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4 The purpose of this chapter is to define and characterize the genre of painting that emerged as state-sponsored public art during the second Sino-Japanese War1 and the Pacific War2 between 1937 and 1945. This important work was called sensō sakusen kirokuga (war campaign documentary painting) for its depictions of Japanese military campaigns in Asia; today the term is often abbreviated to sensō kirokuga (war documentary painting). This official war art constitutes its own genre apart from other war-themed paintings (sensōga or war paintings) created by private Japanese artists, both professional and amateur. Our current understanding of war documentary painting has benefited from critical analysis appearing in publications in Japan and abroad over the past two decades. Examples include the work of Tanaka Hisao and Bert Winther-Tamaki.3 These studies, although small in number, focus on the historical and cultural relevance of war documentary painting. In this way they are distinct from other references that were available mostly in Japanese publications. These commentaries either emphasized war responsibility on the part of state-sponsored artists without analyzing institutional elements of the state war art program, or they criticized the propagandistic character of the work without articulating the mechanism of its propaganda component. The underlying sentiment in those two attitudes was that war documentary painting was a wartime anomaly that had only surfaced briefly and had little significance in the history of Japanese art. This chapter questions those dismissive views by focusing on formal and stylistic elements in these works, which could indicate historical continuity with previous movements. War documentary painting is categorically a variety of the genre of European monumental history painting.4 However, this chapter proposes that war painting is more than just a large format picture depicting a historical theme; it evolved from Japanese art of preceding periods in an environment where the importance of the general public had grown rapidly for both art production and the politics of war. Significant precursors were war panorama painting popularized in late nineteenth-century Japan, and socially concerned art movements such as the mural in the immediate prewar years. These preceding forms were often of foreign origin and had developed in different historical contexts, but nonetheless would inspire Japanese artists who had been attuned to artistic and technical developments abroad. The nineteenth-century Western invention of panorama painting was a direct precursor to the cinema in its ability to transport the viewer to an artificially created Mayu Tsuruya Sensō Sakusen Kirokuga Seeing Japan’s War Documentary Painting as a Public Monument 100 | MAyu TSuruyA “reality” even though the images were still. Europeans rushed to panorama theaters to experience the mountainous landscapes of Switzerland and aerial cityscapes of London and Paris that they could never have seen in person before. Murals, on the other hand, provided a public arena for artists to directly communicate their political and social views to people beyond the confines of museums, which were frequented mostly by cultural elites. The enthusiastic reception of these new forms taught Japanese artists the potential of the larger public as a receptive audience for art. They saw that art could have a social role to play. Japanese officials also became aware of the potential power of mobilizing the masses with disseminated information about policy. The project of the Meiji Picture Gallery to commemorate the Meiji emperor (who ruled from 1868 to 1912) in the 1930s was an exemplary attempt by the government to promote patriotism by displaying a series of monumental pictures illustrating the life of the emperor. Soon, war documentary painting manifested the military regime’s desire to provide a monumental national imagery of war in order to unite the Japanese people in the late 1930s. One of the most powerful messages conveyed in the war painting imagery was the nobility of the depicted imperial soldiers sacrificing their individual desires for the cause of the nation. Japanese artists who had acquired the new concept of art for the masses were ready to respond to the state’s call for such public depictions of sacrifice, thereby harnessing art as a psychological weapon in the total war effort. Five aspects of the war documentary painting effort, when seen together, demonstrate a clear commitment on the part of the government to establish a visual monument. First, as this chapter emphasizes , the art was state-sponsored. Second, it depicted nationalistic subject matter. Third, the works utilized the readily comprehensible realism of yōga (Japanese adoption of Western-style oil painting). Fourth...

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