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  • Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts
  • Tom Havens (bio)
Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts. Edited by Hiroshi Nara. Lexington Books, Lanham, Md., 2007. xiv, 269 pages. $90.00, cloth; $32.95, paper.

Inexorable Modernity examines various tough questions asked by Japanese writers, painters, and playwrights as they confronted modernity from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Nearly all of the contributors to this volume are associated with the University of Pittsburgh or with J. Thomas Rimer, the senior scholar to whom the book is dedicated. A brief introduction by editor Hiroshi Nara, a linguist and intellectual historian, frames 11 chapters as efforts "to show that there are a number of ways of dealing with modernity even within one culture." The authors "aim to capture the multifariousness of modernity" (p. 5) in Japan, a phenomenon the editor believes was "inexorable" because "Japan sanctioned influences from outside"—i.e., from the West. Surprisingly, Nara also contends that "the centrality of perceived cultural tradition, along with the polyvalence, may be the only grand narrative of Japan throughout history" (p. 12). This problematic view is only fitfully developed elsewhere in the volume.

Of four chapters on art and aesthetics, the most captivating is Mikiko Hirayama's crisp study of the major art critic Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950), who attacked avant-garde styles by embracing an eclectic "new realism" in Japanese oil painting during the 1930s. By "new realism," Kojima meant avoiding indiscriminate emulation of European methods and instead cultivating "solidity of form, superb draughtsmanship, and rich colors," as well [End Page 212] as employing East Asian conventions that recognized "the line and the mass as the main force of expression" (p. 54). Kojima championed the works of Yasui So¯taro¯ (1888–1955), who dared to combine formalist principles from both Europe and Asia, making Yasui "the most modern of modern painters" in Kojima's eyes. But perhaps because of political conservatism in the 1930s, Kojima also resisted any synthesis of Japanese natural-pigment painting (Nihonga) with oils, leading Hirayama to conclude aptly that Kojima sought "to perpetuate the essentialized view of Japanese painting [Nihonga] as an artistic style unlike any other," with "its potential as an important vehicle for representing Japanese national identity" (p. 62).

Hiroshi Nara's chapter on ethics and aesthetics in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960) shows that Watsuji thought "art satisfied an important moral role" but that he "did not directly ascribe a political role to it" (p. 108). Watsuji believed good artists had ethical obligations, basing their works on the classical heritage of their own culture and showing both a love of nature and keen technical skills. From his reading of Rinrigaku (Ethics, three volumes, 1937–49), Nara concludes that for Watsuji, "art is not an expression of the artist as an individual but of the artist as defined in his affiliation to the larger social and political entity" (p. 112). The philosopher's pride in Japanese culture, Nara adds, led him to assert that artists "had a moral obligation and mission to protect Japan and Asia from Western colonial expansion" (p. 114) —a much less accommodating critical position than the eclecticism of Kojima Nobuo.

Two other chapters on art revisit familiar turf. The well-known bakumatsu-Meiji artist Kawanabe Kyo¯sai (Gyo¯sai; 1831–89) is the focus of Brenda G. Jordan's discursive contribution on censorship and printmaking under the post-1868 government. Kawanabe's politically satirical imagery earned him a brief prison term in 1869; his subsequent portrayals of crows, catfish, and sea creatures won him a large popular following, with more commissions than he could fulfill. Mayu Tsuruya carries the theme of art and politics forward to World War II in a chapter on the growing state support for Western-style oil painting during the 1930s and early 1940s. Relying on critical scholarship on this well-studied topic, Tsuruya reconfirms that the wartime "change in official attitude toward yo¯ga [oils] was due to the military's desire to portray the war in realistic detail when disseminating war information to the people...

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