Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan
... In addition to those nine peer-reviewed articles discussed above, we were able to locate a few books during the same period of time (e.g., Chung, 2012;Shin, Lim, Bae-Dimitriadis, & Lee, 2017;Jesty, 2018). However, a limited number of publications shows an obvious lack of research and practices of teaching East Asian in the extant art education research. ...
Drawing from the rich philosophical traditions of East Asia, we redress the questions and inquiry methods of teaching about East Asian artists and their works in the classroom, rejecting European White master frameworks when appreciating the arts of East Asia. To illustrate our approach, we have chosen two contemporary Asian artists, Do-ho Suh and Wou-Ki Zao, and we discuss why and how European White pedagogy has limitations in appreciating these works. As an alternative, we focus on a holistic lens of viewing East Asian artistic expressions, which is one of the key methods to understand artworks by many East Asian artists (Sullivan & Vainker, 2018; Stanley-Baker, 2014). To make East Asian art curriculum culturally responsive and authentic, we suggest that art educators adopt the holistic approach of teaching the East Asian art, in which art is seamlessly weaved with worldview, culture, and philosophy as one.
... Their promotion of capitalist power contradicted the Marxist idea of educating the masses, which was widely shared among postwar documentary circles (Irie 2006, p. 248;Hani 2012, p. 31). Where other artist groups could intervene in education or the regional avant-garde, using reportage and social realism as a means of social "engagement" (Jesty 2018), documentary filmmakers at companies such as Iwanami Productions, Nihon Eigasha, and Shin Riken Eiga Kaisha worked in the service of the high-growth capitalist economy. This contradiction prompted artistic and ethical debates among documentary makers from the early sixties, such as those published in Kiroku eiga (Yamane 1993). ...
The documentary mode has not had the recognition it deserves in the western historiography of Japanese cinema [...]
... Art critic Yoshie Yoshida published the first analysis of its kind in 1996 (Yoshida 1996), followed by Setsuko Kozawa, who meticulously placed the Hiroshima Panels in the history of Japan's postwar art and thoughts (Kozawa 2002). For analyses written in English, see Dower (1990) and Jesty (2018). 2 The Marukis recall the details and processes of the production of the Hiroshima Panels in Maruki (1958) and Maruki (1988). ...
Experiencing the atrocities in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, Chinese-ink painter Iri Maruki and oil painter Toshi Maruki began their collaboration on the Hiroshima Panels in 1950. During the occupation of Japan by the Allied powers, when reporting on the atomic bombing was strictly prohibited, the panels played a crucial role in making known the hidden nuclear sufferings through a nationwide tour. In 1953, the panels began a ten-year tour of about 20 countries, mainly in East Asia and Europe, and disseminated the stories of the sufferings in the age of the US-Soviet arms race. Acquiring perspectives that transcended national borders and ethnicities through dialogues with many people in these exhibitions, the Marukis embarked on collaborations in a new direction in the 1970s with their emphasis on complex realities of war in which the victim/perpetrator dichotomy was not clear-cut and on other forms of violence such as pollution and discrimination. The forceful images of the paintings give us an opportunity to know the memories of the dead that would otherwise be doomed to be erased from our collective memory, and to stimulate our imagination to recognize that we are always facing the problem of life. Understanding the “memories” that we have never experienced would constitute a torch to survive hardships in this world.
В 2021 году Приморская государственная картинная галерея отметила свой 55-летний юбилей выставкой «Пятьдесят пять историй». Каждый из показанных экспонатов имел особенную историю: провенанса, реставрации, атрибуции и т. п. Так сотрудники галереи решили рассказать зрителям о внутренней жизни музея и хранящихся в нем предметах. Два черно-белых рисунка Ири Маруки (1901–1995) и Тоси Маруки (1912–2000), переданные в дар галерее, дали возможность рассказать об одной из первых экспозиций иностранных художников, состоявшейся во Владивостоке в 1990 году. Статья посвящена описанию выставки, подаренных Приморской галерее экспонатов, их места в творчестве художников, японском и мировом искусстве. Сведения о представленных в статье графических произведениях вводятся в научный оборот впервые. Актуальность этой работы обусловлена, с одной стороны, исследовательским интересом к недостаточно изученным процессам взаимовлияния японского и западноевропейского искусства, а с другой стороны, современным историко-культурным контекстом, в котором выставка японских художников Ири и Тоси Маруки в России представляется свидетельством нерушимых творческих связей двух стран, а ее тематика — напоминанием об истинных ценностях человечества.
In 2021, the Primorye State Art Gallery celebrated its 55th anniversary with the Fifty-Five Stories exhibition. Each of the displayed exhibits had a special history: provenance, restoration, attribution, etc. The gallery staff decided to tell the audience about the inner life of the museum and the items stored in it. Two black-and-white drawings by Maruki Iri (1901–1995) and Maruki Toshi (1912–2000), donated to the gallery, made it possible to tell about one of the first exhibitions of foreign artists, held in Vladivostok in 1990. The article is devoted to the description of the exhibition, exhibits donated to the Primorye Gallery, their place in the work of artists, Japanese and world art. Information about the graphic works presented in the article is introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The relevance of this work is prompted by research interest in the insufficiently studied processes of mutual influence of Japanese and Western European art. Moreover, the exhibition of Japanese artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi in Russia seems to be evidence of the indestructible creative ties between the two countries in the modern historical and cultural context, and its theme is a reminder of the true values of humanity.
Histories of democracy in modern Japan often position ‘democracy’ itself as an elite, introduced, inorganic facet of post-defeat Japan’s reconstruction by outside influences. However, analysis of discourses and texts prior to this revisionist narrative reveal a much more complex and continuous intellectual history at play. Ishizaka Yōjirō’s (1900–1986) run-away hit Aoi sanmyaku (Blue mountain range, 1947) was a timely and highly influential serialised work in The Asahi Shimbun, which was quickly republished as a novel and then adapted into a massively successful film in 1949. In this discussion the work both uses and challenges a feudalism versus democracy binary, and reveals strong intellectual continuities between prewar and post-war thinking regarding modernity. The work also challenges the positioning of relationships between school-age male and female students as a symbol of democracy and modernism in this era. Through Ishizaka’s use of debate and humour, this work is not an account of the failings of democracy, or its success, but rather an exploration of the tensions that emerge with attempts to implement these discourses.
With the rise of television in late 1950s and 1960s Japan, television documentary became the focus of multiple debates as a fledgling genre. This article examines two television documentary series, Japan Unmasked (Nihon no sugao) and Non-Fiction Theatre (Non-fikushon gekijō), and the discourse surrounding them, particularly the Japan Unmasked debate. In the debate, Hani Susumu emphasized that the political significance of television documentary lies in amateurs’ attempts to capture their experiences using the unfamiliar camera and microphone. This emphasis on amateurism, however, involved problems: the growth of amateurs into professionals and their loss of an autonomous position within the corporate structure. Calling upon the legacy of left-wing political avant-garde work, Ushiyama Jun’ichi, the father of Non-Fiction Theatre, responded to the issue by inviting filmmakers with political voices such as Ōshima Nagisa to television documentary. The debates, from amateurism in Japan Unmasked to auteurism in Non-Fiction Theatre, sought the political possibility of television documentary as a changing force on people’s views towards the everyday world. This article argues that the resulting implementation of multimedia auteurism, television documentary made by a political auteur, was integral to continuing audio-visual experimentation in the new-born genre, which was in danger of being lost in the development of the television industry.
This study examines the revolution of ideas surrounding the body in 1950s Japan from the perspective of two women dancers, Noh dancer Tsumura Kimiko (1902–74) and butoh dancer Motofuji Akiko (1928–2003). By contrasting one mid-twentieth-century view—that the postwar era offered a chance to “liberate” individual bodies—with the backdrop of continued control over bodies exercised by large institutions, I first show that this perceived rupture was not as stark as it initially appears. Moreover, I show how Tsumura and Motofuji rejected popular ideas about the body's purpose to forge their own. This allowed them to critique and confront the issues that popular views presented, particularly for disabled or gendered bodies. These issues involved increasing urbanization and the treatment of bodies based upon their desirability. This article argues that Tsumura's and Motofuji's conceptions of “body” challenged gender norms and presented new ideas about how to live.
In this paper, I explore three cases from postwar Japanese media history where a single topic inspired the production of both documentary films and magic lanterns. The first example documents the creation of Maruki and Akamatsu’s famed painting Pictures of the Atomic Bomb. A documentary and two magic lantern productions explore this topic through different stylistic and aesthetic approaches. The second example is School of Echoes, a film and magic lantern about children’s education in rural Japan. The documentary film blurs distinctions between the narrative film and documentary film genres by utilizing paid actors and a prewritten script. By contrast, the original subjects of the documentary film appear as themselves in the magic lantern film. Finally, the documentary film Tsukinowa Tomb depicts an archeological excavation at the site named in the title. Unlike the monochrome documentary film, the magic lantern version was made on color film. Aesthetic and material histories of other magic lanterns include carefully hand-painted monochrome films. Monochrome documentary films in 1950s Japan tended to emphasize narrative and political ideology, while magic lantern films projected color images in the vein of realism. Through these examples of media history, we can begin to understand the entangled histories of documentary film and magic lanterns in 1950s Japan.
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