” image, as well as the variety of races included within the American forces. This experience also called into question his own views on Japanese superiority, as Kojima realized that, from the American point of view, he was just one of the “funny-looking guys they’d caught.”93 The racial differences that Kojima appreciated at the front, however, hardly caught the artists’ attention as a worthy subject for their official record paintings. Although it may be argued that the racial homogeneity seen in the depiction of enemies was related to Japan’s criticism of racism within the United States and Britain (one of Japan’s strategies in its aim to formulate a “nonwhite” alliance), this does not entirely justify the complete silence about racial distinctions— so pronounced in Kojima’s eyes—in Japanese

26 Mukai Junkichi. A Scene on April 9, 1942, Bataan Peninsula, 1942. Oil on canvas, 178.5 x 239 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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27

The seeming “naturalness” of the exclusive focus on Japanese as well as Caucasian men was therefore not natural at all, but highly selective and hierarchical. All in all, the production of campaign-record paintings systematically marginalized women, the colonized, and ethnic minorities, both as agents of war and subjects of official record. In other words, this project was populated by those who were privileged within the racial and gender hierarchies of both the Japanese and Euro-American empires. The drama played out mostly between Japanese and Caucasian men, within a highly claustrophobic space where both Japanese soldiers and artists narcissistically performed the roles of aggressors, victors, and violators. While the “white” soldiers were defeated, injured, and murdered by the Japanese, women, Asians, and “non-white” races were simply nonexistent in the climax of this drama. Whether or not this avoidance was purposeful, a serious lack of racial and/or gender awareness, and an embrace of the value of male/Caucasian dominance, characterized campaign-record paintings. One significant exception, however, can be found among the fourteen surviving campaign-record

Tamura Kōnosuke (1903–1986). Bloody Battle, 1943. Oil on canvas. Presumed lost.

paintings by Fujita. Produced at the very end of the Asia-Pacific War, Sacred Soldier to the Rescue features an “Asian” woman—embodying the two absent “others” of Asians and females—as the main character (fig.  28). The work was presented in the Army Art Exhibition of 1944; according to the explanation that appeared in a contemporary art journal, the scene depicts the arrival of the Japanese to the rescue of an Indonesian maid after the escape of the Dutch owners of the luxurious house.97 From the narrative given in this explanation, the theme of the painting seems to match perfectly with Japan’s wartime ideology by visualizing the Western exploitation and consequent Japanese rescue of Asians. Yet, from the standpoint of the dominant political ideology or rhetoric, Rescue is not so easily decipherable. In fact, the work appears quite exceptional among not only Fujita’s oeuvre, but also the entire body of campaign-record paintings and wartime visual culture in many ways. Rather than being based on an actual event, this work likely came entirely out of Fujita’s imagination. Given the abstracted title and the lack of any clear indication of place or time in the image, the setting and narrative remain obscure. Such ambiguity was unusual 54

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Fujita Tsuguharu. Sacred Soldier to the Rescue, 1944. Oil on canvas, 192 x 257 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

for campaign-record paintings, which always were intended to guide the viewer to an unmistakable recognition of the events depicted in association   with the expected role of each nation/ race/gender. More importantly, the ways in which the figure of the Indonesian maid was illustrated and incorporated into the narrative of Japanese rescue do not easily fit into the common iconography or expected roles imposed upon Asian women during the war. As Japan’s war campaign was expanded into Southeast Asia from around 1941, “Southward” (nanpō) art became a new category of Japanese visual propaganda. At the beginning of 1942, four pacification units consisting of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers were organized and sent

to the Malay Peninsula, Java, the Philippines, and Burma, respectively. Also, in the spring of that year, the Army and Navy sent another twenty-eight painters to the frontlines of Southeast Asia for the purpose of creating campaign-record paintings.98 Apart from these military-oriented projects targeting “Southward” subjects, the South Seas Art Association (Nan’yō Bijutsu Kyōkai), established in 1940 by those artists who had been to Micronesia, regularly organized exhibitions on the theme of Micronesia as well as Southeast Asia. Through the efforts of these artists, along with a number of popular media representations and propaganda films and photographs, abundant images of the “Southward” regions were disseminated within mainland Japan and in colonized areas.99 55

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the famous Olympia (1863) by Édouard Manet (1832–1883), which Fujita appropriated on a number of occasions throughout his career. To be certain, neither Fujita nor any of his contemporaries ever referred to Olympia in relation to Rescue. Yet, it does not seem incautious to recall Olympia here, given the presence of the “black” maid accompanied by flowers on the table, the black and white cat at her feet, the reclining “white” nude that appears in the painting hanging on the rear wall at right, and above all, Fujita’s close association with Bohemian Paris. Even if it is not appropriate to consider Rescue as a reworking of Olympia, the provocative recasting of the European painting tradition played out on the stage of Japanese war—a common strategy used by Fujita and other painters for a number of campaign-record paintings—can be observed in this work. Specifically, Japanese men with bayonets (an attribute representing both the brush and phallus) are about to enter a luxurious European (presumably colonial-style) house that contains various art works and items, including the allegorical painting in the first room (the subject of which, as Bert Winther-Tamaki speculates, might be The Rape of Europa), the picture of a reclining nude, and the East Asian bird-and-flower folding screen near the door, together with the cat and the “black” woman waiting for “rescue.”102 As many post-colonial studies have explored (especially concerning Manet’s Olympia), the “black” female has been denied her own presence or has simply been regarded as an accessory to accentuate the “whiteness” and natural centrality of her female counterparts in the European painting tradition.103 In Fujita’s 1921 Nude, which clearly refers to Olympia (and with which the artist firmly established his fame in Paris), Manet’s maid is entirely invisible, dissolved into the black background that the artist employed to emphasize the beauty and whiteness of his nude model and original canvas ground (fig. 13). Once dismissed on the occasion of the artist’s entry into the European visual regime, the maid was reinstated by Fujita in Rescue at a moment when the Japanese Empire claimed to be fighting for the sake of the unity of

Examining works made by the members of the South Seas Art Association and others, Takizawa Kyōji points out that the majority of these images are fantastical illustrations of the ways of life, customs, and landscapes of the “Southward” regions, rarely indicating any trace of war, exploitation, or the presence of Japanese soldiers.100 Certain works clearly demonstrate the influence of the Tahitian women depicted by Paul Gauguin (1848– 1903), featuring half-dressed girls with dark skin who often cast alluring glances at viewers. Campaign-record paintings and other propaganda materials, on the other hand, tend to emphasize a more active presence of “Southward” peoples in specific historical or political contexts. Yet even their iconography is limited to a few subjects: “Asian” women (often together with children) celebrating release from Western rule or helping/ welcoming Japanese soldiers; and “Asian” male leaders, such as Ba Maw and Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), depicted in a dignified fashion as reliable Japanese allies.101 Fujita’s Rescue does not fit into any of these vocabularies of the “Southward” prevalent in the late Imperial Japanese imagination. His Indonesian woman, bound and gagged in an abandoned house, while intended to express the brutality of Western colonial rule, is an extremely unusual subject. Also, the corporeality of Fujita’s maid seems to be quite distinct from that of other imagery featuring Javanese women. While a turbaned Javanese woman with dark skin was not an uncommon figure at that time, Fujita particularly emphasized the skin color, voluptuous body, and stout arms of his maid. Her body is contorted into an unnatural position to clearly reveal her ample breasts to the viewer. Strongly stressing her physicality and sexuality, the expression of Fujita’s “Indonesian” maid arguably appears to resemble the images of “black” female attendants abundant in the long history of European painting. Given the specific ways in which Fujita illustrated the “Indonesian” maid, Rescue may be considered his commentary on the European depiction of “non-white” peoples, possibly referring to 56

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“Asian” woman in Rescue, indicate that both the artist and Imperial Japan made their claims ultimately without stepping beyond the male-dominated and Caucasian-centered imperialist order.

“colored” people. In visualizing the “black” maid as a heroine and assigning Japanese soldiers to the role of savior, Fujita’s Rescue may be interpreted not only as a literal allegory of Japan’s “race war,” but also as the artist’s challenge to the European visual regime and especially its racial and gender politics, which placed both “black” women and “Oriental” men on the periphery. Rescue, however, did not entirely subvert the Caucasian-centered racial, gender, and artistic hierarchies. While issuing his challenge to “white” supremacy, Fujita illustrated the “black” maid faithfully following the stereotype of the “Hottentot”—a voluptuous “black” woman with excessive sexuality, crafted and eagerly consumed in nineteenthcentury European society—rather than questioning the stereotyping imposed upon non-Caucasians and women. As stated by the art critic Imaizumi Atsuo (1902–1984) in his telling comment on this painting, “only Fujita, who knew a black person’s flesh, could paint such a picture,” exposing his own sexual gaze over her body and revealing one of the ways in which the Japanese consumed such an image.104 Given Imaizumi’s comment, Bert Winther-Tamaki argues that, as the Japanese soldier with the bayonet pointing to the Indonesian maid can be seen as an aggressor rather than a divine rescuer, this work thus unintentionally exposes the Japanese exploitation of Asia.105 At the same time, acknowledging Fujita’s probable reference to the European treatment of the “black maid,” Imaizumi’s comment also informs us that the maid’s presence served to secure Fujita’s privileged status as one of the few Japanese artists with the same prerogative as European men. Instead of “white” female skin, Fujita made an invisible “black” maid visible again at a time when his country waged war for the “colored” people. Yet her visibility in Rescue did not recover her agency, but merely reiterated a European stereotype and essentially served to strengthen the masculine identity of Japanese male elites in accordance with the racial politics of imperialist European nations. The paucity of gender, racial, and ethnic variation in campaignrecord paintings, along with Fujita’s treatment of the

conclusion The “ambiguous” Japanese male figures painted by Fujita Tsuguharu and many other official war painters can be considered as the products of the individual experiences of these artists in Europe as well as the specific position that Japan, as a non-Western empire, occupied in the early-twentieth-century political, artistic, and racial/gender hierarchies. While celebrating Paris as their artistic home since the late nineteenth century, many Japanese artists chose to support the Asia-Pacific War and willfully engaged in the production of campaign-record paintings. A number of official war painters, such as Miyamoto Saburō, perceived the war as an opportunity to master the language of European history painting, through which they attempted to reconcile the existing racial/gender/ artistic hierarchy with their “Japanese” identity and racially marked bodies. With a more intimate connection to Paris than perhaps anyone else in Japan, Fujita claimed Japan’s superiority in quite a distinct manner. Rather than mastering European history painting and Westernizing the Japanese body, Fujita attempted to nullify the Caucasian-centered hierarchies per se by flattening the three-dimensional spatial construction of Western works, disorienting the ordered compositions, and obscuring the racial markings of both the “Japanese” and the “Caucasians” under the command of Japanese soldiers, or possibly himself. Much like his creation of an original canvas in the 1920s, Fujita’s deathly battle pictures can be considered his endeavor to transform the very foundation supporting the Western artistic hegemony into a ground on which Japanese artists could take certain control of their own image and claim their equal, if not superior, status to “white” male artists in Paris. 57

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Yet such an endeavor, which occasionally appeared as a provocative transgression of racial, gender, or national boundaries, was conducted mainly within the dichotomized framework of Japan and France, the “East” and “West,” the “white” and the “non-white,” and “man” and “woman,” the exact categories deployed by the Western (as well as Japanese) imperial powers. Fujita’s unsettled stance on, and later silence about, the Asia-Pacific region in the 1930s and 40s may indicate his adherence to these dichotomized and monolithic categories; he almost always articulated and played with his “Japanese” identity vis-à-vis Caucasian masculinity, while his relationship with the Asia-Pacific seems to have remained somewhat ambiguous, despite his deep inclination toward the region in the 1930s. In this sense, Rescue is quite a compelling image among Fujita’s oeuvre, embracing the figure of a “black” woman—a sexual/racial other in both the Western and Japanese imperial nations—in conjunction with the Japanese soldier/artist. While an unusual portrayal within both Japanese wartime visual culture and Fujita’s own works, however, Rescue merely reiterates the stereotyped image of the “black” woman then prevalent in European visual culture, and thereby ends up reinforcing rather than subverting the Western imperialist gaze cast exclusively upon her. In this Caucasian-centered vision, Fujita’s Japanese soldier does not fully perform the role of the heroic rescuer; he establishes no real contact with the maid, only standing in the

doorway at the far left corner of the painting. In fact, art critics expressed their deep dissatisfaction with the figure of the soldier in Rescue. Imaizumi, for example, commented, “It would have been better if the black woman had not been at the center of this image … more attention should be paid to illustrate … the beautiful figure and spirit of the pure Japanese solider.”106 Similarly, another (male) art critic complained, “For the expression of a divine soldier, I want [Fujita to employ] a brighter and younger imperial soldier.”107 In contrast to the solid presence of the “black” maid, the Japanese soldier figure, who was supposed to be the real protagonist in this drama of rescue, appeared rather small, less prominent, off-center, and “dark” to the eyes of Japanese male art critics. This combination of the highly sexualized image of the “black” maid and the “ambiguous” Japanese soldier informs us of the ambivalent position that Fujita, and many other Japanese male cultural elites, occupied in the European-centered visual regime, as well as in the racial, gender, and colonial order of the early twentieth century. In this male- and Caucasiancentered hierarchy, the “Japanese” “man” could not find any salvation or ideal image of himself, but could only repeatedly see the “unfamiliar, dark man” that haunted Takamura, and possibly Fujita, too, for the several decades until the temporary release given by the surrender of Paris and the outbreak of the Pacific War.

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3 Modern Portraiture as the Site of Battle: Yasui Sōtarō’s Male Portraits and the Shirakaba School painters of the twentieth century, was a noticeable example. When his younger colleagues endeavored to work on battle scenes and soldier figures, Yasui’s main painting subject was also male figures, but his were quite distinct from those of his associates and predecessors. From the mid-1930s throughout the Asia-Pacific War, Yasui produced a number of portraits, focusing especially on distinguished men in the fields of politics, business, academics, literature, and the arts (figs.  29–32). Painted in a PostImpressionist and Fauvist-inspired manner, and mainly featuring men in civilian clothes and domestic settings, Yasui’s portraits clearly differed from those produced by the official war painters. This raises the question of what Yasui’s male portraiture, which seems discordant with the image(s) of men pursued in wartime Japan, can inform us about the relationship between war, masculinity, and a group of male artists who did not engage in the production of campaign-record paintings or any of the military’s other art projects. The portraits painted by Yasui from the mid1930s until his death in 1955 were considered then, and are still considered now, the culmination of his art, and pinnacle of modern Japanese portraiture. For example, a 1979 survey book on the modern art of Japan gave the following evaluation of Yasui’s portraiture:

The period of Yasui and Umehara … was the truly prosperous period, unprecedented in the world of Japanese oil painting, likely never to be seen again. —Azuma Tamaki, “Yasui Umehara jidai (1),” 1979

introduction Campaign-record paintings provided Paris returnees with a rare opportunity to challenge the European-centered international art community as well as its gender/racial hierarchy. Through the production of such works, a large number of male artists, many known for their international experience, engaged with the military passionately and by choice. Yet campaign-record paintings, while undoubtedly occupying a hegemonic position, did not entirely dominate the Japanese art scene during the age of militarism and war. A number of artists continued to work on subject matter such as the female form, still-lifes, interior scenes, and landscapes, outside the aegis of the military. Some artists achieved prominent social status without being overshadowed by campaign-record paintings or other military-oriented forms of art. Yasui Sōtarō (1888–1955), one of the most well-established yōga

Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo, 1937, detail of fig. 31.

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30

Yasui Sōtarō (1888–1955). Portrait of Professor Tamamushi, 1934. Oil on canvas, 91 x 72 cm. Tōhoku University Archives, Sendai.

Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Honda Kōtarō, 1936. Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 74 cm. Institute for Materials Research, Tōhoku University, Sendai.

apolitical and even asocial figure, rarely having made substantial comments on his own artistic practice, not to mention political or social matters. Consequently, even in the few studies that touch upon the sociopolitical context of his works, Yasui is not found to have any connection to contemporary politics. The art historian Harada Hikaru, for example, states that, “from 1936, [Yasui] served as a juror for the Choson Art Exhibition and Manchurian Art Exhibition … if we seek his contact with contemporary [politics], this is it.”3 All in all, Yasui is believed (often without any critical examination) to have spent Japan’s age of militarism as a kind of “internal émigré” who quietly concentrated on his own artistic pursuits, thereby safeguarding the last resort of artistic autonomy from the tyranny of militarism. While the above account of Yasui’s wartime standing is not necessarily inaccurate, he was neither disempowered under the shadow of militarism nor

[the artist] pursued the balance of subjectivity and objectivity to its extreme, and thereby represented even the sitter’s personality and character closely and artistically … He preferred to illustrate the sitter in his most relaxed everyday pose, and by doing so, attempted to illuminate the sitter’s signature gesture and the atmosphere of his everyday life.1

As seen in the above account, Yasui’s portraiture is typically praised for the artist’s superb ability to capture the personalities of his sitters beyond their external appearances in their “private” moments. In this type of account, the sociopolitical context in which Yasui’s portraiture was produced and consumed has almost always been overlooked.2 Indeed, Yasui’s portrait paintings—all of which feature men in domestic settings, with no obvious signs of Japanese expansion, militarism, or the war effort—seemingly ignore contemporary political events. The artist, too, is known to have been an 62

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Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo, 1937. Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 76 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

did he remain irrelevant to contemporary politics. In fact, quite the opposite may be true. Throughout his career, Yasui was backed strongly by the group of elite intellectuals and writers known collectively today as the Shirakaba School (Shirakaba-ha). In particular, the art historian Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950), a core member of the group, was behind the production and popularization of Yasui’s paintings. Thanks to the endorsement of Kojima and the Shirakaba School, Yasui and his friend and rival, the painter Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986), achieved significant social status throughout the 1930s and 40s, the decades known today as “the period of Yasui and Umehara” (Yasui Umehara jidai). A few of the honors and titles given to Yasui attest to the unmatched status that the artist achieved at the time: membership in the Imperial Fine Arts Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1935 (reappointed in 1937, when the Academy was reorganized into the Imperial Art Academy); professor in the Western-Style Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; designation as an Imperial

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Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Abe Yoshishige, 1944. Oil on canvas, 111.5 x 71.3 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Artist (Teishitsu gigeiin) in 1944; and, in the postwar period, recipient of the Order of Culture (Bunka kunshō) in 1952. The list of these titles, honors, and awards alone would perhaps be enough to question the generally accepted account of Yasui’s wartime standing as a cloistered artist; it also raises the question of how and for what reasons Yasui, who seemingly pursued a very different set of aesthetics and idea of the male form from that of the military, was elevated into one of the most nationally recognized artists at the height of Japanese militarism. In order to consider these questions, this chapter re-examines Yasui’s practice of male portraiture and its political significance, with a specific focus on Kojima Kikuo and his fellow Shirakaba intellectuals’ involvement with the portraits’ production 63

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yasui’s “atypical” male portraiture in the 1930s and 40s

and reception. As many scholars have already pointed out, from its initial formulation in the 1910s, the Shirakaba School embraced specific types of artists and art works in order to promote its own aesthetic and (as this study proposes) distinctive form of masculinity. This chapter attempts to read the promotion of Yasui’s art, particularly his male portraiture, by Kojima and the Shirakaba group as their strategic means of asserting their power and presence within and beyond the wartime art community. In so doing, the state of the wartime art community—in which the vigorous soldier figures featured in campaign-record paintings sponsored by the military and Yasui’s male portraits in a modernist style promoted by the Shirakaba School may have co-existed equally as hegemonic art/male forms, without entirely excluding each other until the very end of the Asia-Pacific War—will ultimately be illuminated. First, through comparison with the male figures in campaign-record paintings, as well as reference to the contemporary political climate, the characteristics of Yasui’s portraiture will be defined. Kojima’s career is then introduced, and the ways in which the art critic validated the superior value of Yasui’s male portraits (not only in terms of artistic merit, but also in terms of gender) will be examined. Following is a consideration of how the physical or symbolic values that Kojima ascribed to Yasui’s male portraiture were relevant to the contemporary political climate of the 1930s, and how (if at all) they served the Japanese imperialist expansion efforts of that time. Finally, yet another political function attributed to Yasui’s male portraiture by Kojima and the Shirakaba intellectuals in the last phase of the Japanese Empire, with the prospect of Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, will be discussed. In the course of examining the symbolic and physical values that Yasui’s art carried in the 1930s and 40s, this chapter will reveal the political significance embedded in his seemingly “apolitical” male portraiture, and its contribution to the maintenance of the patriarchal order of Imperial Japan, if not to Japan’s war machine per se.4

From the mid-1930s through the Asia-Pacific War, Yasui Sōtarō produced a number of portrait paintings of distinguished social figures. These commissioned works include portraits of Tamamushi Ichirōichi (1868–1942), retired director of the Second Higher School (1934; fig. 29); Honda Kōtarō (1870–1954), an internationally acclaimed scholar in the field of physical metallurgy (1936; fig. 30); Fukai Eigo (1871–1945), former president of the National Bank of Japan and member of the House of Peers (1937; fig. 31); Nagayo Matarō (1878– 1941), a distinguished scholar of pathology and exchancellor of Tokyo Imperial University; Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), a politician and philosopher (1944; fig. 32); and Matsuhara Hisato (b. 1898), an art critic as well as a bureaucrat in the Home Ministry.5 Chiefly commissioned by companies, schools, or institutions for some special occasion (such as the retirement or birthday of the sitter), these paintings, commonly known as commemorative portraits (kinen shōzōga), are canonized today as the best examples of the so-called “Yasui style” (Yasui yōshiki), the culmination of the artist’s career. Yasui was born into a wealthy family that ran a textile shop in Kyoto, and received his initial training in oil painting at the Shōgoin Yōga Kenkyūjo (founded in 1902, and reorganized into the Kansai Art Institute in 1906). Between 1907 and 1915, Yasui studied in France, first at Académie Julian; eventually, however, he distanced himself from the Académie after becoming intrigued by the late-nineteenth-century Paris avant-garde, especially Camille Pissarro (1830– 1903) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). When Yasui returned from Paris, the paintings that he had made in France—characterized by opulent female nudes in fantastical settings, and inspired by Cézannesque color schemes and geometric forms—caused a sensation in Japan (fig. 33). After this noteworthy debut, the artist fell into a long slump, struggling to find an appropriate subject and means of expression within his home 64

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country. The beginning of the 1930s is generally recognized as the time when Yasui finally developed his individual style, mainly through the production of portrait paintings. In order to capture the essence of reality (his lifelong goal, initially inspired by Cézanne), the artist developed a signature style characterized by a thorough observation of his painting subjects, who were then rendered using such formal qualities as bold outlines, the application of bright, opaque colors, strong twodimensionality, and the radical deformation or stylization of forms, inspired by both the East Asian painting tradition and European modernist artists.6 Yasui, who was known for his superb draftsmanship, began with careful observation and sketches of the subjects of his paintings; in the case of portraits, this step sometimes lasted for several months. After this painstaking study, the artist brought his sketches back to the studio, distancing himself from the actual persons or objects, and reconstructed and transferred his impressions onto canvas. This final process involved some formal experimentation, such as the deformation of forms or elimination of unnecessary elements according to the artist’s “creativity” and “intuition.” For example, in one of his early commissioned portrait paintings, Portrait of Professor Tamamushi of 1934, Yasui abandoned mimetic representation, boldly exaggerating the face and body of the sitter. With

Yasui Sōtarō. Bathers, 1914. Oil on canvas, 128 x 193 cm. Ishibashi Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Fukuoka.

this style and painting method, Yasui is now remembered as an artist of “modern realism” and master of the portrait who successfully revealed the true qualities of his subjects by his careful observation and creative intervention. In the broader sociopolitical and cultural context of the 1930s and 40s, however, Yasui’s male portraiture deviated quite sharply from the contemporary standard in terms of style and treatment of the male body. In fact, Portrait of Professor Tamamushi and other male portraits by the artist did not win wide acclaim when first exhibited in the 1930s. The art critic Imaizumi Atsuo, for example, gave the following criticism of Professor Tamamushi and the 1937 Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo: Yasui recently produced well-acclaimed portrait paintings. Yet, I do not think that portraiture is the most suitable genre for his style. For example, in the case of “Portrait of Professor Tamamushi,” the stylization [of the sitter] is emphasized too much, and as a result, [the painting has] lost [the sitter’s] graciousness, contrary to the artist’s intention; in “Portrait of Mr. Fukai,” while [the artist’s urge for over-stylization] is successfully controlled and suppressed, there is still a gap between the impression [that Yasui attempted to represent] and his means of expression. Speaking in the extreme, all of the sitters in his paintings are objectified just as in a still life (seibutsuka).7

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Quite contrary to the evaluation given to Yasui today, Imaizumi found his stylization and deformation of the body to undermine the sitters’ authority and characters. Yasui’s colleague Ishii Hakutei, too, warned that “it is mediocre to suck up to a patron, but it is also problematic if an artist enjoys too much freedom [under the name of] art for art’s sake.”8 These bitter criticisms by a number of (male) critics and artists seem to have arisen from their sense of anxiety toward the objectification of the male body that was a result of Yasui’s treatment of the sitters “just as in a still life.” Before closely considering the sociopolitical context in which Yasui’s male portraits were produced, here it will suffice to confirm that, despite the fame and admiration accorded the artist today, many critics, viewers, sitters, and patrons of the time displayed their reservations, if not antagonism, toward Yasui’s portraits, and questioned whether his style was really appropriate for male portraiture. Yasui’s “free” interpretation of the sitters’ bodies not only invited the consternation of male critics and artists, but also drastically differed from the artistic and political standards newly extolled by the military from the late 1930s. As discussed in the previous chapter, at that time the military increased its presence in the art community, and official war painters developed and promoted a radically different set of artistic standards and code of manliness. Once again, Miyamoto Saburō’s group portrait The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival (1942), arguably the most acclaimed campaign-record painting, serves to epitomize one of these standards (Fig.  22). This painting, inspired by the nineteenth-century NeoClassical style, is characterized by solid modeling, smooth surfaces, and an ordered composition. The overall composition and appearance of each figure relied largely on news photographs, as well as the artist’s sketches at the site. Such seemingly “objective” representations of scenes at the front, rather than artistic interpretation in the studio, were clearly favored by both the military and wartime audiences. Although the military did not provide any sophisticated theoretical underpinnings to

sanction its preference for this rather old-fashioned art form, it claimed that the ultimate value of art should be sought in its ability to document and unmistakably convey a message to the populace. Therefore, in the military’s agenda, obvious traces of personal mediation and interpretation of painting subjects had to be minimized, if not altogether eliminated. Not only did Yasui’s artistic style differ from that of campaign-record paintings, but his rendering of the male body also diverged from those standards. Miyamoto’s group portrait, through the gestures, positions, physical features, and clothing of its subjects, intended to indicate the public role that each figure was supposed to play within the Japanese wartime sociopolitical order. The uniformed, dignified, and well-built body of General Yamashita makes a remarkable contrast to the ambivalent corporeality of the defeated British General Percival, who, showing his back to the viewer, appears thinner and insecure. The hierarchy of the Japanese and the British, as well as among the Japanese men (with General Yamashita located at the center), is articulated with the utmost clarity, and leads the viewer to identify unmistakably with the protagonists. In contrast, Yasui’s works feature a single figure in an abstract or self-contained domestic space. While some figures are equipped with props indicating their social, professional, or economic status, the sitter’s public role, especially within wartime society, is not readily visible. Rather, contemporary politics and war seem to be missing entirely from Yasui’s works. The sitters all wear civilian clothes, and in the case of one of the few commissioned female portrait paintings, Portrait of Mrs. F (1939), the subject is dressed in a luxurious modern costume, as if showing off her wealth and bourgeois lifestyle (fig. 34). This sartorial choice made by Yasui (or possibly his patrons) undermined the social reality that the majority of the populace faced at that time, and may even be considered as a challenge to the wartime social code. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, several austere economic campaigns and measures were promoted in 66

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for military service and factory work, it also effectively functioned to offer visual proof of the people’s consent and contribution to the war effort.10 Yasui’s portraits reflected none of these contemporary strictures, which the majority of the population under the rule of the Japanese Empire could not avoid. Yasui’s female figures demonstrate a wealthy upper-middle-class lifestyle, wearing fancy dresses or colorful kimono (unless they are naked), while male sitters appear as civilians enclosed in their own “private” spaces, their bodily features lacking any clear mark of militancy. How, then, should we account for the abundance of male portraiture in Yasui’s oeuvre that seems at odds with wartime political, social, gender, and artistic standards? To answer this question necessitates an examination of the patrons, supporters, and subjects of Yasui’s portraits: the Shirakaba intellectuals and their associates. As stated previously, the production and popularization of Yasui’s “atypical” portraits of men were in large part coordinated by the Shirakaba circle (and chiefly by Kojima Kikuo), who intended for the paintings to serve their political as well as artistic ends. Before exploring the political significance of Yasui’s male portraiture, Kojima Kikuo’s career, and his evaluation of Yasui’s art, must be examined in order to elucidate the underpinnings behind Kojima’s ardent promotion of Yasui’s work.

Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Mrs. F, 1939. Oil on canvas, 80 x 66 cm. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Tokyo.

order to finance this international conflict on an unprecedented scale. For example, the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement, inaugurated in September 1937 as an attempt to instill a collective ethos into every public and private activity, particularly emphasized the virtue of saving and leading an austere lifestyle from the latter half of 1938. This was followed by the issuance of Regulations on Restricting the Manufacture and Sale of Luxury Goods (Shashihintō seizō hanbai seigen kisoku) in July 1940, together with what is arguably the most famous wartime slogan, “Luxury is the enemy” (Zeitaku wa teki da).9 As the war progressed further, men were encouraged to wear the designated “national costume” (kokumin fuku), and monpe (loose pants for manual work) were promoted for women, while luxury goods and bourgeois tastes became the primary targets of severe criticism as symbols of hikokumin (unpatriotic folk). Therefore, not only did the designated clothing prove efficient

kojima kikuo: art historian, critic, and arts administrator Kojima Kikuo was born in October 1887 as the fifth son of Kojima Masukane, a high-ranking military officer.11 He developed his interest in art from an early age, studying painting with Miyake Kokki (1874–1954), one of the pioneers of watercolor painting in Japan. After graduating in 1909 from Tokyo’s Gakushūin, an extremely prestigious school for children of the imperial family, aristocrats, and well-established former samurai families, Kojima entered the Department of Philosophy 67

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study art history and aesthetics with such prominent art historians as Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) and Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929), but also further developed friendships with some of his Shirakaba associates who were traveling around Europe.14 Kojima’s European reunion with Marquis Hosokawa Moritatsu (1883–1970), a Shirakaba associate and one of the major art collectors of twentieth-century Japan, in particular largely determined the course of his career, and later opened a path for his involvement with arts administration. Hosokawa Moritatsu was the fourth son of the prestigious Hosokawa family, a samurai clan whose lineage traced back to the eighth century. In 1914, he became the head of the family when his older brother died, automatically receiving the title of Marquis and membership in the House of Peers. When Hosokawa was traveling through Europe in 1926, he happened to encounter Kojima at the Louvre in Paris, and their friendship quickly developed.15 With advice from Kojima, Hosokawa purchased some works in Paris including Cézanne’s The Road (1867), marking the beginning of the lifelong collaboration between the two men in collecting art and promoting artists.16 After returning to Japan in 1926, Kojima taught European art history and aesthetics at Tōhoku Imperial University in northern Japan; he moved to Tokyo in 1937, and was appointed professor at Tokyo Imperial University in 1941.17 Kojima’s area of expertise was Renaissance art, but from the early 1930s he became increasingly active as a yōga critic, and also began commenting on the state of contemporary Japanese art. Together with his Shirakaba colleagues, Kojima forged connections with a certain group of Japanese artists, especially members of the Pure Light Society (Seikō-kai; 1933–54). Organized by Shirakaba member Gotō Shintarō (1894–1954), the society was practically run by the Shirakaba group, and embraced its favorite artists: the yōga artists Umehara, Yasui, and Sakamoto Hanjirō (1882–1969); the Nihonga artists Kobayashi Kokei (1883–1957), Yasuda Yukihiko (1884–1978), and Tsuchida Bakusen (1887–1936); and the sculptors Satō Chōzan (1888–1963) and Takamura

at Tokyo Imperial University and began studying art history and aesthetics. He also made his presence as an artist known by entering his works into the Nika Society’s annual art exhibition. One of the key factors that determined the course of Kojima’s career and life-long friendship with Yasui was his involvement with the issuance of Shirakaba (White Birch; 1910–23), an extremely influential art and literature journal organized by Gakushūin alumni. These alumni included individuals who would become prominent writers and scholars, such as Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885– 1976), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–1961), and Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961); they soon came to be recognized collectively as the Shirakaba School. As discussed in Chapter One, these young intellectuals resisted the fervent patriotism of their fathers, instead advocating the cultivation of the self through art and literature as the ultimate goal of their lives as well as of society. In so doing, the Shirakaba intellectuals embraced the romantic notion of the artist and “genius” as the ideal embodiment of selfhood, worshipping European artists such as Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Cézanne, and, in the case of Kojima, Leonardo da Vinci.12 Until the termination of the journal in 1923, one hundred sixty issues of Shirakaba were published, featuring novels, poems, essays, exhibition reviews, and art works by the founding editors and their friends, as well as photographic reproductions of European (and later, Asian) art works. The Shirakaba group’s deep interest in art also led them to establish intimate connections with such Japanese artists of their generation as Kishida Ryūsei, Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927), Umehara, and Yasui. These artists began to emerge in the 1910s as a new force rebelling against the national art institutions (much like the Shirakaba intellectuals’ resistance against their fathers) and embracing the styles of European avant-garde art, many of which were introduced through the Shirakaba journal.13 Between 1921 and 26, Kojima studied in Germany, where he not only had the opportunity to 68

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Kōtarō.18 The strong ties and friendships that developed between these artists and the Shirakaba intellectuals are well known, and are apparent not only in the activities of the Pure Light Society, but also in the issuance of new journals and joint organization of a number of exhibitions, various cultural gatherings, excursions, and roundtable discussions during the next several decades.19 Among the artists in the Pure Light Society, Kojima found Yasui to be most promising. Although Kojima had already acknowledged Yasui as early as the 1910s, in 1930 he found “a new style that had never existed either in the West or Japan” in Yasui’s Portrait of a Lady, displayed at the Nika Society’s annual art exhibition, and became an ardent supporter of the artist (fig. 35).20 Presumably seeing huge potential in this work, Kojima arranged more commissions for Yasui and thereby cultivated the artist’s production of portraits. Portrait of Professor

35

Tamamushi and Portrait of Chin-Jung, both displayed at the Nika Society’s annual art exhibition in 1934, are examples of such commissions. The latter, which pictures Hosokawa’s acquaintance Odagiri Mineko (1903–1973), was commissioned by Hosokawa on Kojima’s recommendation (fig.  36). Through this commission, Hosokawa, who had initially been interested only in Nihonga and older Asian art, fully acknowledged Yasui and became one of his major patrons. Professor Tamamushi was one of two portraits commissioned by the Second Higher School on the occasion of Tamamushi’s retirement from the position of school director. The Second Higher School was located in the same region as Tōhoku Imperial University, where Kojima was a professor at that time. Kojima and his colleague Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966) are thought to have served as negotiators between the artist and the school for these commemorative portraits.21

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Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of a Lady, 1930. Oil on canvas, 115.2 x 87.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Chin-Jung, 1934. Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 74.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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While rigorously promoting and supporting Yasui, Kojima became acutely aware of the problematic state of Japanese art after his return from Europe, and eventually got involved with arts administration. Kojima’s standing both within and outside the art world at that time was quite complicated, but his foremost adversaries were the jurors and professors at the national art institutions, positions still occupied by the colleagues and students of Kuroda Seiki. Kuroda was responsible for transplanting several modes of pedagogy and fine-art exhibition from the French Academy to Japan in the late nineteenth century; the Shirakaba group’s favorite artists, including Yasui, established their initial identities as young avant-gardes in contrast to these modes.22 While Kojima found Kuroda himself to be a great artist, he was deeply concerned about the conventions followed in the selection of works for the government exhibitions, and the fact that the appointment of art-school professors seemed to be biased by, and based on, personal connections rather than artistic merit. As early as 1933, Kojima condemned the government’s exhibitions as venues where “only condescending prodigal sons asserted themselves,” and claimed that “the art school will distance itself from art unless some radical reform, such as employing someone like Mr. Yasui Sōtarō, takes place.”23 But Kojima confronted more than his predecessor’s lingering legacy in the national art institutions in the 1930s. He also found himself at odds with the art forms and groups that had developed since the mid-1920s, ranging from Social Realism, Surrealism, and abstraction to war painting. While the Shirakaba intellectuals initially defined themselves as rebels against the Meiji establishment, and Kojima continued to be critical of the national art institutions, with the advent of more socially engaged artist-intellectuals who became increasingly active after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Shirakaba School and the artists that it supported were largely regarded as a conservative faction by the beginning of the 1930s. For those artists and art critics who developed their artistic and political sensibilities under the heavy influence of

Dadaism, anarchism, and Marxism, the privileged family backgrounds, optimistic utopianism, and aloofness from the social reality of the time exhibited by the Shirakaba intellectuals embodied the outdated aristocratic values that must be overcome. For the military, too, the Shirakaba group’s privileged social status and assertion of individualism were incompatible with its political goals, which required equal sacrifice from every citizen beyond birth, class, and individual capacity for the sake of Japanese territorial expansion and the war effort. Witnessing the increasing presence of more socially conscious and politically charged forms of art and artists on the one hand, and the persistent legacy of his predecessors in the national art institutions on the other, Kojima seemed to recognize the need to re-assert the superiority of the Shirakaba School’s aesthetics, and became deeply involved with arts administration from the 1930s to the early 40s. The so-called Matsuda Reorganization (Matsuda kaiso) may have been a direct catalyst for Kojima’s entry into this field. In 1935, Matsuda Genji (1875–1936), the Minister of Education at that time, undertook a large-scale reorganization of the government’s art exhibitions. In an event known as a “coup d’état by the Minister of Education,” Matsuda announced the nullification of the mukansa privilege (which allowed award winners from previous years to display works without going through the screening process) without notifying the majority of artists who regularly participated in these exhibitions. He also made new appointments to the Imperial Fine Arts Academy, the supreme consultative organ of arts administration and the major managing body for the government’s annual juried art exhibition. Matsuda, an amateur in arts administration, was known as an ultranationalist who sympathized with the patriotic insistence on the spiritual value of Nihonga as expressed by the artist Yokoyama Taikan. Yokoyama remained loyal to his mentor, Okakura Tenshin (1863–1913), when the latter was expelled from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1898, and was active only outside official government patronage, much like the members of the Pure Light Society. Presumably encouraged 70

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by the rise of nationalist sentiment and the urge for social reformation that was widespread in the mid-1930s, Matsuda instituted his reorganization mainly in order to invite Yokoyama to the academy.24 While many artists and critics condemned Matsuda’s “reform” as a measure based on his favoritism and as a political assault on artistic autonomy, Kojima displayed his wholehearted agreement with the Matsuda Reorganization. The reorganization indeed worked in the favor of Kojima and the Shirakaba School: newly appointed members of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy included Yasui, Umehara, and other artists of the Pure Light Society, and Hosokawa was one of the first and most important patrons of the reorganized Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) led by Yokoyama Taikan. Given the strong resistance from the artists who lost their privileges, together with Matsuda’s sudden death in February 1936, however, this attempt at “reform” ended in failure, and all of Matsuda’s plans were nullified except for the appointment of Yokoyama, Yasui, and Umehara to the academy. Seeing the failure of the Matsuda Reorganization, Kojima strongly condemned the Ministry as “more careless than ever imagined,” and advocated the employment of experienced personnel in the organization of the academy and crafting of other art-related policies.25 Given the failure of the Matsuda Reorganization, which coincided with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Kojima seemed to decide to work more actively in arts administration. Rather than calling for the need for reform as an art critic outside the national institutions, he associated himself with a few government-oriented art projects beginning in the late 1930s, mainly through his connection with Hosokawa, who had held a number of important posts in the Ministry of Education and had become one of the most powerful cultural bureaucrats by this time.26 Kojima visited Germany as a member of a Japanese cultural mission in 1938, and joined the Research Group for Promoting Art (Bijutsu Shinkō Chōsakai) chaired by Hosokawa in 1940. This group was established as an advisory

committee of the Ministry of Education, and was expected to become the central organ for crafting art policy. Although the Research Group was shortlived, its members, which included a number of intellectuals and cultural bureaucrats, agreed on the need for several reforms to the existing art institutions.27 Such agreement is now known to have been the stepping-stone for the so-called art-school reform (bikō kaikaku) of 1944, in which Kojima, in collaboration with Hosokawa, successfully managed to replace all of the professors with Yasui, Umehara, and other artists in the Pure Light Society.

kojima’s evaluation of yasui’s portraiture The political and artistic positions taken by Kojima (and by extension, Yasui) in the 1930s and early 40s were therefore far more complex than previously presumed. Finding both the new factions that supported politically charged art and the conventional national art institutions problematic, Kojima attempted to assume a position through which he could assert political power over the entire art community. At precisely this moment, he ardently promoted Yasui’s works, especially his male portraits. Given Kojima’s close collaboration with the artist and complicated political stance, Yasui’s male portraiture and its value should be considered within the political complexity of the yōga community as well as the broader sociopolitical conditions of 1930s Japan. While the details of the commissioning and production of Yasui’s paintings (especially during the Asia-Pacific War) are not fully available today, a close investigation of Kojima’s evaluation of Yasui’s male portraits—an evaluation that set the tone for the high acclaim given to the artist at that time as well as at present—will inform us about Kojima’s strategy and provide clues for considering what kinds of values, both artistic and political, Kojima ascribed to Yasui’s male figures that helped them to attain public recognition and nationwide repute. 71

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As mentioned previously, Yasui’s portraits did not immediately win wide public acclaim when first exhibited in the 1930s. Rather, many questioned the appropriateness of his style for the purpose of portraiture. A number of (male) viewers found that Yasui’s portraits treated elite, privileged men such as Professor Tamamushi like objects in a still life; while credible as an artistic experiment, such treatment was thought to undermine the authority of the sitter, and therefore the paintings failed to fulfill their public role as commemorative portraits. Indeed, the director of the Second Higher School was not convinced at first by Yasui’s portrayal of his predecessor, fearing that the representation would be perceived as a derisive caricature. After reading Kojima’s favorable comments on Portrait of Professor Tamamushi (when the painting was shown in the Nika Society’s annual exhibition) in a major newspaper, however, the director elected to place Yasui’s work on display.28 In addition, younger generations of artists, who had been baptized into Marxism or had come from relatively humble family backgrounds, were equally critical of Yasui’s art. For example, Fukuzawa Ichirō (1898–1992), the leader of the Surrealist movement in Japan, which became extremely active from the beginning of the 1930s, commented that Yasui’s exhibits at the Pure Light Society in 1937 displayed “rich men’s taste,” provoking “antipathy among the poor.”29 Kojima persistently defended Yasui’s portraiture against the criticisms that dismissed his style as inappropriate, or characterized it as a “rich man’s” leisurely pursuit, in his numerous exhibition reviews and essays written throughout the 1930s. Kojima claimed that Yasui’s portraits displayed a new stage of realism, as the artist successfully mirrored not only the external appearances, but also the interior lives of his sitters. For example, he heaped the following praise upon Professor Tamamushi and Chin-Jung:

unprecedented. They herald the arrival of contemporary portrait painting in Japan. The originality of these works is worth being presented to the world outside Japan. I dare say they are canonical works of modern realism … The facial expression of Mr. Tamamushi, as well as the depiction of his fist and posture, captures the essence of the subject’s dignified character.30

Kojima’s theoretical rationale in support of Yasui’s portraiture was his conception of “neo-realism” (atarashiki riarizumu), which Kojima began to formulate around 1934.31 The art historian Mikiko Hirayama contends that Kojima, inspired in part by contemporary German philosophy, sought a middle path between academic realism and modernist formal experimentation, as well as a path between Western naturalism and Eastern idealism.32 This may also have been a reaction against the evolving mode of avantgarde art, and later, military-oriented art. “Neorealism,” which Kojima felt should be the basis for all art forms, could be achieved only through an extremely fine balance of an artist’s subjective input and objective description, and thereby would enable the artist to express his subjective vision in a form transmittable to the rest of society. Yasui’s works, which involved careful study and deformation of his painting subjects, abstracted colors and forms, and yet never entirely departed from a representational manner of expression, embodied for Kojima a concrete means through which “neo-realism” could be achieved. Based on this conception, Kojima relentlessly criticized other forms of art, especially those gaining prominence within the art community in the 1930s. Regarding conventional academicism, Social Realism, and later, campaign-record painting, he claimed that these modes adhered too much to mimetic representation without the artists’ creative intervention, while he found Surrealism and abstraction, both extremely popular among the younger generation of artists, far too distant from external reality.33 As a result of losing the fine balance between artistic subjectivity and external objectivity, Kojima asserted, these art forms failed to capture the true essence of their subjects in a transmittable form, unlike Yasui’s portraiture.

The artistic efforts of Mr. Yasui, who has presented two wonderful portraits here, are remarkable. By these, one can only imagine how much the Japanese painting world owes to Mr. Yasui. Truly, these portraits are

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Kojima’s criticism of academy painters was particularly severe. For example, he inexorably disparaged the art of Ihara Usaburō (1894–1976), an assistant professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts who also served as an official war painter during the Asia-Pacific War. In 1937, Ihara and Yasui were both commissioned by the National Bank of Japan to produce portraits of Fukai Eigo, on the occasion of his retirement from the position of chairman. Ihara’s portrait of Fukai, which faithfully follows the conventions of commemorative portraiture, illustrates the sitter in formal wear and a static pose, with a blank and subtly shaded space as its background (fig.  37). Fukai has been captured with a sense of mimetic realism, displaying his solid bodily presence through Ihara’s careful depictions of such small details as his hairline and pronounced veins. Revealed at the government’s annual exhibition of the same year, Ihara’s portrait was dismissed entirely by Kojima:

I had heard from various people that Mr. Ihara’s portrait was unprecedented in terms of its vividness, and his solid and sophisticated technique was truly praiseworthy … Yet I thought that such a [great] portrait could not be made by the painter. And what I saw was what I had expected. Mr. Fukai’s portrait is a typical commercial portrait. [Ihara’s] banal, flappy brush [work indicates that the artist] has no drawing skills, and the finished work is rather stiff. Mr. Fukai appears just like a wax doll in Madame Tussauds … Mr. Ihara has to develop his artistic sense.34

Here, Ihara’s work was condemned for its mere verisimilitude and lack of artistry. In particular, the likeness of the sitter, which Ihara attempted to capture with utmost care in this work, was disregarded completely as a superficial copy of reality without substance, just like “a wax doll.” Kojima’s evaluation of Yasui’s Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo, displayed in the annual Issui Society (Issui-kai) art exhibition of 1937, marks a clear contrast to (or almost inversion of) his withering assessment of Ihara’s work. Kojima found Yasui’s Fukai Eigo “even more superior than the Portrait of Professor Tamamushi or Chin-Jung,” and gave it the following accolades: Portrait of Mr. Fukai is Yasui’s masterpiece. Not only is it the masterpiece of Yasui’s career, but it also represents the pinnacle of recent yōga in many respects … The first prerequisite of portraiture is its resemblance to the model. A portrait that does not look like [the sitter] is not portraiture. Resemblance here, however, does not mean a mechanical copy of the superficial appearance … Unless [the image] captures the soul of the model, it cannot be a true, realistic depiction … This is not an easy task, even for such an excellent artist as Yasui … [as a result of Yasui’s painstaking effort, Portrait of Mr. Fukai gives us] the impression of actually facing the grandpa, who possesses both sharpness and human spirit, relaxing and chatting with someone in the bright Westernstyle room. It is truly a lively portrait.35

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Ihara Usaburō (1894–1976). Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo, 1937. Oil on canvas. Photograph published in Nittenshi 13: Shinbunten hen 1, 56.

In contrast to some other art critics, who perceived Yasui’s artistic interpretation as mitigating the 73

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sitter’s authority, Kojima characterized Yasui’s work as “truly a lively portrait,” produced out of the artist’s significant effort to grapple with the sitter’s “soul.” By emphasizing the value of Yasui’s portraiture as an expression of the sitters’ interior selves, personalities, and true essences beyond the surfaces of their bodies, both the artist’s creativity and the sitters’ authority were not only safeguarded, but also celebrated as equally essential components for creating a great piece of art. While Kojima’s defense and theoretical backing of Yasui’s work have been studied relatively well, what is almost entirely dismissed today is the phallocentric undertone that lies beneath his seemingly universalistic emphasis on “interiority,” “personality,” and “creativity.” Although Kojima never articulated it, Yasui’s technical competence, accurate observation, and artistry in achieving “neo-realism” would not have been enough to entirely reverse the negative evaluation initially given to his works, or to achieve Kojima’s political goals. It had to be male portraiture, not female portraits or any other painting subjects, at which Yasui was most thoroughly accomplished, whether or not Kojima was conscious of this fact. This point becomes at least partially evident when Kojima’s evaluations of Yasui’s portraits of male and female sitters are compared. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Yasui produced a number of paintings featuring female forms, including a few commissioned portraits such as Portrait of Mrs. F, Portrait of Chin-Jung, and Portrait of a Girl (1937; fig.  38). The art historian Ikeda Shinobu points out that Kojima used a different set of standards in assessing Yasui’s portraiture according to the sitter’s gender. To articulate this point, Ikeda quotes Kojima’s comment on Portrait of Chin-Jung:

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Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of a Girl, 1937. Oil on canvas, 61.5 x 51.9 cm. The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai. from her lap. Perhaps, he could have made her thighs look a bit more plump …36

Rather than the representation of the sitter’s personality, which Kojima perceived as the most important element in portraiture, the art critic here only focused on her bodily features and sexuality. As noted above, the subject of this portrait is not anonymous, but Odagiri Mineko, Hosokawa’s acquaintance. Scrutinizing each individual body part, however, Kojima only paid attention to how masterfully or badly Yasui rendered her physique. Odagiri’s distinctive facial features and the sense of individuality that Yasui seemed to attempt to capture here, on the other hand, merely provoked Kojima’s repulsion, as evidenced by the deprecating tone of his expression “her nasty gaze,” and his equation of her facial features with the line of a crotch depicted in one of Yasui’s nudes. These criteria were not only applied to this specific portrait of Odagiri. Kojima (along with many other male critics of the time) rarely paid attention to the

In Portrait of Chin-Jung … see how masterfully he has rendered her nasty gaze. The line of her nose reminds me of the line he used to draw the crotch of a female nude he exhibited last year. Look at the ease with which he painted her sensuous arms, the posture of her upper body that tilts up to the right, and drapery that hangs

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expression of the sitters’ personalities or interior lives in the case of Yasui’s female portrait paintings. Only certain body parts, such as “her black hair and pink cheeks,” the “bunchy line of her fingers,” “her sensuous arms,” “her thighs,” and “her nasty gaze” were of concern to them, while aspects of the sitter’s personality, such as a “dignified character,” “the soul,” or the “human spirit” were tropes used exclusively for male portraiture.37 The official titles given to these female portraits also functioned to undermine the sitters’ individuality. Chin-Jung was Odagiri’s Chinese nickname; by employing this sobriquet, the painting may have gained a somewhat “exotic” or alluring tone, while the subject’s “true” identity was largely abstracted. Similarly, the sitter for Portrait of a Girl was Nakabe Natsuko, and for Mrs. F, the essayist Fukushima Keiko (1900–1983). These works were commissioned respectively by Natsuko’s father, Nakabe Kenkichi (1896–1977), a wealthy entrepreneur; and Keiko’s husband, Fukushima Shigetarō (1895– 1960), an art dealer and critic. Although all of these female sitters were thus clearly specific, known individuals, abstracted titles were chosen nonetheless for their portraits, which was never the case with Yasui’s male portraits. Whether the titles were given by Yasui, Kojima, or the male patrons of the works is unknown, but it is clear that the expression of women’s individuality was not the primary concern of these men, even in the practice of commissioned portraits of named women. The evaluation and practice of Yasui’s male/ female portraiture inform us that the notion and expression of interiority was conceived as exclusive to the male domain, while the materiality of the body was clearly marked with the traits of femininity/inferiority. By emphasizing the expression of interior character as the essential nature of Yasui’s works, Kojima asserted the appropriateness of Yasui’s style for male portraits, thereby stressing the superiority of his works over other forms of art not only for their artistic merit, but also in gendered terms. In other words, Yasui’s paintings, featuring a civilian man in a domestic setting and a halfabstracted form, and Kojima’s celebration of these

figures as true, integrated men, may have functioned to assert the existence of a type of art form and its “masculine” value very different from that represented by Ihara or Miyamoto through their uniformed, physically fit, and well-disciplined male bodies. Yasui’s works thus may be considered a challenge to the mode of expression and masculinity dominant in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and military art projects. It should not be forgotten, however, that the value of Yasui’s portraiture as sanctioned by Kojima never went beyond (and, in fact, strengthened) conventional gender norms and the patriarchal order. Moreover, these portraits were in fact celebrated, rather than dismissed or hidden, in the increasingly militarized society of 1930s Japan. To further articulate how Yasui’s male forms operated within the specific sociopolitical context of the 1930s, a decade known for Japan’s expansionism and militarization, the public image of Yasui and his art must be examined. By analyzing how Kojima’s evaluation shaped the image of Yasui and its popular reception in relation to the contemporary nationalistic discourse, the intimate link between Yasui’s seemingly “apolitical” practice, his male forms, and the increasingly reactionary political climate of the decade will be revealed.

yasui as an artist of male portraits Although it is difficult to discern to what extent Kojima’s theory was accepted at that time, it is at least clear that his evaluation contributed significantly to the popularization of Yasui and his art. While the artist had consistently received public attention since early in his career, Yasui truly enjoyed high visibility in the mass media and eventually attained nationwide recognition in the 1930s, when he was increasingly envisioned as an artist suited to making portraits of men. Tellingly, the artist’s persona as publicized alongside his paintings was similar to his male portraits, in which masculinity was manifested not by physical strength or 75

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sexual prowess, but by deep inwardness and a dignified personality. Moreover, in this age of ultranationalism, Yasui, together with his friend and rival Umehara Ryūzaburō, came to be recognized as an artist with a “Japanese” quality or the foremost practitioner of the so-called “Japanization of yōga” (yōga no Nihonka), which also resonated with Kojima’s claims about the artist. The public image of Yasui and his art can be investigated through the January 1937 special issue of the art journal Mizue. The entire issue was devoted to Yasui, and carried several commentaries by art critics as well as his fellow artists and students on not only his art, but also his private life and personality. With six color and forty-eight black-and-white photo reproductions of his works, this issue was undoubtedly the most substantial publication on the artist produced to that date. Among the numerous comments on Yasui, the art critic Sawa Hajime (1901–1971) described the artist’s personality as follows:

popularized by the Shirakaba intellectuals in the first decade of the twentieth century), Yasui’s character here seems to be intertwined specifically with the “masculine” traits associated with interior nature, which Kojima asserted as the important quality of his male portraits. While endowed with such attributes as “intelligence,” “clarity,” and “reason,” Yasui was imagined at the same time as a rather old-fashioned Japanese painter who maintained traditional values. As mentioned above, Yasui was often regarded as a key artist involved in the “Japanization of yōga,” a trend prominent among yōga painters in the 1930s characterized by the purposeful incorporation of certain visual elements from premodern Japanese sources into oils and a modernist visual language. While this trend was promoted mainly by a younger generation of artists, particularly members of the Independent Art Association (Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai) founded in 1930, Yasui has been included in this artistic movement (or considered a forerunner to it) due to his painstaking efforts to capture “Japanese” subjects in oils after his return from Paris, and his highly stylized forms with their strong emphasis on two-dimensionality.39 In addition to his works, Yasui himself was increasingly conceived as a truly “Japanese” person. The art critic Araki Sueo (b. 1894), who contributed to the same special issue of Mizue, devoted much space to describing Yasui’s lifestyle, personality, and painting. Araki characterized Yasui and his art as “simple, concise, and above all, modern taste in the good sense,” similar to Sawa’s comments. Yet Araki went on to state that Yasui’s “modern taste” was achieved through his disposition as a Japanese person, or more precisely as a native of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, where Yasui was born and received his initial training in oil painting. The critic portrayed Yasui as a true Kyoto type in the following words:

As everyone knows, Mr. Yasui is a man of reason. It is by no means coincidental that his career began from his inclination toward realism. He loves order and clarity. He uses his unique deformation in order to express the volume, quality, movement, contrast of light and shadow, and bright modern color tones of objects. His modern sense and intelligence shine through in his works. You should not seek in his works a flood of romantic emotions. Because he loves the light and clarity endorsed by intelligence … He loves peace and tranquility. No matter how much his art forms demonstrate radical experimentation, and [no matter how much] we admit the tremendous internal depth embedded in his artistic spirit, [his art maintains] a certain distance from the anxiety and so-called zeitgeist generated by the coming year and its unrest.38

This passage, similar to Kojima’s endorsement of Yasui’s male portraiture, includes a number of tropes celebrating the artist’s interior character, such as “order,” “intelligence,” “reason,” “clarity,” and “internal depth.” While it was not at all uncommon to perceive art works as a reflection of the artist’s personality (a concept that indeed was

Yasui is the most Kyoto-type person (among other artists from Kyoto). Starting with his appearance, his pleasant baby face, slight, tall body, and gentle manner all indicate that he is a typical Kyoto person. He is a graceful

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materials, as well as essays by Kojima, Mushanokōji, Umehara, and Imaizumi were included in this publication. In all of the photographs of him in this picture book, Yasui appears in a dark, simple kimono, which was quite common for the artist from a family of Kyoto textile merchants, but fairly unusual for the majority of yōga painters at that time, most of whom adopted Western clothing (fig.  39). While almost all of the photographs show a close-up of Yasui working on a canvas or making a sketch, one photo captures the kimono-clad artist in his studio, looking up toward the viewer from near the center of the room (fig.  40). The artist is surrounded by easels, canvases, tables, paintbrushes, and other materials, neatly organized and carefully arranged, all strongly emphasizing the order and cleanliness of his studio. As the caption for the image states, “here is no trace of incomplete works or sketches, all of which would have been organized on shelves somewhere else. [His studio is] clean and neat but not cold-looking …”42 The painting materials and the architectural components, such as the window frame and wooden floors, together form layers of several geometric shapes surrounding the artist. Such an arrangement functions partly to recall Yasui’s portrait paintings, in which the combination of modernist formal elements with a human figure was intended to indicate the personality of the sitter, in this case Yasui himself. Furthermore, this studio was designed by the architect Yamaguchi Bunzō (1902–1978), who was known for the synthesis of traditional Japanese architectural components and modernist design. While stressing the sense of order, cleanliness, and modernity found in the kimono-clad artist’s “Japanese” studio, the book features one photograph of the artist making a sketch of a female model in a garden (fig. 41). This is the only photograph that shows the artist outside his studio, accompanied by another person. The figures of artist and model, captured from a distance, are slightly out of focus under the bright sunshine, yielding a romantic and dreamlike mood that is rather exceptional in this picture book. Also, the text that

and sophisticated person who carries with him to some extent the mood of a humble virgin maiden … He is an intellective type … not overtly passionate, but calm and rational … His personality, way of life, and works are quiet, peaceful, and harmonious, just like the Kyoto landscape. If I put it this way, Yasui may seem terribly Oriental, but since he is such a wise and sensible figure, wakon yōsai (Japanese spirit and Western learning) is his theme. He surely is not a stubborn worshipper of Eastern spiritualism, but Western culturalism is nicely blended [in him] without any contradiction.40

Here, Yasui was given highly ambivalent characteristics, embracing both feminine and masculine qualities (an “intellective” man with “the mood of a humble virgin maiden”) as well as aspects of the traditional and modern, and Oriental and Western. These seemingly contradictory elements were justified by Yasui’s embodiment of wakon yōsai, which ultimately enabled the artist to embrace Western modernity within his Japanese body, without sacrificing one for the other. While Kojima hardly ever stressed any Japanese elements either in Yasui’s art or his personality, his evaluation of Yasui’s portrait paintings as an extremely fine blend of objective representation and subjective input, or as “a new style that had never existed either in the West or Japan,” resounded in part with the all-embracing character of the artist celebrated by Araki and many others at the time. The Janus-faced image of Yasui as modern, ordered, and Western, as well as traditional, oldfashioned, and unmistakably “Japanese,” can also be seen in photographs of the artist taken in that period. In May 1940, Yasui had a solo exhibition of his portrait paintings at Tokyo’s Sanmaidō Gallery. To accompany the exhibition, the art journal Zōkei geijutsu (Plastic Art) published a special issue on Yasui and his portraits, which was reprinted as the luxurious Yasui Sōtarō shōzōga gashū (Picture Book of Yasui Sōtarō’s Portrait Paintings), published in 1942.41 Photo reproductions of Yasui’s thirty-two portrait paintings, together with eight photographs (credited to renowned photographer Domon Ken, 1909–1990) of the artist, his studio, and painting 77

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accompanies this photograph mentions that Yasui forgot to remove the price tag from the parasol held by the model. While meant to provoke a smile, the text uses this small episode to inform the reader about the unexpected heedlessness of the artist, who was otherwise always polite and attentive, in front of the female model. Treating the female model and outdoor scene as possible elements of disarray, this photo and the accompanying text mark a clear contrast to the rigid and geometric representation of the artist’s studio, strongly emphasizing the latter as an orderly, self-contained, “masculine” space. To investigate such images of Yasui and his practice of portraiture within the contemporary (especially political) context of the 1930s, it would be useful to refer to Umehara Ryūzaburō, another favorite artist of the Shirakaba group often paired with Yasui.43 The lives and careers of Yasui and Umehara, both born in Kyoto in 1888, indeed intersected in curious ways. Both artists received their initial training in oil painting at the Shōgoin Yōga Kenkyūjo, where they acknowledged each other and

Domon Ken (1909–1990). Photograph of Yasui Sōtarō published in Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1940).

became lifelong friends. Umehara studied in Paris between 1908 and 1913, overlapping with Yasui’s time in the city, and both men first studied at Académie Julian. But rather than learning the academic painting methods and styles taught there, the young Umehara quickly found Renoir as his ideal artist, while Yasui found Cézanne. After their return to Japan, Umehara’s painting style in the 1930s was counted as another superb example of “Japanized” yōga, alongside Yasui’s. In contrast to Yasui’s carefully designed portraits, however, Umehara’s signature style was characterized by Japanese landscapes or highly erotic female figures rendered in dynamic compositions, unfettered brushstrokes, and a bright color palette, said to be inspired by various Japanese sources including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century folding screens, works of the eighteenth-century Rinpa School, early ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and Japanese literati painting. To further this contrast, Umehara was famous for his daring and cheerful disposition and his well-built physique, while Yasui, with his modest, quiet personality, was known for his relatively poor health. 78

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40 Domon Ken. “Yasui Sōtarō in His Studio.” Photograph published in Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1940).

Given the similar course of their careers, and their seemingly contrasting personalities and artistic dispositions, Yasui and Umehara were frequently discussed together and compared with each other. In considering Yasui’s male portraits in his 1938 article, Imaizumi Atsuo described Umehara as “Dionysian,” and Yasui as “Apollonian.”44 In the theory by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to which Imaizumi referred, “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” indicate two opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum and male stereotypes embodied by two Greek gods, Dionysus and Apollo; a perfect balance of the two would constitute the highest form of art. While the former generally embraced

“feminine” and subversive elements, the latter was conceived of as a straightforward and positive type of masculinity and aesthetics. Following these Nietzschean stereotypes, Imaizumi characterized Umehara and his art as emotional, sensual, and carnal, while Yasui was perceived as rational, no-nonsense, and intellectual. This view of the two artists seemed to be shared widely by other art critics and audiences. Drawing a parallel with Cézanne and Renoir, the art critic Yanagi Ryō similarly contended that Yasui and Umehara represented intelligence and sensitivity, spirituality and corporeality, balance and movement, and form and coloring, respectively.45 Yanagi went so far as to say that Yasui 79

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mainland Japan, especially by the Shirakaba intellectuals and their associates, and that today are counted as the culmination of the artist’s career (figs. 42, 43). The literary historian Nishihara Daisuke, focusing on Umehara’s rendering of the Forbidden City, points to the colonialist tone unmistakably embedded within these cityscapes.46 Occupying a room on the fifth floor of the Beijing Hotel, the most luxurious hotel in the center of the city, Umehara always illustrated the Forbidden City from the oblique angle of a bird’s-eye view in his signature style of bright colors and brisk brushstrokes. By comparison with images of the Forbidden City painted by such Taiwanese artists as Kuo Po-chuan (1901– 1974), Nishihara argues that Umehara’s Forbidden City is presented as fragmented clusters of vivid orange-red, scattered in disarray on the green carpet of the forested city. The sense of order and control so crucial to the perfectly symmetrical design of the Forbidden City, which is clearly visible in Kuo Po-chuan’s renderings, is significantly mitigated in Umehara’s works. In other words, the symbol of Chinese authority has been transformed into a mere part of the visual spectacle through Umehara’s “Japanese” aesthetics, thereby becoming something more easily consumable for the Japanese audience. Here, Nishihara finds complicity between Japanese imperialist desires and Umehara’s works, both of which attempted to “emasculate” the unyielding power of Chinese authority in order to integrate it into the Japanese Empire and its visual regime.47 If Umehara’s “Dionysian” paintings, which were in accord with Japanese imperialist desires, offered images of a subverted or chaotic China, Yasui’s “Apollonian” works (and presence) may have functioned as a straightforward representation of Japanese manhood and superiority. Imagined as ordered, rational, intellectual, and undoubtedly Japanese and modern at once, the male type embodied by Yasui and his seemingly “apolitical” art provided a contrasting image to the China that Umehara portrayed. The image of Yasui popularized at that time indeed resonates with a certain nationalistic discourse of the 1930s (one of many

Domon Ken. “Yasui Sōtarō and Female Model in Garden.” Photograph published in Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1940).

and Umehara together embodied the trajectory of the entire yōga community since the early twentieth century, as these two artists embraced all of the currencies and elements of modern European painting. Although he never engaged with the military, and in fact was openly critical of the military’s intervention into art, the intimate connection between Umehara’s “Dionysian” paintings and Japan’s imperialist enterprises has been widely acknowledged today. While Yasui was working mostly in mainland Japan (largely due to his poor health during the war), Umehara visited Beijing, which enthralled him, five times between 1939 and 43, until the intensification of the war prevented him from traveling to Asia. Displaying great passion, Umehara produced a number of Beijing cityscapes and paintings on the theme of Chinese women that were highly acclaimed in 80

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sanctioning Japanese “uniqueness” and superiority) that associated the austerity, simplicity, and sense of order observed in certain premodern Japanese cultural forms with modernist aesthetics and Western modernity. The most explicit examples of such cultural forms would be the Ise Shrine in present-day Mie Prefecture (originally constructed 7th century) and Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto (ca. 17th century), the updated value of which was “rediscovered” through the course of the 1930s.48 These structures were highly praised by such modernist architects as Bruno Taut (1880–1938), who visited Japan in 1933. Taut found the ordered, simple, and geometric design components that govern the two structures

Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986). Forbidden City, 1940. Oil and mineral pigment on canvas, 114.5 x 89 cm. EiseiBunko Museum, Tokyo.

as both quintessentially Japanese and authentic according to modernist aesthetics. Taut’s account was immensely influential in Japan, appealing strongly to nationalistic sentiment. The perceived synthesis of Japanese tradition and Western modernity, endorsed by the European modernist, functioned as a means through which the Japanese could assert their superiority vis-à-vis the rest of Asia without fully accepting their indebtedness to the West. This conception provided a powerful discourse for justifying Japan’s imperial expansion and Greater East Asian War. The architectural historian Jonathan M. Reynolds notes, for example, that Taut’s advocacy made a profound impact on such philosophers as Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) in 81

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Imaizumi and Yanagi indicate, Yasui and Umehara came to embody contrasting and yet mutually constitutive “Japanese” masculinities and aesthetics. Umehara offered a site for the displacement of Japanese fear and projection of imperialist desires to conquer China, while Yasui embodied the Japanese male’s “unique” capacity to embrace both East and West. The pairing of the two thus would have served effectively to enact a sense of Japanese superiority and masculine subjectivity vis-à-vis both China and the West in the age of Japan’s expansion and later full-fledged war against the imperialist Euro-American nations. The significant popularity of the two artists in the 1930s, a decade that is still recognized as “the period of Yasui and Umehara,” can be attributed not only to their artistic talents, but to their close affinity with contemporary nationalistic discourses and gender norms.

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Yasui’s portraiture, however, did not serve all “Japanese” “men” on equal terms, nor was its political function limited to the support of Japan’s imperialist expansion through the reinforcement of the nationalistic discourse. It was Kojima and the Shirakaba intellectuals who embraced both Yasui and Umehara throughout the 1930s and 40s as a core part of their group, and thereby would have benefitted most from their works, popularity, and recognition. As discussed above, Kojima and his fellow intellectuals not only served as friends and ardent supporters of Yasui’s art, but attempted to assert their presence in the art community and power in the national art institutions, in which Yasui’s male portraits and their “masculine” value played a crucial role. Especially toward the end of the Asia-Pacific War, when Japan’s defeat appeared inevitable, the practice of Yasui’s male portraiture seemed to gain new symbolic and physical values that specifically served the Shirakaba circle and its political ends.

Umehara Ryūzaburō. Chinese Girl and Tulip, 1942. Oil on canvas, 73.1 x 40.1 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

their determination of the superiority of Japanese culture during the Asia-Pacific War, by defining the special ability to transcend the duality of East and West as something uniquely “Japanese.”49 Yasui’s art and personality, as celebrated by Kojima and other art critics, can be read within these nationalistic discourses of Japan’s modernity that proliferated through the 1930s. Yet, rather than serving holistically for all “Japanese,” Yasui’s artistic practice was clearly gendered. As the essays by 82

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Together with the aforementioned study by Nishihara, Ikeda Shinobu has written a critical text on Umehara’s art in relation to the Shirakaba School during the Asia-Pacific War.50 Focusing on Umehara’s paintings of Chinese women, a theme as important for the artist as the Forbidden City during the war, Ikeda draws our attention to the specific ways in which Umehara rendered his painting subjects. Ikeda argues that, unlike the typical Orientalist template imposed on other “Asians” that was prevalent in the military’s propaganda visuals, Umehara’s Chinese women are characterized by their strong gazes, robust arms, and big hands, and therefore “show a subtle presence that cannot be easily violated.”51 In order to consider this seemingly contradictory image of women in a country colonized by Japan, created by an imperial male painter, Ikeda addresses the need to specify the chief audience for Umehara’s works, rather than assuming that all Japanese men throughout the war enjoyed the artist’s female images in the same way. Ikeda contends that Umehara’s alluring and yet somewhat defiant Chinese women were intended primarily for such elite Japanese men as the Shirakaba intellectuals, specifically pointing to their ambivalent political position during the war: they were highly privileged within the hierarchy of the Japanese Empire and society, and yet they endorsed aesthetics and political sensibilities that were somewhat incompatible with those of the military. Characterizing Umehara’s frequent trips to China as an elite Japanese man’s escape from the increasingly homogenized/militarized Japanese society, Ikeda argues that Umehara’s Chinese women, who were enthralling and yet resisted being subsumed into the template of submissive Asian females, were products created by and for elite Japanese intellectuals in order to allow them to enact their imperial masculinity outside the spectrum of the military’s propaganda visuals and their conceptions of gender, ethnicity, and nation. Ikeda’s highly compelling argument leads to the question: if Umehara’s Chinese women served as a site upon which the members of the Shirakaba

group could both project their desire for China and express their rather unfocused urge for resistance against Japanese militarism, then how did Yasui and his male portraiture, which was imagined as the embodiment of the superb capabilities of Japanese men in the 1930s, serve Kojima and the Shirakaba circle in the last phase of the Japanese Empire? To answer this question, it is necessary to look more closely into the complex political standpoint of the Shirakaba intellectuals during the Asia-Pacific War. The Shirakaba members’ attitudes to the war varied to a significant degree. The core members (such as Mushanokōji, as well as the associated artist Takamura Kōtarō) supported the Great East Asian War ardently, largely due to the racism that they had experienced in Europe and their belief in Japan’s self-righteous justification of the war as a means to unify Asia. Kojima, Umehara, and others, on the other hand, while they never directly criticized Japan’s war per se, indicated their unease with regard to contemporary politics. Kojima, in particular, from time to time criticized military-oriented cultural policies with relative frankness as bringing “no benefits, but only harm [to the development of Japanese art].”52 Despite such disagreements on their positions on Japan’s full-fledged war effort, the Shirakaba intellectuals nonetheless seemed to maintain their strong belief in art and culture throughout the war. Especially after Japan’s objective for the unification of Asia proved unfeasible, and once the country’s defeat was assured, they found an urgent need (or opportunity) to overturn the existing political order both within and outside the art community by reasserting the value of cultured men over militant masculinity. Many of the Shirakaba intellectuals should have anticipated Japan’s defeat at a relatively early stage of the war due to their privileged family backgrounds and strong connections to several wartime political leaders, such as Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), who served as Prime Minister twice and formed three cabinets during the Asia-Pacific War.53 The political standing of the Shirakaba intellectuals in the last phase of the war is also evidenced by the informal group called the 83

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Three Year Society (Sannenkai) that formed around January 1945, led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigemitsu Mamoru (1887–1957). This group held gatherings organized for the purpose of “saving … and reconstructing Japan from the confusion of defeat … [by establishing] a stable backbone.”54 Several intellectuals and philosophers, including Shiga Naoya, Mushanokōji, Abe Yoshishige, Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), and Tanikawa Tetsuzō (1895–1989), participated in the Three Year Society; the latter three were Kojima’s classmates at Tokyo Imperial University, and were closely associated with the Shirakaba group through their appreciation of art and East Asian aesthetics.55 Although the Three Year Society is said to have achieved nothing concrete, the very presence of such a society and the participation of many Shirakaba members and associates, at the very least, suggest that those likeminded, elite intellectuals had prepared for the postwar reconstruction of Japan under the name of peace, culture, and art, even before the surrender. Yasui’s male portraiture seemed to play a key role in this highly complex political landscape of late imperial Japan. A certain postwar episode may shed light on the concrete ways in which the Shirakaba group deployed Yasui’s portraits and their “masculine” or symbolic values for their political purposes. Around 1950, the novelist Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957) negotiated the commissioning of his portrait with Yasui. In the end, however, this commission went unrealized, because Shiga Naoya, an acclaimed novelist and key member of the Shirakaba group (and possibly one of the organizers of the Three Year Society), was strongly against accepting it. While multiple reasons for Shiga’s disapproval may have existed, one was Tokutomi’s close collaboration with the military during the war: Tokutomi was the flag-bearer among writers for their participation in the war effort, and during the Occupation was named a Class A War Criminal. Shiga sent a lengthy letter to Yasui to persuade him to decline the commission. The literary scholar Ichihara Toyota (1902–1990) quoted the following portion of Shiga’s letter:

T [Tokutomi] bears a great deal of responsibility for the war. He was always on the radio making incendiary statements and sent many young people to their deaths. He’s been arrested for war crimes … I may be being overtly suspicious, but it seems to me that if T could be portrayed by Yasui, then he would be able to pretend to have support, even now, from leading men of culture …56

Shiga’s letter and this episode, though they occurred in the postwar period and thus may not be completely applicable to the prewar and wartime periods, provide insight into a number of the social, cultural, and political factors that surrounded the practice of Yasui’s portrait painting in relation to the Shirakaba School. Clearly, not only Kojima, but also many other Shirakaba intellectuals could assert significant power over the production of Yasui’s portraits, and particularly the selection of sitters. These men seemed to have a strong sense of territoriality over Yasui’s art, and treated it as if it were the common property of the Shirakaba circle. Also, being portrayed by Yasui clearly held value beyond the artistic merit of the work produced. A portrait by the artist functioned as cultural capital, a symbolic certificate signifying the sitter as one of the “leading men of culture.” The episode detailed above indicates that the Shirakaba intellectuals were fully aware of the cultural capital that Yasui’s portraits carried, and used it strategically for their political ends. Yasui’s portraiture here functioned as an effective means through which the Shirakaba School defined its allies and foes by drawing a clear line between “leading men of culture” and militarists, and demonstrated (as well as strengthened) the boundaries around the former. This episode, and the Shirakaba group’s political stance during the war, at least partly, explain the absence of any trace of militarism, or portraits of military personnel, from Yasui’s oeuvre. The roster of those who were selected, or allowed to be portrayed, is equally informative. The art historian Satō Yukari points out that Yasui’s subjects included Kojima’s classmates at the First Higher School (Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō) and Tokyo Imperial 84

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is seated at far right, presumably in the position of kamiza (the place of honor, usually at the back of the room, in front of the tokonoma alcove). The photo clearly indicates the hierarchical relationship between Yokoyama and the rest of the artists. Rather than merely an object of the artists’ gaze, Yokoyama appears as a figure of authority, displaying a dignified presence with his back straight, while all of the other artists have their heads down as they concentrate on their sketches, indicating their respect for their portrait subject. Far from showing an enjoyable artists’ gathering, the photo displays a tense atmosphere in which each artist is seriously engaged in portraying the most established painter of the age. Yasui indeed recalled these gatherings as being rather tiring, stating that Yokoyama had “a troublesome face” to paint, and suggesting that these events were not a pleasurable personal pursuit, but a social obligation and public affair (fig.  45).59 While nerve-wracking and draining, the gathering as pictured in the photo also seems to represent an intimate, enclosed, and highly privileged space that only the male artists chosen by Kojima and Hosokawa were allowed to enter, and where they thereby would develop a sense of companionship through their creativity, artistic skills, and respect for the sitter. Indeed, Yokoyama later recollected that, although he had known Yasui for a long time, it was through these gatherings that he came to fully acknowledge the younger artist.60 For the formation of an alliance of “leading men of culture,” no one but Yasui, who was known for his superb ability to illuminate the interior lives of Japanese men, could have been more suitable. A number of other male sitters also recalled their experience of being models for Yasui. These recollections not only confirm Yasui’s public image as rational, orderly, and intelligent, but also vividly inform us of the highly intense and intimate engagement made between the artist and the sitter for the sake of art-making, and possibly more. Abe Yoshishige, for example, who posed for Yasui sixty times between February and the summer of 1944, recalled his experience as follows:

University (Tokyo Teikoku Diagaku), prestigious academic institutions from which many politicians and business leaders hailed. Several of these men occupied important posts within the government or official institutions during and after the Asia-Pacific War, including Abe Yoshishige, who served as the Minister of Education between January and May 1946. By pointing to the existence of a politically strong group of intellectual men behind Yasui’s art, Satō explains the ways in which the artist’s uncontested fame was established; but perhaps the reverse is also true: the practice of Yasui’s portraiture functioned to define and formulate the bond and alliance between these elite men.57 One concrete example demonstrates how Kojima Kikuo, in collaboration with Hosokawa Moritatsu, used the practice of portraiture as a means of defining or reinforcing the bonds between likeminded men. Between November 1941 and July 1943, Kojima organized a series of gatherings by the name of the Twenty-fifth Day Society (Nijūgo Nichi-kai). These gatherings took place at the expensive restaurant Shinkiraku in Tokyo on the twenty-fifth of the month, and were held at least eight times; their main purpose was the production of a portrait of Yokoyama Taikan. The invited artists were Yasui, Umehara, Yasuda Yukihiko, and Kobayashi Kokei, and Kojima also participated in the gatherings both as an organizer and a painter. At the time, Yokoyama was not only one of the most established Nihonga painters of the day, but also was undoubtedly a very powerful political figure, maintaining a strong connection both with the military and the Ministry of Education.58 These rather unusual gatherings, which took place secretly throughout the AsiaPacific War, are thought to have been part of Kojima’s plot to reorganize the national art institutions, a goal that was eventually realized toward the very end of the war. A few photographs of the four painters and Kojima making sketches of Yokoyama are known today (fig.  44). Inside a Japanese-style room, five artists sit in a circle extending from Yokoyama, who 85

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44 Photograph of the Twenty-fifth Day Society artists making sketches of Yokoyama Taikan, date unknown. Eisei-Bunko Museum, Tokyo.

Other sitters, too, made similar comments. Fukai Eigo, for example, described Yasui’s eyes as “like [those of] a falcon that is in pursuit of its prey,” and Tokugawa Kuniyuki (1886–1969) commented that “the genteel Mr. Yasui all of a sudden flared with intensity, as if he became a different person once he faced the canvas. His attitude, which did not compromise on even a single brushstroke, made me feel the severity of the way of art.”62 Several photographs that capture Yasui’s practice of portraying male sitters, in either his studio or the sitter’s house, are known today, and may confirm the sense of intensity and intimacy

When Mr. Yasui put his brush down, he sometimes looked around me; other times he gave me a truly sharp eye, just like a hawk hunting its prey; and some other times, it was as if he was trying to see through something with one of his eyes … When Mr. Komiya [Toyotaka] became a model for Yasui, he said Yasui’s serious attitude absolutely exhausted him. While I was not so tired, probably thanks to my obtuseness, certainly I became acutely aware of the severity of the way of art (gei no michi).61

Yasui’s painting practice was here remembered as a serious and strenuous experience that made the sitter fully aware of “the severity of the way of art.” 86

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artist and sitter described as intense, tiring, and severe, Yasui’s portraiture would have been the site for developing personal and possibly political alliances between “leading men of culture,” and demonstrating their superiority vis-à-vis the physical and artistic values promoted by the military.

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The Twenty-fifth Day Society was an important stepping-stone for the reform of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts between May and June 1944, and possibly for other reshufflings of personnel in the official institutions that took place toward the end of the war and beginning of the Occupation. This school “reform,” Kojima’s longstanding ambition, was realized through a well-organized conspiracy.63 After the school’s director was suddenly recalled, all of the professors were forced to submit their resignations without any explanation. When the new professors were announced, they all turned out to be artists associated with the Shirakaba intellectuals: Yasui and Umehara for the Western-Style Painting Department, Yasuda Yukihiko and Kobayashi Kokei for Nihonga, and Hiragushi Denchū (1872–1979) for sculpture.64 Following this school “reform,” Yasui and Umehara were also named Imperial Artists in July, a designation that officially determined their unmatched status in the yōga community. In this sequence of events, the Twenty-fifth Day Society functioned as the site where Kojima and Hosokawa reached agreement about the content of “reform” with Yokoyama, and produced this new roster of professors. Around the same time, many other art institutions were having difficulty functioning due to the intensification of the war. The sociopolitical confusion, however, served as an opportunity for Kojima and the others to send Yasui and Umehara to the official institutions. The reform of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts could have caused a huge controversy, yet it was swiftly and confidentially accomplished at a moment when no one could afford to pay attention to the replacement of

Yasui Sōtarō. Portrait of Yokoyama Taikan, 1943–46. Oil on canvas, 35.8 x 28.4 cm. Collection of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto.

that many sitters remembered. A photo of Yasui making a sketch of Komiya Toyotaka taken around 1949, for example, places equal emphasis on the artist and the sitter, highlighting their commitment to, and possibly their reciprocal engagement in, the act of art-making (fig. 46). Again, the artist’s workplace, in complete contrast to the photo showing the artist and his female model, is imagined as an ordered space where two associated men together pursue the severe “way of art,” thereby confirming their camaraderie within the highly exclusive homosocial environment. As all of the accounts and photographs indicate, the production of Yasui’s portraits—a process that always encompassed painstaking posing, but was meant to see through to the essence of the subject beyond his bodily surface—was remembered as an exercise almost like a testing ground, to see if the sitter could endure the scrutiny of Yasui’s sharp eyes, and if Yasui could capture the true nature of his models. Involving sessions that both 87

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46 Photograph of Yasui Sōtarō and Komiya Toyotaka in the studio, ca. 1949.

art professors. Also, the rhetoric of the time endorsed institutional reform as necessary for the sake of the war. The Yomiuri newspaper, under the subheading of “the fighting art school,” for example, reported the school reform as “the great reformation” that was needed in order to integrate the war machine into the art world.65 Given that these shifts happened in the last years of the war, Ihara Usaburō, who was one of the professors forced to resign and an active official war painter at the time, accused the Hosokawa group of plotting this “hijacking” for years, pointing to Kojima as the central figure in the conspiracy.66 In addition, Fujita Tsuguharu, who had assumed a leading role in the art world through his close engagement with the military (as discussed in the previous chapter), voiced his astonishment when he saw the exclusion of the top-rated official war

painters from important posts in the national art institutions, stating that “all of my fellow [artists] who have been working on war painting were kicked out and rejected, and I don’t understand what on earth is going on.”67 After Japan’s acceptance of unconditional surrender in August 1945, the national art institutions resumed activity at an astonishing pace. The government’s annual exhibition was reorganized and run by the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin; formerly the Imperial Art Academy), and renamed the Japan Arts Exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai, or Nitten). Umehara and Yasui were appointed as jurors for the first Nitten in 1946.68 Having successfully integrated the Shirakaba group’s favorite artists into all of the official art institutions, Kojima offered the following comment two months after Japan’s defeat: 88

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the 1930s and early 40s can be attributed to a number of other sociopolitical and artistic factors besides those discussed here. One of the key (and less acknowledged) factors, however, is the fact that Yasui’s male portraiture served as a way for privileged classes of men, such as the members of the Shirakaba School, to assert their power, aesthetic preferences, and masculinity. Most importantly, while the Shirakaba intellectuals and their fellow artists ultimately may have challenged militarism by exalting culture, creativity, and interior character, it should not be forgotten that these tropes were heavily gendered as well as class based. Male portraits by and of Yasui Sōtarō always feature a man of intellect, creativity, and integrity, accompanied by suggestions of rationality, austerity, and “Japaneseness,” while downplaying the value of the corporeal representation of the body as the female domain. Such images would have effectively mitigated male viewers’ fear of the objectification of the male body that many art critics initially found in Yasui’s experimental renderings, and safeguarded male authority. Yasui’s portraits of women, on the other hand, saw their subjects objectified and fragmented into several body parts (not necessarily by Yasui’s rendering alone, but by Kojima’s mode of evaluation), significantly undermining the individuality, subjectivity, and interior lives of the sitters. Kojima ultimately affirmed the superiority of Yasui’s art, which was claimed to be capable of illuminating the male character beyond the bodily surface, by confirming the male-centered values of patriarchal society. Yasui’s “apolitical” portraiture and its authority were largely supported by such politics of gender and class. His images of men thus not only functioned within the nationalistic discourse of the 1930s or the elite male circle of the Shirakaba School, but also were fully compatible with the patriarchal order of modern Japan, which survived intact throughout the Asia-Pacific War and continued to be upheld by the powerful political alliances formed between elite men of culture and intellect.

During the years of suffering caused by the meaningless great war, the art world fortunately [witnessed] the successful reform of the art school, and now the government’s exhibition is to be reclaimed … We are so fortunate that, because the professors of the art school also constitute the Art Academy, there is no worry [for the future of the art world].69

For Kojima, the war was nothing but an opportunity to reverse the power politics of the Japanese art world by monopolizing the national art institutions through placement of the Shirakaba School’s favorite artists. Similarly, in the realm of politics, the Shirakaba group and other allied, likeminded intellectuals, all of whom came to be known collectively as the “Old Liberalists,” gained a number of governmental posts, transforming their country into a “nation of culture” (bunka kokka), the new national identity strongly asserted by postwar Japan in the course of its democratization and demilitarization. Rather than becoming marginalized or confining themselves to the realm of aesthetics, Yasui, Kojima, and the Shirakaba intellectuals assumed power within and beyond the art community during the last stage of the Japanese Empire. With a strong emphasis on the expression of interior character as the male domain, both Yasui’s image and his practice of portraiture, while quite distinct from the aesthetics and ideal of manhood promoted by the national art institutions and the military, offered another idealistic self-image of the Japanese male in the age of nationalism and expansion. By embracing Yasui, moreover, Kojima and the Shirakaba intellectuals forged an alliance of “leading men of culture,” especially at a time when militarism no longer sustained Japan’s “masculine” status and hegemonic position both within and outside the country. Yasui and his portraits, whose masculinity was supported by their deep inwardness and inner strength, served to provide a new self-portrait of Japan as a “nation of culture” at the very end of the Asia-Pacific War and beyond. The reasons why Yasui’s male portraiture was not only accepted, but also celebrated throughout

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4 Artists as Madmen: Yamashita Kiyoshi and Matsumoto Shunsuke’s “Disabled” Bodies This chapter investigates how those labeled as “deviants” were represented or represented themselves in the specific historical context of the AsiaPacific War. Two artists marginalized during the war, who became extremely well known in the postwar period, are the main foci of this chapter: Yamashita Kiyoshi (1922–1971) and Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912–1948). Yamashita Kiyoshi was a mentally challenged painter. From 1934 he lived in the Yawata Institute (founded in 1928), a nursing home for children with impaired intelligence, and beginning around 1938, he attracted significant media attention as an “idiot savant” for his prominent talent in painting and especially hari-e (a form of collage using cut or torn pieces of colored paper glued together to make a picture). A craze for Yamashita and his art lasted for roughly two years until he suddenly disappeared from the institute in November 1940. The popularity of Yamashita Kiyoshi provoked a series of debates over the value of the works of the mentally ill and the proximity of artistic genius to “madness.” While these debates involved a number of prominent artists and intellectuals, the yōga painter and essayist Matsumoto Shunsuke was among those who reacted most strongly against Yamashita. Matsumoto is considered one of the very few artists who expressed his anti-militarist views in the middle of the Asia-Pacific War. While

The spirit wishes to be a madman rather than remaining mediocre, The spirit yearns for being [at least] a madman if it cannot be a genius, How many times have men seriously thought about it, Men wish to be humans with limitless imaginations —Yanagi Sōetsu, “Batsu,” 1939

introduction The preceding chapters focused mainly on those artists who occupied dominant positions within Japanese society in the 1930s and 40s. Yet the majority of artists active at that time were not as privileged as those who achieved their fame in the field of military propaganda or in the national art institutions, such as Fujita, Miyamoto, Yasui, or Umehara. A number of younger artists were sent to the front not as painters but as soldiers, and many never made their way back home.1 Those artists who were perceived as “deviants,” such as Communists, pacifists, the disabled, and homosexuals, found it extremely hard to survive, and some were indeed under threat in this period of increasingly oppressive mobilization policies.

Matsumoto Shunsuke, Five, 1943, detail of fig. 59.

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widely known as a “painter of resistance” (teikō no gaka) today, Matsumoto, too, was a socially marginalized figure at the time. Born in the 1910s, Matsumoto and a number of his fellow artists found themselves at odds with a society engaged in all-out war, mainly because, according to Kawata Akihisa, “they were too young to be established war painters and yet too old to become immediate targets of conscription.”2 Along with his ambivalent social position due to his age and the short length of his professional career, Matsumoto was deaf from the age of thirteen, which exempted him from conscription. The difficult position that he occupied in society, as many studies have already pointed out, may have allowed him to maintain a critical distance from the mainstream militant ideology and culture. Two monumental self- (or family-) portrait paintings of Matsumoto, Portrait of a Painter (1941) and Standing Figure (1942), are known today as bold manifestations of his resistance to militarism and assertion of the value of individualism (figs. 47, 48). What has been almost entirely dismissed in Matsumoto’s practices during the Asia-Pacific War, however, is his great antagonism to the art of Yamashita Kiyoshi, which he expressed in essays written between 1939 and 41. As discussed in detail later in this chapter, Matsumoto’s reaction to Yamashita, which was truly blistering and relentless, constituted an important factor in his production of self-portraits. Although Yamashita and Matsumoto were never in direct contact and are rarely discussed together, the popular reception of Yamashita, and Matsumoto’s strong reaction to it, provide us with a clue to one of the key issues pertinent to the theme of this book: the presentation of the male figure as a possible medium of negotiation for the politics of gender, the body, as well as health, during the AsiaPacific War. At that time, being “healthy,” both physically and mentally, was the nation’s obligation, for men to be soldiers and for women to reproduce soldiers. Bodies perceived to be “deviant” from or “unfit” in relation to this standard not only met with severe discrimination, but also sometimes became the actual targets of punitive sanctions.

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Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912–1948). Portrait of a Painter, 1941. Oil on board, 162.4 x 112.7 cm. The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai.

Yamashita and Matsumoto both were labeled as “unfit,” the former for his impaired intelligence and the latter for his hearing disorder, which ultimately exempted both from conscription. While this obsessive promotion of “health” and regulation of the body affected the entire population, these policies exerted a significant impact on the art community, which was already in question due to the widespread image of the artist as a social “deviant” or “madman.” The popular reception of Yamashita can be explicated, and Matsumoto’s denial of Yamashita and his rigorous production of selfportraits can be reexamined, within this specific political context, where discourses on “health,” “ablebodied/disabled body,” “insanity,” and “art” were all at stake during the implementation of Japan’s war effort. 92

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48 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Standing Figure, 1942. Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama.

In dealing with two artists, and the respective reception and production of their works, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first half is devoted to illustrating the debates over, as well as the political climate of, discourses on art and “health,” with a specific focus on the popular reception of Yamashita Kiyoshi in the late 1930s. The following section focuses on Matsumoto Shunsuke and examines the artist’s rendering of his own body in his series of self-portraits through not only the lens of his response to Japanese militarism, but also the lens of the “health” politics evident in his harsh criticism of Yamashita. By examining the reception of Yamashita and production of Matsumoto’s self-portraits together, this chapter reveals a specific way in which male artists,

especially those who found themselves in a marginalized position, dealt with the increasingly problematic linkage of art and “insanity,” and the newly developed politics of the body, gender, and health through the representation of their own bodies or those of “others.”

yamashita kiyoshi and wartime society In 1939, the seventeen-year-old Yamashita Kiyoshi suddenly found himself at the center of media attention. He was born in 1922 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, and although not much is known about his family and early life, his childhood was 93

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colored by a series of hardships. At the age of three, Yamashita became seriously ill, leaving him with a mild speech impediment and intellectual impairment. “Yamashita” was his mother’s family name; after his father, who was an alcoholic, died in 1932, his mother, Yamashita Fuji, more or less singlehandedly brought up her son. At elementary school Yamashita became a target of bullying and sometimes injured his classmates in retaliation. In addition to these incidents, he became seriously behind in his schoolwork. In 1933 his mother decided to send him to a nursing facility for mentally disabled children, the Yawata Institute (Yawata Gakuen), located in Chiba Prefecture.3 Yamashita quickly showed his talent at the Yawata Institute, where art-making was integrated into the curriculum as both a training method and entertainment for the children. While Yamashita eventually worked in various media such as watercolors, oils, and ink, the technique he used most in the prewar period was hari-e (figs.  49, 50). Starting with a relatively simple motif in a small size, Yamashita soon created highly complex

50 Yamashita Kiyoshi. La Musume by van Gogh, 1940. Hari-e, colored paper and glue, 75 x 57 cm.

compositions with sophisticated application of color, forming nuanced patterns by combining and overlapping small pieces of colored paper. He also possessed an incredible visual memory. Despite rarely making a sketch on site, Yamashita was said to have been able to remember perfectly what he saw and reproduce it on a piece of paper. Within a few years after he began learning hari-e, his pictures became more detailed, and his painting subjects expanded to include landscapes, bird-andflower works, people, re-workings of past pieces by famous artists, and some imaginary scenes. Yamashita’s artistic talent attracted the attention of Togawa Yukio (1903–1992), a clinical psychology lecturer at Waseda University, who regularly visited the institute beginning around 1935. Struck by the art made by Yamashita and the other children, Togawa (in consultation with the institute) decided to put their works on public

49 Yamashita Kiyoshi (1922–1971). Cicada, 1934. Hari-e, colored paper and glue, 13.5 x 19 cm.

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display, and called the show the “special children” (tokui jidō) exhibition. “Special children” was Togawa’s neologism, as other words commonly used to refer to mentally disabled children, such as teinōji (mentally deficient children) and ijōji (abnormal children), carried negative and discriminatory connotations.4 Togawa organized a series of “special children” exhibitions between 1938 and 1939 in a number of venues, and received an unexpectedly enthusiastic public response.5 The exhibition held at the Seijusha Gallery in the Ginza district of Tokyo, in particular, attracted the significant number of twenty thousand visitors

Front cover of Tokui jidō sakuhinshū (Portfolio of Special Children), 1939, published by Shun’yōsha, Tokyo.

in just five days, between December 8 and 12, 1939. That same year, a picture book of selected works entitled Tokui jidō sakuhinshū (Portfolio of Special Children) was published, and quickly sold out (fig. 51).6 Although the exhibitions included many works by several other children, it was Yamashita who attracted the most attention, gaining him the nicknames “the Japanese van Gogh” and “idiot savant.”7 Yamashita made a significant impact not only on the general public, but also on the art community. Several famous artists and authors commented on and analyzed his art, including Yasui Sōtarō, 95

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Umehara Ryūzaburō, the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), the yōga painter Kitagawa Tamiji (1894–1989), and Matsumoto Shunsuke. The roundtable discussion published in the art journal Mizue in February 1940 comprised the principal investigation of the impact made by Yamashita on the art community. Mizue’s chief editor, Ōshita Masao (1900–1966), who was in charge of the picture book of “special children” exhibitions, organized this discussion, to which he invited several well-known artists. These included four yōga painters: Yasui, Umehara, Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943), and Ihara Usaburō; two Nihonga artists: Kawabata Ryūshi (1885–1966) and Itō Ren (1898–1983); the philosopher Tanikawa Tetsuzō; and the art critic Araki Sueo, as well as the exhibition organizer, Togawa Yukio.8 Although the roundtable discussion was entitled “Upon the Special Children Exhibition,” the exclusive focus was on Yamashita, especially regarding the issue of whether or not he was a creative genius. Opinion was divided. Among the participants, Yasui, Umehara, and Fujishima found real artistic talent in Yamashita, while Tanikawa persistently denied it. Yasui Sōtarō, in particular, was impressed by the art of Yamashita. Upon seeing the picture (presumably by Yamashita) printed on the invitation card for one of the “special children” exhibitions, Yasui went to see an exhibition in person. Impressed by Yamashita’s art, Yasui agreed to be in charge of selecting the works for the picture book. He visited the Yawata Institute twice, met Yamashita, and spent hours choosing seventy-three works.9 Although the picture book was meant to be a portfolio of the art of several “special children,” as Mizutani Takashi has observed, “this is practically a picture book of Yamashita alone,” pointing out that twenty-five of the twenty-six color reproductions selected by Yasui were Yamashita’s.10 Together with Yasui, Umehara Ryūzaburō and Fujishima Takeji were arguably the top yōga painters of the time, and all gave rave reviews to Yamashita’s art and endorsed him as an artistic genius. Umehara, for example, offered this praise of Yamashita during the roundtable discussion:

I think he is a true genius. Not only does he have a sense of color or some good quality, but he has in all aspects completed and fully expressed [these qualities together]. It is almost a miracle that he can do it without any instruction, or without even knowing it.11

Yasui, Umehara, and Fujishima found Yamashita’s pictures accomplished, and marveled at certain formal qualities that appeared similar to those of van Gogh, such as the sophisticated use of primary colors and a flattened composition. They were particularly amazed that Yamashita had made these works “naturally” rather than through learning or formal training, which entitled him to the designation of genius. While the rest of the participants displayed a mixed attitude toward Yamashita’s works, throughout the discussion, Tanikawa Tetsuzō denied them as art. Tanikawa was a philosopher and famous art lover closely associated with the Shirakaba School, and an ardent supporter of Umehara’s works. He admitted that he first found Yamashita’s works truly astonishing, yet his initial excitement quickly waned the more works he saw. Tanikawa explained the reason why his initial impression did not last long: Because [I sensed that] there was something unhealthy [about Yamashita’s works]. Van Gogh was the one who actually went mad and indeed painted some strange pictures, but van Gogh’s works have something deeper or stronger that attracted us to [step] inside of them. That kid’s works do not have [such a quality].12

Tanikawa found a lack of spiritual depth in Yamashita’s art and questioned whether his works were made through his own vision or ireme (literally, “inserted eyes”). What Tanikawa meant by ireme was the special, but not artistic, ability to perfectly memorize and re-present a vision that had been seen in the past. Tanikawa argued that Yamashita was probably equipped with ireme, enabling him to respond sensitively to and clearly remember a certain combination of colors and/or compositions in laborious detail. Yet Yamashita’s works relied solely 96

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had a special appeal due to his derangement and the tragic end to his life. For the Shirakaba group, as well as many other contemporaries, van Gogh was the creative genius who “embodied the ultimate form of art and life,” devoting his entire life to pursuing higher spiritual accomplishments.16 His derangement and suicide were perceived as the inevitable result of such an uncompromising pursuit of his own path, which often went against societal norms. While each intellectual and artist developed his own image of van Gogh, Kinoshita points out that the belief in his madness was widely accepted in Japan in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The close relationship between artistic creativity and insanity was thus hailed positively and romantically as a sign of specialness, purity, and true artistic spirit. While the romantic notion of artistic insanity prevailed widely, mainly because of the image of van Gogh, it was not linked with any pathological concerns or actual health and welfare issues at this stage. Although ranshinsha (people whose minds are disoriented) were a target for confinement soon after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, this confinement was a security issue conducted by the police force for the purpose of protecting society, not for curing or taking care of “patients” under the supervision of psychiatrists.17 Thus, the boundary between “the mentally ill” and others who became similar targets, such as the homeless, orphans, criminals, and prostitutes, was not strictly drawn. According to Serizawa Kazuya, only after 1901, when Kure Shūzō (1865–1932), known as a pioneer of Japanese psychiatry, came back to Japan from Germany, was psychiatry finally institutionalized as an academic as well as practical discipline. Yet even then, the field of psychiatry continued to suffer from a lack of understanding and proper facilities.18 Perhaps due to this slow establishment of psychiatry as a sanctioned discipline, it was only from the 1920s, and mainly during the 1930s, that the boundary between artist and insanity, as well as the works of the mentally ill or disabled, came to be examined from the perspective of pathology under the light of “science.”

on this special ability without any “maturity as a human being,” and thus could not be called art or designated as the work of a creative genius.13 While no consensus was reached about the value of Yamashita’s works and talent, his emergence offered an extremely rare occasion when the top artists and intellectuals of the time gathered and discussed the definition of artistic genius, especially in relation to mental illness and intellectual disability. The controversy caused by Yamashita was not due solely to his significant talent, but intimately linked with the political climate of the 1930s, in which “health” and art were no longer personal or aesthetic matters, but urgent national concerns in light of the war. Before the link between art and mental illness in the age of the Asia-Pacific War is explored further, however, the introduction and reception of one of the relevant concepts—the notion of artistic genius as “madness”— in Japan prior to the war must be outlined briefly.

the discourse of “insanity” and art in prewar japan As both Tanikawa’s comment quoted above and the nickname given to Yamashita at the time indicate, the popular image of Vincent van Gogh played a key role in popularizing the link between insanity and artistic creativity in Japan.14 The art and life of van Gogh had been known in Japan as early as the 1910s.15 Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the group of Shirakaba intellectuals who appreciated and greatly contributed to the popularization of van Gogh in Japan. The artist’s insanity and tragic death were of particular importance for the Shirakaba intellectuals. As discussed in previous chapters, for the Shirakaba School, the artistic styles and techniques of van Gogh (or any other artist) were not the primary concern; his mad/genius persona was. The art historian Kinoshita Nagahiro argues that, among the many European avant-garde artists whom the Shirakaba School ardently endorsed, van Gogh 97

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The key figure in the pathological approach to the relationship between insanity and artistic creativity was Shikiba Ryūzaburō (1898–1965). Shikiba was a psychiatrist who was also deeply interested in art and culture, and inspired by the Shirakaba School. While working as a medical student in the early 1920s, he became close to Shirakaba members, and once even suspended his own training in the field of medicine in order to participate in Yanagi Sōetsu’s mingei (folk craft) movement. Through his contact with the Shirakaba School, Shikiba became fascinated with certain European artists, van Gogh in particular. From 1925 onward, Shikiba concentrated on his study of psychiatry, but his interest in art and contact with Shirakaba members continued until his death. In the 1930s, he became increasingly active as a scholar of van Gogh, as well as an expert on the art of the mentally ill. His intensive research of the former was presented in several journal articles, culminating in the book Fan Gohho no shōgai to seishinbyō (The Life of van Gogh and Insanity), published in 1932.19 Through an examination of van Gogh’s biographies, letters, and paintings, and previous pathological studies on the artist, Shikiba diagnosed his illness as epilepsy, and pointed out that some traces of symptoms appeared in his paintings. According to Kinoshita, however, Shikiba’s study did not radically alter the image of the artist or prompt a reconsideration of the concepts of artistic genius and insanity.20 The diagnosis of epilepsy as the cause of van Gogh’s insanity did not at all lessen the artist’s agency. Just like the romantic vision that Shirakaba intellectuals shared and promoted, in Shikiba’s study, van Gogh’s symptoms simply proved his uncompromised and unlimited creativity, which caused an unbearable friction with society and led him to insanity. Therefore, as Kinoshita contends, Shikiba simply legitimized the romantic notion of van Gogh as a tragic genius with the support of a pathological explanation. Despite the “scientific” method that Shikiba introduced into the study of the artist, he only saw van Gogh’s art and symptoms as per his own design, shared with that of the

Shirakaba group: the celebration of creative geniuses and their tragic lives. Shikiba was not only absorbed by his study of van Gogh, but largely inspired by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (The Artistry of the Mentally Ill; 1922) by Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), an extremely influential study examining a huge collection of art works by the mentally impaired. He also became interested in art made by patients.21 Shikiba himself collected some works and published several essays on art by the mentally ill, and in due course came to acknowledge Yamashita Kiyoshi as well.22 Shikiba’s major achievement in this field was his study of Nishōtei, the private residence of Watanabe Kinzō (ca. 1877–1942), a wealthy estate owner. Watanabe designed the Nishōtei residence by himself. The construction started around the mid-1920s but was never completed, due to Watanabe’s hospitalization for a mental disorder in 1938. The residence, known as a “haunted mansion,” became famous in its neighborhood for the outstandingly strange design of the halfcompleted building, which ignored architectural rules and practical efficiency. Shikiba had a chance to conduct research at the site before Nishōtei was destroyed in April 1936, and published journal articles about it at the end of 1937.23 Together with another article, “Paintings by [a] Madman” (originally published in May 1938), Shikiba’s studies of Nishōtei were compiled into a book entitled Nishōtei kitan (The Strange Tale of Nishōtei) in the beginning of 1939 (figs. 52, 53).24 In The Strange Tale of Nishōtei, Shikiba paid his deep respect to Watanabe as an artist while stimulating the voyeuristic curiosity of the reader with a more casual writing style reminiscent of the outlandish detective stories popular at the time. Shikiba portrayed Watanabe as a tragic artist who could not complete his masterpiece because he was hospitalized by the people around him, who did not understand his immense creativity.25 In the section entitled “Nishōtei as Art,” Shikiba draws our attention to the value of the site beyond any pathological inquiry: 98

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Nishōtei is made for the individual. Akagi Jōkichi [the alias for Watanabe used by Shikiba in this book] made the house just for himself. But this house embraces a number of mirrors that reflect human life. We must review these various reflections of his mirror. [For] the artist, your longtime effort does not achieve the pleasure of completion, but people, about whom you would never have thought, are trying to understand the various thoughts embedded in this monumental work. Even though your work, to which considerable labor was devoted, has been destroyed, your robust intentions will never disappear. I wish that you can spend the rest of your life at peace.27

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Similar to the Shirakaba group’s understanding of van Gogh, in the life and production of Watanabe, Shikiba found a strong will and limitless creativity, the potential that everyone possessed but that had been lost somehow in contemporary society. Shikiba’s colleague Yanagi Sōetsu also saw “a healthy instinctive power” in Nishōtei, which he deemed “far better than powerless common buildings in the modern city.”28 As both Yanagi’s comment and Shikiba’s rendering of Nishōtei display, the mentally ill and their art were romantically and positively endorsed as the antithesis of the mediocrity of “ordinary” works at this stage. Such unrestrained and optimistic praise for the art of the mentally ill, however, changed dramatically just a few months after the publication of The Strange Tale of Nishōtei. The historian Ōuchi Kaoru argues that this book was the last prewar text in which Shikiba and others positively hailed the closeness of artistic creativity to mental illness. Ōuchi points to Shikiba’s article “Byōteki kaiga dansō” (Fragmented Thoughts about Pathologic Painting), published in November 1939, as the turning point in the discourse, as well as in Shikiba’s standing on the issue of artistic insanity.29 Shikiba’s text was presented as part of a special issue of the art journal Bijutsu (Art) on Surrealism, a movement that reached its zenith around this time. Ōuchi speculates that, in this special issue, Shikiba was probably expected to back up the Surrealists’ revolutionary position against the status quo by

Photograph of Nishōtei published in Nishōtei kitan (The Strange Tale of Nishōtei), 1939. Surrealist and abstract painters have already paid attention to Nishōtei … A superficial copy or hasty slapdash work can’t even come close to Nishōtei, which was made over ten years. Anyone who finds in it only a grotesque or indiscriminate construction only shallowly understands it. After getting rid of these [views], we could touch upon the deep intentions of the artist.26

Shikiba argues that, together with its artistic merit, Nishōtei could function as a critique of contemporary life, which forces humans to adapt themselves to a building and not vice versa. He ends his book with the following homage to Watanabe: Some people consider the minds of the mentally ill and ordinary people to be entirely different … but it is also possible to consider that [the workings of the mind seen in Nishōtei] are the reinforcement of certain aspects of everyone’s mind and simply a bold embodiment of the innermost intentions of ordinary people …

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pointing to the proximity of Surrealism to the art of the mentally ill. Yet, quite contrary to the views expressed in his own earlier works and the editor’s expectations, in this text Shikiba insisted on the importance of a clear separation between the two. For example, he warned about the possible danger inherent in the Surrealists’ imitation or integration of elements of works by the mentally ill:

Photograph of Shikiba Ryūzaburō published in The Strange Tale of Nishōtei.

pathological painting, becomes a real [mentally ill person]. I [therefore] would say that it can be dangerous to come close to and try to be in the same state of mind as such [pathological painters].30

Shikiba’s attitude changed from admiring a pathological work as a fount of creativity and uncontaminated originality into finding it something dangerous for “normal” people to get close to. Ōuchi sees Shikiba’s political conversion (tenkō) here, arguing that Shikiba, who seemed to have

We would possibly see one day that [a Surrealist], who thinks that he or she is making just a copy of a

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once come close to Marxist materialism in the mid1930s, would have seen the danger in the increasingly oppressive political climate of the time and thus made this significant and conservative turn in his approach to the mentally ill.31 A series of obsessive “health” policies issued in the late 1930s coincided with the introduction of Nazi art politics, which made the romantic blending of artistic creativity and insanity an increasingly contested issue, not only for Shikiba or other politically charged intellectuals, but also for many artists active at that time. Together they largely configured the discourse on art and insanity, as well as the reception of Yamashita and the production of Matsumoto’s self-portraits.

provide the mentally ill with “proper” treatment, was instituted in 1919 with strong support from a group of psychiatrists. Yet, due to an insufficient budget, only five asylums were set up in the end. No official attention was paid to disabled children like Yamashita Kiyoshi until the Law of Elementary School was amended in 1900. This law, however, simply exempted those who could not catch up with the school curriculum from compulsory education, and thus officially deprived disabled children of educational opportunities. Throughout the prewar period, a few institutions run privately as charitable enterprises were the only places for children with severe disabilities and/or little family support to live. The Yawata Institute, where Yamashita lived, was one such institution.32 It was during the 1920s and 30s that the nation’s mental (as well as physical) “health” gained official attention, bringing stricter regulation. In this process, eugenics played a key role. Eugenics, translated into Japanese as yūseigaku or minzoku eisei (race hygiene), was initially introduced to Japan in the late nineteenth century, but the concept and practice only attracted official attention in the latter half of the 1920s.33 Tightly connected with nationalistic sentiment and the imperialist desire to become a “higher race,” eugenics shifted the government’s basic approach toward its welfare program from a rather passive form of confinement and exclusion to the prevention and extermination of illness from society. The culmination of “race hygiene” in prewar Japan was the foundation of the Welfare Ministry (Kōseishō) in January 1938, a move that was inseparable from the rise of militarism. It was initially the Army Ministry that insisted on the need to establish an official organ dedicated to the maintenance of the nation’s “health,” hygiene, and well-being in order to secure human resources for the forthcoming war effort.34 The Welfare Ministry first placed its emphasis on the maintenance and development of physique (mainly muscular development and the prevention of tuberculosis), but its scope was quickly expanded to cover the nation’s mental “health.”

art and “health” policy in the 1930s From the late 1930s, “health” or “healthy” became a common trope to describe and evaluate art works. This trend was in harmony with the broader sociopolitical climate of the time, when the Japanese government obsessively promoted its “health” policy for the successful conclusion of Japan’s full-fledged war effort. While the nation’s body had already been under strict control and surveillance by the state since the mandating of family registration and permanent conscription in 1872 and 1873, respectively, throughout the 1930s it became more and more compulsory for people to be mentally and physically “fit.” As briefly mentioned above, the institutionalization of psychiatry and the foundation of the asylum were delayed in Japan compared with other disciplines and modern institutions introduced from the West. In terms of legislation, the Law for the Confinement and Protection of the Mentally Ill went into effect in 1900 (and remained in effect until 1950); it permitted families and legal groups to privately confine the mentally ill, as long as the formal procedures for doing so were followed. As the problems of private confinement became evident, the Mental Hospital Act, which obligated each prefecture to establish asylums and 101

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As mentioned briefly in Chapter Two, the 1940 National Eugenics Law, which was passed by the Diet together with the National Physical Strength Law, became the legal foundation for the government’s “health” measures. The National Eugenics Law legalized the sterilization of those with hereditary diseases as well as those related to them to the fourth degree, while strictly prohibiting the performance of abortion on “healthy” subjects. Five subcategories of such diseases were listed: “hereditary mental illness, hereditary mental retardation, extreme and malign cases of hereditary pathological character, extreme and malign cases of hereditary physical ailments, and extreme cases of hereditary physical deformity.”35 While the sterilization of individuals who fit such criteria was not mandated, 538 sterilizations were conducted during the war based on the wishes of the families of such individuals. Together with these institutional and legislative formulations, a number of national campaigns took place promoting the state’s “health” policy, emphasizing being “healthy” as the peoples’ obligation and as part of the war effort. In 1938, at a lecture held for the National Spiritual Mobilization Health Week, one of the earliest government-oriented “health” campaigns, the first Welfare Minister, Kido Kōichi (1889–1977), declared,

abandoned to die. The most infamous case was that of Matsuzawa Hospital, a psychiatric hospital located in Tokyo. The annual death rate of its patients reached 31.19 percent in 1944, and increased to 40.89 percent in the next year, mainly because of malnutrition. The inhumane conditions, in which many patients were neglected to the point of death, came to light in the postwar period, giving Matsuzawa Hospital the name “the Japanese Auschwitz.”38 With this increasingly oppressive political climate, it was not completely by chance that Yamashita Kiyoshi appeared in the mainstream media in 1938. The intentions of the Yawata Institute and Togawa in organizing a series of “special children” exhibitions have been subject to wide speculation, but Ōuchi Kaoru’s argument— that they wished to demonstrate the ability and “usefulness” of “special children” and thereby provide a path for “handicapped” children to survive in an age of war and militarism—seems most convincing.39 Kubodera Yasuhisa (1891–1942), the founder and director of the Yawata Institute, clearly articulated the foremost concern of the organizers in his comments in the picture book of the exhibitions. Rather than focusing on the shows or art works, Kubodera used most of the space to call for the support of the nation and populace for children with intellectual impairments:

The body of each single national is not your own, but the

The reason why we need to protect and educate children

state’s [property]. It is very important to sustain the belief

with mental impairments, or so-called abnormal

in kenkō hōkoku (devotion to the nation through being

children, is that, first of all, children with minor mental

healthy) by understanding that the development of your

impairments are useful in terms of national defense and

physique is not just for your own happiness, but also for

the promotion of industry, but in fact [those with] even

the prosperity of the family, and to train and reinforce

relatively significant [impairments] by some means can

36

[your physique] for the sake of the nation.

accomplish and contribute to something. Therefore, I insist that we should provide them with an opportunity

Given this concept of kenkō hōkoku and the numerous campaigns urging people to be “healthy,” the historian Fujino Yutaka points out that being “handicapped” or fragile in and of itself became a target of criticism and repression during the war, with such individuals often labeled as hikokumin.37 Indeed, those who were seriously ill or “handicapped” faced severe discrimination, and in the worst cases, were

to obtain training and a chance to cultivate [their abilities]. Secondly, for the suffering and desperate complaints of the families of these children, it is the state’s responsibility to provide proper treatment [for the children], and [the establishment of] institution[al support] can be a benchmark of the high [rate of] mental health of our nation. Even if such racial-hygiene policies as sterilization or prohibition of birth are legalized in the near

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An Attempt to Direct its Aesthetic).42 This issue also featured several photographs of works displayed in the exhibitions. In a two-page spread, works from the two exhibitions were juxtaposed, faithfully representing the original intention of the exhibitions’ organizers. In September 1938, a collaboration between the German Embassy and the Japan German Cultural Association brought the Great German Art Exhibition to Tokyo. Works by artists selected for this exhibition, such as Arno Breker (1900–1991), were displayed and introduced as art that was “made in opposition to the misconceived so-called ‘free art,’ which has fallen into a pathological technicism and degenerated into decadence.”43 In the following years, a large number of articles and publications on Nazi art politics and German contemporary art (and to a lesser extent that of Fascist Italy, too) were issued one after another, showing the significant degree of interest in Nazi art in Japan.44 To be sure, the Japanese government never systematically incorporated any standards of eugenics or pathology to suppress certain types of art works, as did the Nazis. The majority of artists, too, while displaying interest in the Nazis’ policies on art, remained quite ambivalent about their suppression of modern art. Yet, taken together with the promotion of Japan’s “health” policy, the Japanese art community in the late 1930s became increasingly conscious of, and cautious about, the concept of “health,” especially in relation to the value of modern art. Shikiba Ryūzaburō, for example, distanced himself from the study of the art of the mentally ill after 1940, and instead shifted his interest again to the folk craft movement. Together with Yanagi, what Shikiba emphasized in his study of folk craft throughout the war was the “beauty of health” (kenkōsei no bi) as the new direction for any production. The “beauty of health” was defined mainly by what was excluded from this category; according to Yanagi, this was “modern art that is inclined to anomaly or that sometimes advocates the beauty of decadence … the shared characteristic of which is a pathological or abnormal disposition.”45 Yanagi continued to insist that such “unhealthy” beauty

future, the treatment of these children must always be 40

considered.

Fully aware of the increasingly worsening political climate of the time (including the expected legalization of sterilization), Kubodera here called insistently for careful consideration of the treatment of “handicapped” children by emphasizing their potential as well as “usefulness” for the society at war.41 The most effective way to do so would appear to have been to demonstrate the children’s potential through their art works, a domain that may perhaps be considered harmless, and the last area that the “science” of eugenics could dissect. The debut of “special children” into the art world was therefore an outcome of Japan’s oppressive “health” and mobilization policies. Yet art was also one of the professional fields particularly sensitive to the newly promoted “health” policy at that time. While being “healthy” and preventing or excluding “diseases” from society were obligations imposed upon the entire nation, they had special implications for artists due to the widespread stereotypical image of the artist as a “madman,” as well as the introduction of Nazi art politics. As is widely known, the Nazis suppressed basically all forms of modern art. Partly by reference to Prinzhorn’s study of the art works of the mentally ill, their rationale was constructed by fabricating analogies between modern art and works by, and/or figures of, “handicapped” people, thereby pathologizing both modern art and the “handicapped” as outcomes of an “unhealthy” state of society and mind. They displayed the officially sanctioned “healthy” art and prohibited “degenerate” art works with the utmost clarity by holding two contemporaneous exhibitions, the Great German Art Exhibition and the Degenerate Art Exhibition, in Munich in 1937. News about the Great German Art Exhibition and Degenerate Art Exhibition was reported in Japan almost immediately. The October 1937 issue of Atorie (Studio) carried a translation of parts of E. Wernert’s L’Art Dans Le IIIe Reich: Une Tentative D’esthétique Dirigée (Art in the Third Reich: 103

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that “you yōga artists probably feel that [Yamashita] encroaches on your domain (jibun no ryōiki o arasareta).”48 Admired and feared, celebrated and repulsed at the same time: the ways in which the art of Yamashita was eagerly received by society can probably be understood as a process of “othering” in order to conceive of “our” normalcy. Reference to Elizabeth Grosz’s “freak discourse” may help to articulate more clearly the case of Yamashita. Grosz defines “the freak,” which often includes “the disabled,” as “[an] ambiguous being [who] … exist[s] outside and in defiance of the structure of binary oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of self-definition.”49 She argues that “the freak” becomes an object of fear and fascination all at once, because its ambiguity functions as “our mirror-images,” ultimately “confirm[ing] the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category,” which thus is often accompanied by narcissistic pleasure. The viewer’s fear, on the other hand, is rooted in the recognition that “the freak” is “at the heart of his or her own identity,” and thus must be ejected or “abjected” from one’s self-image in order to sustain a coherent “category-obeying self.”50 Imagined and passionately discussed as both a fascinating artistic genius and an incomprehensible transgressor, Yamashita would seem to fit well into this “freak discourse.” His “extraordinary” presence may have offered the Japanese public (and artists, in particular) an opportunity to confirm their subtle social positions within society, which was increasingly becoming intolerant of any forms of deviation. Before jumping to this conclusion, however, we will turn to an examination of Matsumoto Shunsuke, another artist who lived through the war labeled as “handicapped.” While the art community quickly forgot about Yamashita Kiyoshi after 1940, Matsumoto was one of the few artists/intellectuals who remained interested in Yamashita as well as in the issue of art and insanity. Matsumoto’s response to Yamashita, moreover, cast a deep shadow on the art works that he made during the Asia-Pacific War—a series of self-portrait

brought no happiness to people, and concluded that “a disease surely needs to be cured.”46 It was in this specific sociopolitical context that Yamashita appeared in the art world and stirred debate about the boundaries between “healthy” and “unfit,” genius and insanity, and art and nonart. For the Yawata Institute, which wished to demonstrate the children’s potential to play an integral part in the society at war, the fact that Yamashita Kiyoshi alone was singled out and celebrated as an artistic genius was probably unexpected. While it may have effectively functioned to demonstrate the huge potential that those children possessed, the sensational treatment of Yamashita’s talent, which was seen not as cultivated through education and discipline but “natural-born,” emphasized his “extraordinariness” rather than his adaptability to “normal” society. Indeed, Yamashita was often portrayed as a kind of interloper or transgressor, as evidenced by the impression that he made on the art community. The newspaper article introducing the “special children” exhibition, for instance, made the following sarcastic and sensational remark: Starting with the wizard of the yōga world, Yasui Sōtarō, many painters who always seek for a new expression and sensitivity saw [the “special children” exhibition] and all became speechless with admiration; this was truly unprecedented for the yōga community, and some painters went so far as to say, “What is all my training to date? As of today I will quit my painting business.”47

The fear and anxiety aroused in the professional art community by the presence of Yamashita, as articulated in this newspaper article, was evident in the aforementioned roundtable discussion carried in the journal Mizue. One of the participants in this discussion, the Nihonga artist Kawabata Ryūshi, found the conversation irrelevant to himself, his practice, and his identity, as he regarded Yamashita as a yōga painter. Listening to the passionate speeches made by several yōga painters in attendance, Kawabata commented sarcastically that he could not understand why yōga painters were making such a big fuss about Yamashita, and speculated 104

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Yamashita’s ability was beyond the human realm (“just like God”), precisely for this reason —the lack of his sociality and humanistic mind— Matsumoto rejected Yamashita’s art, and thereby drew a clear line between a “madman” and an artist. In “Black Flower,” which was published in December 1940 but said to have been written simultaneously with the above text, Matsumoto’s antagonism was extended to those established painters who endorsed Yamashita as a real genius. “Black Flower” is a fable-like essay consisting of seven parts; the one entitled “Hontō no hanashi” (True Story) was Matsumoto’s commentary on the 1939 roundtable discussion:

paintings that have been interpreted predominantly in the light of his anti-militarist standing. An investigation of Matsumoto’s practices will reveal both a new facet of the artist’s rendering of his own “male,” “Japanese,” and “disabled” body, and the specific ways in which Yamashita was singled out or “abjected” from society in the process of artists’ negotiations of their social identities within the radically oppressive political environment.

“the living painter”: matsumoto shunsuke When Yamashita Kiyoshi was in the spotlight, Matsumoto Shunsuke was only a moderately known artist who had begun developing his professional career as a yōga painter from the mid-1930s. While he had no direct involvement with, and may not have had a chance to see, the “special children” exhibitions in person, Matsumoto acknowledged the presence of Yamashita in art journals, newspapers, and the picture book. In two essays entitled “Avangyarudo no shippo” (Tail of the Avant-Garde) and “Kuroi hana” (Black Flower), published in February and December 1940, respectively, Matsumoto relentlessly condemned Yamashita’s works and also exposed his distrust of those artists who supported him in the roundtable discussion. In “Tail of the Avant-Garde,” Matsumoto argued,

A dirty idiot boy is carrying around the Goddess’s handbag and making a display of its interior, despite the fact that the Goddess of Beauty had never showed it even to masters who had served her over fifty or sixty long years; this is a disbelieving true story. The masters Tsubo (Urn) and Kame (Jar) said that he must be a fake; it is unbelievable that our Goddess let this dirty idiot boy handle [her handbag] before us. In response, the masters Pin (First) and Kiri (Last), who had glanced at the inside of the Goddess’s handbag, reproved them by saying, “No, he is real for sure. Even if he is an idiot and dirty, the boy’s purity is a precious treasure. Our Goddess must have valued it.” The masters and middle masters who occupied the sanctuary looked at Pin and Kiri, whose childlike faces

Needless to say, there is a huge gap, even if the mode of

with grey hair somewhat recalled the idiot boy, and con-

expression seems similar, between a madman (kyōjin) or

vinced, then said, “Yes, they are right.”

imbecile (chigu) whose specific sensibility alone is

At this moment, a young man (seinen) who was not

abnormally developed, and [artists] whose sensibility is

even allowed to step into the sanctuary shouted, “What’s

sharpened as a result of a strong awareness of reality. For

this about her handbag? I have come to this country to

example, [van] Gogh’s works are filled with humanistic

get hold of the Goddess herself,” which startled and

love, while Kiyoshi’s works are terribly void of the

abashed both the masters and middle masters. After a

human. Void just like nature. Void just like God. This is

short contemplation, then [they concluded], “Yes, our

because [his art was] born without a tail tied to real life.

middle ground is the right way.” They decided never to

Thus his spirit is all alone, eternally flying through the

allow this wanton young man to enter the sanctuary.52

51

sky of darkness, and cannot be ours.

“Masters” and “middle masters” clearly correspond to such well-established painters who participated in the roundtable discussion as Yasui, Umehara,

Like Tanikawa, Matsumoto found a serious spiritual “void” in Yamashita’s art. While admitting that 105

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and Fujishima, while the young man who had no pass to enter the sanctuary is evidently Matsumoto himself. A “young man” (seinen) was the term often used by Matsumoto to refer to himself or his fellows until his death at the age of thirty-six. This indicates his self-imposed identity as an outsider to the art establishment, which he equated with “the dirty idiot boy,” presumably in terms of their asocial standing and lack of “a tail tied to real life.” For those who are familiar with Matsumoto Shunsuke and his works today, his reaction to Yamashita Kiyoshi may come as a surprise. Matsumoto is primarily known as a moralistic and intelligent anti-war artist, and thus his inexorable condemnation of Yamashita as a “madman,” “imbecile,” “idiot,” and “dirty” would appear to be uncharacteristic of him. Indeed, Matsumoto’s reaction to Yamashita has been almost completely ignored in his biography, exhibition catalogues, and art historical investigations, with the exception of Murai Hiroya’s recent study (introduced presently). Before further exploring Matsumoto’s practice in relation to Yamashita’s art, his career and how he came to be viewed as “a painter of resistance” must be outlined here. Matsumoto Shunsuke was brought up in the City of Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, in the northern part of Japan. His family name was Satō; he married into the family of his wife, Matsumoto Teiko (1912–2011), in 1936. (Matsumoto and Yamashita both thus happened to use their wife or mother’s family name.) At the age of thirteen, Matsumoto contracted cerebrospinal fever, which cost him his hearing. His father—in order to console his depressed son, who was forced to give up his dream of becoming an engineer due to his hearing disorder—bought young Matsumoto a camera and painting materials. Matsumoto showed little interest in photography, but was soon absorbed with painting. Together with his brother, Satō Akira, he came to Tokyo to learn oil painting in 1929, and received his initial training at the Pacific Yōga Society (Taiheiyō Yōga Kenkyūjo), one of the major private art schools located in the Yanaka area of Ueno. There he made several lifelong

friends, including Asō Saburō (1913–2000) and Ai-Mitsu. Until the late 1930s, Matsumoto was more active as an essayist and editor than as a painter. He first worked for the journal Seimei no geijutsu (Arts of Life), which was inaugurated by Satō Akira for House of Growth (Seichō-no-Ie), a new religion founded in 1929 that Matsumoto and his family belonged to between 1933 and 1936. After he left the religion, Matsumoto and his wife published the monthly journal Zakkichō (Essay Note). Matsumoto envisioned Zakkichō as a place where a wide range of people across institutional boundaries and political beliefs could freely publish and discuss their opinions.53 Although it had to be terminated in December 1937 due to financial difficulties, the journal’s list of contributors was quite impressive, including a number of prominent artists, intellectuals, poets, scholars, and novelists. It was after the termination of the journal that Matsumoto finally began to focus on his painting. Matsumoto’s painting before 1940 featured mainly cityscapes populated by a wide range of people—men and women, rich and poor, modern girls and ladies wearing kimono—overlapping and merging into one another (fig.  54). The major sources of inspiration were the German artist George Grosz (1893–1959), whose picture book featuring thin line drawings was published in Japan in 1929; and the Japanese-American painter Noda Hideo (1908–1939), who was known for his melancholic and romantic renderings of workers and their everyday lives.54 Like many of his contemporaries of similar age, Matsumoto once leaned toward Marxism. Although his adherence to the pure aesthetic value of art prevented him from entirely committing to its use for political activism, Matsumoto always sought an organic connection between art and everyday life. His choice of Noda and Grosz reflects his ambivalent position at the time, oscillating between the autonomous value of art and the political importance of the social integrity of art. Due to the overall sweetness of the style, which is said to be inspired by Noda, Matsumoto’s painting lacks the sharp sarcasm about city life and capitalist 106

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54 Matsumoto Shunsuke. In the Street, 1940. Oil on board, 116.5 x 90.7 cm. Shimonoseki City Art Museum.

society seen in Grosz’s work, yet the melancholic blending of city and people probably expressed the artist’s desire to be an integral part of society. From around 1940, Matsumoto’s oeuvre exhibited a dramatic shift. While the cityscape continued to be one of the artist’s main subjects, the animated human figures were now almost entirely void from Matsumoto’s city, which had taken on predominantly gloomy, grayish tones (figs.  55, 56). More significantly, a new painting subject appeared in his oeuvre: human figures and body parts, especially faces and hands, illustrated in a classicized style. The very first work of this kind is Face (Self-Portrait), made in December 1940 (fig.  57). Following this

work, Matsumoto presented three vigorous, largescale paintings focusing on human figures, all of which include his self-portrait: Portrait of a Painter (1941; fig. 47), Standing Figure (1942; fig. 48), and a set of two paintings titled, respectively, Three and Five (1943; figs.  58, 59). All of these works were painted with direct reference to premodern European art in terms of techniques, forms, and possibly content and iconography as well. The questions of what brought this dramatic shift to Matsumoto’s painting, and what kind of message the artist was attempting to send out (especially through the presentation of his own body), have invited a number of discussions. While 107

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55

Matsumoto Shunsuke. A Tree-Lined Street, 1943. Oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

several assumptions have been made by art historians, critics, collectors, and friends of the artist, most have agreed that the outbreak of the AsiaPacific War initiated this change, and that the main message must have been linked to the anti-militarism articulated in Matsumoto’s essay “Ikiteiru gaka” (The Living Painter), published in the April 1941 issue of Mizue.55 This was Matsumoto’s response to the roundtable discussion “Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu, gaka wa nani o subeki ka?” (The National Defense State and Art: What Should Painters Do?), presented in the January 1941 issue of the same journal.56 Three military officers participated in this discussion, and one of them, Major Suzuki Kurazō (1894–1964), insisted that artists

should more actively engage with the war effort, condemning many who still maintained an “art for art’s sake” attitude while the entire nation was supposed to work for the country.57 As far as we know today, Matsumoto was the only artist who publicly responded to this now extremely infamous roundtable discussion. With courageous determination (emphasizing at the end of the essay that the text all belonged to him and had nothing do to with the people around him), the artist rejected Suzuki’s proposal by insisting on the importance of artistic autonomy and the universal value of art and humanity. Postwar art historians and critics perceive Matsumoto’s self-portrait paintings as visual 108

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56 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Bridge in Y-City, 1943. Oil on canvas, 61 x 73 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

manifestations of “The Living Painter.” For example, as the art historian Asano Tōru argues,

Painter,” must have been closely related to this shift [seen in Matsumoto’s paintings] … [the publication of the essay] would have obligated him to make a work cor-

When we look at Face (Self-Portrait), made in December

responding to his statement … Together with Face (Self-

1940, we cannot help but be surprised [by the shift made

Portrait), one such work would be the monumental

by Matsumoto from his earlier cityscapes] … we have

Portrait of a Painter …58

the impression that it is as if [the artist] had returned to

As in Asano’s assumption, many postwar scholars have regarded the shift in Matsumoto’s oeuvre, both in subject matter and style, as related to the onset of outright war and the artist’s critical stance against it. His self-portraits of monumental size, Portrait of a Painter and Standing Figure, in

a classic descriptive painting from a modernist one … Shunsuke’s qualitative change in painting style cannot be irrelevant to the sociopolitical climate of that time. I also speculate that his essay written and submitted to the journal Mizue in January 1941 (which appeared in the April issue of the same year), entitled “The Living

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seemingly “heroic” rendering of his own body. A large gap seems to exist between the public image of Matsumoto as a moralistic anti-war artist and his relentless attacks on Yamashita. While the postwar portrayal of Matsumoto is not to be denied, his resistance cannot be fully captured if the focus remains solely on his opposition to the rise of militarism. As is seen in his strong reaction against Yamashita as well as the art-world establishment, his resistance was fostered by a combination of multiple sociopolitical forces that Matsumoto—as a lesser-known artist labeled as “handicapped” and exempted from conscription— perceived as obstacles to establishing himself as an artist, and possibly as a “man.” It is therefore necessary to investigate Matsumoto’s rendering of his own body, not only as a reflection of his political beliefs, but within the complex power dynamics of the time, especially the politics of health, gender, and the body, as well as family.

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matsumoto shunsuke’s resistance to “abnormality” in militant japan

Matsumoto Shunsuke. Face (Self-Portrait), 1940. Oil on board, 33 x 23.5 cm. Private collection.

While the majority of scholars have ignored or excluded Matsumoto’s reaction to Yamashita from their investigations, the art historian Murai Hiroya, in his 2004 articles, has offered a new insight by boldly re-reading Matsumotos’ selfportraits.60 Murai contends that the main motive behind his self-portrait paintings was his personal fear of and antagonism toward Yamashita, not his anti-military viewpoint. Murai attributes Matsumoto’s relentless attacks on Yamashita to his traumatic bout with cerebrospinal fever, the oftenfatal disease that cost the artist his hearing. Murai refers to the memoir of Matsumoto’s father, in which the father recollects that his son’s disease could have damaged not only his hearing, but also his mental capacity. Knowing about this possibility, as Murai speculates, Matsumoto may have developed an excessive fear of “insanity.” In order to repress this fear as well as compensate for his

particular, are considered concrete visualizations of the assertion made in “The Living Painter.” In his comments on Portrait of a Painter, Standing Figure, and Five, the well-known art writer, collector, and seminal Matsumoto scholar Sunouchi Tōru states that “in all paintings, the artist rises to his full height. Matsumoto Shunsuke probably got up and headed off [militarism] ‘under the name of humanism and art.’”59 Perceived as demonstrating the artist’s determination to stand alone against the increasingly militarized society, Matsumoto’s portraits have been sanctioned as monuments of “heroic” resistance singlehandedly made by a young moralistic painter. The question that must be addressed is how Matsumoto’s strong response to Yamashita can be contextualized within this widely accepted postwar account of a “painter of resistance” and his 110

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58

Matsumoto Shunsuke. Three, 1943. Oil on canvas, 162 x 113 cm. Private collection.

59 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Five, 1943. Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Private collection.

physical disability, he worked hard to become a man of reason and intelligence, as evidenced by his passionate engagement with writing and editing as well as his absolute faith in reason, expressed in a number of his essays. Murai then argues that Yamashita’s emergence threatened Matsumoto’s self-made identity; not only did it recall his own potential disabilities, but the high evaluation given to Yamashita by yōga masters hurt Matsumoto’s pride deeply. Murai draws our attention to one section of Matsumoto’s essay “Black Flower,” subtitled “If I Were an Idiot.” In this part of the essay, Matsumoto expresses his fear of being “an idiot” with no sense of time or space, able to satisfy his “void spirit” by “drawing a black line all day.” Then Matsumoto declares,

human emotions with both ends of a black line on a white ground. I now want to name something born out of the dark side of human beings beauty. I will accept myself drifting away from a life of idiocy as my destiny and responsibility as a living [human], or for the sake of fulfilling my days.61

Murai draws our attention to the fact that, while declaring his sanity explicitly, Matsumoto gives symbolic meaning to a line. In another essay written at about the same time, Matsumoto calls the line his “Mephistopheles,” a product of his unconscious that he must suppress with the power of his will.62 Given Matsumoto’s fear of the line as expressed in a number of his essays, Murai argues that the line, an important pictorial component of Matsumoto’s cityscape paintings of the time, came to symbolize something uncontrollable and frightening in association with the image of idiocy and the art of Yamashita Kiyoshi. Based on these assumptions, Murai explains Matsumoto’s turn to

I who live in [the contemporary] time and air cannot imagine anything more fearful than [drawing a line all day]. Therefore, I, who am sane, endeavor to entangle

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self-portraits in a classic style, in which the unfettered line was largely reduced as a defining feature, as a means through which the artist overcame his trauma and exorcized the shadow of Yamashita by scrutinizing his own body and confirming his full control over it. Murai’s challenging argument (which also includes detailed and insightful examinations of many of Matsumoto’s texts and works) takes Matsumoto’s reaction to Yamashita and to disability fully into account in the analysis of his portraits for the first time.63 In so doing, however, Murai treats Matsumoto’s strong reaction against Yamashita as an entirely personal issue, insisting that even Matsumoto’s essay “The Living Painter” should be read separately from the contemporary political climate. In this now celebrated essay advocating the autonomy of art, Matsumoto brought up Yamashita Kiyoshi’s name in order to respond to Major Suzuki, the military officer who had most forcibly called for artists’ cooperation with the war effort. In the middle of the aforementioned roundtable discussion in which he participated, Major Suzuki condemned abstract art by stating, “it is just stupid child’s play, the circles and triangles that people in the Matsuzawa [mental] Hospital are likely to paint as art.”64 Against Suzuki’s condemnation, Matsumoto argued,

Murai attempts to de-politicize his paintings and texts, which have indeed been read too exclusively through the lens of postwar political ideals. Rather than treating Matsumoto’s fear, anxiety, and resistance (which Murai explores insightfully) as an entirely personal issue, however, these factors must be reexamined in a broader sociopolitical context, for two reasons: first, the fascination with and fear of Yamashita were not only Matsumoto’s, but were shared by many other artists and intellectuals at that time as discussed earlier; and second, Matsumoto’s reaction against Yamashita and his resistance to militarism were intimately linked to each other. In Matsumoto’s numerous writings, such terms as “idiot,” “madman,” and “insanity,” as well as “intelligence,” “reason,” and “sanity,” were indeed common tropes, all functioning to determine his social, artistic, and gender identity. It is important to recognize, however, that the implications carried by these terms shifted during his relatively short career. In his early career, from the late 1920s to around 1936, Matsumoto was largely attracted by the image of idiocy. “Idiot” and “madman,” together with “children” and “primitives,” were used predominantly with positive connotations in this period. For example, in the early 1930s, Matsumoto was deeply moved by the novels The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). He admired Prince Myshkin in the former and Alyosha in the latter for their spirits of “pure simplicity.”66 Quoting sentences from The Idiot, Matsumoto illustrated the ideal personality, as embodied by the character of Prince Myshkin, as holding “the virtue that people often mistakably understand as ‘stupid’ or ‘idiotic.’”67 For Matsumoto, the “mental illness,” “idiocy,” or “naiveté” of Prince Myshkin and Alyosha were signs of their pure moralistic spirit as humans uncontaminated by modern society. Such pure spirit, he argued, resided in “all great works and all great things.”68 Those who remained outside the mundane world, such as “idiots,” were Matsumoto’s objects of admiration, often equated with his fellow artists. In

[Major Suzuki said that abstract art is] just like [a work made by] a mad person, but mad people are miserable. In many cases, they are pitiful victims, dried up as human beings. Although they have lost common sense, because they still live among us, they—like nature—from time to time do something that amazes normal people. The special child Kiyoshi is such an example. But because they are not people with normal lives (seikatsusha) and personalities, they cannot earn our appreciation and enrich our hearts … Works by the abstract school or Surrealist school are different from those of a mad person.65

Pointing to this passage, Murai argues that Matsumoto’s real motivation for this essay was to draw a clear line between insanity and artists, and thereby between Yamashita and himself. By foregrounding Matsumoto’s psychological state, 112

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with “normal people” (jōnin). Adhering to both pure artistic value and the sociality of art, Matsumoto wished to be a moralistic outsider, and in his writings in the first half of the 1930s he often characterized his young fellow artists as “madmen,” epitomizing such outsider status and “purity” vis-à-vis the secularized world and status quo. From around 1936, however, the notion of the “idiot” or “madness” began carrying an increasingly negative connotation, and simultaneously the importance of “reason,” “intelligence,” and “order” came to be stressed frequently in Matsumoto’s essays. In the essay “Tegami (2)” (Letter [2]), published in 1937, for example, Matsumoto criticized the rise of fascism and ultranationalism, and lamented the widespread fanaticism that was a result of manipulation and agitation, by his use of the terms “insanity” (kyōki) and “sanity” (shōki):

the first half of the 1930s, Matsumoto was part of a young artists’ community that mushroomed in the district known as Ikebukuro Montparnasse (Ikebukuro Monparunasu). Ikebukuro, an area of Tokyo newly developed from the late 1920s, became a magnet for “vagabonds,” to use the word of the poet Oguma Hideo (1901–1940), including dancers, film actors, foreigners, and young art students from poor families or the countryside.69 As the rent was cheap and the location was convenient for trips to Ueno, where museums and art schools were gathered, a number of artists’ villages were formed in this area, and Matsumoto rented his studio in one of these villages with fellow artists. In this gathering place for all sorts of rootless people and outlaws from the increasingly homogenized society, the young artists—the majority of whom never had the chance to go to Europe—compared their villages to Montparnasse, the area of Paris known as the mecca of avant-garde art and the Paris Commune. Matsumoto shared both the ethos and pathos of this artists’ community, where poverty, drunks, and fights were everywhere, yet friends and company were always around to share both dreams and anxieties, help each other out, and plan art events and parties. In his incomplete novel Tamiji, presented in 1935, Matsumoto revealed his suffering and his anger toward society, which suppressed free artistic pursuit, through the lives of the protagonist Tamiji and his friends, characters presumably modeled after himself and his fellows in Ikebukuro Montparnasse:

How much can people be educated and edified by political maneuvering? Culture, science, and the arts all become part of politics. When mistaken beliefs and insanity created by deception mislead the people, I think it is natural that cultural achievements cannot be extended beyond a certain point. What I dream of is to realize a life in which many people can share deep emotions in a sophisticated culture, and make thoughtful and precise judgments. But seeing how the various false beliefs and producers of insane [thoughts] appeal to many people, and how even many thinkers are manipulated, I wonder when we could possibly have a sane life.71

I know a number of my seniors [artists] who look like

“Insanity” here is equated with false beliefs, and both were products of the oppressive political thought and maneuvering that Matsumoto perceived as widespread in contemporary Japanese society. From around 1937, he wrote a number of essays that indicated his anxiety and anger over fascism, fanaticism, conformism, and “Eastern mysticism,” all of which he found characterized by a lack of reason and intelligence. Matsumoto clearly analogized “insanity” with the frenzy of these reactionary influences seen in late

madmen to normal people [although they were supported by society] … but today, society does not want young people to become geniuses. Only young people who are loyal cooperators with society and moderate copycats are treated as exemplars … if someone boldly pursues a life for the creation of art, people cannot help but exclude him as a danger and treat him either as a madman or a stray dog …70

In this text, too, artists with a real passion for creation are equated with “madmen” and contrasted 113

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1930s Japan, while he seemed to adopt intelligence, rationality, and reason as his weapon of the time, enabling him to remain unswayed by the dominant ideology and separation of “us” and “them.” Yet, it was not simply the dichotomy of pro- and anti-militarism that Matsumoto saw as the difference between “insanity” and “sanity.” In stark contradiction to his perceived anti-military standing, the state of “sanity” and the ideal human form were sometimes embodied by the figures of his friends who were soldiers on the battleground. While Matsumoto wrote a lot about politics, he rarely touched upon actual political events, including the Japanese colonization of Asia and invasion of China. Although it was indeed risky to make any concrete comments on the ongoing war, his silence was probably not due solely to self-censorship. The few texts in which he touched upon Japan’s ongoing battles were all only concerned with his friends who were sent to the battlefield as soldiers. In these texts, rather than viewing these friends as constituents or victims of Japanese militarism, Matsumoto admired them as figures equipped with reason and calmness, and even expressed his unfeasible hope to fight alongside them. In part of the aforementioned essay “Letter (2),” for example, Matsumoto introduced a letter that he received from his friend, a soldier in China, who wrote,

[They looked so happy that] those of us who have been left behind are far more miserable. For those who [are expecting to take] immediate action, we [will look miserable as we] have to continue our gloomy and appalling fight of everyday life.72

Matsumoto here clearly indicates his envy and sense of misery at being excluded from the “brothers in arms” who “so happily” departed for the front. The artist’s imagination about Japan’s war did not extend beyond his admiration for his friends to the aggression that the Japanese military was imposing at that time upon the people of Asia. In another essay in which he once again mentioned the ongoing war, Matsumoto made a contrast between soldiers and the people at home: The time for clarifying the countenance of love for country has come. To patriots who scream their love of country with great excitement, anyone who remains calm apparently seems hikokumin. If I tell this to my friends at the front, they would surely smile … They are fighting for their lives with all their power and yet in a calm. We would be embarrassed if, when they return, our work is still floundering about in ignorance, accomplishing nothing.73

Equating his battle in everyday life at home with that of his friends at the front, Matsumoto positioned himself together with these friends, who were fighting “in a calm,” in contrast to the people who merely screamed their loyalty. Matsumoto here drew a line between “us” and “them” according to the possession of reason, rationality, and resolute minds, not swayed or manipulated by the dominant ideology, status quo, or irrational fanaticism. Yet, it should be noted that Matsumoto’s characterization of his friends at war seemed to respond to, rather than subvert, one of the ideal male forms that militant Japan eagerly promoted at the time. This is probably most evident in such tropes as “[departing] for the battleground in high spirits” and “fighting for their lives with all their power, and yet in a calm,” all of which

How beautiful and fresh [is] every landscape that I see here. Although I don’t know exactly where we are heading, a battleground is also just one of the [beautiful] landscapes … where men’s blood exposes its animalistic quality. This is an open and fair battleground … I feel like going on a joyful school excursion with my brothers in arms, leaving the gloomy and appalling battleground [of yours in Japan] …

About this letter, which expressed the joy of exploring a “real” battleground, Matsumoto commented, Several of our close friends have departed for the battleground in high spirits. Everyone departed so happily.

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resonate uncannily with the official slogans and the military code of ethics.74 While maintaining a critical distance from the dominant ideology, Matsumoto no longer attempted to identify himself with the “vagabonds” in Ikebukuro Montparnasse, but with the “brothers in arms” on a “beautiful” battleground. What caused this change in Matsumoto’s view of idiocy, the ideal artist/human, and possibly manhood? As is clearly indicated in the texts quoted above, the increasingly oppressive political climate was undoubtedly one of the contributing factors as Matsumoto developed his antagonism toward the rise of militarism and ultranationalism as well as the selfless subordination to these fanatical ideas; all were associated with a lack of reason and expressed as “insane.” Also, a number of changes occurred in Matsumoto’s personal life around the time when Japan embarked on all-out war. As mentioned above, in 1936 Matsumoto left the religious organization Seichō-no-Ie and married his wife, Teiko, after strong opposition from her family members. Living with Teiko’s mother and sister, Matsumoto set up his studio in their house, and the young couple together inaugurated the monthly journal Essay Note. In the same year, Matsumoto was exempted from conscription for his hearing disorder. These events were followed by the birth and death of their first son, Susumu, and the termination of Essay Note in 1937, which convinced Matsumoto to concentrate on painting. As Matsumoto rarely commented on his private life, and never mentioned the exemption or his hearing disorder, it is nearly impossible to discern the impact of these events on the artist. It would not be too incautious to speculate, however, that these events would have required Matsumoto to take on more social responsibility and arrive at adulthood sooner. Because Matsumoto could not make a living as an artist, Teiko worked as an editor to support the household, and after the birth of their second son, Kan, in 1939, Matsumoto took care of the child during the day, often in the studio. Teiko indicated the social pressure felt by this young couple, whose practices would have

appeared to deviate significantly from the gender norms of that time, by recalling a criticism that she should stay with “her husband with the hearing disorder” and “find other ways to help him [than working outside the home].”75 According to Teiko, her husband valued their equal partnership and thus encouraged her to develop a professional career.76 But as one of his diary entries from 1938 stated, “I should give Teiko more time. Although I don’t want her to become a mere housewife, delicate life attitudes need to be ingrained in her … Once I start working, I must steadily lead our lives.”77 Together with the worsening political climate, the increasing pressure and difficulty of meeting his new social obligations as husband, father, and citizen may have helped to push Matsumoto to seek out a social position on par with his friends at the front, rather than remaining a young outsider who was attempting to safeguard his small artists’ colony. It was at this juncture of Japan’s militarization, the rise of reactionary ideologies, the outbreak of war, and significant changes in his personal life and artistic career that Yamashita Kiyoshi would have come to epitomize what Matsumoto perceived as the antithesis of his ideal artist-hood, manhood, and society. In his writings, Matsumoto always condemned and pitied Yamashita, not necessarily for his individual life or personality (which Matsumoto never knew), but for his perceived identification with militarism, fanatical ideas, selfless subordination, the status quo, and “outsider” status. In other words, from around 1936 Matsumoto came to perceive “insanity” as the negative mirror of his personal, artistic, and sociopolitical ideals, all of which seemed to be projected on the figure of Yamashita when he made his sensational debut as a “genius/ madman” in 1938. Matsumoto’s series of selfportraits may be read as his attempt to “abject” the negative elements represented by the stigmatized figure of Yamashita from his own body and the “insane” Japanese society. This practice would have been necessary for Matsumoto in order to attain a coherent self-image at a significant turning point in his life, a pursuit that became inextricably linked 115

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with his political ambition to bring change to the increasingly militarized Japanese society.

matsumoto’s bodily representation of “health” and “manhood” From 1940, the classicized human figure was embraced as one of the main painting motifs in Matsumoto’s oeuvre, comprising a significant shift. Departing from such modern artists as Grosz and Noda, whose influences characterized his early cityscapes, Matsumoto showed his interest in much older art forms and cultures, especially those of the Renaissance and ancient Greece. Inspired by Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492) as well as ancient Greek statues (which he saw through photo reproductions), Matsumoto intensively studied human forms, especially his own, based on careful observation and modeling (fig.  60). While his turn to more classic forms of art and human figures has been variously explained, one major cause would have been the influence of his artist friends. Asō Saburō, who had known Matsumoto from art school, traveled to Europe between February and September 1938, and dramatically changed his painting style from a mode inspired by modernism to representational figure painting modeled after the Renaissance. Another of Matsumoto’s fellow painters, Nanbata Tatsuoki (1905–1997), was also deeply inclined toward ancient Greek culture around the same time. The craze for ancient Greece was a widespread phenomenon seen elsewhere in the 1930s and early 40s, but especially among Matsumoto’s generation of artists, many of whom found themselves at odds with a society engaged in a full-fledged war effort. Kawata Akihisa argues that this trend for the “classic age” evident among the members of Matsumoto’s generation expressed their longing for what had been lost in contemporary Japan: a “natural,” “simple,” and “healthy” state of society.78 Nanbata, for instance, while admitting that his

60 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Self-Portrait, 1942. Pencil on paper, 45 x 37.5 cm. Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

admiration for the classics might be derived only from an escapist desire, stated that “even so, I have become healthier by longing for and understanding the artistic spirit of the classics.”79 Greece was perceived as a detoxifying agent for Nanbata, and in his artistic predilections as well as in the widespread Greek craze, “health” again appeared as the key concept. While undoubtedly inspired by the work of his artist friends and sharing a number of elements with it, Matsumoto’s integration of the European classics into his art was solemn, and may be perceived as more confrontational than that of his contemporaries. Nanbata’s paintings on the theme of Greece made between the late 1930s and early 40s feature certain Greek icons and monuments, such as the Pantheon and the Venus de Milo, against hazy and abstracted backgrounds, and overall generate a nostalgic and romantic mood (fig.  61).80 Matsumoto’s oeuvre was more tense and somber. Both in Portrait of a Painter and Standing Figure, 116

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61

As mentioned earlier, in the postwar years Portrait of a Painter and Standing Figure were accepted as expressions of the artist’s bold resistance. Yet a few scholars and critics have questioned this interpretation, especially for the latter work. The art historian Mizusawa Tsutomu has found “psychological ambivalence” in Standing Figure rather than a resolute stance against militarism, and suggests that the artist may have purposefully disturbed a symmetrical composition and balanced disposition with the undetermined posture of the artist, the disparity between his fists (one of which is just loosely held), the stray thread at the hem of his trousers, and above all his unfocused eyes.82 Murai also finds Standing Figure “schizophrenic,” pointing to the unbalanced configuration of the body as well as the sharp contrast between the black-garbed figure and the white sky, along with the asymmetrical rendering of the background cityscape.83 Murai goes so far as to say that Standing Figure can be interpreted as a negative image of Matsumoto’s self, provoked by the presence of Yamashita; that is to say, “Matsumoto without intelligence.”84 Whichever interpretation—”bold” figure of resistance or “schizophrenic” portrait of a “negative” self—may be correct, what is more intriguing is that, whether or not Matsumoto intended it, his standing portraits embrace some kind of ambivalence that prevents at least a few art historians from determining their meaning. For Matsumoto, like Nanbata, ancient Greece and the Renaissance together embodied a “healthier” world in contrast to the “madness” of contemporary Japan. On the Renaissance, in a 1937 article in which he criticized “irrational East Asian thought,” Matsumoto stated,

Nanbata Tatsuoki (1905–1997). Venus and a Boy, 1936. Oil on canvas, 65.2 x 53 cm. Itabashi Art Museum, Tokyo.

Matsumoto displayed himself standing (in the former with his wife and an unidentified child) in front of a Tokyo cityscape.81 His body is illustrated in a far more representational manner compared with his earlier figures, and clearly stands out from the cityscape and the people in it, whose figures are minimized like black stains. In both paintings the artist appears statuesque; his body is elongated into the 1:7 head-to-body ratio of ancient Greek sculpture, which clearly indicates his “return” to this classic art form. Yet his “Western” body does not seem to fully match his Japanese head, and the relationship between the background cityscape and the standing figure also remains highly ambiguous. In contrast to Nanbata’s romantic rendering of ancient Greece, which incorporates the faceless adolescent boy into a hazy, dreamlike space, Matsumoto seems to attempt, rather forcefully, to glue the Western standard onto his Japanese body and Tokyo cityscape.

In the West, there was the Renaissance. The cry for the human was the flower of logic. Science is the stem of this logic. Our plight is different, and to make Japanese humanism something of our own, we must find our own path forward.85

While the Renaissance represented rational thought and humanism, ancient Greece was further idealized 117

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Winther-Tamaki has acknowledged the resonance between Matsumoto’s views and the official “politics of the body.”89 Pointing out that “new order” was the key term employed for justifying Japan’s invasion of Asia, and indicating a number of body metaphors used in both the official discourse and Matsumoto’s essays during the war, WintherTamaki contends that the artist’s ambition to digest and surpass Europe, and thereby to create a new Japanese body under the name of the new order, was not necessarily at odds with Japan’s imperialist ambitions, but was aligned with them.90 In addition to Winther-Tamaki’s interpretation, one last set of self-portraits rarely discussed by art historians also illuminates Matsumoto’s highly ambivalent political position: the aforementioned Three and Five of 1943 (figs.  58, 59).91 In these last self-portraits of monumental scale, Matsumoto’s ultimate solution for overcoming the issue of “idiocy” and thereby his unsettled social identity may be discerned. In this settlement process, the compatibility of the artist’s conceptions with official policies, especially those of health, gender, and family, seems to become most apparent. The largest in size among Matsumoto’s surviving works and the last in which the artist included his own figure, Three and Five should be considered an important turning point in his career. Despite this fact, this set of paintings had been almost entirely dismissed by art historians until, once again, Murai Hiroya examined them in his 2004 article.92 Murai argues that the three figures in Three—an old man, a young man, and a boy—represent Matsumoto himself at three different stages of his life, pointing to self-portrait sketches of an aged face and the similar facial features shared by the three men. In Five, the man at the center, the small boy in front of him, and the woman sitting on the wooden box at right are identified, respectively, as Matsumoto, his son Kan, and his wife Teiko. The identities of the two girls in Five remain unknown, but Murai speculates that they were possibly Matsumoto’s nieces, who lived in his neighborhood at that time.93 Identifying the three figures in Three as portraits of Matsumoto’s childhood, adolescence, and future, and Five as a

in Matsumoto’s mind, not simply as the antecedent of the Renaissance and origin of Western culture, but also as a universal canon that the Japanese, too, could use to begin developing their culture. Thus, unlike Nanbata, who admitted quite frankly that his escapist desire led to his preference for Greece, Matsumoto was determined to continue engaging with Japanese society. In his article concerning Greek art, Matsumoto argued, I do not think that the perfection seen in Greek art was entirely foreign to us. Yet the difficulty lies in the minds of contemporary men, which find it so hard to maintain a balance in such simple and naïve [forms as those seen in Greek art]. The contemporary seriously seeks a new order. We will start there.86

The phrase “a new order” displays Matsumoto’s desire to renew Japanese society by embracing Western humanism, science, and rationality, and thereby eliminate “insanity” from both his own body and Japanese society.87 Matsumoto’s self-portraits then can be understood as traces of his struggle to attain a new body—a Japanese body shaped with Western rationalism, or possibly his own body equivalent to that of his “brothers in arms” fighting “in a calm.” Matsumoto’s friend Asō Saburō, in fact, described Matsumoto’s painting practices in the early 1940s as a “physical exercise” (taiiku) that the artist imposed on himself in order to “fully integrate intelligence into his body by pushing himself into something [I would call] European rationalism or the perseverance of the rational spirit.”88 This interpretation does not necessarily contradict the postwar reading of Matsumoto’s self-portraits as a manifestation of his anti-war standpoint, as for Matsumoto “insanity” and “madness” were equated with the frenzy of militarism, against which the thorough integration of the Western “flower of logic” was a possible weapon. The fact that the yearning for “health,” call for “a new order,” and classicized form of the male figure embraced by Matsumoto and his fellow artists all resonated uncannily with the official discourses of that time, however, must not be dismissed. Bert 118

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sculptures), moreover, only Kan and Matsumoto appear in contemporary dress, and display a much more active presence. Kan is also the only figure in the group of eight people with his back to the viewer, thereby looking like he is standing in front of a large canvas. Holding the paper plane, which appears to be an analogue of the painter’s brush, Kan seems to be placed in the position of the artist, drawing this utopian world of humanism on the large canvas. The presence of his son was quite important for Matsumoto, not only because he was a doting father, but also because Kan’s creativity was an important source of inspiration for the artist. At about the same time that he did Three and Five, Matsumoto made a few curious paintings based on Kan’s scribbles (figs. 62, 63). These are characterized by the use of freely drawn, spontaneous lines, which the artist had once called his “Mephistopheles” in association with “idiocy” or Yamashita. Although these small-scale works were never displayed at major venues, Matsumoto, nonetheless, carefully traced and transferred his young son’s drawings into oil. A note that he wrote referring to his son’s scribble stated, “9-12 is based on a free-drawing made by my five-year-old son. It is my pleasure as an artist to find a pure painterly expression in such a naïve feeling.”96 While imposing upon himself the task of integrating the Western “flower of logic” into the irrational Japanese body, Matsumoto also still seemed to find joy in freeing his artistic impulses from order and reason through appreciating and appropriating his son’s creative drawings. Or perhaps Matsumoto had come to terms with his fear and fascination with what Yamashita or the figure of the “idiot” used to symbolize by transferring such qualities as “pure,” “simple,” and “naïve” to his own son. Wearing the jacket that he always wore in the studio, Matsumoto, with Kan’s presence, seems to confidently present himself both as an artist and father. With his robust body and towering height, and standing right in front of Kan, the artist clearly marked himself as a guardian of his young son/artist, and of the whole family. The postcard that Matsumoto sent to Kan in September 1945, during a period when Teiko and Kan had been evacuated from Tokyo and

portrait of his present as “the patriarch of an ordinary family,” Murai concludes that Three and Five should be considered the ultimate portrait of Matsumoto as a unified subject. As Murai argues convincingly, the forcible integration of Western culture into the Japanese body seems to be settled in Three and Five. In Five, Matsumoto again illustrated himself with an unrealistically tall and well-built body, yet compared with his figure in his earlier self-portraits, the incompatibility of the Western body and Japanese head seems to be lessened, or at least his bodily ambivalence (as seen in the unfocused eyes and the loose thread at the bottom of his pant leg) has ebbed away. In the cityscapes in Three and Five, too, the metropolises of ancient Greece and contemporary Tokyo have been overlapped without any visible discord; the icons of both cities, such as the Acropolis of Athens and the Holy Resurrection Cathedral (known as Nikorai-dō) co-exist in the background.94 The juxtaposition of ancient Greece and contemporary Tokyo is also seen in the illustration of the clothing worn by the seated woman (presumably Teiko) in Five. Her pair of monpe—women’s cotton pants for manual work, designated as national dress for women during the war—have been transformed into drapery typical of ancient Greek costume. Matsumoto’s Japanese head and Western body, as well as war-torn Tokyo and an idealized city of ancient Greece, were now organically connected to each other, appearing continuous. Acknowledging Murai’s argument about Three and Five as Matsumoto’s embodiment of himself as “the patriarch of an ordinary family,” it is compelling to question how the artist attained a sense of coherence about his body as well as Japanese society. Together with Matsumoto himself, the most important figure in the two paintings appears to be the small boy illustrated in the foreground of Five, Matsumoto’s five-year-old son, Kan. Sakai Tetsuo argues that the protagonists of these paintings are children (Kan in particular), pointing to the composition of the group of adult figures that centers on and surrounds Kan.95 In contrast to the rest of the figures with their static postures and somewhat archaic costumes (probably reminiscent of Greek relief 119

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62 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Cow, 1943–46. Oil on board, 13.7 x 18 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama.

63

Matsumoto Shunsuke. Elephant, 1943–46. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama.

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only Matsumoto remained at home, was accompanied by a similar illustration of the artist (fig. 64). In this illustration, Matsumoto’s body is again tall and muscular, presenting itself as that of a reliable father; the message asks, “Who is he? This is [a picture of] your dad with his arms crossed walking around the studio like a bear.” In Three and Five, Matsumoto’s professional and gender identities seem to be supported by multiple elements: not only his well-built physique, but also his visible social roles as the father of a young son, mentor of a “naïve” artist, and husband of Teiko (transformed here into a Greek goddess), and above all as the patriarch of an “ordinary” family in the ideal society of Greece/Tokyo. Through this confirmation of his position as patriarch and the

paternal lineage of artistic creativity, the artist was able to balance his admiration for and animosity toward a “naïve” artist, confirm his identity both as an artist and a “man,” and ultimately link an irrational Japanese body to Western humanism. Matsumoto’s bold resistance to militarism and yearning for the betterment of Japan undoubtedly lie behind his portraits of self, family, and Japanese society, which manifest his divergent values. Kawata Akihisa finds that Portrait of a Painter and Five deviate from the wartime normality of family portraits, as the artist, who failed to become a soldier due to his “handicapped” body, designated himself as the dignified patriarch.97 Yet Matsumoto’s representation of his family and himself, especially as seen in Five, was not necessarily incompatible with the politics of gender, family, and health current during the AsiaPacific War. A few scholars have pointed out that Matsumoto’s family portrait can be read in accordance with the iconography of the ideal family promoted by the government at that time. As Kawata argues, Five can be considered compatible with the officially sanctioned image of the family at war, which often featured a boy with his older sister. This family component indicated the parents’ efforts to bear a boy (after having a girl), and also articulated the supposed role of women as benevolent caretakers of men, both represented by the presence of the older sister, whose real identity in Matsumoto’s work remains unknown. Murai, too, suggests that Matsumoto’s family portraits could be interpreted in accordance with the government’s policy: the figure of Kan, a boy playing with a paper plane in front of his father, can be read as a typical image of shōkokumin (small nation), a militant boy who promised to be an excellent soldier in the future.98 In addition, Matsumoto’s fondness for classical art, which became particularly evident from 1940, paralleled the military’s conservative taste in art, as noted in the production of campaign-record paintings.99 The ambivalence embraced within Matsumoto’s expression of himself, his family, and Japanese society informs us of the complex ways in which

64 Matsumoto Shunsuke. Letter to Teiko and Kan, September 1946. Ink and colors on postcard, 14.2 x 9.1 cm. Private collection.

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the artist legitimized his social position and his professional and gender identities at a time when ever stricter control over the body was imposed by the government. His portrayal of the artist as a patriarch with a well-built body clearly deviated from, while not subverting, the contemporary standard. As Kawata points out, it was quite unusual to give such a “masculine” tone to the body of someone who failed to be a soldier, and we thus can see here Matsumoto’s bold assertion of his authority and control over his own body, production, and family. Yet Matsumoto’s antagonism to “insanity” and longing for “normalcy” seemed to resonate with the state-oriented health policy of the time, as both attempted to transform an “unfit” male body into a “healthier” one in the light of “science” or the Western “flower of logic.” Matsumoto’s self- or family portraits, made out of his yearning for “sanity,” thus can be viewed as both subversive and conservative at once. At the end of his journey in search of an ideal state of self and society, Matsumoto seemed to attain a “healthier” body in Three and Five. His representation of this “healthier” body seems to be the antithesis of the negative image of himself and Japanese society that he projected upon the figure of Yamashita Kiyoshi, whose “spirit [was] all alone, eternally flying through the sky of darkness,” in Matsumoto’s words.100 Matsumoto’s self-representation was motivated without doubt by his anti-militarist sentiments, yet his physique and social roles as they appeared in Five not only reiterated the contemporary gender code and heterosexual normality, but also accorded well with the health policy imposed upon the Japanese, including Matsumoto himself.

Yamashita wandered through a number of regions and drifted from one job to another. One of the motives behind this drifting was to escape conscription. In 1943, Yamashita was forced to take a physical examination for conscription, after which he was rejected, presumably because of his impaired intelligence. While continuing to work in various places, he returned from time to time to the institute and made paintings or hari-e mainly from the memory of his wanderings. Yet neither his disappearance nor his works attracted further attention. It was only after Japan had fully recovered from the scars of the Asia-Pacific War in the 1950s that Yamashita began to resurface in the mainstream media and popular consciousness. As discussed throughout this chapter, Yamashita provoked many conflicting reactions from the nation at war, despite the fact that he was rarely given the chance to assert himself with his own voice. For the organizers of the “special children” exhibitions, these children, including Yamashita, demonstrated their potential to contribute to society. The strategy taken by the institute and Togawa Yukio may answer, at least in part, the question of why the exhibitions made a significant impact on the public. In the contemporary context, these “special children” would have demonstrated—as the institute and Togawa had intended—that “retarded” or “handicapped” people could be “fixed” or transformed into a useful human resource. As the newspaper article introducing the exhibition stated, Special children in fact means mentally deficient children, and these works are made by those who are in a school for special children, the Yawata Institute. These powerless persons, who were merely intolerable bothers for society and their parents, were encouraged to

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cultivate their latent talent after they were institutionalized in the caring home of the institute and given proper

On November 18, 1940, Yamashita Kiyoshi disappeared from the Yawata Institute. According to his own diary, he escaped because “I have been in the Yawata Institute for around six and a half years, and so I am tired of it.”101 After he left the institute,

instruction.102

Rather than being exhibitions of “outsider” artists or a gentrified form of a freak show, the “special children” exhibitions demonstrated that those who 122

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were “impotent” (munōryokusha) and “bothers” (yakkaimono) in society were “curable” as long as that society provided them with the proper institutional support. While the institute and Togawa attempted to resist the discriminatory categories imposed on children by reframing “mentally deficient” or “abnormal” children as “special children,” the attempt to transform “disabled” bodies into “normal” or “usable” ones through proper care, training, and discipline also accorded well with the mobilization policy of the state. The story provided by the exhibitions therefore would have played on the militaristic and patriotic desires shared by a wide range of people during the war to transform everything into a useful resource for the sake of the nation in a state of emergency. Yamashita Kiyoshi, however, was singled out as an “extraordinary” child. His miraculous talent was sensationally promoted and was sometimes regarded as a threat, especially within the art community. Not only to Matsumoto Shunsuke, who most explicitly displayed his fear and antagonism, but also even to those who praised Yamashita as an artistic genius, he seemed to remain an “other,” someone who crossed the boundaries of art and non-art, professional and amateur, artist and “madman.” Once again, looking at the 1939 roundtable discussion, the conversation was fraught with a strange tension, which seemed to have been generated by the participants’ uncertainty about where they should or could draw a line between Yamashita and themselves, regardless of whether or not they deemed him a true genius. When Togawa Yukio, the organizer of the exhibition, mentioned that Yamashita could keep doing just one thing for a long time without getting bored, Kawabata Ryūshi jokingly commented, “come to think of [it], we all do the same, too,” drawing laughs from the other participants.103 Even Yasui Sōtarō, who most passionately admired Yamashita as an artistic genius and was the only artist who had met him, displayed strong ambivalence when asked how Yamashita actually looked and what kind of person he was. Without answering these questions, Yasui instead kept insisting that Yamashita should not be seen in person. Although he did not clearly articulate

the reason, he was probably concerned that Yamashita’s actual body would betray the expected image of a suffering genius, and thereby expose the mark of his “otherness.” The reason why many artists so passionately discussed the image of Yamashita and his art was probably because of his “freakish” presence. Seen both as a fascinating artistic genius and a destructive interloper who “encroache[d] on [their] domain,” the presence of Yamashita provided Japanese artists with an opportunity to reexamine the line between artistic creativity and insanity, and thereby confirmed their “proper” social position and category. Furthermore, this desire to confirm their own identities within the given social categories was shared not only by the artists’ community, but by a wide range of people who lived in this oppressive political environment in which the borderline between “normal” and “abnormal,” “abled” and “disabled” could immediately be relevant to the issue of life and death. In this sense, Yamashita’s physical disappearance from the institute, as well as from public view, and the increased visibility of Matsumoto through his own works in 1940 were quite compelling. The disappearance of Yamashita and emergence of Matsumoto coincided with even greater enforcement of Japan’s “health” and mobilization policies. With the establishment of the National Eugenics Law in May 1940, as well as the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, little room was left for questioning or discussing the possibility of an “extraordinary” body as an integral part of society. At this stage, Yamashita’s body, which Yasui had already refused to publicize, probably had to be “abjected” from the homogenous society, which was supposed to work together coherently for the same political purpose. Yamashita’s brief appearance in the mainstream media and the eager consumption of his image between 1938 and 1940 then can be considered a response to the rapidly changing policies and conceptions concerning the nation’s “health,” to which artists and many others were compelled to conform their self-images, expelling any ambiguity from the society at large. 123

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Compared with those who quickly forgot about Yamashita, Matsumoto Shunsuke’s attention was relatively persistent. Finding himself in a marginal position due to his age, the short length of his career, and his deafness, yet determined to maintain “a tail tied to real life,” Matsumoto decided not to escape from his social and familial obligations, nor to become complicit with the wartime authorities and status quo. He was indeed quite exceptional in his resistance, in his uncompromising integrity to his own ideals of himself, the art community, and Japanese society at large. It should not be forgotten, however, that his uncompromising pursuit was

made through the stigmatization of another “handicapped” artist and celebration of the “able” male body equipped with “calmness,” “reason,” and “order,” the qualities required for fulfilling his imposed or self-imposed obligations as artist and patriarch. The ideal body that Matsumoto seemed to attain in Three and Five through the exclusion of anomalies and integration of Western rationalism, then, ironically resonated with the “health,” gender, and family policies, or was constructed within one of the hegemonic forms of masculinity, that suppressed the individual bodies of Yamashita, Matsumoto, and many others during the war.

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5 Conclusion: Male Icons of Japan’s “Long Postwar” the chameleon-like transformation of these painters and called on them to refrain, at least temporarily, from any artistic activities.1 In response, Fujita and others defended themselves by stating that they were liberals in principle, and, like everyone else, had simply carried out their “duty as Japanese citizens” during the state of national emergency.2 A more concerted effort to identify war criminals in the art world was made by the Japan Art Society (Nihon Bijutsukai), founded in 1946. The Japan Art Society was inaugurated for the purpose of “becoming a force for establishing a democratic Japan” through the organization of events such as discussion forums, study meetings, and exhibitions, managed mainly by Communist and young leftist-inspired artists.3 As one of its initial activities, the Japan Art Society published a list of “people who bore war responsibility in the art world” in July 1946. The list identified thirteen individual artists who “require voluntary restraint,” and categorized the members of eight patriotic art groups as “those who require self-reflection.”4 While those who engaged in the production of campaign-record paintings were the primary targets of criticism (as evidenced by the aforementioned debate in the Asahi newspaper), the list not only included former official war painters, such as Fujita and Miyamoto Saburō, but also those who were closely associated with the state-oriented art institutions, like Yokoyama Taikan and Kodama Kibō (1898–1971).5 These pronouncements had no legal foundation or

Even today, we need to question the meaning of defeat in order to subjectively accept the opportunity, brought on by the external force known as defeat in war, to transform our values. Without recognizing that the survival of our way of life depends on whether we can live through the meaning of defeat as the turning point of our spiritual history, we cannot think about the post-defeat [period], and by extension, postwar art. —Oda Tatsurō, “‘The Hiroshima Panels’ and their Surroundings,” 1958

The study of the visual art made during the AsiaPacific War began immediately after Japan’s unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945, in the form of questioning who in the art world was responsible for waging war. The so-called “artists’ morality debate” (bijutsuka no sessō ronsō) began in the autumn of 1945, and ignited a discussion over the war responsibility of artists. The debate was initiated by the article “Bijutsuka no sessō” (Artists’ Morality), which appeared in the Asahi newspaper on October 10, 1945, written by the yōga artist Miyata Shigeo (1900–1971). Miyata was the first to point out that some of the former official war painters, such as Fujita Tsuguharu, cooperated with the Allied Forces in organizing an exhibition of Japanese art for the American forces in Japan. He criticized

Domon Ken, Fujita Tsuguharu at Haneda Airport, Ōta, Tokyo, March 10, 1949, detail of fig. 65.

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bearing, but called for the “deep self-reflection” of every single artist who was responsible for allowing “militarists” to “overrun the art world.”6 The search for war criminals in the art world, however, quickly waned without any consensus or conclusion, concurrently with the American Occupation’s shift in policy known as the “reverse course.” This new policy, grounded by the intensification of the Cold War from around 1948, was a conservative turn that promoted the remilitarization of Japan and suppression of Communism.7 Coupled with this significant political shift, two symbols of the war responsibility of artists disappeared from Japan almost simultaneously: campaign-record paintings and Fujita Tsuguharu. On March 10, 1949, Fujita left Japan for France via the United States (fig.  65). He gained French citizenship in 1954 and died in Europe in 1968 without making a single visit back to Japan. In addition, by

1948, more than one hundred and fifty campaignrecord paintings had been collected from all over Japan, as well as colonized areas, and were temporarily placed in storage in the Tokyo Prefecture Museum. These art works were said to have been accumulated for the purpose of an exhibition, but for unknown reasons, the exhibition was never realized. For the next few years, the collected campaign-record paintings were simply left in a storage room at the museum. The very presence of campaign-record paintings troubled the Japanese people both physically and, presumably, psychologically as well. Toward the end of the Occupation, Japanese curators and artists asked the U.S. government to remove these paintings from the museum in order to secure more space for other art works. As a response to this request, the campaign-record paintings were sent to the United States in 1951.8 With the relics of war physically removed from its presence, the Japanese art community seemed to quickly forget its immediate past, and forged ahead with the democratization of art and pursuit of economic growth under the new political alliance with the United States. The memory of war, however, continued to haunt the Japanese people for the next several decades in various forms. Carol Gluck, in her 1993 article “The Past in the Present,” argued that the Japanese still considered their country to be in the period of sengo (“the postwar”; the term “postwar” is used as a noun in Japanese) nearly fifty years after the end of the Asia-Pacific War. Gluck identified the root of this prolonged sengo, or “Japan’s long postwar,” as the shared desire of the Japanese populace to cling to “the myth of a new beginning” on August 15, 1945, in order to legitimize postwar prosperity and development.9 As suggested in the first chapter of this book, Fujita Tsuguharu, Yasui Sōtarō, Matsumoto Shunsuke, and Yamashita Kiyoshi all achieved iconic status in postwar society mainly for their wartime practices, although at different times, and due to different constituents in Japan’s “long postwar” period. Their practices during the Asia-Pacific War were rediscovered, re-examined, and re-narrated in order to reconcile the memory of war with defeat, and

65 Domon Ken. Photograph of Fujita Tsuguharu at Haneda Airport, Ōta, Tokyo, March 10, 1949. Domon Ken Museum of Photography.

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elsewhere. For another example, a 1951 article about the two artists stated that, “though perhaps not to the extent of the absolute almighty ‘Picasso, Matisse,’ ‘Umehara, Yasui’–worship has surely reached the god-level …”12 The promotion of Yasui and Umehara in the immediate postwar years was supported, again, by the Shirakaba circle. As discussed in Chapter Three, the two artists gained high posts in the official art institutions with strong backing from Kojima Kikuo and his fellow Shirakaba intellectuals in the last few years of the Asia-Pacific War. Yasui and Umehara continued to form an integral part of the Shirakaba circle, which constituted an influential political and cultural faction known as the “Old Liberalists” in the postwar years. This faction was not an organized group, but the name generally referred to the elite intellectuals and political figures whose main members were the Shirakaba associates and their contemporaries who had studied at the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University under the tutelage of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). The wartime Three Year Society played an important role in the formulation of the Old Liberalists. While the society was short lived, it developed into the well-known Likeminded Society (Dōshinkai) established in October 1945, in which Yasui, Umehara, and Kojima participated. The Likeminded Society issued the extremely influential journal Sekai (World; founded December 1945) under the banner of the establishment of world peace through culture; this publication functioned as a hub for the Old Liberalists.13 With the leadership of Abe Yoshishige, who served as Minister of Education and director of the newly reorganized Tokyo National Museum, the Old Liberalists came to occupy several important posts in the Ministry, and thereby exercised significant political power over the arts administration of postwar Japan.14 While severely criticizing the military for singlehandedly driving the nation into all-out war, they advocated a “nation of culture” as the key concept for postwar Japan, insisting on restoring the importance of individualism, liberalism, and culture to the country. At the same time,

thereby legitimize each subsequent state of postwar Japan and Japanese art. Delineating the processes by which the pre-1945 activities and works of these four artists were rehabilitated or reconfigured in the postwar period will reveal the ways in which their practices, male figures, and even their own male bodies were deployed to restore Japan’s “masculine” identity, as well as the lingering effect of this identity on current art historical studies.

the persistence of modernity: yasui sōtarō The first artist who achieved canonical status in the post-1945 period was Yasui Sōtarō. From around the late 1940s to the early 50s, Yasui’s popularity, together with that of his friend/rival Umehara Ryūzaburō, seemed to reach its zenith. In June 1949, the two artists jointly presented the “SelfSelected Works of Yasui Sōtarō/Umehara Ryūzaburō Exhibition” at the Matsuzakaya department store in Tokyo’s Ginza district. This was probably the largest-scale retrospective exhibition to be organized for both artists to that date, and one of the first major exhibitions that featured only contemporary Japanese artists after Japan’s defeat. According to the catalogue, seventy-nine works by Umehara and sixty-three by Yasui, from their early paintings of the 1910s to the most recent from 1949, were displayed in total.10 The exhibition was extremely well attended. The art critic Imaizumi Atsuo described its great popularity as follows: Among all the exhibitions held this year so far, this Umehara Yasui exhibition was overwhelmingly popular … the exhibition hall was packed every day. Although I went to the exhibition twice, one time I could just barely see [the works] from a small gap between people’s heads and shoulders. I’ve heard that the other day there was a long line for entry, going down the long stairs and extending outside …11

The significant popularity that Yasui and Umehara enjoyed around this time was also recorded 129

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however, they were highly critical of the democratization policy initially employed by the U.S. Occupation, mainly because it potentially threatened their privileged social positions and the emperor’s authority. The sociologist Oguma Eiji attributes these seemingly contradictory attitudes—the emphasis on liberalism, but skepticism toward the U.S.–led democracy—to the Old Liberalists’ unabashed elitism. Oguma argues that their advocacy of liberalism, individualism, and culture was not a positive response to the postwar democracy, but a desire for returning back to the Japan of the 1910s and early 20s, when politics was conducted exclusively by the upper class and aristocrats, who enjoyed a stable social position and “cultured life.”15 For the Old Liberalists, Yasui and Umehara continued to be the only artists who fully embodied their aesthetic ideals of selfhood and manhood, ideals that traced back to their worship of such modern masters as Rodin and van Gogh in the first decade of the twentieth century. Many exhibitions of the artists’ work, including the aforementioned “SelfSelected Works” of 1949, were organized in cooperation with the Old Liberalists, and the artists’ books were published through Zauhō Kankōkai, the Shirakaba group’s publishing company. Zauhō Kankōkai also began issuing Zauhō, a monthly journal on art and culture, from April 1946; as its mission statement declared in the inaugural issue, “it is the spirit of Shirakaba that is needed for Japan in the future” (fig. 66).16 Works by Yasui and other members of the Pure Light Society were featured in this journal almost every month. Given Japan’s defeat and withdrawal from militarism, a strong urge existed among these elite intellectuals and politicians to regain their momentum and restore their authority through art and culture, an endeavor in which Yasui and Umehara were given ever more significant attention. The canonization of Yasui and Umehara in the late 1940s and early 50s, however, cannot be explained solely by the support of these elite intellectuals. In fact, the Old Liberalists sometimes  invited strong criticism for their “outdated” elitist attitudes and their favoritism in “unfairly”

66 Front cover of Zauhō, no. 1 (April 1946).

elevating Yasui and Umehara. Nonetheless, Yasui’s art seized the public’s attention well beyond the limited circle of the Shirakaba group, as evidenced by the massive popularity of the aforementioned Umehara and Yasui exhibition. Here, the Shirakaba intellectuals’ urge for achieving liberalism and individualism through culture and art seemed to meet the demands of a wide range of people at this specific historical moment. To explicate Yasui’s popularity and canonization, it is therefore necessary to look more closely at what his art and perceived personality signified within the specific historical and political context of the immediate postwar years. The evaluation of Yasui’s art and public image, as seen through exhibitions, contemporary art journals, general magazines, and newspapers of the time, does not display a significant shift from that cultivated and configured by Kojima Kikuo and 130

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others throughout the 1930s and early 40s. While some differences can be identified, such as an emphasis on formal experimentation in his art and his new image as a good family man, the basic image of the artist remained intact: Yasui was always introduced as a rational, moderate, and diligent Japanese man with a sophisticated modern sensibility; and his male portraiture, particularly Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo, was still identified as the culmination of his oeuvre, as well as of modern painting in Japan (fig.  31). In the postwar context, however, the very continuation of Yasui’s image and practice by itself seemed to gain importance. That is to say, Yasui, together with Umehara, came to symbolize the survival and persistence of individualism, liberalism, and modernity in Japanese society through the age of militarism and all-out war. As the debates raged over the war responsibility of artists and the direction of Japanese art in a new political reality, the artists and their Shirakaba supporters alike insisted that militarism had made no interruption of, or impact upon, their aesthetic pursuits and careers. For example, as Umehara stated in 1951,

Here we may find one of the chief reasons for the popularity and canonization of Yasui and Umehara in this specific postwar context. In particular, Yasui, who had rarely traveled outside mainland Japan during the previous decade, would have provided a desirable image of Japan and the Japanese male.18 An artist with a sincere personality and modern sensibility, who remained entirely irrelevant to Japan’s colonialism, militarism, and war effort, was probably a much needed male icon for the late 1940s and early 50s in Japanese society and the art community. From the late 1940s to early 50s, yōga was historicized in line with the developmental model of European modern art, and we can clearly observe how Yasui’s art related to or served Japan’s recovery from the devastation of war during this period.19 More precisely, the historicization of yōga itself was a product of the Japanese desire to achieve “democracy” and quick reentry into international society. A number of grand-scale exhibitions of European art, especially those showing the work of modern masters, held from 1947 through the 1950s, and the establishment of modern art museums in Japan both promoted yōga’s historicization.20 The former began in 1947 with the Exhibition of European Masterpieces (Taisei meigaten), which displayed a wide range of European paintings accumulated from various Japanese private collections. Several exhibitions followed, including the Contemporary World Art Exhibition in 1950, the Great Matisse and Picasso Exhibitions in 1951, the Braque Exhibition in 1952, the Rouault Exhibition in 1953, and the Vincent van Gogh Exhibition in 1958. These exhibitions attained significant public attention and popularity; the Matisse and van Gogh exhibitions, in particular, were said to have attracted one hundred twenty thousand and four hundred thousand visitors, respectively.21 For the majority of Japanese people, these exhibitions constituted the first opportunity to see original works by modern European painters, yet the significance of these presentations was not limited to their novelty. Such exhibitions functioned as a

What was wrong with this war was that they started the war in the first place. That’s what I had felt, strongly, right after [Japan] embarked on the war. So, nothing in my work changed before or after the war. Although Japan has lost the war and been in chaos, [the defeat] is not necessarily a bad thing for the future. I do not know what the fate of Japan as a nation will be, but [I am certain that] each individual can grow far more freely than in the prewar period. In short, what was wrong with the prewar Japanese was that they failed to be rugged individualists.17

Umehara’s comment that “[the defeat] is not necessarily a bad thing” echoed the optimistic view about the future of Japanese art presented by Kojima in the immediate postwar years (introduced in Chapter Three). At that time, few artists or people addressed the future of the country with such confidence, while entirely denying their involvement with the war or its impact on their lives and careers. 131

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site where the Japanese could contemplate their future through the art of “democratic” nations. Referring to the 1947 Exhibition of European Masterpieces, for example, the art critic Sanami Tōru characterized all of the paintings presented as “democratic art” (minshushugi geijutsu), although they included a wide range of works from Georges Braque (1882–1963), Picasso, Henri Matisse, Renoir, and Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955) to André Derain (1880–1954) and others. Sanami contended that prewar Japanese society failed to fully absorb the essence of this “democratic art” due to “narrowminded Japanism” and “feudalistic academicism,” and called for young artists to learn from those works based on the spirit of democracy found within European or French modern art.22 Hariu Ichirō (1925–2010), who became active as an art critic in the 1950s, recalled his experience of viewing these exhibitions: “I eagerly gazed at each single

work in order to capture the ‘West,’ which finally unveiled its figure … for the sake of understanding the root of tradition and finding a possible path for the contemporary reformation [of Japan].”23 These statements attest to the idea that exhibitions of European modern art functioned at the time as a means through which the Japanese could contemplate a possible path toward overcoming their own recent past and reentering international (i.e., Western European) society by absorbing its “democratic” art and values.24 Along with the organization of international art exhibitions, Japanese modern art, including yōga, was institutionalized in the discipline of art history and in museums. In the pre-1945 period, no museums within mainland Japan specialized in modern art, which was not yet a subject of study for art-historical investigations. The first public museum entirely devoted to modern art, the Kanagawa Museum of

67 Sakakura Junzō (1901–1969), architect. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, 1951.

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Modern Art (now the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama), opened in 1951, followed by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1952. The mission of the latter was defined as “to confirm the lineage of the modern art of our country and thereby determine the mission of our art in the currency of world art”; and of the former, as “to introduce … and define the place of contemporary Japanese art within the larger context of international art.”25 As clearly seen in these mission statements, the institutionalization and historicization of Japanese modern art were aligned with Japan’s efforts to find its own position within the currency of world (or, more precisely, European “democratic”) modern art. Such a desire was also manifested in the designs of the museum buildings. The white rectangular building of the Kanagawa Museum was designed by Sakakura Junzō (1901–1969), and the National Museum in Tokyo was renovated by Maekawa Kunio (1905–1986). Sakakura and Maekawa were two famous Japanese students of Le Corbusier (1887– 1965) who were known for their international style of architecture (figs. 67, 68).26 A similar effort to line up Japanese art with European “democratic” art is seen in a number of art-historical surveys of both Japanese and European modern art published one after the other throughout the 1950s.27 One such example is Kindai yōga no ayumi: Seiyō to Nihon (The Footsteps of Modern Yōga: The West and Japan), published in 1955. This work was co-authored by Imaizumi Atsuo and Ishikawa Kōichi (1921–1963), who comprised the core staff members of the newly established National Museum of Modern Art at the time. The book delineated the history of yōga from the early Meiji period to 1955 by juxtaposing Japanese oil paintings with their corresponding European art works from the schools of Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, École de Paris, and finally abstraction. Two flow charts appeared at the end of the publication: one showing the development of modern European painting, clearly referring to the famous diagram made by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902–1981) for the exhibition Cubism and

68 Maekawa Kunio (1905–1986), architect. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1952.

Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936; and the other depicting the development of yōga from the late nineteenth century (figs. 69a, 69b).28 The Japanese chart was organized according to the formulation and derivation of major art groups, listing a few key members for each, and vaguely corresponded to the schools or movements and their main practitioners in the European chart. As Griselda Pollock has pointed out, Barr’s chart was highly selective, hierarchical, and malecentered, and included no women (or non-Caucasians) as agents of “mainstream” modern art movements.29 By juxtaposing Europe and Japan, and “major” European male artists with their Japanese counterparts, the close proximity or synchronicity of the two was strongly emphasized. On the other hand, none of the categories that presumably were considered to lack correspondence to European “democratic” modern art, such as campaign-record painting, Korean or Taiwanese artists, or art that developed out of Japanese interactions with Asia, not to mention female artists, found a place within this historical survey. The historical scheme for yōga that appeared in this survey corresponded to the Japanese desire to claim the country’s position within the European- and malecentered hierarchy of modern art, thereby declaring the presence of modernity and “men of culture” 133

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69 “Genealogy of Modern Western Painting” (a) and “Genealogy of Modern Japanese Western-Style Painting” (b), from Kindai yōga no ayumi: Seiyō to Nihon, 63–64.

in prewar Japan, while largely erasing the traumatic past of war, militarism, and colonialism from its developmental history. In this specific context, in which the historicization of yōga and rehabilitation of Japan were intimately linked to each other, Yasui’s art and practice came to be canonized. For the exhibitions of modern European art introduced earlier, Yasui— although not personally involved with their organization—often appeared in the media as a commentator and reviewer who had firsthand experience with the Belle Époque, and was thus not only an admirer, but also one of the few “true” practitioners of modern painting. Together with Umehara, Yasui also occupied a central position in the surveys of yōga as well. In the aforementioned flow chart made by Imaizumi and Ishikawa, Yasui and Umehara appear at the center as the key members of the Nika Society, the main body out of

which almost all of the modernist and avant-garde art groups in Japan evolved. In December 1955, Yasui suddenly died of pneumonia. A number of newspapers and journals reported the artist’s death and expressed their sense of significant loss. For example, the Tokyo newspaper stated that “Japan lost one of its important cultural properties. That is the death of Yasui Sōtarō,” and carried the art critic Yanagi Ryō’s comment that “his life is symbolic, which means that [his life] by itself indicates the struggle for the modernization of Japanese oil painting.”30 These comments inform us of the significant value that the artist carried for postwar Japan: Yasui’s death was not just an artistic loss, but a loss for the nation that strived for uninterrupted modernity as a counterpart to Europe. While such evaluations of Yasui as “the Japanese Cézanne” or an artist with a modern sensibility appear purely artistic, in the context of Japan in the late 1940s and 134

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early 50s, the canonization of Yasui’s art was intimately linked to the desire to reconfirm Japan’s position within the European- and male-centered community of modern art, thereby swiftly and surely departing from the country’s militant past as the self-proclaimed leader and colonizer of Asia.

after the war, from late 1953 the Asahi Newspaper Company, in collaboration with Shikiba Ryūzaburō, organized a campaign to search for the artist, who had not been back to either the institute or his mother’s home for two and a half years. The article “Nihon no Gohho wa ima izuko?” (Where Is the Japanese van Gogh Now?) appeared in the January 6, 1954 issue of the Asahi newspaper.33 Only four days later, Yamashita, who was then traveling around Kagoshima in the southern part of Japan, was “discovered.”34 The period from this “rediscovery” of Yamashita until the late 1950s can be regarded as the second “Yamashita Kiyoshi boom” in Japan. Especially in 1956, Yamashita was the hottest man of the moment, appearing in a number of magazines, newspapers, and radio programs, as well as having a large-scale solo exhibition at the Daimaru department store in Tokyo, which was said to have attracted eight hundred thousand visitors for a month (although this number seems somewhat unrealistic) and was attended by the crown prince. The exhibition later toured fifty cities, from the island of Hokkaidō in the north to Kyūshū in the south, for the next five years. Several publications on Yamashita were issued, including Yamashita Kiyoshi hōrō nikki (Yamashita Kiyoshi’s Wandering Diary), and a luxurious full-color artist’s portfolio, Yamashita Kiyoshi gashū (Picture Book of Yamashita Kiyoshi).35 Two films were made about his life and works: the short documentary film Hadaka no tensai gaka Yamashita Kiyoshi (The Naked Genius Painter Yamashita Kiyoshi) in 1957, and Hadaka no taishō (The Naked General) in 1958. Starting with these pictorializations, Yamashita’s life was adapted into a number of TV dramas and other films. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Yamashita was, and is still, one of the best-known painters in Japan after this mid-1950s “second Yamashita boom.” The mastermind of the Yamashita boom at this time was again not Yamashita himself, but the art historian and psychiatrist Shikiba Ryūzaburō, an expert on van Gogh and the art of the mentally ill. During the Asia-Pacific War, he largely shifted his

the resurrection of wartime memory: yamashita kiyoshi Yasui’s sudden death at the age of sixty-seven in 1955 coincided with the arrival of a new artistic trend in Japan. In November 1956, the exhibition Exposition Internationale de l’Art Actuel (Sekai kyō no bijutsu ten) made a significant impact, beginning what eventually came to be known as “the Whirlwind of Art Informel” (Anforumeru senpū). While Art Informel—the Parisian counterpart to Abstract Expressionism—had already been known in Japan, the 1956 exhibition, which included works by several major artists such as Jean Fautrier (1898– 1964), Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), and Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), had far-reaching effects.31 Such museum curators as Imaizumi and a younger generation of artists and art critics sought to keep up with this new artistic trend from Europe and the United States, which in due course replaced French modernism as the canon for Japanese artists, including yōga painters.32 While Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism did not necessarily dominate the Japanese art scene completely, figurative arts by such Paris-trained painters as Yasui and Umehara clearly had gone out of fashion. Also coinciding with Yasui’s death, although almost entirely dismissed in current art historical studies, was the resurrection of Yamashita Kiyoshi. Yamashita’s return to the spotlight in the mid1950s was truly sensational and far more significant than the prewar “Yamashita boom” discussed in Chapter Four. During his wanderings all over Japan in the 1940s, Yamashita returned occasionally to his mother’s place and the Yawata Institute, where he continued making his pictures. While no attention was paid to him during and immediately 135

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claiming the equal importance (if not superiority) of the artist’s “pure” state.38 As seen in the titles of the aforementioned films The Naked Genius Painter and The Naked General, “naked” quickly became Yamashita’s defining term, and his art and public persona, as constructed largely by Shikiba, found immense popularity and were eagerly consumed by a mass audience. While Yamashita and Shikiba achieved significant popularity with the masses, Yamashita’s art provoked only antagonistic reactions from the professional art community. In contrast to the prewar period, when a group of established painters such as Yasui and Umehara celebrated Yamashita as an artistic genius (although not without some controversy), the response from the 1950s art community was overwhelmingly negative. For example, in the roundtable discussion carried in the special issue of Bijutsu techō (Art Notes) in December 1956, which aimed to summarize the important art news of the year, Yamashita’s outstanding popularity came up in the conversation. Yet the participants, Imaizumi in particular, refused to discuss his art, and ended up merely expressing their sense of puzzlement or murmuring about his popularity in the media.39 In another article that appeared in 1958, the literary critic Ara Masahito (1913–1979) had particularly harsh words for Shikiba. Scarcely referring to Yamashita’s works, Ara blamed Shikiba for placing “his patient” on display, and strongly urged Yamashita’s quick withdrawal from public view.40 Based on their close investigations of the state of the art world and art criticism at the time, Hattori Tadashi and Fujihara Sadao have given several possible reasons for these harsh reactions from the professional art community.41 In so doing, they refer to the curious opposing phenomena then seen in the Japanese and Euro-American art worlds: in the latter, the art of the mentally ill was deployed widely by avant-garde artists in order to challenge the conventional way of seeing; while in Japan, “naïve” or “primitive” art, including Yamashita’s, was supported by a conservative element, such as the Shirakaba group. As is widely known, the

interest to the folk craft movement. Through his appreciation of folk crafts made by anonymous people, Shikiba came to espouse “health,” “purity,” and “innocence” as the most important concepts for any production, and at the same time became increasingly critical of modern society and art. While Shikiba had known Yamashita as early as the late 1930s, it was in the 50s that Shikiba presumably found his principles of “health” and “purity” perfectly embodied by the artist, and came to serve as his promoter, specialist physician, and guardian. Yamashita’s art and postwar public persona were largely configured by Shikiba’s endorsements of “health” and “purity.” The psychiatrist particularly emphasized Yamashita’s state of mind as that of an “eternal boy,” referring to his lack of both intelligence and sexuality. Shikiba argued that, without ego or sex drive behind his artistic production, Yamashita’s “naïve” art was supported by such a childlike spirit.36 One piece of evidence provided by Shikiba for this state of mind was that the artist often took his clothes off in front of others without showing any sense of embarrassment. In the afterword to Yamashita’s picture book Hadaka no ōsama (literally, Naked King; the Japanese translation of The Emperor’s New Clothes), for example, Shikiba explained the reason why he, as editor, chose this title: Because Kiyoshi likes being naked. Despite [the fact] that he is now thirty-four and weighs twenty-one kan (roughly 175 pounds), his mentality often seems just like that of a five- or six-year-old boy. When it is a little hot, he wants to be naked [even] in front of other people … And he wants to walk in the city or on a country lane just with a backpack. Kiyoshi is a man whose spirit is permanently that of a young boy. This is probably one of the reasons why Kiyoshi is so popular.37

Shikiba persistently emphasized Yamashita’s asexuality and child-like innocence as evidenced by his “nakedness” in other sources as well. In so doing, Shikiba made a sharp contrast between Yamashita’s art and the commonly accepted notion of male sexual potency as the source of artistic creativity, 136

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promotion of the art of the mentally ill, or asylum art, was not necessarily a phenomenon unique to 1950s Japan, but was also seen in a few other countries that experienced the devastation of World War II. Most noticeably, the French artist Jean Dubuffet collected the art of the mentally ill, which he used as key sources for his own works, and coined the term art brut (raw art) in the late 1940s.42 In contrast, those Japanese art critics who belonged to the younger generation and welcomed Art Informel, including Dubuffet’s works, mostly refuted paintings such as Yamashita’s. Referring to a certain art  critic’s analogy between Yamashita’s art and conventional literati paintings—both of which were supported by the Shirakaba School and considered products of “the selfless realm”— Hattori and Fujihara contend that Yamashita’s art came to be associated with the conservative values of the Japanese tradition or Eastern mysticism by the postwar generation of artists and art critics.43 On top of the sociopolitical and artistic factors that Hattori and Fujihara have indicated, the experience and memory of the Asia-Pacific War also seemed to play a key role in the resurrection of Yamashita, his significant popularity, and his dismissal by the art community at this specific historical moment. The 1958 film The Naked General, produced by the Tōhō Film Company, is the prime text for examining the reception of Yamashita in conjunction with such memory (fig. 70). This film was directed by Horikawa Hiromichi (1916–2012) and scripted by Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003) based on Yamashita’s Wandering Diary of 1956.44 The film was received quite well and was chosen as one of the top ten films of the year by the prestigious film magazine Kinema junpō (Cinema Bulletin); Kobayashi Keiju (1923–2010), who played Yamashita in the film, won the best actor award in the Mainichi Film Contest. The Naked General, which was also a box-office success, epitomized and reinforced one of the archetypes of Yamashita’s public image that would be reiterated in the numerous films and TV dramas made in subsequent years. In contrast to a later version that appeared as a TV soap opera, which was mostly a heartwarming

70 Poster for Hadaka no taishō (The Naked General), 1958. Tōhō Film Company.

human drama, this 1958 film was a burlesque comedy, sarcastically illustrating the delusional nature of wartime and postwar Japanese society through the lens of Yamashita’s “innocent” eyes and naked body. The film begins around 1941, when Yamashita is wandering through various cities in order to escape conscription. In his wanderings, Yamashita meets people, social norms, conventions, and customs incomprehensible to him, and poses simple questions such as “Why do we have to go to war?” and “What is the reason for carrying a gun?” A strong anti-war feeling characterizes the entire  narrative. Mizuki Yōko, the author of the screenplay, explained her motive as “leading us to regret” the behavior of the Japanese during the war by foregrounding Yamashita’s innocent questions and honesty.45 137

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Despite such underlying sensibilities, however, the film did not thoroughly examine Japanese war responsibility or the discrimination directed toward Yamashita; instead, audiences were strongly encouraged to adopt Yamashita’s “innocent” vantage point and status as a victim. The artist’s hari-e pictures were frequently inserted between the scenes of the film, and included beautiful Japanese landscapes as well as the burnt cityscapes that appeared after air raids. The insertion of Yamashita’s hari-e functioned to inform the audience that they were viewing Japanese society as seen through Yamashita’s eyes. In other words, wartime Japan as viewed through the lens of an “innocent” artist who bore no war responsibility was one of the film’s chief themes. In fact, the starting point of the film at 1941, when Japan embarked on war against the United States and Britain, successfully eliminated Japan’s

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earlier aggressions in Asia from the narrative. The war itself is depicted almost like a natural disaster, its presence indicated only by air-raid sirens and destroyed cityscapes. The Japanese people, although their self-deceiving behavior vis-à-vis Yamashita is emphasized strongly, appear mostly as congenial commoners rather than agents of war, aggression, and invasion. Toward the end of the film, after the confusion of the immediate postwar years, Yamashita temporarily returns to the institute, where he makes a series of hari-e visualizing various scenes that he witnessed during his wartime wanderings (fig. 71). Here, the hari-e technique encompasses a visual and tactile effect that cannot be matched by oil or watercolor painting. Yamashita’s painstaking process of art-making—filling up the surface of a large white sheet of paper by pasting small pieces of

Yamashita Kiyoshi. Mountain Landscape, 1950. Hari-e, colored paper and glue, 61 x 86 cm.

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hospital. One of the climactic scenes of the film shows Yamashita running nearly naked from the mental hospital, escaping through a city emptied by air-raid sirens. In the middle of his run, Yamashita encounters a group of people crying as they listen to a broadcast of the emperor announcing Japan’s unconditional surrender (gyokuon hōsō). Throughout this climactic scene, the film scarcely pays attention to Yamashita’s emotions or psychological state (except for very basic emotions such as his fear of air-raid bombings) in the face of war, defeat, or the grief of the populace. Instead, only his naked body is displayed on the screen in order to serve as a mirror reflecting the “abnormality” of both wartime and postwar Japanese society.47 The ways in which the image of Yamashita— simultaneously admired and ridiculed, accepted and excluded—was crafted and consumed, as seen through the film as well as by the mass audience and professional art community, suggest that he continued to be viewed as “the freak” (to use Elizabeth Grosz’s term) by postwar Japanese society.48 Yet, in order to consider the much larger scale of this second Yamashita boom, the specific historical and geopolitical conditions of postwar Japan must be taken into account. As per General Douglas MacArthur’s (in)famous description of the country as a “twelve-year-old boy,” an immature or asexual man was indeed one of the national personas given to postwar Japan.49 Such a label was not only forcibly imposed by the allied power, but to some extent accepted by the Japanese people themselves to mask their own aggression in order to reconcile with their recent past, a motive that would explain, at least in part, the popular consumption of a male artist with the mind of an “eternal youth” as a symbol of postwar Japan. This portrayal of Japan, however, was at the same time troublesome, and had to be revisited, particularly in the mid-1950s. According to Yoshikuni Igarashi, the memory of the war was resurrected in Japanese society in the mid-50s, after the country had regained its independence following the Allied Occupation, and as its economy was showing signs of significant growth. Popular media

colored paper onto it, one by one—can be considered an analogue to the postwar reconstruction of Japan, in which people rebuilt their houses, livelihoods, and society piece by piece from a pile of rubble. All in all, Yamashita’s eye and his art, driven not by ego or male sexual potency but by a childlike innocence, offer a rather “docile” portrait of wartime and postwar Japan that runs contrary to the original intention of the script writer. In this portrait, the country’s past as an aggressor playing a dominant, “masculine” role vis-à-vis Asia is almost entirely masked. It must be noted, however, that Yamashita was not simply treated as an icon of innocent Japan. While viewers were strongly encouraged to identify themselves with the artist throughout the film, he remained strictly an “other” to both wartime and postwar Japanese society. In a manner not so different from his rejection by the art community, Yamashita was excluded from any socially accepted group or category, largely due to his lack of sexuality and intelligence, qualities that were humorously illustrated throughout the film. The filmic personality given to Yamashita may at first glance appear quite “heroic,” similar to the Japanese masculine stereotype of the nagare-mono (drifter), enormously popular in mainstream movies of the 1960s that featured a man who refused to be integrated into conventional society. The protagonists of the popular nagare-mono genre, however, often still belonged to a certain conservative, dominant male social group, such as a homosocial yakuza group or a low-income but good-hearted downtown district of Tokyo.46 Yamashita, in contrast, basically builds no relationships with anyone in the film, and the reason for his continuous wandering during and even after the war is never addressed to the audience in a fully comprehensible form. Instead of foregrounding his emotion or humanity, the film emphasizes Yamashita’s naked body, the symbol of his innocence and asexuality. In the middle of the film, for example, Yamashita, who has just been exempted from conscription, is prompted by homeless people to take off his clothes in a public space, which forces him to enter a mental 139

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and cultural forms, such as radio, film, magazines, tabloids, TV, and sporting events, became sites for the exorcism of “the monstrous past,” expression of which had been (and still was, in some forms) prohibited in the official discourses and practices promulgated under the Occupation.50 Yamashita’s resurrection and the ambivalent consumption of his image as an “innocent,” “asexual” male artist could be interpreted through this nationwide practice of revising and re-articulating the past memory of war and defeat in the age of recovery and independence. While such an image of Yamashita as a symbol of innocence was eagerly consumed, his nakedness and asexuality were also the key factors that excluded the artist from the rest of Japanese society and the art community.51 Here, the much-needed and yet troublesome image of a “twelve-year-old boy” seemed to be imposed solely upon the figure of Yamashita, thereby allowing the Japanese people to confirm their “masculine” adulthood. The strong reaction of, and repudiation by, the professional art community may epitomize this exercise of excluding or rejecting Yamashita in its most strenuous form. In concert with Japan’s political independence, Japanese artists, curators, and critics resumed participation in several international art exhibitions, starting with the São Paulo Art Biennial in October 1951 (immediately after the independence of Japan was confirmed) and the Venice Biennale in the next year. Throughout the 1950s, the dominant concern for the postwar generation of artists, art critics, and curators was to demonstrate that they could keep up with and master the new artistic trends from Europe and the United States, particularly in these international arenas. For the professional art community, Yamashita, whose art was characterized by his immaturity and what he lacked as well as endorsed by the outdated Shirakaba circle, must have been an especially troublesome figure. In order for Japan to reenter the international arena on equal footing with Europe and America and their newly evolved avant-garde art, Yamashita—the embodiment of the defeated nation as innocent and immature— had to be entirely refuted.52

In the prewar period, Yamashita was once singled out as a child with “extraordinary” talent, temporarily serving as a mirror for those artists who wished to confirm their “normalcy”; he was then quickly ejected from the popular consciousness as Japanese society was increasingly homogenized in order to build a coherent workforce for the fulfillment of the war effort. In the post-1945 years, society was eager to bring Yamashita back into the landscape of war-torn Japan. His artistic talent, supported by his innocence, functioned to mirror the Japanese people’s own “abnormality” of the recent past in order to eject it from the body of postwar society, while he was rejected for the same qualities: his lack of intelligence and sexuality. By incorporating and yet at the same time excluding Yamashita from the postwar landscape of Japanese art and society, Japan in the 1950s seemed to maintain a coherent self-image both as a victim in the recent past and as a rising “masculine” power in the present, when Japan had regained its political independence, economic supremacy, and reentry into the international art world.

the reconciliation with the past: fujita tsuguharu As already mentioned, Fujita Tsuguharu permanently left Japan in 1949 after being singled out as the primary target in the debate over artists’ war responsibility. Given this “unfortunate” state of relations between Fujita and Japan, the recent biographical studies of the artist tend to assert that, since 1945, the value of his art has been “unfairly” dismissed because of his activities during the AsiaPacific War. Yet Fujita continued to attract the attention of the Japanese media and art world even after his self-imposed exile from his home country. Immediately after his departure from Japan, newspapers, general magazines, and tabloid journals closely reported on his travels and his new life in France, and not all of them were harsh in tone. In the 1950s, when Japanese artists became increasingly conscious of (re)entering the international art 140

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the problems of Japanese society as a whole. The collaboration of artists with “any type of authority,” a phenomenon that became particularly evident during the Asia-Pacific War, was thus not a deviation, but the necessary result of Japan’s ill-fated modernization without a civil revolution.56 Yet Hariu did not entirely condemn artists’ engagement with the production of propaganda art per se. What appeared intolerable to Hariu was the artists’ lack of subjective commitment to their own tasks or aesthetics, which allowed for their unabashed transformation from painters in the service of the military to peace-loving artists. Here, Fujita gained a special role within Hariu’s criticism. First a star artist in Paris, then transforming into the most active propaganda painter, and finally escaping abroad without facing his war responsibility, Fujita represented, in Hariu’s words, the “freakishness of Japanese artists’ mentality” (Nihon no bijutsukatachi no shinri kōzō ni aru kikeisa).57 Without autonomy or a sense of social responsibility, Hariu argued, the artist could freely change his themes and styles from erotic European female nudes to aggressive Japanese soldiers, and from the earlytwentieth-century Paris avant-garde to nineteenthcentury Romanticism, without any inner struggle, according to the prevailing political climate and financial opportunities.58 For Hariu, Fujita was an emblem of the irresponsibility and lack of subjectivity of the Japanese, a figure upon whom the critic may have transferred his unfocused anger toward the emperor, whose transformation and betrayal of the nation after the defeat became the starting point for his art criticism. Hariu’s account of Fujita’s chameleon-like transformation as the symbol of the lack of subjectivity and freakish mentality of Japanese artists set the tone for the critique of artists’ collaboration with the military. It was only in the late 1960s, however, that Fujita’s war efforts, together with the collaborative activities of other artists, again attracted wide attention beyond a group of politically conscious artists and intellectuals. Two events brought Fujita’s wartime practices to the surface of popular consciousness. The first was the “rediscovery” and

community, Fujita was often treated quite positively as the first and only Japanese artist who had achieved an international reputation, in contrast to Yasui and Umehara, who were celebrated only within the domestic context. Fujita’s work and activities during the AsiaPacific War, however, were indeed stigmatized and largely ignored in the art world, and his campaign-record paintings rarely attracted the interest of the general public after his departure and the removal of such works from Japanese soil.53 The only exception would be postwar art critics such as Hariu Ichirō and Nakahara Yūsuke (1931–2011), who approached the subject of artists’ collaboration with the military critically, with strong political convictions nurtured by their own experiences of the war and defeat. Hariu, in particular, tackled the issue of artists’ war responsibility as early as the mid-1950s.54 A fanatical emperor-worshipper in his youth, Hariu was nineteen when Japan surrendered unconditionally. Initially, he could not believe that the country had been defeated, but once he realized that the emperor indeed had surrendered, his devotion turned into fierce anger against the wartime political leaders.55 The defeat also made Hariu aware of the huge gap between himself, a citizen who had wanted to die for the nation, and other Japanese who celebrated their survival and welcomed the American Occupation. This experience led to Hariu’s conversion into an anti-authoritarian pacifist and made him determined to pursue the establishment of a real democracy in Japan, where all citizens would retain both individual autonomy and a sense of social responsibility. This strong political conviction and sense of mission underlay Hariu’s art criticism throughout his career. Like many of the progressive thinkers of postwar Japan, Hariu identified the “emperor system” as the main cause of Japan’s involvement in the war, because without a revolution at the hands of the people, the Japanese never had the chance to develop a sense of political responsibility and autonomous subjectivity as modern citizens. For Hariu, the prewar art community epitomized all of 141

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eventual return to Japan of 153 campaign-record paintings. Since the confiscation of such paintings by the American Occupation forces in 1951, they had been preserved in storage at U.S. military bases. From the beginning of the 1960s, the Asahi Newspaper Company and certain Japanese museums began reclaiming these paintings, and in the late 1960s the recovery of these works became a national concern. In 1966, the Japanese photographer Nakagawa Ichirō (1931–2007) took photographs of campaign-record paintings preserved in the U.S., and these images were widely publicized through exhibitions of photo reproductions and publication in picture books, newspapers, and journals (fig.  72).59 This created a huge sensation in Japan as the “rediscovery” of the country’s war legacy more than twenty years after the defeat.

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Responding to a request by the Japanese government, the U.S. government returned 153 campaignrecord paintings, including fourteen by Fujita, to Japan in 1970 in the form of an “indefinite loan.” The return of these paintings enhanced a renewed debate about artists’ war efforts, their political responsibility, Japanese historical amnesia, and how such works could be displayed in museums and contextualized within the history of Japanese art. The other important event that illuminated Fujita’s wartime activities was the artist’s death in Europe in January 1968, which coincided with the height of this revived debate. Fujita’s passing was widely reported in Japan, provoking both emotional reactions and increased interest in the artist’s life and work. To commemorate his death, several exhibitions were organized, including the Fujita

Nakagawa Ichirō taking a photo of Suzuki Makoto’s The Military and the Civilians Work Together in Air-Raid Defense on the Mainland (1945). Photograph published in Geijutsu shinchō 46, no. 8 (August 1995), 79.

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Tsuguharu Retrospective Exhibition held between September and November 1968, the largest-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in Japan to that date. The media tirelessly featured Fujita and his “tragic” life, and a handful of substantial publications on the artist were issued.60 This event was not accepted simply as the death of a famous painter; the fact that the artist reached the end of his life without making a single visit back to his home country required a reconsideration of the implications of Fujita’s permanent departure from Japan and its cause: the treatment of war responsibility during the postwar years. In the face of the artist’s death, an overtly sympathetic view of Fujita was prevalent in both the mainstream media and the art world. Newspapers, art magazines, and exhibition catalogues were full of comments expressing deep sympathy for the artist, often in an extremely sentimental tone, rather than critically recalling his past collaboration with the military. In these sympathetic accounts, which appeared from the late 1960s to the early 70s, two conspicuous tendencies can be observed. First, in  consideration of Fujita’s personality and his inexhaustible passion for art-making, he was viewed by many as an innocent, childlike artist rather than a crafty war painter. Second, Fujita’s Japanese identity was emphasized persistently, despite his French citizenship. While these two accounts—Fujita as a childlike artist, and as unmistakably Japanese—may appear unrelated to each other at first glance, together they functioned to mitigate the war responsibility of the artist, and possibly, by extension, of the entire Japanese population as well. Concerning the former narrative, the image of Fujita as a childlike artist was not necessarily new, but had been promoted by the artist himself through the careful construction of his public persona (as discussed briefly in Chapter Two). The foregrounding of the image of Fujita as an innocent or childlike person in the late 1960s, however, seemed to have specific political implications in relation to the issue of artists’ war responsibility. For example, the aforementioned Fujita Tsuguharu

Retrospective Exhibition included more than one hundred works that Fujita created from the 1910s until 1967, together with several photographs delineating the artist’s life and career, but no war paintings. Except for a few photographs of Fujita with his fellow artists during the Asia-Pacific War, no indication of his close involvement with the war effort could be found in the exhibition. Only one essay in the exhibition catalogue, “Gikō to himitsu” (Techniques and Secrets) by the oil painter Miyamoto Saburō, Fujita’s colleague in the production of campaign-record paintings, touched upon Fujita’s practices during the war.61 As the title indicates, the main focus of Miyamoto’s essay was Fujita’s unmatched technical virtuosity. Miyamoto stated how diligently Fujita pursued artistic achievement through the improvement of his technique, and also introduced a few episodes that indicated Fujita’s mischievous behavior, such as when the artist enjoyed viewers’ amazement at his “traditional” ink painting that had, in fact, been painted with darkened water from an ashtray. In praising Fujita’s marvelous technique and appealing, “childlike” personality, Miyamoto explained how Fujita came to be involved with producing campaign-record paintings: Fujita seemed to find great pleasure in the production of campaign-record paintings, through which his dramatic imagination soared. Seeing such innocent enthusiasm, I thought that the excitement that [Fujita] felt in his boyhood when viewing panoramas of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars probably came back to him.62

Miyamoto here attributed Fujita’s close engagement with the military to his innocent, childlike quality and memories of his boyhood. In this account, the artist’s seemingly diverse styles and subject matter, from European female nudes to war paintings, and from the creation of a unique canvas to the challenges of large-screen propaganda art, were explained by his childlike pursuit of new wonders and his persistent efforts to seek out new technical advances. This image of the artist as a kind of “noble savage” indeed functioned 143

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well to bridge the two seemingly incompatible facets of his persona: the cosmopolitan Paris artist and the brutal war painter. By emphasizing his childlike innocence, Fujita’s transformation and involvement with the military was ascribed to the quintessential nature of a modern artist, aloof from worldly affairs and faithful to his own artistic instincts and desires. While the accounts of the artist by Hariu and Miyamoto seem to oppose each other completely, they share one crucial factor in common: both note the immaturity of Fujita as a citizen of modern society. For this same quality, Hariu condemned and Miyamoto praised Fujita, yet both admitted, in the end, that the artist was too immature to bear any responsibility for waging war. For Miyamoto, Fujita’s innocence would also have functioned to lessen the political responsibility of other war painters, possibly including himself. If Fujita, the most prolific war painter, was innocent, then no one in the field could retain political responsibility for his collaboration with the military. Hariu’s account, in contrast, aimed at critiquing Fujita and other official war painters, such as Miyamoto. Ultimately, however, because Hariu attributed the reason for Fujita’s “freakish mentality” to the broader historical conditions of Japan’s ill-fated modernization, over which no artist or Japanese citizen had control, he did not fully pursue the artist’s political responsibility. Purposefully or unwittingly, both Miyamoto and Hariu portrayed Fujita as an innocent or immature male artist, a representation that uncannily resounded with the image of Yamashita Kiyoshi as the embodiment of Japanese innocence that was popularized in the mid-1950s. Together with the “childlike” Fujita, the other theme emphasized in the wake of the artist’s death was his identity as a true Japanese. While Fujita’s nullification of Japanese citizenship in the mid1950s was widely reported in Japan, nearly all of the commemorative articles written about the artist asserted that he had not lost his Japanese spirit and must have longed to return to his home country. At the beginning of his biography of Fujita, Tanaka Jō

introduces several comments made by Fujita’s fellow artists and colleagues that were published in a newspaper at the time: Although Fujita … was often considered cosmopolitan, I believe that he was the one who maintained a “Japanese heart.” (Hayashi Takeru) Mr. Fujita was a true master of painting. It is [our] regret that he obtained French citizenship because the Japanese art world did not treat him well. As I visited and saw Mr. Fujita in Europe almost every year, I cannot help but think that he focused on his work in order to get through his loneliness. [Fujita] was often said [to have] “Japanophobia,” … [but] he was actually a hospitable person. (Tōgo Seiji) Many people thought that Leonard Foujita became French … But I really think that Mr. Fujita was the last Japanese painter with the “Meiji spirit.” (Hijikata Teiichi)63

These types of comments, which emphasized Fujita’s unchanged Japanese identity in quite a sentimental tone, were extremely common. To take another example, Fujimoto Shōzō (1896–1992), a well-experienced editor, organized a special issue of the journal Sansai (Three Colors) to commemorate the death of the artist, and concluded the issue by stating that, despite Fujita’s nullification of his Japanese citizenship, “Fujita, a Japanese person, could not rid himself of his love for Japan.”64 While the reason for Fujita’s departure from Japan was rarely mentioned, and thus his collaboration with the military (or the postwar treatment of artists’ war responsibility) was never fully addressed, Fujita was increasingly imagined as a kind of tragic figure who was “unfairly” exiled and yet retained his Japanese mindset for two decades in a foreign land.65 This extremely sentimental response to Fujita’s death and overwhelmingly sympathetic account about his life may conflate with the contemporary trend of the “banalization” of wartime experiences that has been identified by a number of scholars as a particular phenomenon of the 1960s.66 After two decades, the immediate impact of the war had been 144

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the war in a less traumatic form or possibly be relieved of their sense of guilt. By imagining Fujita as an innocent artist and acknowledging his pure love for his country, artists of such works could attempt to come to terms with their uneasy relationship with postwar Japan, and thereby reconcile their past and present. While certain art critics such as Hariu continued to pursue the issue of artists’ war responsibility and severely criticized the reactionary tendencies seen in the rather sympathetic reception of Fujita, at this stage few substantial arguments were advanced on the highly aggressive male figures depicted in the campaign-record paintings made by Fujita and the other official war painters, evidence of Japanese aggression and the nation’s selfproclaimed “masculine” position vis-à-vis the “West” and Asia.68 One of the main reasons for this lack of dialogue was the limited access to the actual works. Once returned to Japan, the 153 campaignrecord paintings continued to cause controversy over whether and how these wartime works could be displayed. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, postponed the decision by insisting that a number of works were badly damaged and had to be restored first. After several debates and the completion of the restoration work, the National Museum decided to put these paintings on public display in 1977. Right before the opening of the exhibition, however, the show was called off so as “not to rouse the emotions of Southeast Asian nations or the United States, due to complicated domestic and diplomatic circumstances.”69 Instead, four works were put on display as part of the permanent collection.70 From this moment on, campaign-record paintings, especially Fujita’s late deathly battle pictures, continued to provoke controversy in terms of both their content and method of display, indicating that Fujita’s male figures, aggressively engaged in intimate battle with Caucasian soldiers, did not fit comfortably into the narrative of his tragic life or any acceptable forms of masculinity in postwar Japan. Before further considering the reception of Fujita’s aggressive male figures, however, it is necessary to discuss the last artist who was also resurrected at about

reduced substantially alongside the tremendous growth of the Japanese economy. In 1968, the year of Fujita’s death, Japan achieved the second highest GNP after the United States; in roughly the same period, the country successfully hosted two significant international events: the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and Expo ‘70 (1970) in Osaka. Narratives of the war were produced and consumed often in rote form with a sense of nostalgia rather than regret or acute pain, and featured the wartime sufferings of the Japanese or their selfless devotion to the nation with a sense of melodrama. For example, while admitting that his engagement in the production of campaign-record paintings deserved some criticism, Miyamoto recalled that the age of the Asia-Pacific War was also a valuable period for him and the Japanese: There was a pleasure [in such painting], because as long as we painted the given subject matter well, we could immediately appeal to the national emotion. All of the Japanese got into that tragic drama … but when the age of peace came … the national emotion was dispersed. We lost a song that everyone could sing together.67

Accompanied with the weathering of war memories and the increase in material wealth, the age of the Asia-Pacific War did not always emerge as a nightmare or troubled past to be overcome, but was somewhat nostalgically recollected as a time when people maintained ties to each other and worked together for a common goal. Fujita’s death coincided with this “banalization” of wartime memory in the 1960s. The infantalization of Fujita (or his treatment as the embodiment of the “freakish” Japanese mentality) displays a curious resonance with the portrayal of Yamashita in the mid1950s. Rather than stirring controversy, however, Fujita’s public image did not seem to disturb the masculine identity of Japanese artists at a time when Japan had already achieved prominent international status. Instead, Fujita’s death seemed to provide a site where the Japanese—especially those who were involved with the production of, and postwar controversy over, campaign-record paintings—could revisit 145

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“painter of resistance” throughout the 1960s.73 Hijikata graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1930 and studied in Germany between 1931 and 32; in his youth, he was inclined toward literature as well as anarchism. Despite this early inclination, during the Asia-Pacific War, from 1942 to 45, he came to work for a state institution called the Cultural Section of the Comprehensive Research Institute of Northern China (Kahoku Sōgō Chōsa Kenkyūjo), located in Beijing. Through the investigation of Chinese art (as well as other intelligence data) required by this position, Hijikata began his professional career as an art critic and art historian. While working for the state institution, he became highly critical of Japan’s aggression in Asia. The art critic Yamaguchi Taiji argues that Hijikata maintained a deep sense of regret about Japan’s war and his job in China, and suggests that Hijikata’s wartime experience was one of the reasons for his interest in Matsumoto in the postwar years, possibly as an act of compensation.74 Hijikata did not have a chance to see Matsumoto or his works during the artist’s lifetime, but went to the commemorative exhibition and became absorbed in Matsumoto’s aesthetic world of “voiceless tranquility” and “pure crystalline bodies.”75 In 1951, Hijikata became the sub-director of the new Kanagawa Museum of Modern Art, the first museum specializing in modern art in Japan (as discussed above). For the next two decades, Hijikata was the central figure at the museum behind the organization of several exhibitions of twentiethcentury Japanese artists, especially those yōga painters who had attained less public attention. Matsumoto was one of the artists that Hijikata, together with his younger colleague Asahi Akira (b. 1928), eagerly featured through his curatorial as well as scholarly activities, beginning with the 1958 exhibition of works by Matsumoto and Shimazaki Keiji (1907–1944), another oil painter who had died in the war.76 The museum’s association with the artist was further strengthened when the Matsumoto Shunsuke Memorial Room was set up in 1968, with several works donated by Matsumoto’s friend, the art collector

the same time that this debate reached its zenith in the late 1970s: Matsumoto Shunsuke.

the “discovery” of the lone protester: matsumoto shunsuke While Yasui, Yamashita, and Fujita reemerged in the public consciousness at key points in time during the postwar years, it is not easy to pinpoint the year or specific historical moment when Matsumoto Shunsuke secured his position within the history of Japanese art or society in the course of the postwar recovery. After his tragic death in 1948, Matsumoto’s memory was sustained, and his works passed down, more or less through the individual efforts of those who had held a strong personal attachment to the artist. As discussed in Chapter Four, Matsumoto was only a moderately successful artist during the prewar and wartime periods, and remained so for at least a decade after the defeat. In the immediate postwar period, he worked vigorously for the cause of democratizing the Japanese art world by participating in the Japan Art Society and advocating various new measures such as the formation of an artists’ union.71 To commemorate his untimely death (from heart failure aggravated by bronchial asthma) in 1948, Matsumoto’s friends held retrospective exhibitions in October and November of that year, in which eighteen and thirty-five oil paintings were displayed, respectively. In 1949, the first book on the artist was published; the volume included commemorative essays and comments by the art critic Sanami Tōru and Matsumoto’s artist-friends, along with reprints of some of Matsumoto’s essays (such as “The Living Painter”).72 This was the first collective study of Matsumoto, who was already admired as one of the very few artists who had protested against the military. These commemorative events were scarcely recognized beyond the circles of the artist’s friends, however. Rather, it was the art historian and curator Hijikata Teiichi (1904–1980) who crafted the blueprint for the postwar myth of Matsumoto as a 146

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the desperation and isolation that resulted from his lone protest in the increasingly militarized society. Hijikata also touched upon Matsumoto’s self(or family) portraits. While recognizing a small, shadowy figure in an emptied cityscape and a selfportrait of monumental scale as quite distinct from one another, Hijikata ultimately perceived both, again, as products of Matsumoto’s solitary protest:

Hatakeyama Shōroku (1913–1988), and his widow, Matsumoto Teiko. A lengthy essay by Hijikata that appeared in a picture book of Matsumoto’s works, published in 1963, set the tone for the evaluation of the artist as a “painter of resistance” in the following years.77 While Matsumoto’s protest against militarism had already been recognized in the immediate postwar years by his friends, in this essay, Hijikata firmly established the link between the artist’s works and his political position. Hijikata argued that Matsumoto’s paintings displayed a significant change in 1941, pointing to how his cityscapes became much darker, quieter, and less emotionally charged than those made during the 1930s. As briefly mentioned in Chapter Four, Matsumoto continued to work on cityscapes alongside his production of monumental self-portraits, yet his rendering of the city was quite distinct from that seen in earlier examples: the city was rarely populated, and even when people were illustrated, they appeared almost like black stains (figs.  55, 56). Hijikata explained this significant change in association with the publication of “The Living Painter”:

Matsumoto Shunsuke, who—as a small, black shadow— was walking within and contemplating his own spiritual world [in his cityscapes after 1941], simultaneously painted Portrait of a Painter, Standing Figure, Five, and Three. He probably wanted to confirm two types of human existence under tragic conditions. How heartfelt an existence they represent: [one as] a small black shadow, and [the other as] a self-portrait within the larger family image.79

Hijikata saw both Matsumoto’s cityscapes and selfportraits as reflections of anxiety, desperation, and isolation, as well as the courageous determination to never turn his eyes away from the tragic, war-torn city in order to confirm his existence as an individual human being. This interpretation of “The Living Painter” as the catalyst for the shift in the artist’s work, and the image of the artist as a lonesome resister and flâneur in the war-torn city, were recycled elsewhere by Hijikata and his followers, often gaining even more of the authors’ emotional investment. The image of Matsumoto as a solitary protester standing within the war-torn cityscape was indeed favored by those postwar male intellectuals who retained a strong sense of guilt or carried feelings of unease about their own wartime activities, just like Hijikata. Another famous admirer of Matsumoto, the gallery owner and essayist Sunouchi Tōru (1913–1987), too, seemed to compensate for his own painful wartime experience through his appreciation of Matsumoto’s position.80 After making a traumatic tenkō (political conversion) from Communism and becoming involved with the Japanese military’s brutal actions in China during the Asia-Pacific War, Sunouchi found spiritual comfort only in the

In 1941, Matsumoto Shunsuke presented “The Living Painter” in the journal Mizue, and protested as a human and artist against the Military = fascism, which stood up menacingly [against artists] as a destroyer of culture … [“The Living Painter”] was his desperate cry and selfconfirmation of the [contemporary] situation. And after writing this text of protest, Matsumoto, as he always did, walked from Nakai Station to Shinjuku, Hijiri Bridge, Tokyo Station, and Yokohama with a sketch book in his pocket, yet he could not help but [realize that] the image of the “cityscape,” which used to resonate with the good will and love of the people, had been lost; and he saw, with a sense of horror, the buildings, mirroring the innermost depths of his pitiable spirit, which was fighting in isolation and desperation.78

Pointing to the anti-militarist position that Matsumoto adopted in “the Living Painter” as the chief catalyst for the shift in his oeuvre, Hijikata perceived the artist’s dark cityscapes as an expression of 147

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appreciation of art works, especially Matsumoto’s wartime cityscapes, in the postwar years. Through his extremely popular essays “Kimagure bijutsukan” (Whimsical Museum), serialized in the monthly art journal Geijutsu shinchō (New Currency of Arts) from January 1974 until his death in October 1987, Sunouchi further crystallized the image of Matsumoto as the lonely wanderer of the wartime city. While he admired Matsumoto’s cityscapes, however, Sunouchi reacted strongly against both Hijikata’s enshrinement of the artist as a “painter of resistance” and the artist’s larger-than-life self-portraits, in which he found only a sense of self-righteousness and superficial political correctness. Sunouchi instead passionately celebrated the “lonely,” “sorrowful,” small, black shadowy figures in Matsumoto’s cityscapes as “the real Shunsuke.”81 The art critic Sawaragi Noi contends that Sunouchi’s antagonistic attitude toward the notion of the “painter of resistance” that Hijikata so admired reflected the specific ways in which the two men came to terms with their wartime pasts in the present: while Hijikata attempted to construct his postwar identity by projecting himself upon the figure of a wartime protester, Sunouchi, who developed a strong sense of cynicism through his conversion and collaboration with the military, lived through the postwar period by imagining Matsumoto as an isolated figure rather than a courageous protester, and thereby distancing himself from alliance with any seemingly hypocritical postwar ideals.82 Whether celebrating or rejecting the “heroic” stance seen in Matsumoto’s self-portraits, however, the image of Matsumoto envisioned by Hijikata and Suouchi was in fact largely the same: the lonesome artist who barely maintained his spiritual independence and tragically stood alone within the war-torn society. From this highly polished image of the artist constructed by male intellectuals (presumably as an act of compensation), Matsumoto’s aggressive condemnation of another wanderer of wartime Japan, Yamashita Kiyoshi, was entirely cleansed, and the meaning of the artist’s inclination toward a rather

conservative form of art was rarely questioned. Even the presence and role of Matsumoto’s family was often dismissed, despite the fact that Teiko (who had been co-editor of Essay Note and supported her family financially during the war) and other relatives were the chief subjects of the artist’s works throughout the war. In fact, Sunouchi was openly hostile to the notion of accepting Matsumoto as anything other than a lonesome wanderer. He commented, for example, that “Shunsuke looks rather stupid” in his self-portraits, especially in Five and Three, in which the artist was positioned so that “his wife and children stand or sit around him … as if [he was] their guardian.”83 The individual voices of admiration for Matsumoto began to ring out clearly from the late 1970s, and together elevated him into a nationally known artist.84 This was especially true in 1977, the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s death (in the traditional East Asian reckoning), when two large-scale exhibitions of his works were held: the Departure of Postwar Art (Sengo Bijutsu no Shuppatsu) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in which works by Matsumoto and Ai-Mitsu were featured; and Matsumoto’s solo exhibition at the Odakyū department store. Along with these exhibitions, several publications on Matsumoto were issued, including a reprint of the entire Essay Note journal series, two luxurious picture books of sketches and oil paintings, and a substantial monograph on the artist written by Hijikata’s colleague Asahi Akira.85 At this stage, Matsumoto’s popularity reached well beyond the group of artists and intellectuals who shared firsthand experience of the Asia-Pacific War as agents of aggression. The following comment by the art critic Tanaka Jō, in his 1978 biography of Matsumoto, not only attests to the artist’s significant popularity, but associates it with the broader socioeconomic conditions of Japan at that time: Matsumoto Shunsuke has recently enjoyed a boom … To be brief, Matsumoto Shunsuke lived through the “misery” of World War II and died young, after the defeat. The fact that society has begun paying attention to this tragic painter perhaps reflects today’s situation, in

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with this “double standard” practice or mentality. Matsumoto’s works and presence were indeed often contrasted with the campaign-record paintings displayed at the National Museum. The Yomiuri newspaper, for example, introduced Matsumoto’s 1977 solo exhibition at the Odakyū department store by stating, “The monument[al works] epitomized the beauty of the Japanese heart, which was not blown out by the war. These mark a sharp contrast to the war paintings in the National Museum of Modern Art put on display this year.”88 Upon this significant shift in the memory of the war and view of postwar development, Matsumoto’s solitary figure of resistance and the aggressive soldiers seen in campaign-record paintings came to symbolize the two opposite ends of the artist’s practice as well as the Japanese male figure during the Asia-Pacific War. While the aggressive male figures of campaign-record paintings had to be concealed from public view so as “not to rouse the emotions,” the highly sanitized and aestheticized image of Matsumoto as a lone resister was accepted as the epitome of “the beauty of the Japanese heart, which was not blown out by the war.” This image of Matsumoto crafted and celebrated by those male intellectuals who had participated in the war as agents of aggression, and lived in the postwar era with a feeling of unease, came to provide a readily convenient site upon which many Japanese could comfortably project their sense of “a new beginning,” again quoting Gluck’s words, to reflect and legitimize the troublesome present.89

which bankruptcy and unemployment have run rampant after the period of high economic growth.86

Although it is questionable whether Matsumoto’s popularity can be attributed solely to economic factors, as Tanaka has stated here, the 1970s indeed witnessed an important shift in Japanese society in terms of the consistency of postwar development and the memory of the war, and this shift seemed to contribute to the artist’s resurrection at this specific historical moment. The oil crisis in 1973, followed by an economic recession, signaled a break for the first time in Japan’s postwar trajectory. Events such as the prolonged Vietnam War, and Japan’s political alliance with the United States in this Asian conflict; the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Republic of China; and the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control (1972) all raised questions about both Japan’s aggression in the Asia-Pacific War and the country’s postwar development, especially with regard to its unsettled relationship with other Asian nations. The aforementioned cancellation of the 1977 exhibition of campaign-record paintings correlated with such diplomatic conditions, and clearly indicates that no consensus had been made about the war and Japan’s relationship to the United States and other Asian nations even three decades after the war’s end. As a lone figure of resistance, Matsumoto seemed to be brought up to counter this “problematic” material evidence of Japanese aggression. The historian Yoshida Yutaka argues that, while the new diplomatic conditions of the 1970s required the Japanese to face their own imperialist past, their attitude toward the Asia-Pacific War had not entirely changed. Rather, Yoshida contends, the Japanese mostly maintained what he calls the “double standard” established in the 1950s: while admitting their war responsibility (to a certain degree) according to the ever-changing diplomatic conditions of the postwar period, they preserved, or sometimes even nurtured, a strong victim consciousness within the domestic sphere.87 The denial of campaign-record painting and popularity of Matsumoto in 1977 seemed to resonate

******************************** The wartime practices and male figures of Yasui Sōtarō, Yamashita Kiyoshi, Fujita Tsuguharu, and Matsumoto Shunsuke have been rediscovered and re-narrated as these artists have been canonized as masters of modern art or icons of wartime/postwar society through the processes by which Japanese society came to terms with loss and legitimated the postwar present. In the course of these processes, all four male artists were envisioned as childlike, innocent, lonely, and/or “handicapped,” whereas 149

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the typical masculine tropes of aggressiveness, competitiveness, sexual prowess, physical strength, and “wholeness” were largely (although not entirely) absent. According to Christine Marran, this is indeed a common phenomenon seen in a wide range of cultural productions during the postwar years, in which “Japanese” “men” were portrayed as naked, abject, masochistic, and castrated.90 This choice of depiction, which was made almost entirely by male artists, art historians, authors, collectors, and museum curators, seems to have resonated in many cases with the Japanese desire to forget the country’s past aggressions and/or lessen the impact of its traumatic defeat. Such a portrayal would have been a refracted image of the men of a defeated nation under the aegis of the United States, or the “feminine” role performed by the emperor as introduced through Igarashi’s argument at the very beginning of this book. The intention here is not to argue that these postwar narratives or portrayals are “wrong” or do not faithfully reflect the “reality” of the time. An acute sense of regret and the determination to face Japan’s “shameful” past very often underlie postwar investigations of wartime art, which indeed have illuminated various aspects of the artistic practices of that era. Yet, the framework employed by these studies very often relies on a rigidly dichotomized pro- and anti-war template that tends to result in the homogenization of the diverse experiences of the war and colonialism as a tragedy of the “Japanese” nation manipulated by the military. What remains largely absent in the dominant postwar narratives and portrayals of Yasui, Yamashita, Fujita, and Matsumoto is the suppression of, and discrimination against, various groups within the Japanese Empire and society, such as women, the poor, ethnic and sexual minorities, and the “disabled,” as well as a critical examination of the male forms of these artists not only as icons of an innocent or victimized Japan, but also as agents of these aggressions and dominations. The controversy over campaign-record painting seems to epitomize these problems embedded in the postwar narrative of wartime practices. Around

the time when the National Museum of Modern Art cancelled the display of campaign-record paintings in 1977, perhaps the first text that directly touched upon the aggressive male figures in these paintings was written by the artist Kikuhata Mokuma (b. 1935). Kikuhata was born in a rural area of Fukuoka and never received formal training as an artist. He became a core member of the avantgarde art group Kyūshū School (Kyūshū-ha; 1957– ca. 1968), which staged radical performances and installations of junk art under the banners of antiart, anti-elitism, and anti-Tokyo throughout the 1960s.91 From around the beginning of 1970, Kikuhata began investigating the campaign-record paintings that were returned to Japan, particularly Fujita’s deathly battle pictures. His investigation resulted in a series of articles published in various magazines beginning in 1972, and later reprinted in his Fujita yo nemure: Ekaki to sensō (Rest in Peace, Fujita: Painter and War) and Tennō no bijutsu: Kindai shisō to sensōga (The Emperor’s Art: Modern Ideologies and War Painting) in 1978, and Ekaki to sensō (Painter and War), with some revisions, in 1993.92 In the series of articles and books that he produced in the 1970s, Kikuhata insisted that none of his forebears, whether they criticized or defended the official war painters, truly engaged with the campaign-record paintings themselves.93 Even those who dealt directly with the issue of artists’ war responsibility (such as Hariu), Kikuhata argued, tended to approach campaign-record paintings with a certain political purpose already in mind, and thus had often made their judgments from the beginning. Kikuhata therefore called for contemplating campaign-record paintings as an artistic expression, rather than treating them as a tool for addressing the critics’ own political agendas. In so doing, Kikuhata—unlike other authors and artists—frankly admitted the irresistible attractiveness that he found in Fujita’s sadistic and gruesome images, arguing that only Fujita’s deathly battle pictures captured “the divine force” (myōri), thereby unexpectedly becoming the works through which he achieved artistic autonomy.94 While 150

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the aegis of the United States. Kikuhata’s account illuminated, probably for the first time, the highly aggressive nature of Fujita’s deathly battle pictures, and problematized the postwar reluctance to face such violence. Yet his anger at the “castration” of campaign-record paintings exposed his sense of victim consciousness, nationalistic sentiment, and masculine ego rather than dissecting and dismantling the political power of the authorities. Through his investigations of campaign-record paintings, Kikuhata ultimately reclaimed the masculine vigor of Japanese art and Japanese men, which had been mitigated in the course of the nation’s democratization in the shadow of the United States. Kikuhata’s contentions about Fujita’s deathly battle pictures did not seem to be widely shared in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s, however, Kikuhata’s outcry came to resonate with certain nationalistic discourses on the war and art that proliferated in Japan. After the corruption of the Cold War system in the late 1980s, and the Japanese economic recession and testimony of former “military comfort women” in the 1990s, the memory and history of Japan’s last war largely shifted once again. One significant reaction was “historical revisionism” (rekishi shūseishugi). Neo-nationalist intellectuals and politicians called for regaining the nation’s pride by rewriting the history of the Asia-Pacific War (basically denying the government’s involvement with the system of “military comfort women” and other atrocities), and the “normalization” of Japan as an independent nation through the amendment of the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution crafted under the American Occupation.98 A certain nationalistic sentiment and the revision of wartime/postwar Japanese society also characterized the art scene of the 1990s and beyond. For one example, the Japanese neo-pop artist Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), in his 2005 exhibition Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture held at Japan Society, New York, addressed his own understanding of postwar Japanese society and its art. Selecting the code name of the atomic bomb dropped on

acknowledging the disheartening fact that such “masterpieces” were produced by the artist in obedience to the wartime state authority, Kikuhata ultimately celebrated Fujita’s deathly battle pictures, asserting that their “demonic” artistic value was powerful enough to exceed the reach of any moralistic judgments and nullify the persuasiveness of the postwar criticism that relied on the superficial concept of political correctness. Recognizing the transcendent value of Fujita’s pictures, Kikuhata strongly condemned the postwar treatment of campaign-record paintings by the Japanese government and society in alliance with the United States. For him, the concealment of campaign-record paintings pointed to Japanese historical amnesia and the superficiality of the nation’s democracy. In criticizing the government and mainstream society, however, Kikuhata frequently used a number of gendered terms to describe the state of campaign-record paintings. He once called the confiscated and then returned paintings the “canvases of prostitutes” (shōfu no gafu) serving the United States, and more recently the “abducted princess” violated by American politicians.95 On other occasions, Kikuhata equated campaignrecord paintings with Japanese POWs in a sympathetic tone as those who once fought for, and yet were dismissed by, their own country.96 He further argued, with perceptible anger, that the restoration of damaged campaign-record paintings by the National Museum was yet another “castration” of these art works.97 The gendered terms that Kikuhata variously used in his texts, and his strong anger toward the U.S.–Japan political alliance, indicate that, for him, campaign-record paintings symbolized not only the transcendent value of art, but also Japanese masculinity, which had been disgraced by the United States and “castrated” even by the Japanese government in the postwar years. Kikuhata’s anger at the government and mainstream society was closely associated with his antiauthoritarian position as an avant-garde artist, challenging the problems of the technological development, and superficiality of the cultural sophistication, that postwar Japan enjoyed under 151

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and only survived in the realm of subculture, until the neo-pop artists brought elements of this imagination into the space of fine art. While Sawaragi’s totalizing historicization of Fujita’s works is certainly debatable, Murakami and Sawaragi (as well as Kikuhata) fully acknowledged the aggressiveness and clear sense of agency of the Japanese male figures “recorded” in many campaign-record paintings. By foregrounding the violent, war-related images prevalent in postwar Japanese cultural productions, these men have drawn our attention to the violence that has lain beneath the so-called postwar democracy and peace. Again, however, any awareness of Asia, Japan’s former colonial subjects, and the diversity within “Japan” itself is absent from their accounts.103 While dealing with highly aggressive and gruesome imagery as the quintessential aesthetic of Japan, they ultimately defined the nation as a victim that was “castrated,” “closed,” or perpetually infantilized by an outside force (the United States), generating yet another victimized self-portrait of Japan conceived by male artists, namely a “little boy.” At the same time, the dichotomies of Japan– U.S., pro- and anti-war, and victim and aggressor were variously challenged by a number of studies in the 1990s, especially from post-colonial and feminist vantage points (as discussed in Chapter One). Many scholars have explored far more complex webs of power dynamics operating within wartime society and the Japanese Empire than previously acknowledged, through uncovering, for example, women artists’ contributions to the war, the activity of artists in Japanese colonies, and war images made by non-professional artists. Yet another example of such a trend can be found in the Voiceless Museum (Mugonkan) established by Kuboshima Seiichirō (b. 1941) in Nagano Prefecture, which has displayed works by students of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts who died in the war. Together with the painter Nomiyama Gyōji, Kuboshima—one of the foremost collectors, since the 1970s, of the works of Matsumoto Shunsuke and many other artists who suffered yōsetsu (premature death)—visited the families of deceased art students and collected their

Hiroshima for the exhibition’s title, Murakami portrayed postwar Japan as a “little boy” perpetually infantilized due to the after effects of the atomic bombings, defeat, and Article 9. In featuring a large array of neo-pop art by himself and his colleagues, together with Japanese manga, anime, cute mascots, and sci-fi elements all displayed in a non-hierarchical (or “superflat,” to use Murakami’s term) manner, Murakami posed the little boy’s challenge to the aesthetics and hegemony of the “big boy” (the United States) through these pop-culture forms born of a “childish” imagination that postwar Japan eagerly produced and consumed.99 Fujita and his deathly battle pictures occupied an important position for the circle of neo-pop artists. Inspired by Kikuhata’s account made some twenty years earlier, the art critic Sawaragi Noi (b. 1962) closely associated Fujita with Murakami’s art. In his seminal 1998 book Nihon · gendai · bijutsu (Japan · Contemporary · Art), Sawaragi re-narrated the history of the Japanese art of the past sixty years, defining postwar Japan as a “bad place” or “closed circle” that produced only a kitschy copy of Western art “under the stability of the Japanese democracy after the defeat.”100 In this “bad place,” no real sense of historical development or autonomy was possible (and therefore Sawaragi organized the book in reverse chronological order). Sharing Kikuhata’s frustration with postwar society and fascination with Fujita, Sawaragi discussed Fujita’s deathly battle pictures at the very end of the book, conceiving the Japanese dismissal of Fujita’s “dark picture” (kurai e) as the beginning of the impasse of “bright” postwar Japan.101 In his essay published in the Little Boy catalogue, Sawaragi delineated the historical development of Japanese neo-pop art, tracing the origins of these works—many of which feature war, violence, nuclear annihilation, and an apocalyptic world inspired by anime, manga, and sci-fi, with reference to the memory of the Pacific War—back to Fujita’s deathly battle pictures.102 Sawaragi claimed that the dark imagination presented by Fujita and some of the other official war painters in campaignrecord paintings was repressed in the postwar years 152

conclusion: male icons of japan’s “long postwar”

works.104 These painstaking efforts resulted in the inauguration of the Voiceless Museum in 1997. As Kuboshima soon recognized, however, his collection of works by young art students who had died in the war could easily be subsumed into a nationalistic discourse and contribute to the sentimentalization of Japan’s war effort. With this realization, Kuboshima has expanded the scope of the museum’s collection to include artworks by students from Asia and those with no school affiliations.105 By widening the scope of the museum beyond national boundaries and official institutions, Kuboshima has attempted to foreground not only Japan’s tragedy, but its unresolved colonial legacies as well as the hierarchy present within the Japanese art community. This book hopes to contribute to these recent efforts, not by illuminating the suppressed voices of “others” or diversifying the scope of the investigation, but by complicating the reading of the now iconic male figures produced, performed, or consumed by male Japanese artists. Through an examination of the male figures created by Fujita, Yasui, and Matsumoto through the lenses of gender, race, class, and the politics of the body, this study attempts to demonstrate that the practices of these male artists cannot be narrated homogeneously as a tragedy of the nation or “Japanese” “men” within the dichotomized template of pro- and anti-war positions. Instead, their practices and “ambivalent”

male figures point to the complex entanglements of power that largely configured (sometimes supporting, sometimes limiting) their participation in and contribution to Japanese imperialism, the full-fledged war effort, and the hierarchical art community. One of the limits of this study, as demonstrated most acutely by the case of Yamashita Kiyoshi, is that the agency of socially marginalized individuals has not been salvaged fully or paid sufficient attention. While the suppressed voices and memories of women and racial or ethnic “others,” such as Asians within the Japanese Empire and JapaneseAmericans both in Japan and the United States, have been recovered (albeit very slowly and still not comprehensively), the agency of those labeled “handicapped” within wartime society has still largely escaped scholarly attention.106 This study, too, only indicates their presence in the wartime and postwar societies, and the subject must be explored further in future investigations. Still, it is hoped that this examination of male figures of and by Fujita, Yasui, and Matsumoto has demonstrated not only the diversity and complexity embraced within the category of “men” or elite male yōga artists, but also the politics of representation and the dynamics of power that generated racial, sexual, and/or physical others in order to support the “masculine” positions of these artists within the Japanese Empire and society.

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notes to pages 1–5

Endnotes Chapter 1 Epigraph. Mukai Junkichi, “Jūgun gaka shigi,” Bijutsu 13, no. 8 (August 1938): 6. 1

2 3

4

5 6

Fujita Wataru, “Kinoshita eiga ni okeru kokusaku to itsudatsu: Danseitachi no ‘danseisei,’” in Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu, ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Tokyo: Shinwasha 2004), 298–99. Ibid., 301. For Kinoshita’s public image and an analysis of his male and female characters, see Ishihara Ikuko, Isai no hito Kinoshita Keisuke: Yowai otokotachi no utsukushisa o chūshin ni (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1999). In addition, the film historian Saitō Ayako has presented a number of provocative studies on Kinoshita, focusing on his treatment of male and female characters. Saitō Ayako, “Orchestrated Tears: Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere,” Senses of Cinema, no. 28 (October 5, 2003), http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/ feature-articles/orchestration_of_tears/ (last accessed September 16, 2013); Saitō, “Ushinawareta farusu o motomete: Kinoshita Keisuke ‘namida no sanbusaku’ saikō,” in Eiga no seijigaku, ed. Hase Masato and Nakamura Hideyuki (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2003), 61–117. For further details about Mukai’s wartime activities, see Maki Kaneko, “Mukai Junkichi’s Transformation from a War to Minka (Folk House) Painter,” Archives of Asian Art 61 (2011): 37–60. Mukai Junkichi, “Boku wa totsugeki suru,” Bijutsu 13, no. 9 (September 1938): 12. How to define Japan’s “wartime” is a contested issue; such definitions can vary depending on the positionality of individual scholars and the focus of their studies. The very existence of the multiple names that refer to Japan’s modern war(s) suggests the problematic nature of periodization: the Hundred Years’ War (Hyakunen Sensō), which views Japan’s international wars from the mid-nineteenth century until 1945 as a sequence of imperialist expansion efforts; the Fifteen-Year War (Jūgonen Sensō), which conceives of the political events from the Manchurian Incident in 1931 until Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in 1945 as a sequence, rather than singling out the Pacific War (an approach that often functions to dismiss Japan’s aggression in Asia); and the Asia-Pacific War between 1937 and 1945, viewed as the period when the war effort was imposed on the

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entire Japanese society. In this book, the period roughly between 1931 and 1945 is termed “wartime,” as the focus here is primarily Japanese artists who were active during these two decades, and who mostly worked within mainland Japan. Yet, as many scholars contend, Japan’s invasions of Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea prior to the 1930s must not be dismissed, and the appropriateness of assuming the year 1945 to be the end of Japan’s “wartime,” considering issues of repatriation, the Korean War, and Japan’s integration into the Cold War, must be questioned. The artificial designation of August 15, 1945, as the beginning of “year zero” for Japanese society (and some other Asian countries as well) has been closely investigated in the following studies: Satō Takumi, 8 gatsu 15 nichi no shinwa (Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho, 2005); and Yomoda Inuhiko, Nihon eiga to sengo no shinwa (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007), 2–26. For regulations on fine art and the oppression of artists during the years between 1931 and 1945, see Kozawa Setsuko, Avangyarudo no sensō taiken: Matsumoto Shunsuke, Takiguchi Shūzō soshite gagakuseitachi (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1994); Sakouchi Yūji, “Senjika ni okeru bijutsu seisaku shizai tōsei ni tsuite,” Kindai gasetsu 13 (2004): 104– 27; Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo Bijutsubu, ed., Shōwa-ki bijutsu tenrankai mokuroku (Tokyo: Chūōkōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2006); and Maki Kaneko, “Modanizumu no tayōka: Modanizumu no taiseiha to hantaiha: 1 Seido to shakai,” in Bijutsu no Nihon kingendaishi: Seido gengo zōkei, ed. Kitazawa Noriaki, Satō Dōshin, and Mori Hitoshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu, 2014), 451–62. The whole epitaph reads, “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil error” (Yasuraka ni nemutte kudasai. Ayamachi wa kurikaeshimasenu kara). Because the subject of the sentence is omitted in the original Japanese text (a common occurrence in Japanese), the interpretation and appropriateness of the English translation has been debated for a long time. The English translation here is taken from “20 Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims,” Hiroshima Peace Site: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Website, www .pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/index_e2.html (last accessed May 15, 2012). Concerning the memorialization of Hiroshima and the politics of remembering, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

notes to pages 5–9

9 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 10 Igarashi’s characterization of Emperor Hirohito as “feminine” is somewhat problematic. In this narrative, Hirohito still makes the “divine” decision, which Igarashi indeed numbers among “the deeds of great men,” together with Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs. Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 28. Also, Igarashi’s reading of the famous “wedding” photograph of Hirohito and MacArthur, as Julian Dierkes points out, is rather uncritical. The gender ambivalence that many scholars have found in the role of the emperor must be integrated into the consideration of this MacArthur-Hirohito “melodrama.” Julian Dierkes, “Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture by Yoshikuni Igarashi,” Monumenta Nipponica 57, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 390. 11 The detailed process of the confiscation of these paintings, discussed in Chapter Five of this book, is uncovered in the following studies: Kawata Akihisa, “Sensō kirokuga ni kansuru mittsu no risuto,” Kashima bijutsu kenkyū nenpō 15 bessatsu (1997): 410–28; Hirase Reita, “Sensōga to Amerika,” Himeji Ichiritsu Bijutsukan kiyō, no. 3 (1998): 1–45; and Sasaki Shigeo, “‘Sensōga’ shiryō shūi 5: Sensōga no sengo shori,” LR, no. 17 (January 2000): 46–60. 12 After the renewal of the gallery space in 2012, each room has been given a new theme, although the overall order remains roughly chronological. On my visit to the Museum on January 8, 2014, campaign-record paintings and art works made during the Asia-Pacific War were displayed mainly in Room Eight, under the title of “A Rain of Fire Overhead” (Zujō no hinoko). In this display, the presence of women in the wartime landscape was strongly emphasized through the display of Shufu no tomo (Friend of Housewife), a monthly women’s journal published during the war; along with Suzuki Makoto’s The Military and the Civilians Work Together in Air-Raid Defense on the Mainland (1945), a campaignrecord painting featuring activity on the home front; and Fujita Tsuguharu’s Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End (1945), a painting on the theme of Japanese mass suicide (discussed in Chapter Two). Also, the display of some campaign-record paintings in other rooms organized along different themes somewhat undermined the previous segregation of such paintings from the rest of the works/periods. Yet the clear absence of Japan’s imperial past still remained intact. The strong emphasis on women (together with children and “civilians”) found under “A Rain of Fire

13 14

15

16 17

18

19 20

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Overhead” and the absence of any depiction of Japanese aggression seem to rather foreground Japanese victim consciousness. For the history of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the display of its permanent collection, see Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan 60 nenshi 1952–2012 (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2012). Wall text for “Art During and After the War,” National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, as seen on May 3, 2012. The symposium report and essays based on the presentations have been published in the journal of JAHS, Bijutsushi (Art History), in volume 138 (March 1995). Chino Kaori and Tan’o Yasunori, “Sinpojiumu ‘Sensō to bijutsu’: Gaiyō oyobi tōgi hōkoku,” Bijutsushi, no. 138 (March 1995): 263. Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Shimizu Toshi ten (Tochigi: Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 1996). Hirota Ikuma, “Koiso Ryōhei to sensōga: Jūgun no kiroku to seisaku no katei,” Kōbe Shiritsu Koiso Kinen Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 3 (2008): 9–56. Tanaka Hisao, Nihon no sensōga: Sono keifu to tokushitsu (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1985); Tan’o Yasunori and Kawata Akihisa, Iwanami kindai Nihon no bijutsu 1 Imēji no naka no sensō: Nisshin Nichiro kara reisen made (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996). Tanaka, Nihon no sensōga, 15–19. One of the most recent publications on the theme of war art, Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, published in 2012, for example, strategically employs broader historical and geopolitical ranges. Twenty essays in this volume encapsulate multiple perspectives and the variety of issues addressed to date, such as the striking resonance between militarist and modernist aesthetics, the activity of Asian artists under Japanese colonial rule, and the post-1945 visual and bodily representations of the memory of war. Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo, eds., Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). For other recent studies on war art that also employ a broader scope and perspectives, see Doris Croissant, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Joshua S. Mostow, eds., Performing “Nation”: Gender Politics in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Gennifer Weisenfeld, ed., “Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism,” special issue, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000); Hariu Ichirō et al., eds., Sensō to bijutsu 1937–1945 (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2008); Nagata Ken’ichi, ed., Sensō to hyōshō/Bijutsu 20-seiki igo: Kirokushū: Kokusai shinpojiumu (Tokyo: Bigaku Shuppan, 2007); and Toyotashi Bijutsukan, ed., Kindai no Higashi Ajia imēji: Nihon kindai bijutsu wa dō Ajia o egaite kita ka (Toyota: Toyotashi Bijutsukan, 2009).

notes to pages 9–11

21 Chino Kaori, “Nihon bijutsu no jendā,” Bijutsushi, no. 136 (March 1994): 235–46. Chino Kaori’s essay was originally presented at the Eastern Regional Conference of the Art History Association of Japan in 1993. An English translation is available as Chino Kaori, “Gender in Japanese Art,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003): 17–34. Also, the following special issue commemorating Chino’s untimely death introduces her scholarship and career, and carries an English translation of her essays: Melissa McCormick, ed., “Japanese Art: The Scholarship and Legacy of Chino Kaori,” special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 15 (December 2003). 22 For the activity and scholarship of the Image and Gender Research Group, see its annual journal, Image & Gender. Imēji & Jendā Kenkyūkai, ed., Imēji & Jendā 1–10 (1999–2010). Also, the following publications include several studies as well as substantial bibliographies of art historical investigations employing feminist or gender perspectives: Suzuki Tokiko et al., eds., Bijutsu to jendā: Hitaishō no shisen (Tokyo: Brücke, 1997); and Suzuki Tokiko et al., eds., Bijutsu to jendā 2: Kōsa suru shisen (Tokyo: Brücke, 2005). 23 It should be noted that such artists as Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921) and Shimada Yoshiko (b. 1959) have been dealing with the issue of “comfort women” as early as the 1980s, and continue to problematize the regulation of sexuality, the agency of women in the sex industries, and gender politics during the Asia-Pacific War as well as today. Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, eds., Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010); Shimada Yoshiko, Art Activism 1992–98 (Tokyo: OTA Fine Arts, 1995). 24 Wakakuwa Midori, ed., Heisei 17–18 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyū seika hōkokusho: Kafuchōsei sekai shisutemu ni okeru senji no josei no sabetsu no kōzōteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2006); Wakakuwa, Sensō ga tsukuru joseizō: Dainiji Sekai Taisenka no Nihon josei dōin puropaganda (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2000); Wakakuwa, Sensō to jendā: Sensō o okosu dansei dōmei to heiwa o tsukuru jendā riron (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2005). 25 For the activities of women artists during the war, see Kitahara Megumi, ed., Ajia no josei shintai wa ikani egakareta ka: Shikaku hyōshō to sensō no kioku (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2013); Kira Tomoko, “‘Joryūgaka hōkōtai’ to ‘Daitōasen kōkoku fujo kaidōzu’ ni tsuite,” Bijutsushi, no. 154 (October 2002): 129–45; Kira, Sensō to joseigaka: Mōhitotsu no kindai “bijutsu”(Tokyo: Brücke, 2013);

Kokatsu Reiko, Hashimoto Shinji, and Suzuki Kaoru, eds., Hashiru onnatachi: Joseigaka no senzen sengo 1930– 1950 nendai ten/Japanese Women Artists Before and After World War II, 1930s–1950s (Utsunomiya: Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 2001); Kokatsu Reiko, “Senzen no joseigaka no shutsuji/kateikankyō: 1920–30 nendai o chūshin ni,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 634 (February 2003): 25–37; Shibuyaku Shōtō Bijutsukan et al., eds., Chin Shin ten: Taiwan no josei Nihon gaka seitan 100-nen kinen (Tokyo: Shibuyaku Shōtō Bijutsukan, 2006); and Ikeda Shinobu, “Senjika no ifuku to josei hyōshō: ‘Teikoku’ no karada e no manazashi,” in Heisei 17–18 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyū seika hōkokusho: Kafuchōsei sekai shisutemu ni okeru senji no josei no sabetsu no kōzōteki kenkyū, 41–68. In addition, several studies have uncovered the activities of Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese artists under Japanese colonial rule, which are beyond the scope of the present study. Relevant studies include: Kim Hyeshin, Kankoku kindai bijutsu kenkyū: Shokuminchiki ‘Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai’ ni miru ibunka shihai to bunka hyōshō (Tokyo: Brücke, 2005); Yong-na Kim, 20th-century Korean Art (London: Laurence King, 2005); Chiba Kei, “Dai 2 shō “Orientarizumu hihan” saikō: Chūō kanten no ‘Taiwan’ hyōshō o rei toshite,” in Tōyō ishiki: Musō to genjitsu no aida 1887–1953, ed. Inaga Shigemi (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobō, 2012), 47-73; and Fukuoka Ajia Bijutsukan et al., eds., Kanten ni miru kindai bijutsu: Tokyo Souru Taipei Chōshun (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Ajia Bijutsukan, 2014). 26 Ogino Miho, “Shintaishi no shatei: Aruiwa nan no tame ni karada o kataru no ka,” in Jendāka sareru shintai (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2002), 112–20. Originally published in Nihonshi kenkyū, no. 336 (February 1993): 39–63. 27 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 28 Among the large number of studies on the male figure in Euro-American history and society, those focused on the visual arts include Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); J.A. Mangan, ed., Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon: Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

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1996); Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner, eds., The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 29 Watanabe Tsuneo, Datsu dansei no jidai: Andorojinasu o mezasu bunmeigaku (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1986). 30 Tanaka Toshiyuki, Danseigaku no shintenkai (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2009); Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall, “Introduction: Interrogating Men and Masculinities,” in Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1–21. Also, the following studies delineate the evolution and development of men’s studies by one of the pioneers of the field, Itō Kimio, together with substantial bibliographies: Itō Kimio, “Danseigaku danseisei kenkyū no kako genzai mirai,” in Shinpen Nihon no feminizumu 12: Danseigaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009), 1–28; and Kimio Itō, “An Introduction to Men’s Studies,” in Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, ed. Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 145–52. 31 For works on male-male love, see Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999); Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan, 1720–1810 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); and Joshua S. Mostow, “The Gender of Wakashu and the Grammar of Desire,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, 49–70. For the study of the politics of the body with a focus on the emperors’ bodies, see Chiba Kei, “Kindai Jinmu tennōzō no keisei: Meiji tennō=Jinmu tennō no shinborizumu,” Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002): 96–126; Chiba, “Ryōsei guyūzō no ekonomī: Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation o yomu,” Imēji & jendā 3 (2002): 113–28; Kanō Mikiyo, “Nihonkoku tennō no zō o jendā de yomu,” in Onna? Nihon? Bi? Aratana jendā hihyō ni mukete, ed. Kumakura Takaaki and Chino Kaori (Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999), 81–98; Kitahara Megumi, Kenryoku to shikaku hyōshō: Jendā kara mita tennō/kōshitsuzō: Monbukagakushō kagaku kenkyūhi hojokin kenkyū seika hōkokusho 2002–2003 (Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2004); Mikiko Hirayama, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait Photography,” History of Photography 33, no. 2 (2009): 165–84; Osa Shizue, “Tenshi no jendā: Kindai tennōzō ni miru ‘otokorashisa,’” in Kyōdō kenkyū danseiron, ed. Nishikawa Yūko and Ogino Miho (Kyoto: Jinbushoin, 1999), 275–96; Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern

32

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34 35

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Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Taki Kōji, Tennō no shōzō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988). Such artists as Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), Dumb Type (b. 1983), and Morimura Yasumasa (b. 1951) have consciously used their own (male) bodies to address issues of masculinities, gender (and racial) identities, and sexual orientation. A few studies largely integrate the image of “men,” male sexuality, and the notion of masculinities into the analysis of war art or the mobilization system: Bert WintherTamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War,” Monumenta Nipponica 52, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 145–80; Kitahara Megumi, “Kesson setsudan sareta dansei shintai: Furusawa Iwami no haisen taiken to shutai,” Ajia gendai joseishi 5 (2009): 88–95; Ikeda Shinobu, “Egakareta senjō no bōryoku: Ima, haisengo no ‘sensōga’ o donoyō ni miru no ka,” in Shikaku hyōshō to ongaku, ed. Ikeda Shinobu and Kobayashi Midori (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010), 204–31; and Uchida Masakatsu, Dai Nihon Teikoku no shōnen to danseisei: Shōnen shōjo zasshi ni miru “uīkunesu fobia” (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010). Also, the following study by Kawata Akihisa focuses on the representation of the male body during the Asia-Pacific War, yet his approach does not incorporate any gender perspective, and the body in his analysis is treated rather monolithically as the “Japanese” body. Kawata Akihisa, “Nihonjin no nikutai to ‘tadashii karada,’” Gendai shisō 30, no. 9 (July 2002): 166–79. An English translation of this article is available as Kawata Akihisa, “The Japanese Physique and the ‘Proper Body,’” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, ed. Ikeda et al., 139–53. For the detailed processes involved in the formulation of these painting categories in relation to Japan’s modernization, see Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden: “Bijutsu” juyōshi nōto teihon (Tokyo: Brücke, 2010); and Dōshin Satō, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011). Osa, “Tenshi no jendā: Kindai tennōzō ni miru ‘otokorashisa.’” Concerning the genre of “history painting” in Japan, see Yamanashi Toshio, Egakareta rekishi: Nihon kindai to “rekishiga” no jiba (Tokyo: Brücke, 2005). Wakakuwa Midori, Iwanami kindai Nihon no bijutsu 2 kakusareta shisen: Ukiyoe yōga no josei rataizō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997). From 1896, Kuroda served as the first professor in the Western Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; he was also one of the organizers of the Ministry of Education’s annual art exhibition (the Japanese National Art Salon), inaugurated in 1907. Ibid., 96.

notes to pages 14–23

38 Norman Bryson, “Westernizing Bodies: Women, Art, and Power in Meiji Yōga,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, 89–118. Also, the following study details Japanese artists’ experiences of Paris: Imahashi Eiko, Ito shōkei: Nihonjin no Pari (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001). 39 Bryson, “Westernizing Bodies,” 108. 40 The racial boundaries and hierarchies within the maledominated art studios of Europe are discussed in Chapter Two. 41 For detailed analysis of self-portrait paintings by several yōga artists, see Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Strong Flesh at the Ready: Body and Self in Self-Portraiture,” in Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, The Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), 25–62. 42 A number of important artists and works cannot be covered in this brief overview. Of particular note would be Aoki Shigeru (1882–1911) and Murayama Kaita (1896–1919). Aoki’s paintings frequently feature seminude male figures based in Japanese myth and legend, while Murayama created a striking, full-length image (said to be a self-portrait) of a naked man standing and urinating, entitled Naked Monk Urinating, in 1915. For the latter, see Winther-Tamaki, “Strong Flesh at the Ready,” 37–43; and Jeffrey Angles, Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 43 Gennifer Weisenfeld has explored the conscious use of the artist’s male body to problematize gender roles in Japanese society in her study on the avant-garde art collective Mavo. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Additionally, androgynous figures or those that subverted contemporary gender norms seemed to proliferate in Japan during the interwar period. The advent of such figures presumably was a response to the contemporary situation of the increasing pathologization of same-sex love and intersexuality, as well as the women’s liberation movement, which began to manifest a prominent presence; these factors remain largely unexamined in the field of Japanese art history. Jeffrey Angles, in his Writing the Love of Boys, has addressed the issues of male-male desire in close association with the visual arts. 44 Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 47–68. 45 While these socioeconomic shifts affected a wide range of artists, the situation was generally more serious in the field of yōga than in Nihonga. As discussed above, the category of Nihonga was also a modern invention; yet with a longer history of its practices dating back before the age of modernization, Nihonga was relatively quick to cultivate a group of consumers in the capitalist market economy. In addition, certain Nihonga artists

46

47 48 49

50 51

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54 55 56 57 58

still maintained the conventional studio system, in which commissions were made directly by patrons. In contrast, with few commercial galleries and virtually no museums collecting and displaying modern art in Japan, yōga artists relied heavily on juried exhibitions run by the government and established art associations to gain social recognition. Yoshida Yutaka and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, eds., Nitchū Sensō ki no kokumin dōin, vol. 1, Shiryō Nihon gendaishi 10 (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1984), 522–26. Akazawa Shirō, Kindai Nihon no shisō dōin to shūkyō tōsei (Tokyo: Azekura Shobō, 1985), 286. Yokoyama Taikan, “Sensō to bijutsu,” Bijutsu 12, no. 11 (November 1937): 37. For the wartime regulations on jazz, see E. Taylor Atkins, “‘Jazz for the Country’s Sake’: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan,” in Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 127–220. Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 173. Kira Tomoko has suggested that one artist of campaign-record paintings, Inoue Sachi, may have been a woman, but this point cannot be confirmed due to a lack of evidence. See Kira, “‘Joryūgaka hōkōtai’ to ‘Daitōasen kōkoku fujo kaidōzu’ ni tsuite,” 144–45n47. For the activities of women artists during the war, see the sources listed in note 25, and Maki Kaneko, “New Art Collective in the Service of the War: The Formation of Art Organizations during the Asia-Pacific War, 1937–1945,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 309–50. For the Army Art Association, see ibid., 311–22. The Army Art Association was initially established in April 1938 as the Association of War Artists of Imperial Japan (Dai-Nihon Jūgun Gaka Kyōkai). Wakakuwa, Iwanami kindai Nihon no bijutsu, 100. Ibid. Mukai, “Jūgun gaka shigi,” 8. Mukai Junkichi, “Guntai seikatsu Pari jūgun,” Bijutsugan 2, no. 9 (September 1938). Marilyn Ivy, “Foreword: Fascism, Yet?,” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), ix.

Chapter 2 Epigraph. Kojima Kiyofumi, “In the Enemy’s Hands: White Flag,” in Japan at War: An Oral History, ed. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook (New York: The New Press, 1992), 373–82. 1

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Sakusen kirokuga are also known as sensō kirokuga (war-documentary paintings) or simply sensōga (war paintings). Although the National Museum of

notes to pages 23–32

2 3

4

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6 7 8 9 10

11 12

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15 Bryson, “Westernizing Bodies,” 108. 16 Ibid., 108, 111. 17 Takamura Kōtarō, A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kōtarō, trans. Hiroaki Satō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992), xix. 18 David L. Eng’s conception of “racial castration,” although focused mainly on Asian-Americans in the USA, would be applicable to Takamura’s case and thereby useful for considering the racial and sexual identity of Japanese artists in Paris. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 115. For more details on Takamura’s experience in Paris, see Imahashi, Ito shōkei: Nihonjin no Pari, 288–326. 19 Recently, a number studies on this canvas preparation have been made, eventually uncovering the “secret” of Fujita’s canvas ground. For example, see Hayashi Yōko, Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2008), 144–57; and Pōra Bijutsukan Gakugeibu, ed., Reonāru Fujita: Watashi no Pari, watashi no atorie (Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu, 2011). 20 Bert Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 83. 21 For such performances, see Hayashi, Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku, 297–302. 22 Ikeda Shinobu points out that, in contrast to his widespread androgynous image, Fujita sometimes displayed rather conservative views about the notions of “manliness” and gender roles. Ikeda Shinobu, “Tomi to Tsuguharu: ‘Renai’ to ‘ie,’ soshite ‘geijutsu’ o meguru ryōsei no sōkoku,” in Fujita Tsuguharu shokan: Tsuma Tomi ate (4), ed. “Pari ryūgaku shoki no Fujita Tsuguharu” Kenkyūkai (Mobara: “Pari ryūgaku shoki no Fujita Tsuguharu” Kenkyūkai, 2004), 5–27. 23 Fujita Tsuguharu, Bura ippon (Tokyo: Tōhō Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1936), 144–45. 24 For example, Fujita performed jūdō at the Paris Opera House in 1927; this was said to be the first time that a Japanese performed at the Opera House. “Parī no Operaza de waga jūdō shōkai jitsuen,” Asahi shinbun, February 2, 1927. 25 Fujita, Bura ippon, 115. For a comprehensive investigation of the treatment of the female body by yōga painters, including Fujita, see Bert WintherTamaki, “Accelerating the Heartbeat,” in Maximum Embodiment, 63–99. 26 Fujita was married twice before Loucie Badoud, to Tokita Tomiko and Fernande Barrey. 27 Yanagi Ryō and Kōno Misao, “Taidan sekai no tarento Leo Fujita,” Shūkan Asahi 73, no. 8 (February 1968): 46. 28 Vera Mackie, “The Taxonomic Gaze: Looking at Whiteness from East to West,” ACRAWSA 5, no. 1 (2009): 11. 29 Nakagawa Kigen, “Teiten yōgabu manhyō,” Chūō bijutsu, no. 86 (November 1922): 93.

Modern Art, Tokyo, which currently holds 153 paintings of this kind, uses the term “war-documentary paintings,” this book employs sakusen kirokuga and its translation, “campaign-record paintings,” to refer to a group of such works officially commissioned by and displayed under the sponsorship of the military, as this was the name that actually appeared in the military’s official documents in the last phase of the war; the term was often used by contemporary art critics and artists as well. Sasaki Shigeo, “‘Sensō to bijutsu’ kankei shiryō mokuroku (2),” Kōzō, no. 12 (October 1997): 185. For the regulation of art materials during the war, see Sakouchi Yūji, “Senjika ni okeru bijutsu seisaku shizai tōsei ni tsuite,” Kindai gasetsu 13 (2004): 104–27. For the portraits of Emperor Hirohito made by these three artists, see Kitahara Megumi, “Kieta Tennō · Kōgō zō to ‘sensōga’: Dai 2 kai Daitōa Sensō bijutsuten ni tokubetsu hōkei sareta sanmai no kaiga,” Imēji & jendā 6 (March 2006): 23–30. Fujita never returned to Japan; he obtained French citizenship and died in 1968 as Leonard Foujita, his Catholic name. Kawata, “Nihonjin no nikutai to ‘tadashii karada,’” 167. Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 97. Tanaka, Nihon no sensōga, 151. Nomiyama Gyōji, “Sensōga,” in Yonhyakuji no dessan (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1978), 176–79. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 4. Dower’s book is the most famous of these studies. For more recent studies on this theme, see Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004); and Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Dower, War without Mercy, 4. For Iwamura Tōru and his extremely influential bohemian novel Pari no gagakusei (Paris Art Students), see Imahashi, Ito shōkei: Nihonjin no Pari. On Japanese artists and their interactions in 1920s Paris, see ibid.; Tokushima Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Satsuma Jirohachi to Pari no Nihonjin gakatachi (Tokyo: Kyōdō Tsūshinsha, 1998); “Panteonkai zasshi” Kenkyūkai, ed., Pari 1900 nen Nihonjin ryūgakusei no kōyū: “Panteonkai zasshi” shiryō to kenkyū (Tokyo: Seiunsha, 2009); and Miura Atsushi, ed., Ōkan no kiseki: Nichifutsu geijutsu kōryū no 150nen (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2013). Bryson, “Westernizing Bodies,” 89–118; Imahashi, Ito shōkei: Nihonjin no Pari.

159

notes to pages 32–39

30 Kawaji Ryūkō, “Nihon gaka Fujita Tsuguharu,” Bi no kuni 10, no. 3 (March 1929): 42. 31 Sano Yukimitsu, “Sono go no Yuki to Fujita,” Modan Nippon 1, no. 2 (November 1930): 87. 32 Taki Teizō, Nihon no yōgakai 70 nen: Gaka to gashō no monogatari (Tokyo: Nikkeijigyō Shuppansha, 2001). 33 Fujita Tsuguharu, “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono ichi,” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 12 (July 1934): 43–49; “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono ni,” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 13 (August 1934): 56–63; “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono san,” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 14 (September 1934): 64–71; “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono yon,” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 19 (February 1935): 52–56. 34 Fujita, “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono yon,” 53. 35 Ibid., 55–56. In his 1929 autobiography, too, Fujita commented on the importance of art for diplomacy, but this comment was made in order to emphasize the universal power of art, supported by individualism, vis-à-vis politics and collectivism. Fujita Tsuguharu, “Zaifutsu 17 nen (13): Jidenfū ni kataru,” Asahi shinbun, October 10, 1929. 36 Fujita’s interest shows close proximity to the contemporary mingei (folk craft) movement (see Chapter Four). It is necessary to investigate Fujita’s interest in Asia and rural Japan within the context of the broader intellectual trends of the 1930s. 37 “Guro na funsō de gahitsu: Taiheiyō jinshushū kansei e,” Asahi shinbun, January 26, 1935. 38 Ibid. 39 Hayashi, Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku, 364–65. 40 For details on the Society for International Cultural Relations and Nippon, see Shibasaki Atsushi, Kindai Nihon to kokusai bunka kōryu: Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai no sōsetsu to tenkai 1934–45 nen (Tokyo: Yūshindō Kōbunsha, 1999); and Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Touring ‘Japan-as-Museum’: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 747–93. 41 The other half was directed by the professional film director Suzuki Shigeyoshi (1900–1976). Fujita’s half was further subdivided into five parts, known respectively as “Den’en Nippon” (Rural Japan), “Kodomo Nippon” (Child Japan), “Fujin Nippon” (Lady Japan), “Goraku Nippon” (Entertainment Japan), and “Tokai Nippon” (Urban Japan). For more details about Fujita’s film, see Sasaki Shigeo, “Fujita Tsuguharu kantoku no eiga ‘Fūzoku Nippon,’” Bijutsu no mado, no. 282 (July 2006): 161–63. 42 “Fujita Tsuguharu gahaku ga eiga kantoku ni natte katsuyaku,” Osaka mainichi shinbun, November 28, 1935. 43 “Shin eiga hyō: ‘Gendai Nihon’ mondai no yushutsubutsu,” Asahi shinbun, May 12, 1937. 44 “Eiga ‘Gendai no Nippon’ no hamon,” Yomiuri shinbun, April 5, 1937.

45 Kimura Shōhachi, “Nikakai dai nijūikkaiten shoken,” Mizue, no. 356 (October 1934): 210. 46 Uchikawa Yoshimi, Masu media seisakushi kenkyū (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1989), 194–95; Akazawa Shirō and Kitagawa Kenzō, eds., Bunka to fashizumu: Senjiki Nihon ni okeru bunka no kōbō (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1993), 7. 47 For details on Japan’s cultural politics and the mobilization of art, see Kaneko, “Modanizumu no tayōka.” 48 Kawata Akihisa, “Jūgonen sensō to ‘daikōzu’ no setsuritsu,” Bijutsushi kenkyū 32 (December 1993): 96. 49 Fukutomi Tarō, E o atsumeru (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995); Sasaki Shigeo, “‘Sensō to bijutsu’ kankei shiryō mokuroku (2),” Kōzō, no. 12 (October 1997): 182–85; Seo Noriaki, “Yamaguchi Hōshun to sensōga, Shōwa 13–20 nen,” Yamaguchi Hōshun Kinenkan kiyō 1 (1998): 36–39. 50 Sasaki Shigeo, “‘Sensōga’ shiryō shūi 9: Fujita no senchū sengo (3) Fujita no sensōga (2) Rikugun sakusen kirokuga,” LR, no. 21 (September 2000): 81–84. 51 Two leading Surrealists, Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–1979) and Fukuzawa Ichirō (1898–1992), were arrested under suspicion of political engagement with Communism in 1941; the arrests of a number of other Surrealists followed. 52 Sasaki, “‘Sensōga’ shiryō shūi 9,” 81–84. 53 Ibid., 88–89. 54 The enactment in 1939 of the National Conscription Ordinance (Kokumin chōheirei) as part of the National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōinhō) of 1938 enabled the military to conscript artists. 55 Kawata lists the following twelve yōga and two Nihonga artists who each painted more than four campaignrecord paintings: Ihara Usaburō (1894–1976), Kurihara Shin (1894–1966), Koiso Ryōhei, Kobayakawa Atsushirō (1893–1959), Satō Kei (1906–1978), Tanaka Saichirō (1900–1967), Tamura Kōnosuke (1903–1986), Tsuruta Gorō (1890–1969), Nakamura Ken’ichi (1895–1967), Fujita Tsuguharu, Miyamoto Saburō, Mukai Junkichi, Kawabata Ryūshi (1885–1966), and Yoshioka Kenji (1906–1990). Kawata Akihisa, “Sakusen kirokuga,” in Nihon kingendai bijutsushi jiten, ed. Taki Kōji and Fujieda Teruo (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 2007), 452. 56 Kawata Akihisa, “‘Sakusen kirokuga’ shōshi 1937– 1945,” in Sensō to bijutsu 1937–1945, ed. Hariu Ichirō et al. (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2008), 154. 57 Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 84. 58 Ibid., 72–74. 59 Miyamoto Saburō, “Futatabi reisei na jidai Furansu gengadan no tenbō (chū),” Chūgai shōgyō shinbun, March 6, 1940; Miyamoto Saburō, “Futatabi reisei na jidai Furansu gengadan no tenbō (ge),” Chūgai shōgyō shinbun, March 7, 1940.

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notes to pages 39–50

60 Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 66–68. 61 Steve Rabson, “Takamura Kotaro and Saito Mokichi: War and Repentance,” in Steve Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998), 194. 62 Ibid., 191–206. 63 Ibid., 194. 64 Various reasons for Fujita’s trip have been speculated. For example, see Kondō Fumito, Fujita Tsuguharu “ihōjin” no shōgai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2002), 178–84. 65 Hayashi, Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku, 399–400. 66 Fujita Tsuguharu, Chi o oyogu (Tokyo: Shomotsu Tenbōsha, 1942), 71. 67 Ibid., 75. 68 Fujita Tsuguharu, “Kappa atama shintaisei,” in Fujita, Chi o oyogu, 324. In January 1941, Fujita also lost his beloved father, who had served as his bridge to his home country for a long time. The loss of his father may also be related to Fujita’s determination to fully reenter Japan at this particular stage. 69 For the ways in which the Japanese in the modern era attempted to define themselves in terms of both race and ethnicity, see Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: “Nihonjin” no jigazō no keifu (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1995). 70 The demographic for this examination kept expanding as the war progressed: in 1941, men aged between fifteen and twenty were required to undergo the examination; and in 1942, the upper age limit was raised to twenty-five. Takaoka Hiroyuki, “Sensō to ‘tairyoku’: Senji kōsei gyōsei to seinen danshi,” in Modanizumu kara sōryokusen e, Danseishi 2, ed. Abe Tsunehisa, Ōbinata Sumio, and Amano Masako (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2006), 176–202. 71 The profound impact of the national health policy on artists is discussed in Chapter Four. For details on these activities and campaigns, see Fujino Yutaka, Kyōsei sareta kenkō: Nihon fashizumuka no seimei to shintai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2000); and Asato Ikeda, “Envisioning Fascist Space, Time, and Body: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War (1931–1945)” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2012). 72 Suda Kunitarō, “Waga aburae wa izuko ni yuku ka,” Mizue, no. 505 (November 1947): 19–24. 73 Kojima Kikuo, “Seisen bijutsuten (1) yōga hyō igibukaki kuwadate: Ningen kanjō no shajitsu shugi,” Asahi shinbun, July 11, 1937. 74 Wakimoto Rakushiken, “Sensō bijutsuten o miru 1 Sensōga no seishin: Nihonjin to gaijin to no sōi,” Asahi shinbun, May 21, 1938. 75 For Miyamoto’s war imagery, see Komatsushi Miyamoto Saburō Bijutsukan, ed., Miyamoto Saburō no

76

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78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89

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sensō to heiwa: Ano hi ano hito ano fūkei (Komatsushi: Komatsushi Miyamoto Saburō Bijutsukan, 2005). Miyamoto Saburō, “Shin senjō o megutte: Sensō to shikisai no hanashi,” Hinode, no. 765 (September 1942): 116. Miyamoto Saburō, “Yamashita Pāshibaru ryōshirei kaikenzu ni tsuite,” in Miyamoto Saburō nanpō jūgun gashū (Tokyo: Rikugun Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1943), 45. Miyamoto Saburō, “Yamashita shōgun o moderu,” Hinode, no. 780 (February 1943): 89. Ishii Hakutei, Bijutsu no ikusa (Tokyo: Saiunsha, 1943), 353. “Kikatsu (Gadarukanaru no yūshi o omou) Miyamoto Saburō saku,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 27, 1943. An alternate, highly violent version of Battle on the Bank of the Haluha, featuring a large number of Japanese soldiers crushed by Russian tanks, is said to have been secretly created by Fujita. Although the location of this work is currently unknown, the fact that a few people (including Miyamoto) witnessed this painting lends credence to the idea that Fujita produced two paintings on the theme of Nomonhan. If Fujita had indeed produced a brutal image of a deathly battle already in 1940, this may require some reconsideration of Fujita’s “deathly battle pictures”; yet with no surviving image of this work, it is not included in the present study. For an interpretation of these two Nomonhan paintings, see Aya Louisa McDonald, “Fujita Tsuguharu: An Artist of the Holy War Revisited,” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, ed. Ikeda et al., 176–78. Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 150. The following study provides a detailed analysis of Fujita’s images of gyokusai: McDonald, “Fujita Tsuguharu,” 169–89. Ishii Hakutei, “Nihon no bijutsu wa kaku arubeshi,” Bijutsu 1, no. 3 (April 1944): 9. Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 94–101. Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 129–33. Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 143. Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 131. Sakouchi Yūji points out that the lack of color pigments toward the end of war must have been one of the reasons for the prevalence of extremely dark canvases. Sakouchi, “Senjika ni okeru bijutsu seisaku shizai tōsei ni tsuite.” It is not by chance that the contemporary artist Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) frequently refers to Fujita as his model and predecessor. In order to challenge Western aesthetics and the hierarchal world order, Murakami has advocated “Superflat” as a quintessentially Japanese concept. He and his colleague, the art critic Sawaragi Noi (b. 1965), have presented the

notes to pages 50–58

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Eriko and Tan’o Yasunori, eds., Heisei 19–21 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi hojokin kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyūseika hōkokusho: Nihon kindai to “Nanpō” gainen: Zōkei ni miru keisei to tenkai (Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2006). 100 Takizawa Kyōji, “Nanshin seisaku to bijutsu: Nan’yō bijutsu kyōkai o megutte,” in Shōwaki bijutsu tenrankai no kenkyū: Senzen hen, ed. Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2009), 519–40; Takizawa, “Bijutsuka to ‘Nanyō guntō’ to Nihon kindai bijutsu to,” in Bijutsuka tachi no “Nanyō guntō” ten, ed. Machidashiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan (Tokyo: Machidashiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan, 2008), 16–24. 101 Investigating the front covers of Shashin shūhō (Photo Weekly), a propaganda magazine issued by the Cabinetrun Information Division between 1938 and 1945, Kanō Mikiyo has created a chart indicating how the gender and ethnic diversity of the front-cover figures changed during the war. According to this chart, the number of Southeast Asian men, especially political leaders, increased dramatically in 1943, while women of the region only appeared twice, in 1943 and 44: one cover featured Indian and Malayan girls in kimono striking a “banzai” pose; and the other showed female farmers in Borneo smiling widely while holding harvested crops in their hands. Kanō Mikiyo, “Nihon no sensō puropaganda to jendā: ‘Shashin shūhō’ no ‘Daitōa kyōeiken’ ‘kichiku beiei’ hyōshō o chūshin ni,” Jinbun Shakai Kagaku Kenkyūjo nenpō 6 (2008): 1–11. 102 Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 137. 103 For example, see Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 136–50; Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Jones, 174–87; Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s ‘Olympia,’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 95–118; and Sander Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality,” in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinter (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119–38. 104 Imaizumi, “Rikugun sakusen kirokuga yūshū sakuhin hyō,” 24. 105 Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 135–38. 106 Imaizumi, “Rikugun sakusen kirokuga yūshū sakuhin hyō,” 24. 107 Kitagawa Momoo, “Rikugun sakusen kirokuga yūshū sakuhin hyō: Fujita Tsuguharu ‘Shinpei no kyūshutsu itaru,’” Bijutsu, no. 4 (May 1944): 25.

genealogy of “Superflat,” in which Fujita occupies an important position as the artist who intervened in the Western art world before Murakami by flattening the space of European oil painting. For more on the importance of Fujita’s deathly battle pictures for Murakami and Sawaragi, see Chapter Five. “Rikugun haken gaka nanpō sensen zadankai,” Nanpō gashin 2 (1942). Ihara Usaburō’s Portrait of President Ba Maw of Burma (1943) can be considered the only exception among campaign-record paintings. This portrait illustrates Ba Maw as a prominent political leader with a well-built physique and strong gaze. See Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Nittenshi 15: Shinbuntenhen 3 (Tokyo: Nitten, 1985), 50. For more details about Kojima’s experience, see Morris Low, “The Emperor’s Sons Go to War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: Routledge, 2003), 81–99. For Japanese wartime propaganda specifically focusing on racism against African-Americans in the United States, see Satō Masaharu, “Senjika Nihon no taigai senden ni okeru ‘kokujin kosaku,’” Masu komyunikēshon kenkyū, no. 46 (January 1995): 157–70. Although not focusing on the period of the Asia-Pacific War, the following study provides a close examination of the much-neglected subject of Japanese–African-American interactions throughout the twentieth century: Yukiko Koshiro, “Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 183–215. These six works include Fujita Tsuguharu, Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End (1945); Fujita Tsuguharu, Sacred Soldier to the Rescue (1944); Suzuki Makoto, The Military and the Civilians Work Together in Air-Raid Defense on the Mainland (1945); Suzuki Ryōzō, Evacuation of the Wounded and the Hardworking Relief Unit (1943); Suzuki Ryōzō, Activities of the Medical Corps and Goodwill of the Burmese People (1944); and Suzuki Tsugio, Air Defense in Rangoon and Cooperation of the Burmese (1944). Jūgun Ianfu 100 ban Henshū Iinkai, ed., Jūgun ianfu 100 ban: Denwa no mukō kara rekishi no koe ga (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1992). Imaizumi Atsuo, “Rikugun sakusen kirokuga yūshū sakuhin hyō: Fujita Tsuguharu ‘Shinpei no kyūshutsu itaru,’” Bijutsu, no. 4 (May 1944): 24. Iino Masahito, Senjika Nihon no bijutsukatachi dai 1 gō (Yamanashi: Nekomachi Bunko, 2010), 31–38. The following study closely delineates how the concept of “Southward” was imagined, ordered, and visualized by Japanese artists throughout the modern period: Kōgo

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Chapter 3 Epigraph. Azuma Tamaki, “Yasui Umehara jidai (1),” Tenbyō, no. 131 (March 1979): 5. 1

Tomiyama Hideo, “Dai 4 shō Nihon teki aburae yōshiki no kakuritsusha,” in Kindai yōga no tenkai, Genshoku gendai Nihon no bijutsu 7 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1979), 168. 2 The following recent study and exhibition catalogue provide insight into Yasui’s portraiture beyond stylistic analysis: Satō Yukari, “Shirakabaha ni yoru Nihon kindai yōga akademizumu no tenkan to sono haikei: Yasui Sōtarō no shōzōga seisaku o megutte,” Bijutsushi kenkyū 42 (2004): 169–90; and Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Institution, ed., Portraits by Yasui Sotaro/Yasui Sōtarō no shōzōga (Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, 2009). 3 Harada Hikaru, “Yasui Sōtarō hyōden: Tsutsumashiki geijutsu shijō,” in Nihon no kindai bijutsu 9: 1930 nendai no gakatachi (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1992), 48. 4 This inquiry leads us to question the now clichéd dichotomy of the public/political as “masculine,” and the domestic/private as “feminine.” The rigid fixation of the masculine/feminine dichotomy in art-historical discourse has been critically re-examined in a number of studies. In writing this chapter, particular reference was made to the following two studies: Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds., The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006); and Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen, and Pemela J. Warner, eds., Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 5 Portraits made in the postwar period include those of Fujiyama Aiichirō (1897–1985), an entrepreneur and politician; and Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966), a scholar of literature and theater. This list of names is based on the exhibition catalogue Portraits by Yasui Sotaro, ed. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Institution. 6 Yasui Sōtarō, “Shajitsu to Sezannu no e,” in Gaka no me (Tokyo: Zauhō Kankōkai, 1956), 6–8. Originally published in Bijutsu 10, no. 2 (February 1935). 7 Imaizumi Atsuo, “Umehara Ryūzaburō to Yasui Sōtarō,” Atorie 15, no. 7 (June 1938): 8. 8 Ishii Hakutei, “Yasui Sōtarō,” Mizue, no. 508 (January 1948): 40. 9 For Japan’s wartime austerity measures, see Sheldon M. Garon, “Luxury is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 41–78. 10 This does not mean that the national costume and monpe were mandatory throughout the Asia-Pacific

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War. The processes by which they were designed and accepted were complicated and gradual. For the national costume and monpe, see Inoue Masahito, Yōfuku to Nihonjin: Kokumin fuku toiu mōdo (Tokyo: Kōsaidō, 2001); Wakakuwa Midori, “Sōryokusen taiseika no shiseikatsu tōsei fujinzasshi ni miru ‘senji ifuku’ kiji no imi suru mono,” in Sensō bōryoku to jōsei 2: Gunkoku no onnatachi, ed. Hayakawa Kimiyo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2005), 194–220; and Oda Yoshiyuki, “‘Shashin shūhō’ ni miru mohanteki kokumin seikatsu,” in Senji Nihon no kokumin ishiki, ed. Tamai Kiyoshi (Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2008), 79–113. Mikiko Hirayama, “Restoration of Realism: Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950) and the Growth of Art Criticism in Modern Japan” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2001). Among the large number of studies on the Shirakaba School focusing on its relation to the visual arts, particular reference was made to the following works of scholarship and exhibition catalogues: Inaga Shigemi, “Dai III bu Kyokutō Modanizumu to tōyō kaiki,” in Kaiga no rinkai: Kindai Higashi Ajia bijutsushi no shikkoku to meiun (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014), 241–334; Yomiuri Shinbun Osaka Honsha Bunka Jigyōbu, ed., Shirakabaha no aishita bijutsu:”Shirakaba” tanjō 100 nen (Osaka: Yomiuri Shinbun Osaka Honsha, 2009); Iwasa Sōshirō, “Burūmuzuberī gurūpu to Shirakabaha,” Kokubungaku 48, no. 7 (June 2003): 32–38; Kawata Tokiko, “Shirakabaha to Burūmuzuberī gurūpu,” Bijutsu fōramu 21, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 105–9; Inaga Shigemi, “‘Shirakaba’ to zōkei bijutsu: Saikō Sezannu ‘rikai’ o chūshin ni,” Hikaku bungaku 38 (1995): 76–91; Takashina Shūji, Nihon kindai no biishiki (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1993); Chiba Kenritsu Bijutsukan, ed., “Shirakaba” ha to kindai bijutsu (Chiba: Chiba Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 1989); and Honda Shūgo, “Shirakaba” ha no bungaku (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1954). Umehara left the Nika Society and organized the Spring Light Society (Shun’yōkai) with Kishida in 1922, an organization that was also ardently supported by the Shirakaba School. From 1928, he led the National Painting Society (Kokugakai). Yasui continued to be active as a Nika member until 1936, when he was forced to resign due to his acceptance of membership in the Imperial Fine Arts Academy on the occasion of the Matsuda Reorganization (discussed later in this chapter). After his withdrawal from the Nika Society, Yasui was active in the Issui Society (Issui-kai) until his death. The following study details Kojima and his fellows’ experience of Europe with a specific focus on their stay in Italy: Suenaga Kō, Itaria tabi suru kokoro: Taishō kyōyō sedai ga mita toshi to bijutsu (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2005).

notes to pages 68–72

15 Hosokawa Moritatsu, “Kojima no omoide,” Mizue, no. 539 (September 1950): 60. 16 For Hosokawa’s life and collection, see Hosokawa Morihiro, Bi ni ikita Hosokawa Moritatsu no me (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 2010). As for Hosokawa’s collection of modern art, see Shioya Jun, “Hosokawa Moritatsu to Nihon no kindai bijutsu,” in Hosokawake no shihō: Shugyoku no Eisei Bunko korekushon (Tokyo: NHK, 2010), 306–12. For Hosokawa’s close connection with Yokoyama Taikan and the reorganized Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin), see “Tokushū Hosokawa korekushon,” Sansai, no. 540 (September 1992): 8–30. 17 For further details on Kojima’s life and academic career, see Hirayama, “Restoration of Realism.” 18 Although invited, Takamura Kōtarō never submitted any works to the Seikō-kai. The Nihonga artist Hayami Gyoshū (1894–1935) was listed as a member, but died before participating in the group. After the end of the Asia-Pacific War, the Nihonga artist Fukuda Heihachirō (1892–1974) and the yōga painter Kumagai Morikazu (1880–1977) joined the society. 19 After the termination of Shirakaba, members of the Shirakaba School centered around Mushanokōji continued to issue other journals, such as Fuji (Nonseparation), Daichōwa (Great Harmony), and Dokuritsujin (Independent Person). The postwar period saw the inauguration of Kokoro (Heart; 1948–81), in which a number of Shirakaba associates, as well as Umehara and Yasui, participated. Also, between 1929 and 38, Shiga Naoya’s residence in the ancient city of Nara became a famous cultural hub known as the Takabatake Salon. In addition to Shirakaba members and associated artists, Kojima’s likeminded colleagues at Tokyo Imperial University, generally known as intellectuals of Taishō culturalism (kyōyōshugi), regularly gathered there, enjoying the art that they collected and discussing aesthetics and ancient culture, as well as playing games. Concerning the Takabatake Salon as well as the inclination of intellectuals in Nara toward Taishō culturalism, see Asada Takashi and Wada Hirobumi, eds., Kodai no maboroshi (Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2001). 20 Kojima Kikuo, “Yasui kun no shōzōga,” Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1950): 4. 21 Satō, “Shirakabaha,” 174. 22 The English Royal Academy also had a profound impact on the formation of the Japanese art academy. See Ōkuma Toshiyuki, “Bijutsu dantaiten to akademizumu no keisei,” in Bijutsu no yukue bijutsushi no genzai: Nihon, kindai bijutsu, ed. Kitazawa Noriyuki et al. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999), 210–24. 23 Kojima Kikuo, “Teiten yōgahyō (1),” Asahi shinbun, October 20, 1933; Kojima Kikuo, “Teiten yōgahyō (4),” Asahi shinbun, October 23, 1933.

24 Concerning the Matsuda Reorganization, see Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Nittenshi 12 kaiso hen (Tokyo: Shadan Hōjin Nitten, 1984); Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, ed., Yōga no dōran Shōwa 10 nen: Teiten kaiso to yōgadan Nihon, Kankoku, Taiwan/The Reorganization of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1935: WesternStyle Painting of the Era in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (Tokyo: Tokyo-to Bunka Shinkōkai, 1992); Tanaka Hisao, “Nihon Bijutsuin to Teiten sōdō,” in Nihon Bijutsu-in hyakunenshi dai 6 kan, ed. Nihon Bijutsu-in Hyakunenshi Hensan Iinkai (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu-in, 1997), 361–72; and Omuka Toshiharu, ed., Bijutsu hihyōka chosaku senshū dai 11 kan: Teiten kaiso/Shintaisei to bijutsu (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2011). Because Hosokawa Moritatsu was the most important patron of the reorganized Japan Art Institute led by Yokoyama Taikan, it is possible that Kojima, or at least Hosokawa, was involved with, or played a role in, the Matsuda Reorganization. No documents indicating their actual involvement have been uncovered, however, and thus this theory remains the author’s speculation. 25 Kojima Kikuo, “Teiten geijutsu-in hihan/ichiyazuke no kondate/bijutsu hihyōka toshite,” Asahi shinbun, July 4, 1937. 26 The major posts that Hosokawa occupied include the vice presidency of the Patriotic Society for Renovation of the Imperial Museum (1928), head of the Association for Preserving National Treasures (1929), member of the selection committee for Imperial Artists (1934), committee member of the Imperial Museum (1938), chairman of the Research Group for Promoting Art (1940), and chairman of the preparation committee for the Twenty-six Hundredth Anniversary Art Exhibition (1940). 27 Hirase Reita, “Bijutsu Shinkō Chōsakai to Kokumin Bijutsu Tenjijō no shiryō no shōkai,” Himeji Ichiritsu Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 3 (1998): 46–48. 28 The school commissioned two portraits of its former director from Yasui, Portrait of Professor Tamamushi and a smaller bust image. The bust was delivered first, and greeted with laughter by the school’s staff. The current director thus decided not to place this work on display, until Kojima’s positive review of the larger portrait appeared in the Asahi newspaper. Kaizuka Tsuyoshi, “Yasui Sōtarō no shōzōga: Riarizumu to kaigateki utsukushisa/Portraits by Yasui Sotaro: Realism and Pictorial Beauty,” and “6 Tamamushi sensei zō,” in Portraits by Yasui Sotaro, ed. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Institution, 12–13, 45–46. 29 Fukuzawa Ichirō, “Issuikai,” Atorie 14, no. 8 (August 1937): 56. 30 Shinobu Ikeda, “The Allure of a ‘Woman in Chinese Dress’: Representation of the Other in Imperial Japan,”

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31 32

33

34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41

in Performing “Nation,” ed. Croissant et al., 347–81. Kojima’s text quoted by Ikeda here was originally published in Kojima Kikuo, “Nikakai hyō (3),” Asahi shinbun, September 10, 1934. Hirayama, “Restoration of Realism,” 206. For the philosophical underpinnings of Kojima Kikuo’s art criticism, see Hirayama, “Restoration of Realism,” and “‘Modernité in Art’: Kojima Kikuo’s Critique of Contemporary Japanese Painting, 1931–1940,” in Inexorable Modernity: Japan’s Grappling With Modernity in the Arts, ed. Hiroshi Nara (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 49–68. Kojima Kikuo, “Bijutsu kinjō,” Atorie 15, no. 15 (November 1938): 6. As stated in the previous chapter, Kojima expressed high expectations for war painting at a very early stage in the war, and seemed to anticipate that some equivalent to grand-scale European history paintings would be created in Japan. After seeing the Holy War Art Exhibition in 1939 (and other similar exhibitions), however, he apparently was disappointed, commenting that he found “no real war painting” contained therein. Kojima Kikuo, “Seisen Bijutsuten hyō (3) sōhyō kesshutsuseru “Totsugekiro” shussei shōigunjin ni kasaku ooshi,” Asahi shinbun, July 13, 1939. Kojima Kikuo, “Shinbunten yōga hyō (2),” Asahi shinbun, October 27, 1937. Kojima Kikuo, “Kessaku ‘aruhi no Fukai Eigo,’” Mizue, no. 396 (February 1938): 129. Ikeda, “The Allure of a ‘Woman in Chinese Dress,’” 374. The original article by Kojima was published as Kojima Kikuo, “Nikakai hyō (3),” Asahi shinbun, September 10, 1934. Kojima Kikuo, “Nikakai o miru (3),” Asahi shinbun, September 11, 1930; Kojima, “Nikakai hyō (3)”; Kojima, “Kessaku ‘aruhi no Fukai Eigo.’” Sawa Hajime, “Yasui Sōtarōshi no kyōteki ichi,” Mizue, no. 383 (January 1937): 76. For the Independent Art Association and its “Japanist” painting, see Mikiko Hirayama, “From Art without Borders to Art for the Nation: Japanist Painting by Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai during the 1930s,” Monumenta Nipponica 65, no. 2 (2010): 357–95. Also, the following issue of Atorie was devoted entirely to a discussion of the “Japanization of yōga”: “Yōgadan ni hataraku ‘Nihon’ teki keikō no kentō,” Atorie 12, no. 3 (March 1935). For the inclination to the “East” seen in a number of painters associated with the Shirakaba from the mid 1920s, see Inaga, Kaiga no rinkai, 259–314. Araki Sueo, “Yasui Sōtarō jinbutsu ron,” Mizue, no. 383 (January 1937): 68–70. “Yasui Sōtarō shōzōgashū,” Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1940); Fujimoto Shōzō, ed., Yasui Sōtarō shōzōga gashū (Tokyo: Zōkei Geijutsusha, 1942).

42 “Yasui Sōtarō shōzōgashū.” 43 Umehara’s works have been critically examined from postcolonial and feminist perspectives in the last decade. For example, see Nishihara Daisuke, “Kindai Nihonkaiga no Ajia hyōshō,” Nihon kenkyū/Bulletin of International Research Center for Japanese Studies 26 (December 2001): 185–220; Ikeda Shinobu, “Chūgokufuku no josei hyōshō: Senjika ni okeru teikoku dansei chishikijin no aidentiti kōchiku o megutte,” in Sensō to hyōshō/Bijutsu 20-seiki igo, ed. Nagata, 103–17; Tan’o and Kawata, Imēji no naka no sensō, 35–46; Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 117–24; and Toyotashi Bijutsukan, ed., Kindai no higashi Ajia imēji. 44 Imaizumi, “Umehara Ryūzaburō to Yasui Sōtarō,” 5–6. Imaizumi did admit that the actual personalities of the two artists were not so clear-cut as to fit into these dichotomized stereotypes. He commented that, in terms of personality, Umehara was bright and cheerful, and thus might also be described as “Apollonian.” 45 Yanagi Ryō, “Umehara Ryūzaburō to Yasui Sōtarō,” Kikan bijutsu 2, no. 1 (May 1943): 7–18. 46 Nishihara, “Kindai Nihonkaiga no Ajia hyōshō,” 185–220. 47 Ibid., 197. 48 For a detailed and critical reading of the constructed myth of the “rediscovery” of Katsura in 1930s Japan, see Inoue Shōichi, Tsukurareta Katsura Rikyū shinwa (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1986). Katsura Imperial Villa is also known in English as Katsura Detached Palace. 49 Jonathan M. Reynolds, “Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction of Japanese Tradition,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 316–41. 50 Ikeda, “Chūgokufuku no josei hyōshō,” 103–17. 51 Ibid., 109. 52 Kojima Kikuo, “Geijutsu no tōsei,” Asahi shinbun, January 17, 1941. 53 In her study on Shiga Naoya, Katō Mieko speculates that the members of the Three Year Society understood the inevitability of Japan’s defeat by ten months (at latest) before Japan’s unconditional surrender. Katō Mieko, “Shiga Naoya ‘Haiiro no tsuki’ no poritikusu,” Seijō kokubungaku, no. 18 (March 2002): 109. 54 Takeda Tomoki, “Gaimushō to chishikijin 1944–1945 (nikan): ‘Japonikasu’ kōsaku to ‘Sannenkai,’” Tōyō kenkyū, no. 187 (January 2013): 26. 55 These intellectuals are also known collectively as Taishō kyōyōha, or intellectuals of Taishō culturalism, a term that refers to the intellectual trends, ethos, or predilections shared by the elite young men who studied at the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University under the tutelage of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). They often interacted with the Shirakaba intellectuals and shared similar aesthetic tastes and preferences; Kojima

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57 58 59 60 61 62

63

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65 66 67 68

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Kikuo was an integral member of both groups. These two groups of intellectuals, later recognized collectively as the “Old Liberalists,” held significant power as conservatives in the 1940s and 50s. See also Chapter Five. Ichihara Toyota, “Sōshun no Yugawara: Yasui Sōtarōshi hōmon,” Geijutsu shinchō 1, no. 6 (June 1950): 36. The translation is quoted from the following article, with modifications by the author: Kaizuka, “Yasui Sōtarō no shōzōga/Portraits by Yasui Sotaro,” in Portraits by Yasui Sotaro, ed. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Institution, 147. Satō, “Shirakabaha.” Ibid., 180–82. Yasui Sōtarō, “Watashi no egaita shōzōga,” Bungei shunjū 29, no. 5 (April 1951): 21. Yokoyama Taikan, “Watashi no shōzōga,” Kokoro 9, no. 3 (March 1956): 26. Abe Yoshishige, “Omoide,” Mizue, no. 607 (February 1956): 93. Fukai Eigo, “E ni kakareta hanashi,” Miyako shinbun, May 1, 1938; Tokugawa Kuniyuki, “Geidō no kibishisa,” Mainichi shinbun, April 10, 1956. For further details on the reform of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, see Nihon Bijutsu-in Hyakunenshi Hensanshitsu, ed., Nihon Bijutsu-in hyakunenshi dai 7 kan (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu-in, 1998), 861–74; and Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku Hyakunenshi Kankō Iinkai, ed., Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku hyakunenshi dai 3 kan (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1997), 959–84. Hiragushi, who worked to preserve traditional techniques of Japanese wood-carving, was the leading sculptor in the reorganized Japan Art Institute led by Yokoyama. “Kyōju ni zaiya jitsuryokuha: Tatakau bikō jinyō o isshin,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 26, 1944. Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku Hyakunenshi Kankō Iinkai, ed., Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku hyakunenshi dai 3 kan, 971. Hayashi, Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku, 435. Yasui and Umehara both resigned as jurors for the Japan Arts Exhibition in 1948 due to disagreement over the management of the exhibition. For the post-1945 controversies over the management of the Japan Arts Exhibition, see Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Nittenshi 16: Nittenhen 1 (Tokyo: Nitten, 1985). Kojima Kikuo, “Bunten kōsei (jō),” in Nittenshi 16: Nittenhen 1, ed. Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, 487. Originally published in Tokyo shinbun, October 21, 1945.

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4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Chapter 4 Epigraph. Yanagi Sōetsu, “Batsu,” in Shikiba Ryūzaburō, Nishōtei kitan (Tokyo: Shōrinsha, 1939), 135. 1

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A museum called Mugonkan (Voiceless Museum) in Nagano Prefecture is devoted to works by art students

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who died in the war (discussed further in Chapter Five). A 2003 exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, featuring Surrealism, included a number of works by young artists, some of whom had died in the war. Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Chiheisen no yume: Shōwa 10 nendai no gensō kaiga (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2003). Kawata Akihisa, “‘Seinen bijutsuka’ to akogare no ‘kodai,’” in Kurasshikku modan:1930 nendai Nihon no geijutsu, ed. Omuka Toshiharu and Kawata Akihisa (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2004), 13. Concerning Yamashita Kiyoshi’s life and career, reference is made primarily to the following books and studies: Yamashita Kiyoshi, Yamashita Kiyoshi hōrō nikki, ed. Shikiba Ryūzaburō and Watanabe Minoru (Tokyo: Gendaisha, 1956); Yamashita Kiyoshi, Hadaka no taishō hōrōki, vols. 1–4 (Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1984); Yamashita Hiroshi, Kazoku ga kataru Yamashita Kiyoshi (Tokyo: Namiki Shobō, 2000); Mizutani Takashi, Shukumei no gatenshitachi: Yamashita Kiyoshi, Numa Yūichi, hoka (Tokyo: Bigaku Shuppan, 2008); and Hattori Tadashi and Fujihara Sadao, Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu: “Hadaka no taishō” no shinwa o koete (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014). Mizutani, Shukumei no gatenshitachi, 47. For details about Togawa Yukio’s relationship with the Yawata Institute, as well as his management of the exhibitions, see Togawa Yukio, Tokushu jidō (Tokyo: Meguro Shoten, 1940); and Mizutani, Shukumei no gatenshitachi, 26–30, 45–60. Mizutani, Shukumei no gatenshitachi, 73. While it was mainly after the war that Yamashita became nationally famous with the nickname “the Japanese van Gogh,” this nickname was already used for him in the prewar period. Ihara Usaburō et al., “‘Tokui jidō no sakuhin’ zadankai,” Mizue, no. 423 (February 1940): 257–64. Yasui Sōtarō, “Tokui jidō no sakuhin o sentei shite,” Mizue rinjizōkan, no. 420 (December 1939): 4. Mizutani, Shukumei no gatenshitachi, 61. Ihara et al., “‘Tokui jidō no sakuhin’ zadankai,” 258. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 262. The impact of Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1889) in Japan laid the groundwork for the popularity of van Gogh and other artists. For the reception of Lombroso in Japan, see Okada Atsushi, “‘Tensai to kyōjin wa kamihitoe’ Ronburōzo to Nihon,” in Mimēshisu o koete (Tokyo: Keisō Shoten, 2000), 1–40. In his detailed study of the reception of van Gogh in Japan, Kinoshita Nagahiro points out that van Gogh’s name appeared for the first time in Japanese printed media in 1910. The novelist Mori Ōgai

notes to pages 97–103

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(1862–1922), who had recently returned from Germany, introduced several European artists in his serialized articles in the literary journal Subaru (Sterope) between 1910 and 1913. Kinoshita Nagahiro, Shisōshi toshite no Gohho: Fukusei juyō to sōzōryoku (Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1992), 37–38. Ibid., 65–66. Serizawa Kazuya, Kyōki to hanzai: Naze Nihon wa sekaiichi no seishinbyō kokka ni natta no ka (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), 45–53. Ibid., 85–89. Shikiba Ryūzaburō, Fan Gohho no shōgai to seishinbyō jō ge (Tokyo: Jurakusha, 1932). Kinoshita, Shisōshi toshite no Gohho, 152–69. Kinoshita Nagahiro, “Shikiba Ryūzaburō bi ni miserareta ika,” Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002): 29–31. Ōuchi Kaoru, “Nihon ni okeru 1920–1930 nendai no H. Purintsuhorun: ‘Seishinbyōsha no geijutsusei’ no juyō ni tsuite no ichikōsatsu,” Jinbun shakaikagaku kenkyū kaiteiban, no. 16 (March 2003): 66–79. In the post-1945 period, Shikiba became the foremost mentor/promoter of Yamashita (as discussed in Chapter Five of the present volume). Shikiba Ryūzaburō, “Nishōtei kitan,” Chūōkōron, no. 601 (November 1937): 444–63. Shikiba Ryūzaburō, Nishōtei kitan (Tokyo: Shōrinsha, 1939). The English title given in the volume is The Quaint House of Nishōtei, but The Strange Tale of Nishōtei would be a more faithful translation of the Japanese title. The Strange Tale of Nishōtei may also be read as part of a significant contemporary cultural trend known as ero guro nansensu (the erotic, grotesque, and non-sense), which celebrated hedonism, “bizarre-ness,” and “deviancy” in various cultural forms. The following study indicates the intimate and complicated link between the rise of this cultural trend and fascism in Japan: Jim Reichert, “Disciplining the Erotic-Grotesque in Edogawa Ranpo’s Demon of the Lonely Isle,” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 355–80. Shikiba, Nishōtei kitan, 70. Ibid., 74–75. Yanagi, “Batsu,” 135. Ōuchi Kaoru, “Shikiba Ryūzaburō to ‘byōteki kaiga’ no shūsoku ni tsuite no ichikōsatsu: 1930 nendai matsu no ‘zen’eisei’ kaihi toiu mondai,” Karisuta 17 (2010): 52–82. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 62–69. In the care of mentally disabled children, the Takinogawa Institute (Takinogawa Gakuen) played a pioneering role. Established in 1896 and still in operation, it was the first social welfare institute that specialized in

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children with intellectual disabilities and that was funded through private donations. It was only in 1979 that the education of children with intellectual disorders was legally guaranteed in Japan. On the Takinogawa Institute, see Kawakami Teruaki, “Sōseiki ni okeru shōgaiji no fukushi to kyōiku: Ishii Fudeko no kōseki kara manabu mono,” Nagoya Joshi Daigaku kiyō 54 (2008): 43–44. For the detailed processes through which eugenics was popularized in Japan, see Jennifer Robertson, “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japan,” History and Anthropology 13, no. 3 (2002): 191–216; and Robertson, “Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous Repair,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 430–48. Several intra-governmental conflicts arose over the foundation of the Welfare Ministry, which was not necessarily established as the military had initially planned. For details as well as the most comprehensive study of the Welfare Ministry and eugenics in wartime Japan, see Fujino Yutaka, Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō (Tokyo: Kamogawa Shuppan, 1998). Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 50. The sterilization of lepers had already been conducted without any legal provision since 1915. Fujino, Kyōsei sareta kenkō, 25–26. Ibid., 26. Nagai Junko, “Sensō to yūsei no jidai ni okeru seishinbyōsha,” in Jidai ga tsukuru “kyōki,” ed. Serizawa Kazuya (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 2007), 136. Ōuchi Kaoru, “Showa 10 nendai ‘tokui jidō sakuhinten’ to dōjidai no ‘nōryoku’ gensetsu shiron,” Jinbun shakaika kenkyū, no. 21 (September 2010): 62–74. In the postwar period, Togawa himself explained the motivation behind the exhibitions as follows: “Accompanied with the worsening of the war, the government office began treating the education of mentally disabled children as a nuisance. I was called by the Chiba Prefectural Office and required to terminate such make-work as the education of mentally deficient children as soon as possible. Yet I could not bear to ruin the Institute, which had been developed through hard work. Then I came up with the idea to let the children work in some way and show how much even the mentally disabled could work for the bureau and for society.” Togawa Yukio, “‘Hadaka no taishō’ o naze warau!: Yamashita Kiyoshi to gendai no ‘chinō shisū,’” Shūkan yomiuri 17, no. 5 (November 23, 1958): 5. Kubodera Yasuhisa, “Enji sakuhinshū no shuppan ni atarite,” Mizue, no. 420 (November 1939): 3. Concerning Kubodera’s ideas about eugenics, see Hirata Katsumasa, “Senzen Nihon ni okeru yūseigaku

notes to pages 103–113

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58 Asano Tōru, “Matsumoto Shunsuke ichimen: ‘Ikiteiru gaka’ o megutte,” in Matsumoto Shunsuke ten, ed. Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan (Tokyo: Tokyo Shinbun, 1986), 31–33. 59 Sunouchi Tōru, “Matsumoto Shunsuke no fukei (3),” in Kimagure bijutsukan (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1988), 242. Despite his admiring statement, Sunouchi personally disliked these portraits, finding Matsumoto’s stance in them too theatrical and narcissistic. 60 Murai Hiroya, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (jō): Matsumoto Shunsuke ‘Gaka no zō,’ ‘Tateru zō,’ ‘Gonin’ ‘Sannin’ no kaidoku,” Bijutsu kenkyū, no. 383 (August 2004): 34–49; Murai, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (ge): Matsumoto Shunsuke ‘Gaka no zō,’ ‘Tateru zō,’ ‘Gonin’ ‘Sannin’ no kaidoku,” Bijutsu kenkyū, no. 384 (November 2004): 74–99. 61 Matsumoto, “Kuroi hana,” 234. 62 Matsumoto, “Omoide no Ishida kun,” in Ningen fūkei, 219–29. While this essay was originally published in Ishida Shin’ichi tsuitōshi (Commemorative Issue of Ishida Shin’ichi) in 1940, according to Murai, the essay itself was completed on November 15, 1939. Murai, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (jō),” 48n13. 63 As Murai himself mentions, certain scholars have already pointed out Matsumoto’s rather obsessive adherence to reason and intelligence, as well as his unusually strong reaction to Yamashita, without fully exploring the implications of these factors. Kozawa Setsuko, for instance, argues that Matsumoto greatly emphasized his writings as the key tool for communicating with and understanding the world in order to compensate for his deafness, as well as to offer resistance during a time when freedom of speech was increasingly restricted. Yet at the same time, Kozawa recognizes that Matsumoto’s emphasis on “intelligence” sometimes “appeared even fastidious and rather narrow minded,” pointing to his attack on Yamashita’s works. Kozawa, Avangyarudo no sensō taiken, 185n28. 64 Akiyama et al., “Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu,” 132–33. 65 Matsumoto, “Ikiteiru gaka,” 479–80. 66 Matsumoto, “Geijutsu no shinkō,” in Ningei fūkei, 56. Originally published in Seimei no geijutsu 2, no. 1 (January 1934). 67 Ibid., 58. 68 Ibid., 59. 69 For Ikebukuro Montparnasse, see Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Ikebukuro Monparunasu (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 2011); and Usami Shō, Ikebukuro Monparunasu (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1990). 70 Matsumoto, “Tamiji,” in Ningen fūkei, 108–9. Originally published in Seimei no geijutsu, nos. 7, 8, 10–13 (July, August, October–December, 1935).

no chiteki shōgaisha fukushi bunya eno eikyō ni kansuru rekishiteki kenkyū,” Nagasaki Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu kiyō, no. 60 (March 2001): 37–44. E. Wernert and Uemura Takachiyo, trans., “Nachisu bijutsu no zenbō,” Atorie 14, no. 10 (October 1937): 1–23. Dai Doitsukoku tenrankai mokuroku (Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1938). These publications include “Myunhen ni hirakareta daraku bijutsu tenrankai,” Atorie 15, no. 6 (May 1938); Tominaga Sōichi, “Nachisu Doitsu no bijutsu kikō,” Mizue, no. 436 (March 1941): 262–66; Kamon Yasuo, Nachisu no bijutsu kikō (Tokyo: Arusu, 1941); and Kozuka Shin’ichirō, “Nachisu bunka seisaku no ittan,” Atorie 16, no. 13 (December 1939): 4–6. Yanagi Sōetsu, “Shintaisei to kōgeibi no mondai,” Gekkan mingei 2, no. 10 (October 1940): 39. Concerning the concept of “health” in relation to the folk craft movement in the 1930s and early 40s, see Nagata Ken’ichi, “‘Shin Nihonbi’ no sōsei: Senjika Nihon ni okeru mingei undō,” Hihyō kūkan, no. 19 (October 1998): 190–203; and Kim Brandt, “Five Renovating Greater East Asia,” in Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 173–222. Yanagi, “Shintaisei to kōgeibi no mondai,” 39. “Gadanjin sae odoroku geijutsumi yutaka na sakuhin,” Asahi shinbun, December 16, 1939. Ihara et al., “‘Tokui jidō no sakuhin’ zadankai,” 61. Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 56–68. Ibid., 65. Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Avangyarudo no shippo,” Kyūshitsu, no. 2 (February 1940): 13. Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Kuroi hana,” in Ningen fūkei (Tokyo: Chūōkōron Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1982), 231–32. Originally published in Sangei (December 1940). For a detailed analysis of Zakkichō, see Kozawa, Avangyarudo no sensō taiken, 115–42. Sasaki Kazushige, “‘Jinbutsu o shutoseru kōsōzu’ no seiritsu: Matsumoto Shunsuke to Georugu Gurossu,” Iwate Kenritsu Hakubutsukan kenkyū hōkoku 1 (1983): 102–13. Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Ikiteiru gaka,” Mizue, no. 437 (April 1941): 477–80. Akiyama Kunio et al., “Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu, gaka wa nani o subeki ka?,” Mizue, no. 434 (January 1941): 129–39. For Suzuki Kurazō’s life and ideological background, see Satō Takumi, Genron tōsei: Jōhōkan Suzuki Kurazō to kyōiku no kokubō kokka (Tokyo: Chūōkōron Shinsha, 2004).

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71 Matsumoto, “Tegami (2),” in Ningen fūkei, 194. Originally published in Zakkichō 2, no. 10 (November 1937). 72 Ibid., 192. 73 Matsumoto, “Konforumizumu,” in Ningen fūkei, 202. Originally published in Zakkichō 2, no. 11 (December 1937). The translation is taken from Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 47, with some modifications. 74 Nakamura Eri points out that, after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, interest in military psychology and combat neurosis increased. While the need for education and training based on “scientific” methods was addressed, an immovable or resolute mind and calmness were highly valued as the given nature of men, in contrast to “hysteria,” which was condemned as “effeminate” and “immature.” Nakamura Eri, “Nihon Rikugun ni okeru danseisei no kōchiku: Dansei no ‘kyōfushin’ o meguru kaishaku o jiku ni,” in Jendā to shakai: Danseishi, guntai, sekushuariti, ed. Kimoto Kimiko and Kidō Yoshiyuki (Tokyo: Junpōsha, 2010), 170–90. 75 Matsumoto Teiko, “Gazō no naka no watashitachi: Matsumoto Shunsuke to ayunda hibi,” Fujin no tomo 80, no. 6 (June 1986): 61. 76 Ibid., 61–62. 77 Matsumoto Shunsuke, “‘Nikki’ kara,” in Ningen fūkei, shinsō zōho edition (Tokyo: Chūōkōron Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1990), 329. 78 Kawata, “‘Seinen bijutsuka’ to akogare no ‘kodai,’” 24. 79 Nanbata Tatsuoki, “Kodai geijutsu eno akogare,” Jiyū bijutsu, no. 1 (October 1939): 23. 80 For details on Nanbata Tatsuoki’s rendering of the “classics” and Greece, see Kobayashi Shunsuke, “Nanbata Tatsuoki ‘Girisha rensaku’ ni tsuite: ‘Akuroporisu no sora’ o chūshin ni,” Rikkyō Kōtōgakkō hen kenkyū kiyō 25 (1994): 25–67; and Kobayashi, “Nanbata Tatsuoki ‘Girisha rensaku’ to yusai no koten gihō,” Gendai geijutsu kenkyū 1 (1996): 92–108. 81 The question has been raised as to whether this child is Matsumoto’s son Kan, since the child looks too old (Kan would have been three years old at the time) and also seems to be a girl. 82 Mizusawa Tsutomu, “‘Tateru’ koto no imi: ‘Tateru zō,’” in Nihon no kindai bijutsu: Fuan to sensō no jidai (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1992), 129–40. 83 Murai, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (ge),” 79. 84 Ibid., 81. 85 Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Tōyōteki dekiwaku,” Zakkichō, no. 7 (August 1937): 89. 86 Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Kaiga chitsujo,” Zakkichō, no. 10 (November 1937): 85. 87 As the war progressed, Matsumoto advocated the possibility of merging the two cultures in a more nationalistic tone. Perhaps inspired in part by the nationalistic

discourse of the time, in his 1942 article Matsumoto found a shared spirit in ancient Greek culture and the Japanese “foundation of creativity” as seen in such ancient monuments as Ise Shrine, the temple Hōryūji, Katsura Detached Palace, and the poetry collection Man’yōshū, and declared that “we are the only folk who possess the Greek spirit in East Asia.” Matsumoto Shunsuke, “E ni kanshite no zatsubun,” Shin Iwate Nippō, October 17, 1942. 88 Asō Saburō, “Matsumoto Shunsuke kaiko,” in Matsumoto Shunsuke gashū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963), 116. 89 Winther-Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 168–70; Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 43–51. 90 Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment, 49–51. 91 Of the two self-portraits, only Three was displayed in the Nika Society’s annual art exhibition due to the society’s stipulation at the time that each artist could submit only one large-scale work. Murai, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (ge),” 88–89. 92 Although less substantial than Murai’s, the following study also touches upon Three and Five in the investigation of Matsumoto’s series of self-portraits: Sakai Tetsuo, “Matsumoto Shunsuke no ‘Jigazō’ ni tsuite: ‘Gaka no zō’ o chūshin ni,” Miyagiken Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 6 (1991): 1–15. 93 It may be argued that the two girls in Five are possibly his wife at different stages of growth, corresponding to Matsumoto’s alter egos in Three. These pictures may then be read as the image of a couple at three stages of their lives, surrounding Matsumoto and his son. 94 The Nikorai-dō, completed in Tokyo in 1891, often appeared in Matsumoto’s cityscapes, and was a common subject of his paintings both during and after the Asia-Pacific War. The following study provides an indepth consideration of several possible meanings that Matsumoto would have given to the Nikorai-dō (or to church buildings in general): Donald F. McCallum, “Ecclesiastical Architecture in the Painting of Matsumoto Shunsuke,” Humanities: Christianity and Culture, no. 14 (February 1980): 119–44. 95 Sakai, “Matsumoto Shunsuke no ‘Jigazō’ ni tsuite,” 8. 96 Matsumoto Shunsuke, “91 Ushi,” in Matsumoto Shunsuke ten, ed. Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan (Tokyo: Tokyo Shinbun, 1986), 117. “9–12” presumably refers to one of Matsumoto’s paintings. 97 Kawata Akihisa, “Kindai Nihon ‘senji zuzō’ kaishaku: ‘Kazoku’ no baai,” Ajia bunka kenkyū, Bessatsu 14 (2005): 9–11. 98 Murai, “Jiko imēji no benshōhō (ge),” 87. 99 See Chapter Two in the present volume. 100 Matsumoto, “Avangyarudo no shippo,” 13. 101 Yamashita, Yamashita Kiyoshi hōrō nikki, 39.

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102 “Gadanjin sae odoroku geijutsumi yutaka na sakuhin.” 103 Ihara et al., “‘Tokui jidō no sakuhin’ zadankai,” 58. 10 Chapter 5 11

Epigraph. Oda Tatsurō, “‘Genbaku no zu’ to sono shūhen: Maruki Iri Toshiko, Tsuruoka Masao, Okamoto Tarō no baai,” Bijutsu techō, no. 145 (August 1958): 140. 1 2

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Miyata Shigeo, “Bijutsuka no sessō,” Asahi shinbun, October 14, 1945. Tsuruta Gorō, “Gaka no tachiba” Asahi shinbun, October 25, 1945.; Fujita Tsuguharu, “Gaka no ryōshin,” Asahi shinbun, October 25, 1945. “Nihon Bijutsukai: Sengen, kōryō, kiyaku,” in Sengo shiryō bunka, ed. Minami Hiroshi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1973), 200. “‘Sensō sekinin’ ni kansuru sōritsu sōkai saitakuketsu,” in Sengo shiryō bunka, ed. Minami Hiroshi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1973), 201–2. The following individuals and associations were on the list: Inoue Shirō, Nakamura Tsuneo, Suzuki Kurazō, Yamauchi Ichirō, Sumi Kiyoshi, Tōyama Kō, Yokoyama Taikan, Kodama Kibō, Fujita Tsuguharu, Nakamura Ken’ichi, Tsuruta Gōrō, Hasegawa Haruko, Nakamura Naondo, and Kawabata Rūshi. “‘Sensō sekinin’ ni kansuru sōritsu sōkai saitakuketsu,” 201–2. For more details on the postwar debate over artists’ political responsibility, see Nakamura Giichi, “Bijutsushi no kūhaku to anshō: Sensōga ronsō,” in Zoku Nihon kindai bijutsu ronsōshi (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1982), 241–71. One hundred and fifty-five paintings were collected, but two of them were not produced during the Fifteen-Year War. Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed., Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan shozōhin mokuroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1992), 141. Recently the process through which the works were confiscated has been researched widely and is becoming known. See the sources listed in note 11 of Chapter One. Carol Gluck, “The Past in Present,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 64–95. For more recent discussions of Japan’s memory politics, with specific reference to the notion of Japan’s “long postwar,” see Harry Harootunian, “Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2000): 715–39; Marilyn Ivy, “Trauma’s Two Times: Japanese Wars and Postwars,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 165–88; Tsuboi Hideto and Fujiki Hideaki, eds., Imēji toshite no sengo (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2010); and Michael Lucken, Anne Bayard-Sakai, and Emmanuel Lozerand,

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eds., Japan’s Postwar (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). Umehara Ryūzaburō Yasui Sōtarō jisenten shuppin mokuroku (Tokyo: Matsuzakaya, 1949). Imaizumi Atsuo, “Taishōteki na gafū,” Fujin asahi, no. 43 (August 1949): 14. Takabayashi Ken, “Umehara Ryūzaburō,” Bijutsu techō, no. 39 (February 1951): 15. “Dōshinkai hossoku,” Asahi shinbun, October 6, 1945. For details about post-1945 arts administration and the Old Liberalists’ involvement in it, see Park Sohyun, “Senjō” toshite no bijutsukan: Nihon no kindai bijutsukan setsuritu undō: Ronsōshi (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2012). Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002), 204. “Henshū kōki,” Zauhō, no. 1 (April 1946). Umehara Ryūzaburō, “Shigoto shugi: Waga seikatsu shinjō,” Chūōkōron 65, no. 12 (December 1951): 193. The postwar reception of Umehara’s wartime practices must be examined separately. His China period and works continued to be appreciated, often with a sense of nostalgia, in the postwar years. This appreciation would have been closely linked to the fact that “Asia” was largely eliminated from the American-led postwar treatment of Japan, and to the increasing presence of Communist China in the world politics of the Cold War. For prewar studies on modern art, see Tanaka Atsushi, “‘Kindai Nihon bijutsu’ shi no seiritsu o kangaeru tame no nōto: ‘Meisaku’ toiu hyōka to ‘ishoku’ toiu kotoba,” in Nihon ni okeru bijutsushigaku no seiritsu to tenkai (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2001), 335–50; Meiji Bijutsukai, ed., “Tokushū bijutsu hihyōka retsuden,” Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002); and Aoki Shigeru, Shochi, senjika no bijutsusho o yomu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2006). For the postwar democratization of art museums and the government’s use of art works for diplomatic purposes, see Noriko Aso, “Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7–38. Kamon Yasuo, “Kaigaiten sōseiki no ‘chinretsuya’ funtōki,” Geijutsu shinchō 37, no. 2 (February 1986): 42. Sanami Tōru, “Taisei meigaten no igi,” Mizue, no. 500 (May 1947): 26, 27. Hariu Ichirō, “Sengo kaigai bijutsuten hanjōki,” Geijutsu shinchō 37, no. 2 (February 1986): 44. The following article discusses how France became the source of “democratic nationalism,” replacing the “Volkisch nationalism” inspired by Germany in postwar Japan: Kevin M. Doak, “The Uses of France and Democratic Nationalism in Postwar Japan,” in

notes to pages 133–136

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Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, ed. Doug Slaymaker (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 127–47. Park, “Senjō” toshite no bijutsukan, 370; “Museum History,” The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, http://www.moma.pref.kanagawa.jp/en/ museum/index.html (last accessed July 19, 2012). The National Museum of Modern Art building renovated by Maekawa was used until 1969. For critical investigations of the history of modern museums in Japan, see Park, “Senjō” toshite no bijutsukan, 355–412; Mizusawa Tsutomu, “Bijutsukan no jōken: Sengo Nihon no ‘kindai bijutsukan’ no shuppatsu kara,” in Bijutsu hihyō to sengo bijutsu, ed. Bijutsu Hihyōka Renmei (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2007), 281–98; and Laura Hein, “Reckoning with War in the Museum: Hijikata Teiichi at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art,” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, ed. Ikeda et al., 353–65. For example, the following studies on modern art, both Japanese and European, were published from the war’s end through the 1950s: Yanagi Ryō, Kindai kaigashi (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1949); Kindai Nihon bijutsu zenshū, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Tōto Bunka Kōeki, 1953–54); Umehara Ryūzaburō, ed., Gendai sekai bijutsu zenshū, vol. 11, Nihon yōgahen, and vol. 12, Nihongahen (Tokyo: Zauhō Kankōkai, 1954); Zauhō Kankōkai, ed., Gendai Nihon bijutsu zenshū, 10 vols. (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1955); Yashiro Yukio, Kindai gakagun (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1955); Imaizumi Atsuo and Ishikawa Kōichi, eds., Kindai yōga no ayumi: Seiyō to Nihon (Tokyo: Tōto Bunka Shuppan, 1955); and Imaizumi Atsuo, Gendai gakaron (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1958). Imaizumi and Ishikawa, eds., Kindai yōga no ayumi, 63–64. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 72. Yanagi Ryō, “Yasui Sōtarōshi no geijutsu: Shōchōteki na kutō no shōgai,” Tokyo shinbun, December 15, 1955. The French critic Michel Tapié (1909–1987) greatly affected the reception of Art Informel in Japan and formulated an alliance with Japanese artists working in the style with a sense of rivalry toward Abstract Expressionism. See Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Reiko Tomii, “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 12, no. 3 (2004): 611–41. “Nihon no Gohho wa ima izuko?,” Asahi shinbun, January 6, 1954. The processes by which Togawa Yukio distanced himself from Yamashita, and Shikiba instead

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came to play the role of Yamashita’s spokesman, are detailed in Hattori and Fujihara, Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu. “Kagoshima ni ita Yamashita kun,” Asahi shinbun, January 11, 1954. Major publications on Yamashita issued in the mid1950s include Shikiba Ryūzaburō, ed., Yamashita Kiyoshi gashū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1955); Yamashita, Yamashita Kiyoshi hōrō nikki; Shikiba, Yamashita Kiyoshi no hito to sakuhin (Tokyo: Kurihara Shobō, 1956); Shikiba, ed., Yamashita Kiyoshi sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Kurihara Shobō, 1956); and Yamashita, Hadaka no ōsama: Yamashita Kiyoshi no e to nikki, ed. Shikiba (Tokyo: Gendaisha, 1956). Shikiba Ryūzaburō, “Yamashita Kiyoshi no hito to sakuhin,” in Hōrō no tokui gaka Yamashita Kiyoshi sakuhinten (Tokyo: Daimaru, 1956), 8. Shikiba Ryūzaburō, afterword to Yamashita, Hadaka no ōsama, 141. Unlike other Japanese words meaning “the unclothed body,” hadaka carried few sexual connotations. Nikutai (flesh body), in particular, was the key theme of Japanese art, culture, and especially literature in the immediate postwar years. For a discussion of socalled nikutai bungaku (literature of the flesh) and the reclamation by male authors and artists of their sexuality and control over their own bodies after the war, see Douglas Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Yanagi Sōetsu, the leader of the folk craft movement, backed up Shikiba’s endorsement of Yamashita’s art through the framework of Buddhism. Yanagi insisted that Yamashita’s art, like the work of anonymous craftspeople, was also made free from ego or any secular desire for success. While Yanagi did not regard Yamashita as an artistic genius or extraordinary person, he explained that the artist maintained the innate goodness of human beings, according to the Buddhist concept. As Yanagi argued, such a pure state of mind was the source of Yamashita’s art, which he praised as embodying “the beauty of selflessness.” Yanagi Sōetsu, “Kiyoshi kun no e no seishitsu,” in Yamashita Kiyoshi gashū, ed. Shikiba, 28. For Yanagi’s theory on folk crafts, see Yūko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Imaizumi Atsuo, Hariu Ichirō, and Funado Kō, “1956 nendo bijutsukai no mondai o megutte,” Bijutsu techō zōkan bijutsu nenkan (December 1956): 4–11. Ara Masahito, “Yamashita Kiyoshi yo doko e yuku,” Geijutsu shinchō 9, no. 5 (May 1958): 270–74. Hattori and Fujihara, Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu, 269–93.

notes to pages 137–144

42 For Dubuffet and the concept of art brut, see Klaus Ottmann and Dorothy Kosinski, eds., Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). 43 Hattori and Fujihara, Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu, 283–4. 44 Naruse Mikio (1905–1969) was appointed to direct the film at first, but for unknown reasons was replaced by Horikawa Hiromichi. 45 Hattori and Fujihara, Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu, 328. 46 Tora-san, the protagonist of the extremely popular film series Otoko wa tsurai yo (It’s Tough Being a Man), for example, was a middle-aged, unmarried, uneducated drifter who was stigmatized by the general public because of his “extraordinary lifestyle.” But he could always return to the heartwarming downtown district of Shibamata, where his cozy parental house and welcoming neighborhood awaited him. In addition, Torasan was continuously involved in romantic relationships (although never fulfilled) with young, beautiful heroines who were attracted to his purity and alternative form of masculinity. See Yoko Tokuhiro, Marriage in Contemporary Japan (New York: Routledge, 2010), 62. 47 Kobayashi Keiju recalled the difficulty of performing the role of Yamashita because “his face has no expression.” “Kobayashi Keiju no Yamashita gahaku,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 18, 1958. 48 Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” 55–66. 49 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 550–51. 50 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 105. 51 According to James L. Cherney, the asexualization or de-eroticization of the disabled body is ubiquitous in our “ableist culture” as an oppressive means employed by ableists to marginalize and isolate the disabled from the rest of society as sexual others. James L. Cherney, “Sexy Cyborgs: Disability and Erotic Politics in Cronenberg’s Crash,” in Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 165–85. 52 At the time, Yanagi and his associates in the folk craft movement promoted the print artist Munakata Shikō (1903–1975) in a very similar fashion. While both Munakata and Yamashita were known for works that were said to be made free from ego and selfishness, Munakata achieved a significant degree of success in international art venues, winning the grand-prix at the Venice Bienniale in 1956 and shocking Japanese artists and critics. Through his international reputation, Munakata confirmed his position within the history of modern Japanese art. Further investigation and

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comparison of Munakata and Yamashita would reveal new insights into the politics of exclusion in the 1950s art world. For Munakata’s success in New York in the 1950s, see Allen Hockley, “The Zenning of Munakata Shikō,” Impressions 26 (2004): 76–87. For a concise summary of the historiography of “war art,” see Nagashima Keiya, “‘Sensō bijutsu’ kenkyū shōshi,” in Shōwa no bijutsu 1945 nen made: “Mokuteki bijutsu” no kiseki, ed. Niigata Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan (Nagaoka: Niigata Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2005), 146–55. For one of the earliest accounts in which Hariu directly critiqued artists’ collaboration with the military, for example, see Hariu Ichirō, “Sengo bijutsu to sensō sekinin,” Bungaku 27, no. 5 (May 1959): 543–57. “Hariu Ichirō,” Bien, no. 18 (January–February 2003): 4–6. Hariu, “Sengo bijutsu to sensō sekinin,” 544. Ibid., 546. Ibid., 543–57. An exhibition of Nakagawa’s color photographs of campaign-record paintings was held in the Seibu department store in Tokyo between August 19 and 30, 1967. Also, all of the photographs became available through the following picture books: Naruhashi Hitoshi, ed., Taiheiyō Sensō meigashū (Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1967); Naruhashi, ed., Taiheiyō Sensō meigashū zoku (Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1968); and Daitōasen kaiga bijutsushū: Rikukai hen (Tokyo: Seifū Shobō, 1968). For example, the following publications carrying a substantial number of Fujita’s works and/or a detailed account of his life and career appeared soon after the artist’s death: Asahi Shinbunsha Kikaku Sōmu, ed., Fujita Tsuguharu tsuitōten (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1968); Fujita Tsuguharu and Naruhashi Hitoshi, eds., Neko to onna to Monparunasu (Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1968); and Tanaka Jō, Fujita Tsuguharu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1969). Miyamoto Saburō, “Gikō to himitsu,” in Fujita Tsuguharu tsuitōten, ed. Asahi Shinbunsha Kikaku Sōmu, 20–23. Ibid., 22. Tanaka, Fujita Tsuguharu, 10–11. Fujimoto Shōzō, “Tsuioku dampen Fujita Tsuguji shi,” Sansai, no. 226 (March 1968): 59. Although these comments were made mostly by Fujita’s colleagues, the art historian Takashina Shūji, who was born in 1932 and thus belonged to a much younger generation, expressed similar feelings when he learned of Fujita’s death through the New York Times: “Below the news headline [of Fujita’s death] was a photo of that familiar self-portrait of him with a bob hair[style]. That photo provoked in me a weird feeling … This face itself

notes to pages 144–148

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71 Matsumoto Shunsuke, “Zen Nihon bijutsuka ni hakaru,” in Ningen fūkei, 254–58. Originally published in Bijutsu 3, no. 3 (March 1946). 72 Matsumoto Shunsuke Isaku Kankōkai, ed., Matsumoto Shunsuke gashū (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1949). 73 For Hijikata’s career, art criticism, and ideology, see Mie Kenritsu Bijutsukan, ed., Ātisuto to kuritikku: Hihyōka Hijikata Teiichi to sengo bijutsu (Mie: Mie Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 1992); and Satō Yukari, “‘Riarizumu’ to sono jidaiteki na bunmyaku ni tsuite no kisoteki kōsatsu: Hijikata Teiichi, Domon Ken o chūshin ni,” Waseda Daigaku Aizu Yaichi Kinen Hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 8 (2006): 57–70. 74 Yamaguchi Taiji, “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 1,” Sansai, no. 535 (April 1992): 65. Satō Yukari, too, points out that Hijikata’s sense of regret about his work during the Asia-Pacific War would have led him to pursue his postwar museum career, devoting himself to uncovering the “forgotten” artists who lived through the wartime period as “humans.” Satō, “‘Riarizumu’ to sono jidaiteki na bunmyaku ni tsuite no kisoteki kōsatsu.” 75 Hijikata Teiichi, “Matsumoto Shunsuke no sekai,” in Matsumoto Shunsuke gashū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963), 105. 76 As Asahi recalled, when Hijikata asked him, in the winter of 1957, about any plans for an exhibition, Asahi mentioned Matsumoto’s name. Although Asahi had expected that his plan would be rejected because Matsumoto was still unknown (and, in fact, Asahi had never seen the artist’s original works at the time), Hijikata let him go ahead with it. Asahi Akira, “‘Yakeato no hashi’ kara: Matsumoto Shunsuke, Kamakura no Kindai Bijutsukan to,” Sansai, no. 531 (December 1991): 79. 77 Hijikata, “Matsumoto Shunsuke no sekai,” 105–19. 78 Ibid., 109. 79 Ibid. 80 For Sunouchi’s life and art collecting, see Ōhara Tomie, Kare mo mata kami no medeshi ko ka: Sunouchi Tōru no shōgai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1989); Meguroku Bijutsukan, ed., Kimagure bijutsukan: Sunouchi Tōru to Nihon no kindai bijutsu (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1997); and “Kaisō no Gendai Garō” Kankōkai, ed., Sunouchi Tōru no fūkei (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1996). 81 Sunouchi Tōru, “Me to mimi to,” in Kaeritai fūkei: Kimagure bijutsukan (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980), 141. 82 Sawaragi Noi, Nihon · gendai · bijutsu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998), 343. 83 Sunouchi Tōru, “Ōrudo pā,” in Kaeritai fūkei, 252. 84 It also should be noted that, before the 1970s, Matsumoto was frequently featured in local newspapers and journals, such as Iwate nippō (Daily Iwate) in Iwate Prefecture, where he had spent his youth.

did not seem to go with the English letters. No, not just the letters. In this self-portrait, his signature “Foujita” was clearly inscribed just as in many other paintings by him, but even this world famous signature of “Foujita” did not seem to match his face. That is to say, the face is undoubtedly Japanese … I wonder if this self-portrait eloquently states that Fujita, who abandoned Japan and decided to live a cosmopolitan [lifestyle], remained nothing but Japanese until the end of his life.” Takashina Shūji, “Tsūshin: Nyūyōku de kiita Fujita no shi,” Kikan geijutsu 2, no. 3 (Summer 1968): 190–91. For example, see Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 164–69; Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 559–68; Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: Sengoshi no naka no hen’yō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 105–20; and Itō Kimio, “Sengo otoko no ko bunka no naka no ‘sensō,’” in Sengo Nihon no naka no “sensō,” ed. Naka Hisao (Tokyo: Sekai Shisōsha, 2004), 151–79. Ihara Usaburō, Miyamoto Saburō, and Tamura Kōnosuke, “Watashitachi wa rekishi o kiroku shita: Seiyaku no naka de no geijutsu,” Mainichi gurafu rinji zōkan: Taiheiyō Sensō meigashū (November 3, 1967): 91. The only exception, other than those accounts made by such politically conscious art critics and artists as Hariu, can be found in one of the essays in a book of Fujita’s photographs, Neko to onna to Monparunasu (Les Chats Les Femmes et Montparnasse FOUJITA). The main essay in the publication, “Don Juan with Slit Eyes,” devoted a significant amount of space to explaining Fujita’s wartime activities. The authors criticized the overly negative evaluation holistically applied to all campaign-record paintings without much examination of each individual work or artist. While they critically viewed Fujita’s “inferiority complex as a Mongoloid” and “almost childish optimism” as a driving force behind the artist’s inclination toward the production of campaign-record paintings, they contended that these “negative” factors were ultimately justified by the transcendent artistic and humanistic value of Fujita’s works. Nagahara Junpei and Mita Eiichi, “Hosoi me o shita Don Juan,” in Neko to onna to Monparunasu, ed. Fujita and Naruhashi, 75–106. “Sensōga totsuzen kōkai chūshi,” Asahi shinbun, March 8, 1977. The following four paintings were put on display: Shimizu Toshi’s Japanese Engineer’s Bridge Construction in Malaya (1944), Nakamura Ken’ichi’s Kota Baru (1942), Fujita Tsuguharu’s Battle on the Bank of the Haluha (1941), and Miyamoto Saburō’s The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival (1942). “Sensō bijutsu to ware ware,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 12, 1977.

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the history of modern art in its association with state institutions and the formation of the modern nation state. Despite the fact that he claimed to rewrite the history of modern Japanese art as a process and product of Imperial Japan, however, he rarely paid attention to the country’s colonial past and its relations with Asia. Instead, in the first half of his book he focused predominantly on a few (male) artists/intellectuals of the late nineteenth century who were tragically torn between their artistic sensibilities and sense of national mission, as well as their indigenous heritage and the nationwide demand for Westernization. Kikuhata then argued that those yōga artists who came to prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century (such as the painters associated with the Shirakaba group) did share the suffering of their predecessors, but merely produced superficial copies of European art. In this “tragic” history of modern Japanese art, Kikuhata argued that Fujita’s deathly battle pictures alone appeared to overcome these problems. While not clearly articulating the relation between Fujita’s works and the activities of his forebears, Kikuhata seemed to suggest that Fujita alone, who did not struggle with illustrating such gruesome scenes of mass murder, overcame both the suffering of late-nineteenth-century Japanese artists and the mere copying of European art by the earlytwentieth-century yōga painters. 94 Kikuhata, Tennō no bijutsu, 226. 95 Ibid., 171; Kikuhata Mokuma, Ekaki ga kataru kindai bijutsu: Takahashi Yuichi kara Fujita made (Fukuoka: Genshobō, 2003), 179. 96 Kikuhata, Ekaki to sensō, 110. 97 Ibid. 98 A number of studies of 1990s “historical revisionism” have been produced. For a concise summary of the issues and strategies shared by historical revisionists, see Minoru Iwasaki, Steffi Richter, and Richard F. Calichman, “The Topology of Post-1990s Historical Revisionism,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 507–38. The controversial Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution formally renounces war and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. Although it also outlaws armed forces with war potential, the Japan Self-Defense Forces are maintained and justified by the government as not exceeding a minimum level necessary for the nation’s self-defense. The constitutionality of these forces has been challenged numerous times. 99 For critical analysis of Murakami’s Little Boy in association with the historical revisionism of the 1990s, see Ivy, “Trauma’s Two Times: Japanese Wars and Postwars.” 100 Sawaragi, Nihon · gendai · bijutsu, 14.

85 Matsumoto Shunsuke and “Zakkichō” Fukkoku Kankō Iinkai, eds., Zakkichō fukkokuban 1–11 (Tokyo: Sōgō Kōbō, 1977); Matsumoto Shunsuke, Matsumoto Shunsuke sobyō (Tokyo: Sōgō Kōbō, 1977); Matsumoto Shunsuke, Matsumoto Shunsuke yusai (Tokyo: Sōgō Kōbō, 1978); Asahi Akira, Matsumoto Shunsuke (Tokyo: Nichidō Shuppanbu, 1977). Although he belonged to a much younger generation than Hijikata or Sunouchi, Asahi also dealt with his own wartime experience through his admiration for Matsumoto. Asahi was born in Hiroshima and lost his brother in the atomic bombing. As a young aspiring artist in February 1949, he saw a black-and-white reproduction of Matsumoto’s sketch illustrating the burned-out bridge and devastated city in the art journal Mizue. This image, Asahi recalled, overlapped with that of the destroyed A-Bomb Dome where his young brother died. Asahi remembered this specific moment of his encounter with Matsumoto’s image as the true end of the war for him, and the very presence of such artists as Matsumoto and Ai-Mitsu (who was also born in Hiroshima and died in the war) determined his career as a curator rather than an artist. Asahi, Matsumoto Shunsuke, 36–37. 86 Tanaka Jō, “Bijutsu dokyumento: Ikiteiru gaka,” in NHK Nichiyō bijutsukan dai 9 shū, ed. Gakushū Kenkyūjo (Tokyo: Gakushū Kenkyūjo, 1978), 99. 87 Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 124–34. 88 “‘Techō’ Ikeda Masuo Matsumoto Shunsuke ishoku gaka no kaikoten,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 7, 1977. 89 Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” 77. 90 Christine Marran, “Empire through the Eyes of a Yapoo: Male Abjection in the Cult Classic Beast Yapoo,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 250–73. 91 For the activities of Kyūshū-ha, see Raiji Kuroda, “Kyūshū-ha as a Movement: Descending to the Undersides of Art,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 (December 2005): 12–35. 92 Kikuhata Mokuma, Fujita yo nemure (Tokyo: Asahi Shobō, 1978); Kikuhata, Tennō no bijutsu: Kindai shisō to sensōga (Tokyo: Firumuātosha, 1978); Kikuhata, Ekaki to sensō, Kikuhata Mokuma chosakushū 1 (Tokyo: Kaichōsha, 1993). 93 Kikuhata also attempted to contextualize campaignrecord painting in the history of modern Japanese art. In his 1978 book The Emperor’s Art, he intended to rewrite the history of modern Japanese art as “the developmental history of imperialist art.” Kikuhata, Tennō no bijutsu, 9. In contrast to the majority of art historical accounts, which avoided discussing campaignrecord paintings or treated them as deviations from the “proper” path of modern art, Kikuhata’s approach was truly unique, somewhat prefiguring the academic trend of Japanese art history in the 1990s, which reconsidered

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during the war: Shōgaisha no Taiheiyō Sensō o Kiroku Surukai, ed., Mō hitotsu no Taiheiyō sensō (Tokyo: Tachikaze Shobō, 1981); Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai, ed., Watashitachi wa uttaeru “shōgaisha to sensō”: Seikatsu taiken kirokushū kokusai shōgainen o kinen shite (Tokyo: Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai, 1982); Shimizu Hiroshi, Shōgaisha to sensō: Shuki shōgenshū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987); Kōno Katsuyuki, Shōgaisha mondai no mado kara: Sensō, rekishi, fukushi, bijutsu, etc. (Kishiwada: “Shōgaisha Mondai no Mado Kara” Kankō Iinkai, 1991); Jōyō Borantia Renraku Kyōgikai “Shōgaisha no Sensō o Katarukai,” ed., Shōgaisha ga kataru sensō (Kyoto: Bunrikaku, 1995); Komekui mushi, hikokumin to nonoshirarenagara: Sensō o ikinuita shitai shōgaishatachi no shōgen (Tokyo: Zenkoku Shitai Shōgaisha Dantai Renraku Kyōgikai, 2004); “Tokushū sensō to shōgaisha,” Sensō sekinin kenkyū 52 (Summer 2006); and Nakano Emiko, “Haijo, hogo, kakareru sonzai kara ‘muryoku de wa nai’ kaku shutai e: Kindai shōsetsu jiden no sakuhin bunseki o chūshin toshite mita Nihon no shakai seido to shōgaishakan no hensen” (PhD diss., Jōsai Kokusai Daigaku, 2009).

101 Ibid., 321–49. 102 Noi Sawaragi, “On the Battlefield of ‘Superflat’: Subculture and Art in Postwar Japan,” in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, ed Takashi Murakami (New York: Japan Society, 2005), 187–207. 103 Carl Cassegard discusses the fact that Sawaragi’s concept of “Japan” changed after the publication of Japan · Contemporary · Art, and began to embrace the plurality of Japanese traditions. Carl Cassegard, “Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries: On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-pop and Anti-War Activism,” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, ed Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 39–59. 104 For the processes and motives behind the founding of the museum, see Nomiyama Gyōji and Kuboshima Seiichirō, Mugonkan wa naze tsukurareta no ka (Kyoto: Kamogawa Shuppan, 2010). 105 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 11. 106 To the author’s best knowledge, the following studies and collections of diaries and essays have been produced in order to uncover the lives and voices of the “handicapped”

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Selected Bibliography Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Brandt, Kim. Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s ‘Olympia.’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 95–118. Bryson, Norman. “Morimura: Reading.” Art +Text, no. 52 (1995): 74–79. ______. “ Westernizing Bodies: Women, Art, and Power in Meiji Yōga.” In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, edited by Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003, 89–118. ______, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ______. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cassegard, Carl. “Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries: On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-pop and AntiWar Activism.” In Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, edited by Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 39–59. Cherney, James L. “Sexy Cyborgs: Disability and Erotic Politics in Cronenberg’s Crash.” In Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, edited by Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001, 165–85. Chino, Kaori. “Gender in Japanese Art.” In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, edited by Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003, 17–34. Clark, John. Modern Asian Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. Connell, Raewyn W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ______, and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 829–59. Croissant, Doris, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Joshua S. Mostow, eds. Performing “Nation”: Gender Politics in

English-Language Materials Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992. Affron, Matthew, and Mark Antliff, eds. Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Angles, Jeffrey. Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Armengol, Josep M., ed. Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013. Aso, Noriko. “Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7–38. Atkins, E. Taylor. “‘Jazz for the Country’s Sake’: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan.” In Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, 127–220. Balducci, Temma, Heather Belnap Jensen, and Pemela J. Warner, eds. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Bejarano, Shalmit. “ The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream: Gender and Japanese Wartime Visual Culture.” In Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05, edited by Rotem Kowner, vol. 1, Centennial Perspectives. Kent: Global Oriental, 2007, 159–84. Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp. / Penguin Books, 1972. Bernstein, Gail Lee, ed. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600– 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Bloom, Lisa, ed. With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ______. “Reading the Male Body.” In The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures, edited by Laurence Goldstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 265–306. Boscagli, Maurizia. Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

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______, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Garb, Tamar. Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Finde-Siècle France. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ______, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Garon, Sheldon M. “Luxury is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan.” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 41–78. ______. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late NineteenthCentury Art, Medicine, and Literature.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 136–50. ______. “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality.” In Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, edited by Kymberly N. Pinter. New York: Routledge, 2002, 119–38. Gluck, Carol. “ The Past in the Present.” In Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gordon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 64–95. Golomshtok, Igor. Totalitarian Art: In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China. Translated by Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill, 1990. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1993. First published 1991 by Pinter. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996, 55–66. Guth, Christine M.E. “Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial Context.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 605–36. ______. “ Takamura Kōun and Takamura Kōtarō: On Being a Sculptor.” In The Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, 152–79. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Harootunian, Harry D. “Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2000): 715–39. ______. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880–1940. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Dierkes, Julian. “Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture by Yoshikuni Igarashi.” Monumenta Nipponica 57, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 389–91. Dinkar, Niharika. “ Masculine Regeneration and the Attenuated Body in the Early Works of Nandalal Bose.” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 2 (June 2010): 167–88. Doak, Kevin M. “The Uses of France and Democratic Nationalism in Postwar Japan.” In Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, edited by Doug Slaymaker. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 127–47. Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. ______. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1979. ______. Japan in War and Peace: Essays on History, Culture and Race. London: HarperCollins, 1995. First published 1993 by New Press. ______. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. D’Souza, Aruna, and Tom McDonough, eds. The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. ______. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ______. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Frühstück, Sabine. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ______. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ______, and Anne Walthall, eds. Recreating Japanese Men. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ______. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

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Itō, Kimio. “An Introduction to Men’s Studies.” In Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 145–52. Ivy, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fascism, Yet?” In The Culture of Japanese Fascism, edited by Alan Tansman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, vii–xii. ______. “Trauma’s Two Times: Japanese Wars and Postwars.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 165–88. Iwasaki, Minoru, Steffi Richter, and Richard F. Calichman. “ The Topology of Post-1990s Historical Revisionism.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 507–38. Jarvis, Christina S. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ______. “‘Clothes Make the Man’: The Male Artist as a Performative Function.” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 18–32. Kaneko, Maki. “Mukai Junkichi’s Transformation from a War to Minka (Folk House) Painter.” Archives of Asian Art 61 (2011): 37–60. ______. “New Art Collective in the Service of the War: The Formation of Art Organizations during the Asia-Pacific War, 1937–1945.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 309–50. Kano, Ayako. Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Kawata, Akihisa. “The Japanese Physique and the ‘Proper Body.’” In Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, edited by Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 139–53. Kikuchi, Yūko. Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. ______, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Kimmel, Michael S., ed. Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987. ______, Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell, eds. Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2005. Koikari, Mire. “Japanese Eyes, American Heart: Politics of Race, Nation, and Masculinity in Japanese American Veterans’ WWII Narratives.” Men and Masculinities 12, no. 5 (2010): 547–64. Kondo, Dorinne. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Hein, Laura. “Reckoning with War in the Museum: Hijikata Teiichi at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art.” In Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, edited by Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 353–65. ______, and Rebecca Jennison, eds. Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010. Hirayama, Mikiko. “ The Emperor’s New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait Photography.” History of Photography 33, no. 2 (2009): 165–84. ______. “From Art without Borders to Art for the Nation: Japanist Painting by Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai during the 1930s.” Monumenta Nipponica 65, no. 2 (2010): 357–95. ______. “‘Modernité in Art’: Kojima Kikuo’s Critique of Contemporary Japanese Painting, 1931–1940.” In Inexorable Modernity: Japan’s Grappling with Modernity in the Arts, edited by Hiroshi Nara. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 49–68. ______. “Restoration of Realism: Kojima Kikuo (1887– 1950) and the Growth of Art Criticism in Modern Japan.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2001. Hiroshima Peace Site: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Website. “20 Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims.” www .pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/index_e2.html (last accessed May 15, 2012). Hockley, Allen. “ The Zenning of Munakata Shiko.” Impressions 26 (2004): 76–87. Horne, Gerald. Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Ikeda, Asato. “Envisioning Fascist Space, Time, and Body: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War (1931– 1945).” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2012. ______. “Fujita Tsuguharu Retrospective 2006: Resurrection of a Former Official War Painter.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21 (December 2009): 97–115. ______. “Twentieth Century Japanese Art and the Wartime State: Reassessing the Art of Ogasawara Shū and Fujita Tsuguharu.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 43 (October 25 2010). ______, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo, eds. Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Ikeda, Shinobu. “ The Allure of a ‘Woman in Chinese Dress’: Representation of the Other in Imperial Japan.” In Performing “Nation”: Gender Politics in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880– 1940, edited by Doris Croissant, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Joshua S. Mostow. Leiden: Brill, 2008, 347–81.

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McDonald, Aya Louisa. “Fujita Tsuguharu: An Artist of the Holy War Revisited.” In Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, edited by Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 169–89. McLelland, Mark J. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. ______, and Romit Dasgupta, eds. Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan. London: Routledge, 2005. Meyer, Ruth K ., Mika Kuraya, and Midori Tomita. “Foujita and the Modern Mural.” Comparative Culture 6 (2000): 61–79. Miyake, Yoshiko. “Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.” In Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, edited by Gail Lee Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 267–313. Molony, Barbara, and Kathleen S. Uno, eds. Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2005. Morowitz, Laura, and Willam Vaughan, eds. Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. Morris, Ivan I. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. Mortimer, Maya. “ The Shirakaba Group: Genuflecting at the Altar of French Art.” Japan Quarterly 46, no. 4 (October–December, 1999): 57–65. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Mostow, Joshua S. “The Gender of Wakashu and the Grammar of Desire.” In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003, 49–70. Mulvey, Laura. “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama. “Museum History.” http://www.moma.pref.kanagawa .jp/en/museum/index.html (last accessed July 19, 2012). Nead, Lynda. “Seductive Canvases: Visual Mythologies of the Artist and Artistic Creativity.” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 59–69. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1993, 9–22. Nixon, Sean. “Exhibiting Masculinity.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997, 291–336.

______. “Fabricating Masculinity: Gender, Race, and Nation in a Transnational Frame.” In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and State, edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallen. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999, 296–319. Koshiro, Yukiko. “ Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 183–215. Kunimoto, Namiko. “Shiraga Kazuo: The Hero and Concrete Violence.” Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 155–79. Kuroda, Raiji. “Kyūshū-ha as a Movement: Descending to the Undersides of Art.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 (December 2005): 12–35. Low, Gail Ching-Liang. “ White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism.” New Formations 9 (1989): 83–103. Low, Morris. “ The Emperor’s Sons Go to War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan.” In Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, edited by Kam Louie and Morris Low. London: Routledge, 2003, 81–99. Lucken, Michael, Anne Bayard-Sakai, and Emmanuel Lozerand, eds. Japan’s Postwar. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Lyford, Amy. “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment: Surrealism and the Musée du Val-de-Grâce in 1917.” Cultural Critique, no. 46 (Autumn 2000): 45–79. ______. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Mackie, Vera. “ The Taxonomic Gaze: Looking at Whiteness from East to West.” ACRAWSA 5, no. 1 (2009): 1–16. Mangan, J.A., ed. Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon: Aryan Fascism. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Marran, Christine. “Empire through the Eyes of a Yapoo: Male Abjection in the Cult Classic Beast Yapoo.” Mechademia 4 (2009): 250–73. Matsumura, Janice. “Mental Health as Public Peace: Kaneko Junji and the Promotion of Psychiatry in Modern Japan.” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (October 2004): 899–930. Mayo, Marlene J., J. Thomas Rimer, and H. Eleanor Kerkham, eds. War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. McCallum, Donald F. “Ecclesiastical Architecture in the Painting of Matsumoto Shunsuke.” Humanities: Christianity and Culture, no. 14 (February 1980): 119–44. McCormick, Melissa, ed. “Japanese Art: The Scholarship and Legacy of Chino Kaori.” Special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 15 (December 2003).

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______. “ Taisho Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence.” In Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, edited by J. Thomas Rimer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, 37–55. ______. “ Thoughts on the Early Meiji Gentleman.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unviersity Press, 2005, 61–98. Saitō, Ayako. “Orchestration of Tears: The Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere.” Senses of Cinema, no. 28, October 5, 2003. http://www.senses ofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/orchestration_of _tears/. Sandell, Richard, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie GarlandThomson, eds. Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum. London: Routledge, 2010. Sandler, Mark. “ The Living Artist: Matsumoto Shunsuke’s Reply to the State.” Art Journal 55, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 74–82. ______, ed. The Confusion Era: Art and Culture of Japan during the Allied Occupation, 1945–1952. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1997. Satō, Dōshin. Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty. Translated by Hiroshi Nara. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011. Sawaragi, Noi. “On the Battlefield of ‘Superflat’: Subculture and Art in Postwar Japan.” In Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, edited by Takashi Murakami. New York: Japan Society, 2005, 187–207. Screech, Timon. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan, 1720–1810. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Slaymaker, Douglas. The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Smith, Bonnie G., and Beth Hutchison, eds. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Smith, Terry, ed. In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Standish, Isolde. Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the “Tragic Hero.” Richmond: Curzon, 2000. Still, Judith, ed. Men’s Bodies. Paragraph 26, nos. 1–2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Takamura, Kōtarō. A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kōtarō. Translated by Hiroaki Satō. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992.

O’Grady, Lorraine. “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 174–87. Ottmann, Klaus, and Dorothy Kosinski, eds. Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. Park, Sang Mi. “The Making of a Cultural Icon for the Japanese Empire: Choe Seung-hui’s U.S. Dance Tours and ‘New Asian Culture’ in the 1930s and 1940s.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 597–632. Perchuk, Andrew, and Helaine Posner, eds. The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Perry, Gillian, ed. Gender and Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999. Pinder, Kymberly N., ed. Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Rabson, Steve. Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998. Reichert, Jim. “Disciplining the Erotic-Grotesque in Edogawa Ranpo’s Demon of the Lonely Isle.” In The Culture of Japanese Fascism, edited by Alan Tansman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 355–80. Reynolds, Jonathan M. “Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction of Japanese Tradition.” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 316–41. Roberson, James E., and Nobue Suzuki, eds. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. London: Routledge, 2003. Robertson, Jennifer. “ Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japan.” History and Anthropology 13, no. 3 (2002): 191–216. ______. “Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous Repair.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 430–48. ______. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Roden, Donald. Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

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Harvard University Asia Center; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Weisenfeld, Gennifer. Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avantgarde, 1905–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ______. “Publicity and Propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as Method.” Design Issues 25, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 13–28. ______. “Touring ‘Japan-as-Museum’: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 747–93. Winther-Tamaki, Bert. Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. ______. “Embodiment/Disembodiment in Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War.” In Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, edited by Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 111–37. First published 1997 (as “Embodiment/Disembodiment: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War”) in Monumenta Nipponica. ______. “Embodiment/Disembodiment: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War.” Monumenta Nipponica 52, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 145–80. ______. Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. ______. “Oil Painting in Postsurrender Japan: Reconstructing Subjectivity through Deformation of the Body.” Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 347–96. Yiengpruksawan, Mimi Hall. “Japanese War Paint: Kawabata Ryūshi and the Emptying of the Modern.” Archives of Asian Art 46 (1993): 76–90. Yiu, Angela. “Atarashikimura: The Intellectual and Literary Context of a Taisho Utopian Village.” Japan Review 20 (2008): 203–30. Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Yoshihara, Mari. “ The Flight of the Japanese Butterfly: Orientalism, Nationalism, and Performances of Japanese Womanhood.” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 975–1001. Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Japanese-Language Materials Akazawa Shirō. Kindai Nihon no shisō dōin to shūkyō tōsei. Tokyo: Azekura Shobō, 1985. ______ and Kitagawa Kenzō, eds. Bunka to fashizumu: Senjiki Nihon ni okeru bunka no kōbō. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1993.

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______. Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō. Tokyo: Kamogawa Shuppan, 1998. Fujita Haruhiko, ed. Geijutsu to fukushi: Ātisuto toshite no ningen. Osaka: Osaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2009. Fujita Tsuguharu. Bura ippon. Tokyo: Tōhō Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1936. ______. Chi o oyogu. Tokyo: Shomotsu Tenbosha, 1942. ______. Fujita Tsuguharu gashū. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1929. ______. “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono ichi.” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 12 (July 1934): 43–49. ______. “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono ni.” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 13 (August 1934): 64–71. ______. “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono san.” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 14 (September 1934): 64–71. ______. “Gaiyū nijūnenki sono yon.” Chūō bijutsu (Fukkō), no. 19 (February 1935): 52–56. ______. “Gaka no ryōshin.” Asahi shinbun, October 25, 1945. ______. Pari no yokogao. Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1929. ______ and Naruhashi Hitoshi, eds. Neko to onna to Monparunasu. Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1968. Fujita Wataru. “Kinoshita eiga ni okeru kokusaku to itsudatsu: Danseitachi no ‘danseisei.’” In Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu, edited by Iwamoto Kenji. Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004, 295–318. Fukutomi Tarō. E o atsumeru. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995. Gakushū Kenkyūjo, ed. NHK Nichiyō bijutsukan dai 9 shū. Tokyo: Gakushū Kenkyūjo, 1978. Hariu Ichirō. “Sengo bijutsu to sensō sekinin.” Bungaku 27, no. 5 (May 1959): 543–57. ______. “Sengo kaigai bijutsuten hanjōki.” Geijutsu shinchō 37, no. 2 (February 1986): 44–47. ______, Sawaragi Noi, Kuraya Mika, Kawata Akihisa, Hirase Reita, and Ōtani Shōgo, eds. Sensō to bijutsu 1937–1945. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2008. “Hariu Ichirō.” Bien, no. 18 (January–February 2003): 4–6. Hattori Sanae and Mitsunari Miho, eds. Kenryoku to shintai. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2011. Hattori Tadashi. Autosaidā āto: Gendai bijutsu ga wasureta “geijutsu.” Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2003. ______ and Fujihara Sadao. Yamashita Kiyoshi to Shōwa no bijutsu: “Hadaka no taishō” no shinwa o koete. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014. Hayakawa Noriyo, ed. Sensō, bōryoku to josei 2 Gunkoku no onnatachi. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2004. Hayashi Yōko. Fujita Tsuguharu no sakuhin o hiraku. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2008. Hijikata Teiichi. “Matsumoto Shunsuke no sekai.” In Matsumoto Shunsuke gashū. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963, 105–19. Hirase Reita. “Bijutsu Shinkō Chōsakai to Kokumin Bijutsu Tenjijō no shiryō no shōkai.” Himeji Ichiritsu Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 3 (1998): 46–48.

Akiyama Kunio, Suzuki Kurazō, Kuroda Senkichirō, and Araki Sueo. “Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu, gaka wa nani o subeki ka?” Mizue, no. 434 (January 1941): 129–39. Aoki Shigeru. Shochi, senjika no bijutsusho o yomu. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2006. Aoki Tamotsu, ed. Kindai Nihon bunkaron 10: Sensō to guntai. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1999. Asada Takashi and Wada Hirobumi, eds. Kodai no maboroshi. Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2001. Asahi Akira. Matsumoto Shunsuke. Tokyo: Nichidō Shuppanbu, 1977. ______. “‘Yakeato no hashi’ kara: Matsumoto Shunsuke, Kamakura no Kindai Bijutsukan to.” Sansai, no. 531 (December 1991): 79. Asahi Shinbunsha Bunka Kikakukyoku Tōkyō Kikakubu and Hashimoto Yoshiya, eds. Mukai Junkichi ten: Kokoro ni nokoru efude no tabi. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha Bunka Kikakukyoku Tōkyō Kikakubu, 1997. Asahi Shinbunsha Kikaku Sōmu, ed. Fujita Tsuguharu tsuitōten. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1968. Asano Tōru. “Matsumoto Shunsuke ichimen: ‘Ikiteiru gaka’ o megutte.” In Matsumoto Shunsuke ten, edited by Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan. Tokyo: Tokyo Shinbun, 1986, 31–34. Bijutsu Hihyōka Renmei, ed. Bijutsu hihyō to sengo bijutsu. Tokyo: Brücke, 2007. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Institution, ed. Portraits by Yasui Sotaro/Yasui Sōtarō no shōzōga. Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, 2009. Chiba Kei. “Kindai Jinmu tennōzō no keisei: Meiji tennō=Jinmu tennō no shinborizumu.” Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002): 96–126. ______. “Ryōsei guyūzō no ekonomī: Abigail SolomonGodeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation o yomu.” Imēji & jendā 3 (2002): 113–28. Chiba Kenritsu Bijutsukan, ed. “Shirakaba” ha to kindai bijutsu. Chiba: Chiba Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 1989. Chino Kaori. Chino Kaori chosakushū. Tokyo: Brücke, 2010. ______. “Nihon bijutsu no jendā.” Bijutsushi, no. 136 (March 1994): 235–46. ______ and Tan’o Yasunori. “Shinpojiumu ‘Sensō to bijutsu’: Gaiyō oyobi tōgi hōkoku.” Bijutsushi, no. 138 (March 1995): 263–65. Dai Doitsukoku tenrankai mokuroku. Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai, 1938. Daitōasen kaiga bijutsushū: Rikukai hen. Tokyo: Seifū Shobō, 1968. Fujimoto Shōzō, ed. Fujita Tsuguharu gashū. Tokyo: Zōkei Geijutsusha, 1943. ______. Yasui Sōtarō shōzōga gashū. Tokyo: Zōkei Geijutsusha, 1942. Fujino Yutaka. Kyōsei sareta kenkō: Nihon fashizumuka no seimei to shintai. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2000.

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______. Pari · hinkon to gairo no shigaku: 1930-nendai gaikokujin geijutsukatachi. Tokyo: Toshi Shuppan, 1998. Imaizumi Atsuo. Gendai gakaron. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1958. ______ and Ishikawa Kōichi, eds. Kindai yōga no ayumi: Seiyō to Nihon. Tokyo: Tōto Bunka Shuppan, 1955. Imēji & Jendā Kenkyūkai, ed. Imēji & Jendā 1–10 (1999–2010). Inaga Shigemi. Kaiga no rinkai: Kindai Higashi Ajia bijutsushi no shikkoku to meiun. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014. ______ . “‘Shirakaba’ to zōkei bijutsu: Saikō Sezannu ‘rikai’ o chūshin ni.” Hikaku bungaku 38 (1995): 76–91. ______, ed. Tōyō ishiki: Musō to genjitsu no aida 1887–1953. Kyoto: Mineruva Shobō, 2012. Inoue Masahito. Yōfuku to Nihonjin: Kokumin fuku toiu mōdo. Tokyo: Kōsaidō, 2001. Inoue Shōichi. Tsukurareta Katsura Rikyū shinwa. Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1986. Ishihara Ikuko. Isai no hito Kinoshita Keisuke: Yowai otokotachi no utsukushisa o chūshin ni. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1999. Ishii Hakutei. Bijutsu no ikusa. Tokyo: Saiunsha, 1943. Ishii Mie. Jendā no shiten kara mita Shirakabaha no bungaku: Shiga, Arishima, Mushanokōji o chūshin toshite. Tokyo: Shinsuisha, 2005. Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, ed. Ikebukuro Monparunasu. Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 2011. Itō Kimio. “Danseigaku danseisei kenkyū no kako genzai mirai.” In Shinpen Nihon no feminizumu 12: Danseigaku. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009, 1–28. ______. “Otokorashisa” no yukue: Dansei bunka no bunka shakaigaku. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1993. ______. “Sengo otoko no ko bunka no naka no ‘sensō.’” In Sengo Nihon no naka no “sensō,” edited by Naka Hisao. Tokyo: Sekai Shisōsha, 2004, 151–79. Iwasa Sōshirō. “Burūmuzuberī gurūpu to Shirakabaha.” Kokubungaku 48, no. 7 (June 2003): 32–38. Jōyō Borantia Renraku Kyōgikai “Shōgaisha no Sensō o Katarukai,” ed. Shōgaisha ga kataru sensō. Kyoto: Bunrikaku, 1995. Jūgun Ianfu 100 ban Henshū Iinkai, ed. Jūgun ianfu 100 ban: Denwa no mukō kara rekishi no koe ga. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1992. Kamisaka Jirō, Fukutomi Tarō, Kawata Akihisa, and Tan’o Yasunori. Gakatachi no “sensō.” Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2010. Kamon Yasuo. Nachisu no bijutsu kikō. Tokyo: Arusu, 1941. Kaneko Maki. “Modanizumu no tayōka: Modanizumu no taiseiha to hantaiha: 1 Seido to shakai.” In Bijutsu no Nihon kingendaishi: Seido gengo zōkei, edited by Kitazawa Noriaki, Satō Dōshin, and Mori Hitoshi. Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu, 2014, 451–62.

______. “Sensōga to Amerika.” Himeji Ichiritsu Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 3 (1998): 1–45. Hirata Katsumasa. “Senzen Nihon ni okeru yūseigaku no chiteki shōgaisha fukushi bunya eno eikyō ni kansuru rekishiteki kenkyū.” Nagasaki Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu kiyō 60 (March 2001): 37–44. Hirota Ikuma. “Koiso Ryōhei to sensōga: Jūgun no kiroku to seisaku no katei.” Kōbe Shiritsu Koiso Kinen Bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō 3 (2008): 9–56. Honda Shūgo. “Shirakaba” ha no bungaku. Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1954. Hosokawa Morihiro. Bi ni ikita Hosokawa Moritatsu no me. Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 2010. Ihara Usaburō, Miyamoto Saburō, and Tamura Kōnosuke. “ Watashitachi wa rekishi o kiroku shita: Seiyaku no naka de no geijutsu.” Mainichi gurafu rinji zōkan: Taiheiyō Sensō meigashū (November 3, 1967): 86–91. ______, Togawa Yukio, Tanikawa Tetsuzō, Yasui Sōtarō, Araki Sueo, Itō Ren, Kawabata Ryūshi, Umehara Ryūzaburō, and Oshita Masao. “‘Tokui jidō no sakuhin’ zadankai.” Mizue, no. 423 (February 1940): 257–64. Iida Yūko. Karera no monogatari: Nihon kindai bungaku to jendā. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1998. Iino Masahito. Senjika Nihon no bijutsukatachi dai 1 gō. Yamanashi: Nekomachi Bunko, 2010. Ikeda Shinobu. “Chūgokufuku no josei hyōshō: Senjika ni okeru teikoku dansei chishikijin no aidentiti kōchiku o megutte.” In Sensō to hyōshō/bijutsu 20-seiki igo: Kirokushū: Kokusai shinpojiumu, edited by Nagata Ken’ichi. Tokyo: Bigaku Shuppan, 2007, 103–17. ______. “Egakareta senjō no bōryoku: Ima, haisengo no ‘sensōga’ o donoyōni miru no ka.” In Shikaku hyōshō to ongaku, edited by Ikeda Shinobu and Kobayashi Midori. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010, 204–31. ______. Nihon kaiga no joseizō: Jendā bijutsushi no shiten kara. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1998. ______. “Senjika no ifuku to josei hyōshō: ‘Teikoku’ no karada e no manazashi.” In Heisei 17–18 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyū seika hōkokusho: Kafuchōsei sekai shisutemu ni okeru senji no josei no sabetsu no kōzōteki kenkyū. Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2006, 41–68. ______. “Tomi to Tsuguharu: ‘Renai’ to ‘ie,’ soshite ‘geijutsu’ o meguru ryōsei no sōkoku.” In Fujita Tsuguharu shokan: Tsuma Tomi ate (4), edited by “Pari ryūgaku shoki no Fujita Tsuguharu” Kenkyūkai. Mobara: “Pari ryūgaku shoki no Fujita Tsuguharu” Kenkyūkai, 2004, 5–27. ______ and Kobayashi Midori, eds. Shikaku hyōshō to ongaku. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010. Imahashi Eiko. Ito shōkei: Nihonjin no Pari. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001.

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Kinoshita Nagahiro. “Shikiba Ryūzaburō bi ni miserareta ika.” Kindai gasetsu 11 (2002): 29–40. ______. Shisōshi toshite no Gohho: Fukusei juyō to sōzōryoku. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1992. Kira Tomoko. “‘Joryūgaka hōkōtai’ to ‘Daitōasen kōkoku fujo kaidōzu’ ni tsuite.” Bijutsushi, no. 154 (October 2002): 129–45. ______. Sensō to joseigaka: Mōhitotsu no kindai “bijutsu.” Tokyo: Brücke, 2013. Kitahara Megumi. Kakuran bunshi @ kyōkai. Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppan, 2000. ______. Kenryoku to shikaku hyōshō: Jendā kara mita tennō/ kōshitsuzō: Monbukagakushō kagaku kenkyūhi hojokin kenkyū seika hōkokusho 2002–2003. Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2004. ______. “Kesson setsudan sareta dansei shintai: Furusawa Iwami no haisen taiken to shutai.” Ajia gendai joseishi 5 (2009): 88–95. ______. “Kieta Tennō · Kōgō zō to ‘sensōga’: Dai 2 kai Daitōa Sensō bijutsuten ni tokubetsu hōkei sareta sanmai no kaiga.” Imēji & jendā 6 (March 2006): 23–30. ______, ed. Ajia no josei shintai wa ikani egakaretaka: Shikaku hyōshō to sensō no kioku. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2013. Kitazawa Noriaki. Me no shinden: “Bijutsu” juyōshi nōto teihon. Tokyo: Brücke, 2010. Kobayashi Shunsuke. “Dare ga Umehara Yasui o ‘koten’ ni shitaka: Taishō kyōyōha to ‘koten’ no sōshutsu.” In Kurasshikku modan: 1930 nendai Nihon no geijutsu, edited by Omuka Toshiharu and Kawata Akihisa. Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2004, 78–190. ______. Nanbata Tatsuoki: “Chūshō” no seisei. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1998. ______. “ Nanbata Tatsuoki ‘Girisha rensaku’ ni tsuite: ‘Akuroporisu no sora’ o chūshin ni.” Rikkyō Kōtōgakkō hen kenkyū kiyō 25 (1994): 25–67. ______. “ Nanbata Tatsuoki ‘Girisha rensaku’ to yusai no koten gihō.” Gendai geijutsu kenkyū 1 (1996): 92–108. Kodama Kibō. Bitō hayawakari. Tokyo: Shadanhōjin Nihon Bijutsu Oyobi Kōgei Tōsei Kyōkai, 1943. Kōgo Eriko and Tan’o Yasunori, eds. Heisei 19–21 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi hojokin kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyū seika hōkokusho: Nihon kindai to “Nanpō” gainen: Zōkei ni miru keisei to tenkai. Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2006. Kojima Kikuo. Girisha no hasami. Tokyo: Dōtōsha, 1942. ______. Shopan no shōzō: Kojima Kikuo bijutsu ronshū. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984. Kokatsu Reiko. “Senzen no joseigaka no shutsuji/ kateikankyō: 1920–30 nendai o chūshin ni.” Rekishi hyōron, no. 634 (February 2003): 25–37. ______, Hashimoto Shinji, and Suzuki Kaoru, eds. Hashiru onnatachi: Joseigaka no senzen sengo 1930–1950 nendai ten/Japanese Women Artists Before and After World

Kanō Mikiyo. “ Nihonkoku tennō no zō o jendā de yomu.” In Onna? Nihon? Bi? Aratana jendā hihyō ni mukete, edited by Kumakura Takaaki and Chino Kaori. Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999, 81–98. ______. “ Nihon no sensō puropaganda to jendā: ‘Shashin shūhō’ no ‘Daitōa kyōeiken’ ‘kichiku beiei’ hyōshō o chūshin ni.” Jinbun Shakai Kagaku Kenkyūjo nenpō 6 (2008): 1–11. Katō Chikako and Hosoya Minoru, eds. Bōryoku to sensō. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2009. Kawakami Teruaki. “Sōseiki ni okeru shōgaiji no fukushi to kyōiku: Ishii Fudeko no kōseki kara manabu mono.” Nagoya Joshi Daigaku kiyō 54 (2008): 43–44. Kawakita Michiaki. “Seikō-kai shōshi.” In Dai 19 kai Seikōkai ten: Gotō Shintarō tsuitō tenrankai. Tokyo: Zauhō Kankōkai, 1954. Kawamura Kunimitsu. Seisen no ikonogurafī: Tennō to heishi senshisha no zuzō hyōshō. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2007. Kawata Akihisa. “Jūgonen sensō to ‘daikōzu’ no setsuritsu.” Bijutsushi kenkyū 32 (December 1994): 81–98. ______. “Kindai Nihon ‘senji zuzō’ kaishaku: ‘Kazoku’ no baai.” Ajia bunka kenkyū, Bessatsu 14 (2005): 1–21. ______. “Nihonjin no nikutai to ‘tadashii karada.’” Gendai shisō 30, no. 9 (July 2002): 166–79. ______. “Sakusen kirokuga.” In Nihon kingendai bijutsushi jiten, edited by Taki Kōji and Fujieda Teruo. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 2007, 452–53. ______. “‘Seinen bijutsuka’ to akogare no ‘kodai.’” In Kurasshikku modan: 1930 nendai Nihon no geijutsu, edited by Omuka Toshiharu and Kawata Akihisa. Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2004, 12–28. ______. “Senjiki bijutsu sakuhin no fukusū seisaku ni tsuite.” Kindai gasetsu 15 (2006): 48–61. ______. “Sensō kirokuga ni kansuru mittsu no risuto.” Kashima bijutsu kenkyū nenpō 15 bessatsu (1997): 410–28. Kawata Tokiko. “Shirakabaha to Burūmuzuberī gurūpu.” Bijutsu fōramu 21, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 105–9. Kikuhata Mokuma. Ekaki ga kataru kindai bijutsu: Takahashi Yuichi kara Fujita made. Fukuoka: Genshobō, 2003. ______. Ekaki to sensō. Kikuhata Mokuma chosakushū 1. Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 1993. ______. Fujita yo nemure. Tokyo: Asahi Shobō, 1978. ______. Tennō no bijutsu: Kindai shisō to sensōga. Tokyo: Firumuātosha, 1978. Kim Hyeshin. Kankoku kindai bijutsu kenkyū: Shokuminchiki “Chosen bijutsu tenrankai” ni miru ibunka shihai to bunka hyōshō. Tokyo: Brücke, 2005. Kimura Shōhachi. “Nikakai dai nijūikkaiten shoken.” Mizue, no. 356 (October 1934): 206–11. Kindai Nihon bijutsu zenshū. 5 vols. Tokyo: Tōto Bunka Kōeki, 1953–54.

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Yamashita Hiroshi. Kazoku ga kataru Yamashita Kiyoshi. Tokyo: Namiki Shobō, 2000. Yamashita Kiyoshi. Hadaka no ōsama: Yamashita Kiyoshi no e to nikki. Edited by Shikiba Ryūzaburō. Tokyo: Gendaisha, 1956. ______. Hadaka no taishō hōrōki. 4 vols. Tokyo: Nōberu Shobō, 1984. ______. Yamashita Kiyoshi hōrō nikki. Edited by Shikiba Ryūzaburō and Watanabe Minoru. Tokyo: Gendaisha, 1956. Yanagi Ryō. Kindai kaigashi. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1949. Yanagi Sōetsu. “Kiyoshi kun no e no seishitsu.” In Yamashita Kiyoshi gashū, edited by Shikiba Ryūzaburō. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1955, 28–29. Yasui Sōtarō. Gaka no me. Tokyo: Zauhō Kankōkai, 1956. Yasui Sōtarō ronshū. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1956. “Yasui Sōtarō shōzōgashū.” Zōkei geijutsu 2, no. 5 (May 1940). Yomiuri Shinbun Osaka Honsha Bunka Jigyōbu, ed. Shirakabaha no aishita bijutsu:”Shirakaba” tanjō 100 nen. Osaka: Yomiuri Shinbun Osaka Honsha, 2009. Yomoda Inuhiko. Nihon eiga to sengo no shinwa. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007. ______ and Saitō Ayako, eds. Otokotachi no kizuna: Ajia eiga homosōsharu na yokubō. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004. Yoshida Yutaka. Nihonjin no sensōkan: Sengoshi no naka no hen’yō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995. ______ and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, eds. Nitchū Sensō ki no kokumin dōin. Vol. 1. Shiryō Nihon gendaishi 10. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1984. Zauhō Kankōkai, ed. Gendai Nihon bijutsu zenshū. 10 vols. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1955.

Wakakuwa Midori. Iwanami kindai Nihon no bijutsu 2 kakusareta shisen: Ukiyoe yōga no josei rataizō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997. ______. Sensō ga tsukuru joseizō: Dainiji Sekai Taisenka no Nihon josei dōin puropaganda. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2000. ______. Sensō to jendā: Sensō o okosu dansei dōmei to heiwa o tsukuru jendā riron. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2005. ______. “Sōryokusen taiseika no shiseikatsu tōsei fujinzasshi ni miru ‘senji ifuku’ kiji no imi suru mono.” In Sensō bōryoku to josei 2: Gunkoku no onnatachi, edited by Hayakawa Kimiyo. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2005, 194–220. ______, ed. Heisei 17–18 nendo, Kagakukenkyūhi kiban kenkyū (B), Kenkyū seika hōkokusho: Kafuchōsei sekai shisutemu ni okeru senji no josei no sabetsu no kōzōteki kenkyū. Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2006. Watanabe Tsuneo. Datsu dansei no jidai: Andorojinasu o mezasu bunmeigaku. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1986. Yamaguchi Taiji. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 1.” Sansai, no. 535 (April 1992): 64–67. ______. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 2.” Sansai, no. 536 (May 1992): 58–61. ______. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 3.” Sansai, no. 537 (June 1992): 54–57. ______. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 4.” Sansai, no. 538 (July 1992): 48–51. ______. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto 5.” Sansai, no. 539 (August 1992): 44–47. ______. “‘Ikiteiru gaka’ ron nōto hoi 1945 nen 10 gatsu: Matsumoto Shunsuke no sengo.” Sansai, no. 540 (September 1992): 46–51. Yamanashi Toshio. Egakareta rekishi: Nihon kindai to “rekishiga” no jiba. Tokyo: Brücke, 2005.

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Illustration Credits 21. Miyamoto Saburō, Captives. © Mineko Miyamoto 2014/JAA1400025 22. Miyamoto Saburō, The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival. © Mineko Miyamoto 2014/JAA1400025; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 23. Miyamoto Saburō, Hunger and Thirst. © Mineko Miyamoto 2014/JAA1400025 24. Fujita Tsuguharu, Battle on the Bank of the Haluha. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 25. Koiso Ryōhei, Japan-Burma Treaty Signature Ceremony. Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 26. Mukai Junkichi, A Scene on April 9, 1942, Bataan Peninsula. © Mieko Mukai 2014/JAA1400025; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 27. Tamura Kōnosuke, Bloody Battle. © Yuko Onishi 2014/ JAA1400025 28. Fujita Tsuguharu, Sacred Soldier to the Rescue. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 29. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Professor Tamamushi. Courtesy of Tōhoku University Archives 30. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Honda Kōtarō. Courtesy of The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai 31. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo. Image: TNM Image Archives 32. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Abe Yoshishige. Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 33. Yasui Sōtarō, Bathers. Courtesy of Ishibashi Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Fukuoka 34. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Mrs. F. Courtesy of Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Tokyo 35. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of a Lady. Photo: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto 36. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Chin-Jung. Photo: MOMAT/ DNPartcom 37. Ihara Usaburō, Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo. Courtesy of Nitten 38. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of a Girl. Courtesy of The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai 42. Umehara Ryūzaburō, Forbidden City. Courtesy of Eisei-Bunko Museum, Tokyo 43. Umehara Ryūzaburō, Chinese Girl and Tulip. Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 44. Photograph of the Twenty-fifth Day Society artists making sketches of Yokoyama Taikan. Courtesy of Eisei-Bunko Museum, Tokyo

1. Still from Hanasaku minato (The Port of Flowers). © Shochiku Co., Ltd. 2. Mukai Junkichi, Charge Ahead. © Mieko Mukai 2014/ JAA1400025 3. Shimizu Toshi, Refugees. Courtesy of Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya 4. Shimizu Toshi, Charge. Courtesy of Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya 5. Kuroda Seiki, Lakeside. Courtesy of National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo 6. Kuroda Seiki, Flowering Field. Courtesy of National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo 7. Kishida Ryūsei, Self-Portrait. Photo: MOMAT/ DNPartcom 9. Fujita Tsuguharu, Attu Island Gyokusai. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 10. Fujita Tsuguharu, Fierce Fighting on Guadalcanal. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 11. Fujita Tsuguharu, Fierce Fighting of Kaoru Paratroops after Landing on the Enemy’s Position. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 12. Fujita Tsuguharu, Self-Portrait. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photo © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan 13. Fujita Tsuguharu, Nude. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Genève; Photograph: Studio Monique Bernaz, Genève 14. Kuroda Seiki, Knitting. Courtesy of National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo 15. Fujita Tsuguharu, Self-Portrait. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 16. Fujita Tsuguharu, Llama and Four Women. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 17. Fujita Tsuguharu, A Ding-dong Party Bandman and a Maid. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 18. Fujita Tsuguharu, Guests in Itoman, Okinawa. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 20. Miyamoto Saburō, Attack on Nanyuan, Beijing. © Mineko Miyamoto 2014/JAA1400025; Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom

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60. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Self-Portrait. Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 61. Nanbata Tatsuoki, Venus and a Boy. © Takeo Nambata 2014/JAA1400025 62. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Cow. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama 63. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Elephant. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama 64. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Letter to Teiko and Kan. Courtesy of Private collection 65. Domon Ken, photograph of Fujita Tsuguharu at Haneda Airport. Courtesy of Domon Ken Museum of Photography 67. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama 68. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Courtesy of National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 70. Poster for Hadaka no taishō (The Naked General). © 1958 Toho Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved . This publication is not sponsored, approved or endorsed by Toho Co., Ltd. 71. Yamashita Kiyoshi, Mountain Landscape. © Seibisha

45. Yasui Sōtarō, Portrait of Yokoyama Taikan. Courtesy of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto 47. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Portrait of a Painter. Courtesy of The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai 48. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Standing Figure. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama 49. Yamashita Kiyoshi, Cicada. © Seibisha 50. Yamashita Kiyoshi, La Musume by van Gogh. © Seibisha 54. Matsumoto Shunsuke, In the Street. Courtesy of Shimonoseki City Art Museum 55. Matsumoto Shunsuke, A Tree-Lined Street. Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 56. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Bridge in Y-City. Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom 57. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Face (Self-Portrait). Courtesy of Private collection 58. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Three. Courtesy of Private collection 59. Matsumoto Shunsuke, Five. Courtesy of Private collection

191

Index Bode, Wilhelm von 68 Braque, Georges 131, 132 Breker, Arno 103 See also Nazi art bunka kokka. See “nation of culture” bunka kunshō. See Order of Culture

A Abe Yoshishige 63, 64, 84, 85, 129 abjection (abject) 104–105, 115, 123, 150 Abstract Expressionism 135, 171n31 Académie Julian 64, 78 Ai-Mitsu 6, 106, 148, 174n85 Allied Occupation 5, 128, 139–40, 151–52 American Occupation. See Allied Occupation Anarchism 15, 70, 146 Anforumeru. See Art Informel Aoki Shigeru 158n42 Ara Masahito 136 Araki Sueo 76–77, 96 Army Art Association (Rikubun bijutsu kyōkai) 18, 24, 158n53 Army Art Exhibition (Rikugun Bijutsuten) 45, 54 art brut (raw art) 137, 172n42 Article 9 (of Japanese Constitution) 151–52, 174n98 Art Informel 135, 137, 171n31 “Artists’ morality” (Bijutsuka no sessō) 127 art of the mentally ill 98–103, 135–37, art-school reform (bikō kaikaku) 70–71, 87–89, 166n63 See also Tokyo School of Fine Arts Asahi Akira 146, 148, 173n76, 174n85 Asahi Newspaper 23, 127, 135, 142 Asia-Pacific War (Ajia Taiheiyō Sensō) cultural regulations during 16–17, 39–41, 66–67, 160n51 definition of 3, 154n6 justification of 17, 24–25, 39 as race war 24–25 See also Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; Pacific War; Sino-Japanese War Asō Saburō 106, 116, 118 atomic bomb 4, 151–52, 155n10, 174n85 See also Hiroshima; Little Boy Attu Island, Battle of 48

C campaign-record painting (sakusen kirokuga) confiscation of 6, 128, 155n11 definition of 23, 158n1 display of 6–7, 145, 155n12 female artists and 18 gender diversity in 53–58 influence of European history painting on 42–47 Kikuhata Mokuma’s approach to 150–51, 174n.93 Military’s requirements for 37–38 racial diversity in 51–58 return of 141–142 See also “deathly battle pictures”; history painting Caravaggio, Michelangelo 46–47 castration 151, 159n18 Cézanne, Paul 64–65, 68, 78, 79, 134 Chandra Bose, Subhas 56 “Child Nippon” (Kodomo Nippon; film) 36–37, 160n41 See also Contemporary Japan Chino Kaori 7, 9–10, 156n21 Chiossone, Edoardo 12 Cold War System 5, 7–8, 128, 151 Collin, Raphaël 13–14 commemorative portraits (kinen shōzōga) 64 Communism 15, 38, 128, 147, 160n51 Contemporary Japan (Gendai Nihon; film) 36–37, 36–37, 160n41 “cut-flower art” (kiribanateki geijutsu) 41

B Badoud, Loucie 31, 32 Ba Maw 51, 56, 162n92 Barr, Alfred H. Jr. 133–34 “beauty of health” (kenkōsei no bi) 103–4 See also folk craft movement; health politics; Shikiba Ryūzaburō Bijutsuka no sessō. See “Artists’ morality” Bijutsu Shinkō Chōsakai. See Research Group for Promoting Art bikō kaikaku. See art-school reform

D Dadaism 15, 70 Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō. See First Higher School Daitōa kyōeiken. See Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere Daitōa Sensō. See Greater East Asian War Daitōa Sensō Bijutsuten. See Greater East Asian War Art Exhibition Danseigaku. See men’s and masculinities studies David, Jacques-Louis 42 See also history painting

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E Emperor Hirohito 5–7, 23, 24, 139, 141, 150, 155n10, 159n4 Empress Jingū 12 Essay Note 106, 115, 148 See also Matsumoto Shunsuke eugenics (yūseigaku; minzoku eisei) 41, 101–3, 123, 167nn33–34, 167n41 Exhibition of European Masterpieces (Taisei meigaten) 131–32 Exposition Internationale de l’Art Actuel (Sekai kyō no bijutsu ten) 135

Asia depicted by 33–37, 54–58 Attu Island Gyokusai 24–25, 48–51 autobiography written by 33, 160n35 Battle on the Bank of the Haluha 47–48, 161n81 canvas ground invented by 30–31, 159n19 conception of art diplomacy addressed by 33–36 death of 142–45, 172n65 European paintings appropriated by 56–57 as film director 36–37, 160n41 French citizenship of 128, 143–44, 159n5 gender roles played by 30–32, 159n22 Hariu Ichirō’s argument of 141–42, 144 Japanese media response to 32–33 Kikuhata Mokuma’s evaluation of 150–51, 174n93 as official war painter 23–24, 47–51 Orientalism and 30–31, 32–37 in Paris 30–32, 40–41 public persona cultivated by 30–32, 33–35, 40 racial stereotyping of 36–37, 49, 55–58 Sacred Soldier to the Rescue 54–58 Sawaragi Noi’s historicization of 152 Fukai Eigo 63–64, 73, 86 See also under Yasui Sōtarō Fukuda Heihachirō 164n18 Fukuzawa Ichirō 72, 160n51 Fūzoku Nippon. See “Picturesque Japan”

F “family state” (kazoku kokka) 12 Fautrier, Jean 135 Female figure in Bohemian Paris 12–14, 27–32 in campaign-record painting 53–58 as carrier of Western values 17–18 in Fujita Tsuguharu’s painting 31–32, 54–58 in Kuroda Seiki’s painting 12–14, 26–28 in Yasui Sōtarō’s painting 66–67, 74–75 feminist art history 9–10, 156n22 Fifteen-Year War. See Asia-Pacific War First Higher School (Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō) 84, 129, 165n55 folk craft movement (mingei undō) 98, 103–4, 135–36, 160n36, 168n45, 171n38, 172n52 See also Shikiba Ryūzaburō; Yanagi Sōetsu Forbidden City 80–81 “foundational narrative” 5–7, 150, 155n10 “freak discourse” 104–5, 123, 139 Foujita, Léonardo. See Fujita Tsuguharu Fujishima Takeji 96 Fujita Tsuguharu “Artists’ morality” and 127 as anti-war artist 24, 50

G Gakushūin (school) 67–68 See also Shirakaba School Gauguin, Paul 56 Gendai Nihon. See Contemporary Japan Géricault, Théodore 42, 47 See also history painting Gérôme, Jean-Léon 13 Gogh, Vincent van concept of genius and 15, 97–98, 166n14 influence on the Shirakaba School 68, 96, 97–98, 130 reception in Japan 97–98, 131, 166n15 Shikiba Ryūzaburō’s study on 97–98 Yamashita Kiyoshi and 94, 95, 96, 135, 166n7 Gotō Shintarō 68 Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken) 17, 24–25 Greater East Asian War (Daitōa Sensō) 39 See also Asia-Pacific War Greater East Asian War Art Exhibition (Daitōa Sensō Bijutsuten) 43 Great German Art Exhibition 103 See also Nazi art Great Kantō Earthquake 15, 70 Greece 116–22

da Vinci, Leonardo 42, 68 “deathly battle pictures” 24, 47–51, 57, 145, 150–52, 161n81, 174n93 Degenerate Art Exhibition 103 See also Nazi art Delacroix, Eugène 42, 47 See also history painting Den’en Nippon. See “Rural Japan” Derain, André 132 Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai. See Independent Art Association Domon Ken 77–80, 127–28 Dōshinkai. See Likeminded Society Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 112 Dubuffet, Jean 135, 136–37, 172n42 Dürer, Albrecht 15

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Independent Art Association (Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai) 76, 165n39 See also “Japanization of yōga” Information Bureau of Shanghai (Shanhai Jōhōkyoku) 37 See also campaign-record painting; Military Information Bureau “internal émigré” 5–6, 7, 19, 62 ireme (inserted eyes) 96 Ise Shrine 81–82, 169n87 Ishii Hakutei 44, 49, 66 Ishikawa Kōichi 133–34 Issui-kai 73, 163n13 Itō Ren 96 Iwamura Tōru 26–27, 159n12

Gros, Antoine-Jean 42 See also history painting Grosz, George 106–7 Guadalcanal, Battle of 45 gyokusai (“gem-smashing”) 48, 49 H Hadaka no taishō. See Naked General, The Hanasaku minato. See Port of Flowers, The hari-e 91, 94, 138–39 Hariu Ichirō 132, 141, 144, 172n54 Hasegawa Haruko 18 Hatakeyama Shōroku 147 Hayami Gyoshū 164n18 health politics 41, 93, 101–5 Hijikata Teiichi 144, 146–48, 173nn73–74, 174n76 hikokumin (unpatriotic folk) 67, 102, 114 Hiragushi Denchū 87 Hirohito. See Emperor Hirohito Hiroshima 4–5, 151–52, 154n8, 174n85 Hiroshima Peace Memorial 4–5, 154n8 “historical revisionism” (rekishi shūseishugi) 151, 174nn98–99 history painting 41–47, 165n33 Holy Resurrection Cathedral (Nikorai-dō) 119, 169n94 Holy War Art Exhibition (Seisen Bijutsuten) 37, 42, 47, 165n33 Homosociality (homosocial) 7, 87, 139 Honda Kōtarō 62, 64 Horikawa Hiromichi 137, 172n44 Horiuchi Kimiyo 33 Hosokawa Moritatsu 68, 69, 71, 74, 85, 87–88, 164n16, 164n24, 164n26 “Hottentot” 57, 162n103 House of Growth (Seichō-no-Ie) 106, 115

J jahs . See Japan Art History Society Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin) 88 Japan Art History Society (jahs ) 7–9, 155n14 Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) 71, 164n16, 164n24, 166n64 Japan Arts Exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai, Nitten) 88, 166n68 Japan Art Society (Nihon Bijutsukai) 127, 146 Japanese-style painting (Nihonga) 12, 16, 69, 70, 158n45 “Japanization of yōga” (yōga no Nihonka) 76, 78, 165n39 Joryū Bijutsuka Hōkōtai. See Women Artists Service Corps See also feminist art history jūgun ianfu. See “military comfort women” K Kanagawa Museum of Modern Art. See Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama Katsura Imperial Villa 81–82, 165n48 Kawabata Ryūshi 96, 104, 123, 160n55 Kawaji Ryūkō 32 Kawata Akihisa 8–9, 16, 24, 38–39, 49, 92, 116, 121–22, 157n32 kazoku kokka. See “family state” Kazuki Yasuo 6 kenkō hōkoku (devotion to the nation through being healthy) 102 kenkōsei no bi. See “beauty of health” See also Shikiba Ryūzaburō; Yanagi Sōetsu Kido Kōichi 102 Kikuhata Mokuma 150–52, 174n93 See also Fujita Tsuguharu; Sawaragi Noi Kimagure bijutsukan. See “Whimsical Museum” Kimura Shōhachi 37 kinen shōzōga. See commemorative portraits Kinoshita Keisuke 1–2, 18, 154n3 kiribanateki geijutsu. See “cut-flower art” Kishida Ryūsei 15, 68, 163n13 Kitagawa Tamiji 96

I Ichihara Toyota 84 ichioku gyokusai (the shattering of the hundred million like a beautiful jewel). See gyokusai Ihara Usaburō 73, 88, 96, 150n55, 162n92 Ikebukuro Monparunasu. See Ikebukuro Montparnasse Ikebukuro Montparnasse (Ikebukuro Monparunasu) 112– 13, 115, 168n69 Ikite iru gaka. See “Living Painter, the” Image and Gender Research Group (Imēji & Jendā Kenkyūkai) 9–10, 156n22 Imaizumi Atsuo 57–58, 65–66, 77, 79, 129, 133–134, 135, 136, 165n44 Imēji & Jendā Kenkyūkai. See Image and Gender Research Group Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Geijutsuin) 24, 43, 63, 88 Imperial Artist (Teishitsu gigeiin) 63, 87, 164n26 Imperial Fine Arts Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) 63, 70, 71, 163n13

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Lequeux, Madeleine 32, 33 Likeminded Society (Dōshinkai) 129 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (exhibition) 151–52 See also Murakami Takashi; Sawaragi Noi “Living Painter, the” (Ikiteiru gaka) 107–10, 112, 146–47 See also Matsumoto Shunsuke Lombroso, Cesare 166n14 “long postwar, Japan’s” 128–29, 170n9 “Luxury is the Enemy” (Zeitaku wa tekida) 67, 163n9

Kobayakawa Atsushirō 160n55 Kobayashi Hideo 96 Kobayashi Keiju 137, 172n47 Kobayashi Kokei 68, 85, 87 Kodama Kibō 127, 170n5 Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu, gaka wa nani o subekika? See “National Defense State and Art: What Should Painters Do?” Kodomo Nippon. See “Child Nippon” Koiso Memorial Museum 7–8 Koiso Ryōhei 7–8, 24, 51–52, 160n55 Kojima Kikuo art-school reform and 70–71, 87–89 as member of Shirakaba School 68–69, 70–71, 83–89 campaign-record painting evaluated by 42, 165n33 concept of “neo-realism” addressed by 72, 74 in Germany 68 Ihara Usaburō evaluated by 73 Matsuda Reorganization and 70–71 Portrait of Chin-Jung evaluated by 74–75 Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo evaluated by 73–74 Portrait of Professor Tamamushi evaluated by 72, 164n28 Twenty-fifth Day Society and 85–88 Kojima Kiyofumi 23, 52–53 Kokka sōdōinhō. See National Mobilization Law kokumin fuku. See “national costume” Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō. See National Spiritual Mobilization Movement Kokumin Sōryoku Kessen Bijutsuten. See National All-Out Battle Art Exhibition Kokumin tairyokuhō. See National Physical Strength Law Kokumin yūseihō. See National Eugenics Law Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai. See Society for International Cultural Relations Komiya Toyotaka 69, 87–88, 163n5 Konoe Fumimaro 83 Kōseishō. See Welfare Ministry Kubodera Yasuhisa 102–3, 167n41 Kuboshima Seiichirō 152–53, 175n104 Kume Keiichirō 26 Kuo Po-chuan 80 Kure Shūzō 97 Kurihara Shin 160n55 Kuroda Seiki 13–14, 17, 18, 26–29, 70, 157n36 Kyūshū-ha. See Kyūshū School Kyūshū School (Kyūshū-ha) 150, 174n91 See also Kikuhata Mokuma

M MacArthur, Douglas 5, 7, 139, 155n10 See also American Occupation Maekawa Kunio 133 Male Figure in European art history 11, 156n28 scholarship on 11–12, 156n28, 157n31 as subject of yōga 12, 14–15, 18–19 Manchukuo 4, 23, 35 Manchurian Incident 35, 154n6, 169n74 Manet, Édouard 56, 162n103 Man of Genius (book) 166n14 Maruki Toshihiro 12 Mathieu, Georges 135 Matisse, Henri 39, 129, 131–32 Matsuhara Hisato 64 Matsuda Genji 70–71 Matsuda kaiso. See Matsuda Reorganization Matsuda Reorganization 70–71, 163n13, 164n24 Matsumoto Shunsuke cityscape made by 106–7, 109, 111–12, 147–48, 169n94 concept of insanity addressed by 112–16 early life of 106 family portrait by 107, 111, 118–22, 148, 169n81 Five 107–8, 111, 118–22, 148, 169nn91–93 Greece and 116–22 hearing disorder of 3, 21, 92, 106, 110–11, 115, 168n63 Hijitaka Teiichi’s evaluation of 146–48 Ikebukuro Montparnasse and 113–15 Matsumoto Kan and 115, 118–21, 169n81 Matsumoto Teiko and 106, 115, 118–21, 147, 148 Murai Hiroya’s interpretation of 110–12, 117, 118–19, 121 as patriarch 118–122, 148 political standing of 92, 106–10, 114, 118, 146–49, 169n87 Standing Figure 92, 93, 107, 109–10, 116, 147 Sunouchi Tōru’s evaluation of 110, 147 Three 107–8, 111, 118–22, 148, 169nn91–93 Yamashita Kiyoshi and 105–6, 110–12, 115–16, 117, 119, 122

L Law for the Confinement and Protection of the Mentally Ill 101 Law of Elementary School 101 League of Nation 36 Le Corbusier 133

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National Eugenics Law (Kokumin yūseihō) 41, 102–4, 123, 167nn33–34 National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōinhō) 160n54 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo architecture of 133, 171n26 display of the permanent collection at 5–6, 145, 155n12 renewal of 6 155n12 treatment of campaign-record painting 5–6, 145–46, 155n12 See also Imaizumi Atsuo National Physical Strength Law (Kokumin tairyokuhō) 41, 102 National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō) 16, 67, 102 “nation of culture” (bunka kokka) 89, 129 See also “Old Liberalists” Natsume Sōseki 129, 165n55 Nazi art 3, 24, 101, 103 Nazi Germany 17, 24, 38, 39 New Order in East Asia (Tōa shinchitsujo) 39 Nichidō Gallery 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich 79 Nihon Bijutsuin. See Japan Art Institute Nihon Bijutsukai. See Japan Art Society Nihon bijutsu tenrankai. See Japan Arts Exhibition Nihonga. See Japanese-style painting Nihon Geijutsuin. See Japan Art Academy Nii Itaru 16 Nijūgo Nichi-kai. See Twenty-fifth Day Society Nika-kai. See Nika Society Nika Society (Nika-kai) 33, 134, 163n13, 169n91 Nikorai-dō. See Holy Resurrection Cathedral Nippon (magazine) 36, 160n40 Nishida Kitarō 81–82 Nitchū Sensō. See Second Sino-Japanese War Nitten. See Japan Arts Exhibition Noda Hideo 106–7 Nomiyama Gyōji 24, 152–53 Nomonhan, Battle of 47–48, 161n81 See also Ogisu Rippei

Matsuzawa Hospital 102 Mavo 158n43 Meiji Emperor 12 Meiji Period 12, 15, 70 men’s and masculinities studies (danseigaku) 11 Mental Hospital Act 101 “military comfort women” (jūgun ianfu) 7, 10, 53, 151, 156n23 Military Information Bureau 2, 6, 23, 37–38, 53 mingei undō. See folk craft movement Ministry of Education’s annual exhibition (Japanese National Art Salon) 16, 88–89, 157n36, 166n68 minzoku eisei. See eugenics Miyake Kokki 67 Miyamoto Saburō Caucasian physique and 42–47 in Europe 39, 42 Fujita Tsuguharu and 143–44 Hunger and Thirst 45–47 Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival, The 43–45, 66 Miyata Shigeo 127 Mizuki Yōko 137 monpe 67, 119, 163n10 Mori Ōgai 166n15 Mugonkan. See Voiceless Museum Mukai Junkichi 1–3, 18–19, 53, 154n4, 160n55 Murakami Takashi 151–152, 161n90, 174n99 Murayama Kaita 158n42 Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama 131–32, 146 See also Hijikata Teiichi Mushanokōji Saneatsu 68, 77, 83, 84, 164n19 N Nagayo Matarō 64 Nagayo Yoshirō 68 Nakagawa Ichirō 142 Nakagawa Kigen 32 Nakahara Yūsuke 141 Nakamura Ken’ichi 160n55 Naked General, The (Hadaka no taishō) 135, 137–40 Nan’yō Bijutsu Kyōkai. See South Seas Art Association Nanbata Tatsuoki 116–17, 169n80 National All-Out Battle Art Exhibition (Kokumin Sōryoku Kessen Bijutsuten) 48 National Conscription Ordinance (Kokumin chōheirei) 160n54 “national costume” (kokumin fuku) 67, 163n10 “National Defense State and Art: What Should Painters Do?” (“Kōdo kokubō kokka to bijutsu, gaka wa nani o subekika?”) 108, 112, 168n57 See also “Living Painter, the”; Matsumoto Shunsuke

O Odagiri Mineko 69, 74–75 See also under Yasui Sōtarō Oda Tatsurō 127 Ogisu Rippei 47–48 Oguma Hideo 113 Old Liberalists 129–30, 166n55, 170n14 Olympia 56, 162n103 Order of Culture (bunka kunshō) 63 Orientalism (Orientalist) 30–32, 35–37, 55–57, 80, 83, 165n43

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Satō Chōzan 68 Satō Kei 160n55 Sawa Hajime 76 Sawaragi Noi 148, 152, 161n90 See also Kikuhata Mokuma; Little Boy Second Sino-Japanese War (Nitchū Sensō) 3, 4, 6, 16, 37, 38, 66, 71, 143, 154n6 See also Asia-Pacific War Seichō-no-Ie. See House of Growth Seikō-kai. See Pure Light Society Seisen Bijutsuten. See Holy War Art Exhibition Seiyōga. See Western-style painting Sekai kyō no bijutsu ten. See Exposition Internationale de l’Art Actuel sensōga. See campaign-record painting sensō kirokuga. See campaign-record painting Sensō to bijutsu. See “War and Art” Shanhai Jōhōkyoku. See Information Bureau of Shanghai Shashin shūhō. See Photo Weekly Shashihintō seizō hanbai seigen kisoku. See Regulations on Restricting the Manufacture and Sale of Luxury Goods Shiga Naoya 68, 84, 164n19, 165n53 Shigemitsu Mamoru 84 Shikiba Ryūzaburō folk craft movement and 98, 103–4, 135–36, 171n38 Gogh and 98 as guardian of Yamashita Kiyoshi 135, 167n22, 171n33 Nishōtei evaluated by 98–99, 167n25 political conversion of 100–101 Shimada Yoshiko 156n23 Shimazaki Keiji 146 Shimizu Toshi 7–9, 38, 173n70 Shirakaba-ha. See Shirakaba School Shirakaba School (Shirakaba-ha) concept of self 14–15, 68, 130 foundation of 68 Gogh envisioned by 97 issuance of Shirakaba by 68 political standing of 83–84 Yasui’s portraits and 84–86 See also “Old Liberalists” shōkokumin (small nation) 121 Shōwa Emperor. See Emperor Hirohito Socialism 15 Social Realism 16, 70, 72 Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai) 36, 160n40 Shōgoin Yōga Kenkyūjo 64, 78 South Seas Art Association (Nan’yō Bijutsu Kyōkai) 55–56 “Southward” (nanpō) 55–56, 162n99

Ōshita Masao 96 Ozawa Eitarō 1 P Pacific War 1, 3, 38–41, 152, 154n6 See also Asia-Pacific War Pacific Yōga Society (Taiheiyō yōga kenkyūjo) 106 Paris 13–14, 26–32, 38–41, 42, 64, 68, 78, 113, 135, 158n38, 159nn12–13, 159n18 patriarchal order 10, 64, 75, 89, 119, 121–22, 124 Pearl Harbor 4, 17, 39 Percival, Arthur Ernest 43–44 See also under Miyamoto Saburō “period of Yasui and Umehara, the” (Yasui Umehara jidai) 61, 63, 82 Photo Weekly (Shashin shūhō) 162n101 Picasso, Pablo 39, 129, 131, 132 “Picturesque Japan” (Fūzoku Nippon; film) 36, 160n41 Piero della Francesca 116 Pissarro, Camille 64 Port of Flowers, The (Hanasaku minato; film) 1–2 Prinzhorn, Hans 98, 103 Psychiatry 97–98, 101 See also Shikiba Ryūzaburō Pure Light Society (Seikō-kai) 68–69, 70–71, 72, 130 R race hygiene. See eugenics Regulations on Restricting the Manufacture and Sale of Luxury Goods (Shashihintō seizō hanbai seigen kisoku) 67 rekishi shūseishugi. See “historical revisionism” Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 14, 15, 78, 79 Research Group for Promoting Art (Bijutsu Shinkō Chōsakai) 71, 164n26 “reverse course, the” 128 Rikubun bijutsu kyōkai. See Army Art Association Rikugun Bijutsuten. See Army Art Exhibition Rodin, Auguste 14, 15, 28, 39, 68, 130 Rouault, Georges Henri 131 Rubens, Peter Paul 42 “Rural Japan” (Den’en Nippon; film) 36, 160n41 S Sakakura Junzō 132–33 Sakamoto Hanjirō 68 sakusen kirokuga. See campaign-record painting Salon d’Automne 26, 32 Sanami Tōru 132, 146 Sannenkai. See Three Year Society São Paulo Art Biennial 140 Satō Akira 106

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Tsuchida Bakusen 68 Tsuruta Gorō 160n55, 170n5 Twenty-fifth Day Society (Nijūgo Nichi-kai) 85–87

“spaces of femininity, the” 18 “spaces of masculinity, the” 18–19 “special children” (tokui jidō) 94–96, 102–5, 112, 122–23 Suda Kunitarō 41 Sugiura Yukio 17 Sunouchi Tōru 110, 147–48 “Superflat” 152, 161n90 See also Murakami Takashi Surrealism 6, 38, 70, 72, 99–101, 112, 160n51, 166n1 Suzuki Kurazō 108, 112, 168n57 Suzuki Makoto 142, 155n12, 162n95 Suzuki Ryōzō 162n95 Suzuki Shigeyoshi 160n41 Suzuki Tsugio 162n95

U Uchida Iwao 7 Uehara Ken 1 Umehara Ryūzaburō in Beijing 80, 83 as “Dionysian” 79–80, 165n44 evaluation of Yamashita by 96 “Japanization of yōga” and 78 Orientalism in 80–82, 165n43 political standing of 131, 165n43 School reform and 87 Shirakaba School and 68, 71, 83, 129–30, 164n19 Yasui Sōtarō and 78–82, 129–30, 134, 166n68 U.S. Occupation of Japan. See American Occupation Utrillo, Maurice 132

T Taiheiyō yōga kenkyūjo. See Pacific Yōga Society Taisei meigaten. See Exhibition of European Masterpieces Taishō culturalism (Taishō kyōyōshugi) 164n19, 165n55 Taishō kyōyōshugi. See Taishō culturalism Takamura Kōtarō 28, 30, 31, 39–40, 47, 51, 58, 68–69, 83, 159n18, 164n18 Takiguchi Shūzō 160n51 Tamamushi Ichirōichi 64, 69, 72, 164n28 See also under Yasui Sōtarō Tamura Kōnosuke 54, 160n55 Tanaka Hisao 8, 50 Tanaka Jō 144, 148–49 Tanaka Saichirō 160n55 Tanikawa Tetsuzō 84, 96, 105 Tan’o Yasunori 8 Tapié, Michel 171n31 Taut, Bruno 81–82 Teikoku Bijutsuin. See Imperial Fine Arts Academy Teikoku Geijutsuin. See Imperial Art Academy Teishitsu gigeiin. See Imperial Artist Three Year Society (Sannenkai) 83–84, 129, 165n53 Tōa shinchitsujo. See New Order in East Asia Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts 7 Togawa Yukio 94–95, 96, 102, 122–23, 166n5, 167n39, 171n33 Tōhoku Imperial University 68, 69 Tokugawa Kuniyuki 86 tokui jidō. See “special children” Tokutomi Sohō 84 Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō. See Tokyo School of Fine Arts Tokyo Imperial University (Tokyo Teikoku Diagaku) 64, 67–68, 85, 129, 146, 164n19, 165n55 Tokyo National Museum 129 Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) 14, 26, 38, 63, 70, 73, 75, 87–89, 152, 157n36, 166n63 Tokyo Teikoku Diagaku. See Tokyo Imperial University Tomiyama Taeko 156n23

V Venice Biennale 140 Voiceless Museum 152–53, 166n1 W Wakakuwa Midori 10, 13, 18, 19 “War and Art” (Sensō to bijutsu; symposium) 7, 9 war art (sensō bijutsu) 3, 4–9, 172n53 See also campaign-record painting war-documentary painting. See campaign-record painting war painting. See campaign-record painting “wartime” (period) 154n6 Watsuji Tetsurō 84 Welfare Ministry (Kōseishō) 101, 167n34 Western-style painting (Seiyōga, yōga) as “cut-flower art” 41 definition of 12 development of 12–16 Pacific War and 17–18, 39–41 treatment of the male figure in 11–15, 18–19 “Whimsical Museum” (Kimagure bijutsukan) 148 Wölfflin, Heinrich 68 Women Artists Service Corps (Joryū Bijutsuka Hōkōtai) 18 Y Yamaguchi Bunzō 77 Yamamoto Hōsui 26 Yamashita Kikuji 53 Yamashita Kiyoshi asexuality of 136, 139, 140, 172n51 concept of genius and 96–97, 104, 105 early life and art training of 94–95

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in nationalistic discourses 80–82 painting method of 65 Portrait of Chin-Jung 69, 72, 73, 74–75 Portrait of Mr. Fukai Eigo 63, 65–66, 73–74, 131 Portrait of Professor Tamamushi 62, 65–66, 69, 72, 73, 164n28 postwar popularity of 129 public image of 75–82, 130–31 Shirakaba School and 63, 67, 68–69, 82–89 studio of 77–78, 79, 86–87, 88 Umehara Ryūzaburō and 78–82, 129–30, 134, 166n68 Yamashita Kiyoshi and 95–96, 105–6, 123 Yawata gakuen. See Yawata Institute Yawata Institute 91, 94, 96, 101, 102–4, 122–23, 135, 166n5 yōga. See Western-style painting Yokoyama Taikan 16–17, 70–71, 85–87, 127, 164n16, 164n24, 166n64, 170n5 Yorozu Tetsugorō 68 Yoshioka Kenji 160n55 Yuki. See Badoud, Loucie yūseigaku. See eugenics

as the “freak” 104, 123, 139–40 media craze of 94–95, 135 nakedness of 136, 139–40 postwar “discovery” of 135 Shikiba Ryūzaburō’s characterization of 135–36 in “special children” exhibition 95–97 as symbol of Japanese innocence 136, 139 as “the Japanese van Gogh” 95, 135, 166n7 in The Naked General 137–39 wandering of 122, 135, 137–39 Yasui Sōtarō’s evaluation of 95–96, 123 Yamashita Tomoyuki 43 See also under Miyamoto Saburō Yamazaki Yasuyo 48 See also under “deathly battle pictures” Yanagi Ryō 31, 79–80, 134 Yanagi Sōetsu 68, 91, 98, 99, 103, 171n38 Yasuda Yukihiko 68, 85, 87 Yasui Sōtarō as “Apollonian” 79–80 early career of 64–65 in history of modern art 133–34 individual style of 64–65 as “internal émigré” 62 “Japanization of yōga” and 72 Kojima Kikuo’s evaluation of 71–75 as Kyoto person 76–77

Z Zakkichō. See Essay Note Zauhō Kankōkai 130

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