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. But the modern is more than a chronology: it’s also a set of assumptions about representation. The museum is exemplary of a certain modernist ideal: it is accessible, democratic, and illuminated literally and figuratively. In contrast, Weiss notes that “many of the greatest works of Japanese art are veiled in secrecy, hidden in temple storerooms, to be displayed once a year in the annual airing ceremony, if at all.” Many art forms would seem constitutionally opposed to exhibition; instead of attempting to control the terms of the engagement, the shifting circumstance is central to the appreciation of those forms. Weiss continues:
One resultant injustice is that so many Japanese artists who have attempted to engage with Western art are seen abroad as merely derivative of European and American traditions, while many who have received recognition abroad have done so precisely because of those traditional characteristics that have remained in their works, regardless of the extent to which these artists rebelled against such traditionalism.
What I want to explore here is a sort of prehistory. Debates about the modern and traditional, the West and the East were central to Japanese discourse from the very earliest point of its rupture from the old, feudal order. The Meiji was not only a period of dramatic political change, it was also a cultural inflection point. The drive toward “civilization and enlightenment” often meant that Western cultural forms were adopted at the expense of traditional Japanese ones. It was at once an ideological matter and a structural one. Systems of aristocratic patronage to the fine arts and artisans disappeared with the dismantling of feudal classes. Industrialization, the sine qua non of modernization, put pressure on traditional craftsmen whose skilled, laborious work could not match the efficiency of mechanized production.
It is in this tumult that Western academics and advisors were invited to Japan in order to guide its development. The fine arts were no exception. Three Italian instructors in painting and sculpture were given appointments at the Imperial Engineering College in 1876. They were to teach specifically the artistic techniques of their native Europe, ironically, at the same time as western Europe was beginning its fascination with japonisme. (And it’s no coincidence, as Japanese craftsmen were impelled to sell to export markets.) Erwin Bälz, a German physician among those Westerners who came to Japan, noted that “in the 1870's at the outset of the modern era, Japan went through a strange period in which she felt contempt for her own native achievements.”
A feeling emerged among Japanese and foreign observers that Western modernity was coming at the expense of Japan’s distinctive cultural innovations. A contingent of American academics who came to Japan for reasons not at all related to the arts would become champions of traditional and, as they saw it, dying art forms. Edward Morse arrived in 1877 as a foreign advisor in zoology. His post at Tokyo Imperial University would precipitate a series of encounters beginning with marine biology, to the excavation of the shell mounds around Tokyo, to a deep personal interest in Japanese pottery. It was said of Morse by his contemporaries that “‘the kinds [of pottery] he wanted are those bearing potters'-marks and specimens from every kiln and for every kind of use, all in the tradition of that old Japan of which he so keenly lamented the passing.’” Morse would enlist another American to his cause, Ernest Fenollosa, who came to teach philosophy at Tokyo Imperial in 1878 but would, as Morse did, make a lateral move through aesthetics to the arts as such.
Fenollosa became quickly enamored of Japanese art, specifically the painting of the Kano school. In 1882 he delivered a well-received lecture entitled “An Explanation of Truth in Art.” The lecture’s loftier aims aside—he outlines a general theory of art, its development in a Hegelian mode, and enumerates the qualities necessary for “Unity and Beauty”—Fenollosa offers praise for Eastern art, even asserts its superiority, and cautions against merely imitating Western styles. To conclude, Fenollosa offers some practical recommendations: establish a school of art, subsidize young artists, and foster the appreciation of art among the public.
In attendance were an array of sympathetic and influential Japanese, including members of the organization Ryuchikai (later the Japan Art Association, a group linked with the Imperial household, advocating for traditional Japanese art and craft) and ministers in the Meiji government. Clearly there was a shift occurring away from unexamined westernization, of which Fenollosa’s contribution was one expression. Then again, these foreign voices were uniquely capable of articulating a defense of Japanese tradition that couldn’t immediately be accused of insular reaction.
It is here that the pivotal figure of Okakura Kakuzo enters. Okakura was fluent in English from an early age, making him particularly well equipped to create the bridge between the two cultures. His path crossed that of Fenollosa at Tokyo Imperial University, where he was a student and interpreter of Fenollosa. They continued their collaboration through the 1880s, working primarily within the Ministry of Education, before leaving to research art education in Europe. Okakura was inspired by French and Italian efforts to catalog and preserve their national cultural properties; upon their return he and Fenollosa organized a survey of temples, shrines, and private collections throughout Japan but especially in the Kyoto-Nara area. Okakura’s influence over the direction of visual arts was strongly felt. As head of the Tokyo Fine Arts School and later the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) he established a curriculum devoted to national styles. A group of painters emerged around him who championed Nihonga (literally “Japanese painting”), a new style that was nevertheless contrasted with the emerging set of Japanese painters using Western technique.
Okakura was no doubt a nationalist but shouldn’t be read as a conservative, and certainly not a chauvinist. Rather his role as a national champion can only be understood in the face of modernization—forced at first but then adopted—that seemed to lead only to imitation, a criticism shared by Fenollosa. I think ultimately they are grappling with the same question Weiss is, how can the non-Western subject participate in the modern when modernity is seen as always already Western? Although Okakura and Fenollosa are allied in this, they don’t seem to come to the same conclusions. Fenollosa begins by identifying a shortcoming in Western art history, from Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912): “Oriental Art has been excluded from most serious art history because of the supposition that its law and form were incommensurate with established European classes.” His approach to this impasse is to create, as his lecture suggests, a total system of art to contain “the real and larger unity of effort that underlies the vast number of technical varieties.” For Okakura, the answer lies in a return to the singularity of Japanese traditional art forms for a new epoch, just as the Meiji Restoration restored the old emperor in a modern polity. From Ideals of the East (1903):
“With the Revolution, Japan, it is true, returns upon her past, seeking there for the new vitality she needs. Like all genuine restorations, it is a reaction with a difference. . . . We know instinctively that in our history lies the secret of our future, and we grope with a blind intensity to find the clue. But if the thought be true, if there be indeed any spring of renewal hidden in our past, we must admit that it needs at this moment some mighty reinforcement, for the scorching drought of modern vulgarity is parching the throat of life and art.”
*This piece was informed by Geoffrey R. Scott’s “The Cultural Property Laws of Japan: Social, Political, and Legal Influences” in Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 12 No.2 (2003) and J. Thomas Rimer’s “Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth in Art” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation(2002).
