Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912-1955

Chapter 2. Accelerating the Heartbeat: Erotic Nationalism and the Japanese Nude

63 C H a p t E R  Accelerating the Heartbeat Erotic Nationalism and the Japanese Nude The subject of this chapter, the Yōga genre of the female nude, is surprisingly similar to the self-portraiture discussed in the previous chapter. For the male Yōga painter of the female nude typically assumed the stance of Pygmalion, endowing the bodies he painted with aesthetic properties he desired for himself. Pygmalion of Greek mythology was a sculptor who fell so deeply in love with the beautiful female marble body he carved that the goddess Athena rewarded him by vivifying his stone carving into the live body of Galatea, who then became his lover. Commenting on Rousseau’s drama about Pygmalion, Nicholas Mirzoeff remarked, “Pygmalion has reproduced the ultimate (heterosexual) narcissistic object, himself (moi, the self) in female form.”1 Nevertheless, the mapping of the Self onto the female body constitutes a major distinction between the self-portrait and the nudes considered here. Adrian Stokes observed: “We cannot discover in our own bodies the nude entirely. Narcissistic sensitivity obscures contemplation.”2 The gender difference that separated the male painter’s own body from the female nude he painted permitted narcissistic contemplation unimpeded by sensitivity to shortcomings of the artist’s own body. Thus, in addition to heterosexual stimulation, the gender difference between the painter’s body and the nude he painted enabled a great freedom of experimentation with racial, national, and aesthetic properties. The painter could imagine these properties as the shared ground of a blissful union with his Japanese Galatea, while MaxiMuM EMbodiMEnt 64 keeping the spotlight away from any perceived inadequacies of Japanese bodies of his own gender. The mission of embodying ideals of Japanese identity in erotic female bodies in oil on canvas was daunting, in part, because the Pygmalion syndrome and indeed the very notion of painting a large anatomically informed image of an erotically disrobed female body for public spectatorship was unthinkable in Japan prior to the acquisition of this genre from Europe. The virtual absence of nude imagery, at least in this narrowly defined sense, locates pre-Meiji Japanese art in the Chinese cultural sphere, where, according to one view, idealized nude art was a philosophical impossibility.3 The first contested introduction of the European nude into Japanese visual culture occurred in the middle and late Meiji years through the nude paintings, scandals, and debates associated with Kuroda Seiki and his contemporaries.4 This chapter focuses on later painters working in the Taishō and early Shōwa years, when increasingly explicit nude paintings attained greater social acceptance owing, as Kuraya Mika has demonstrated, to their frequent display at public exhibitions attended by large audiences.5 Painters were incited to bolder thresholds of nude expression by eroticism in mass media such as cinema and weekly magazines as well as nude painting by the Fauves and other contemporary European painters. But along with nude painting, younger Yōga painters also inherited a vexing predicament from their Meiji period teachers. The Yōga nude was wedded to the production of erotic bodies that were to varying degrees aesthetically and phenotypically European. Even images that purported to represent Japanese women were constructed through a hybridized mapping of Japanese signifiers onto bodies of Vitruvian proportions.6 This was true for Yōga figures in general, whether male or female, clothed or unclothed. In Kawata Akihisa’s words, “The appearance of Western people crept into the images of Japanese people [in an] unconscious operation.”7 In subsequent years of increasing nationalism and imperialism, Yōga painters became more critical of this disconcerting otherness of canonical Yōga bodies and pursued various means of bringing the bodies they painted into closer identity with their own bodies. The rendering of the Yōga nude into a native body, however, was less an isolationist retreat than a process spurred by ongoing encounters with European bodies. Japanese students’ resolve to study and master Yōga inevitably brought them into contact with European bodies, whether sketching a plaster cast of a Greek god in a Tokyo art school or falling in love with a European woman hired to pose as a model in Paris. Students went into Accelerating the Heartbeat 65 morgues to observe the dissection of cadavers to fathom the anatomy of European bodies, and they contemplated masterpieces in the Louvre and other great museums of Europe to learn how Europeans idealized and...