Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) was a Japanese philosopher who pioneered the influential aesthetic concept and artistic movement known as Mingei, “folk craft.” Beginning in the 1920s, Yanagi began to champion the beauty of common, utilitarian art. The Mingei style stands in contrast to both fine art—art for art’s sake, where the artist’s reputation inheres in the work—and the mass-produced commodities of industrial production that increasingly predominated.

In Allen Weiss’s forthcoming book on Kyoto’s artistic landscape, Illusory Dwellings, he writes about the unease with which modern Western art categories contain Japanese aesthetics. There is, on the one hand, a question of what constitutes the avant-garde and the traditional in a particular national canon.

Steve Beimel, a long-time resident of Kyoto, is the driving force behind JapanCraft21, whose goal is to preserve and nourish Japanese crafts. Here he discusses the variety and significance of crafts in Japan and what makes them so special.