Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (review)

Earlier this year, the Japanese foreign ministry organized a tour of a musical troupe to Canada's major cities to mark the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Attending the performance in Vancouver, i was amused by what i took to be the irony that the majority of the music that was being used to represent “Japan” came from Tōhoku (Tsugaru-jamisen) and Okinawa. Kim Brandt has written a book that has taught me that the effort to define “Japaneseness” by its margins has a longer history. Based on the author's Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, the book has a family connection: in 1954–1955 Vincent Brandt, whom I take to be the author's father, was introduced to mingei—“presented as integral to Japanese culture”—as part of his diplomatic training at the Foreign Service Institute. His daughter has now traced what she calls the “canonization” of Japanese folk art (p. 225).

The critique of Japanese aesthetics in general, and of mingei in particular, has now become something of a recognizable area of study. I take one of the earliest instances to be Brian Moeran's 1984 Lost Innocence: Folk Craft Potters of Onta, Japan (Stanford University Press). The interesting thing about this field, if I may call it that, is that it is explored by scholars from a number of different disciplines: history, art, and anthropology. Brandt's book probably bears closest comparison to Yuko Kikuchi's Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Unlike Kikuchi, however, Brandt does not tie her study to Said's concept of orientalism, nor does she engage in much theoretical positioning besides occasional references to an “aesthetics of fascism” that she sees as common to Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. And compared to art historian Kikuchi's ninety-two illustrations, Brandt's book includes only twenty-one. This is indicative, however, of differences in both focus and methodology, and the only time I felt the actual lack of visual examples was in Brandt's discussion of various styles of dress (“national dress [kokuminfuku],” “National Dress No. 2 [Kokuminfuku otsu go],” “standard dress [hyōjunfuku],” or “the Concordia Dress [Kyōwafuku] of Manchukuo,” pp. 197–98).

Brandt's first chapter relates the championing of Korean Yi dynasty pottery by Yanagi Muneyoshi and other Tokyo middle-class intellectuals in the 1910s. Yanagi initially promoted the beauty of such objects in the pages of the famous literary and art journal Shirakaba (White Birch) and eventually established a museum of Korean folk art in Seoul. Brandt observes that collectors such as Yanagi positioned their enthusiasm toward certain kinds of Korean ceramics in contrast to other types valorized by practitioners of tea—who had “discovered” Korean pots in the sixteenth century— especially the types favored by practitioners of the resurgent “zaibatsu tea,” as Kumakura Isao has called it. Chapter 2, titled “The Discovery of Mingei,” discusses the variety of movements, all active in the 1920s, that promoted various nonelite crafts. One section deals with Yanagi's championing of the Edo-period folk carver Mokujiki, around whom he established a journal. Brandt traces the evolution from getemono (“roughly translatable as ‘low-grade things,’” p. 49) to mingei, “a contraction of the phrase ‘minshūteki kōgei’ (popular craft)” (p. 48). Yanagi called for a return to folk craft as an antidote to modern ugliness caused by capitalism, “machine-ism” (kikaishugi), egoism (shugashugi; not “egotism,” as translated by Brandt), and intel-lectualism (shuchishugi). The purpose of Yanagi's 1927–1928 Kōgei no michi “was to help bring about the socialist ‘Kingdom of Beauty’ (bi no ōkoku) in which a true craft aesthetic, as exemplified by mingei of the preindustrial past, would be restored to the masses” (p. 53). While such a kingdom was ultimately to be transnational...