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.