The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War by Asato Ikeda (review)

Asato Ikeda's Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War looks into paintings produced in Japan from the mid-1930s to 1945—a time of colonial expansion, political oppression, and total war—to reveal the political and ideological functions of Japanese pictorial art. This is hardly a new topic in the field of Japanese art history, having been the theme of a large number of works in both English and Japanese including the 2013 anthology Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960, of which Ikeda served as one of the chief editors.¹ The present book, however, is unique for its focus on what Ikeda calls "non-battle paintings," rather than the various types of war propaganda art that have to date been more studied—among them sensōga (literally, war paintings; a group of official war propaganda paintings commissioned by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War). Ikeda contends that although at first glance milder and much less obvious than war propaganda art, these non-battle paintings—Yokoyama Taikan's depictions of Mt. Fuji, Yasuda Yukihiko's Camp at Kisegawa folding screens (1940–1941) featuring the historical samurai brothers Minamoto no Yoritomo and Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Uemura Shōen's "genre" scenes of Japanese beauties, and Fujita Tsuguharu's mural-size portrayal of rural festivity, Events in Akita (1937)—fully corresponded with contemporary ideologies sanctioning Japan's war and violence, significantly contributing to the mobilization of the Japanese populace in the war effort.

To call attention to the political significations of these works, Ikeda employs the key concept "Japanese fascism." Given the contested and often Eurocentric definition of the word, art historians (with a few significant exceptions, such as Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan in her study of Kawabata Ryūshi)² tend to avoid using "fascism" or "fascist" in relation to 1930s and 1940s Japanese visual art in favor of ostensibly less ideological (but equally problematic) terms such as "war art," "wartime art," and "art produced during the Fifteen-Year War." Countering this scholarly tendency, Ikeda argues that Japanese fascism is a useful concept that "allows us to maintain the important distinction between the 'new' nationalism of the 1930s and 40s and that of the Meiji period" as well as "to highlight the degree to which modernity became a fundamental problem to Japan during the Second World War, and to situate wartime Japan in a global context" (p. 8). Her understanding of Japanese fascism is informed by a body of recent scholarship outside art history, including Harry Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity and especially The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism by Alan Tansman and its companion anthology, The Culture of Japanese Fascism.³ Following Tansman's definition—which essentially accords with Harootunian's—of fascism as "a reactionary modernist response to the threats of social and political division" (quoted on p. 25) brought about by the very condition of modernity (and, in the case of Japan, westernization), Ikeda conceives of Japanese fascism as being akin to the 1930s official Japanese ideology of "return to Japan," which too is characterized by a "paradoxical rejection and embrace of modernity" (p. 24). The aforementioned non-battle paintings, it follows, are prime examples of Japanese fascist art.

Ikeda's choice of artists and paintings will probably not inspire as much surprise among scholars as Tansman did when he included such figures as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Misora Hibari under the umbrella term of Japanese fascist aesthetics. The political nature of Yokoyama's Mt. Fuji, Yasuda's historical samurai figures, Uemura's kimono-clad beauties, and Fujita's rural festivity as well as their close association with wartime ideologies have been acknowledged since the 1990s thanks to Japanese and Anglophone art historians including Tanaka Hisao, Tan'o Yasunori, Kawata Akihisa, Wakakuwa Midori, Bert Winther-Tamaki, and Gennifer Weisenfeld, to name just a few. Ikeda...