Refracted Modernity

3. Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan: Modernity, Colonialism, and National Identity

3 toshio watanabe Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan Modernity,Colonialism,andNationalIdentity In examining how Japanese landscape painting expressed the issues of modernity ,colonialism,andnationalidentityspecificallyinrelationtoTaiwan, my aim is not to investigate the response of the colonized, the Taiwanese, which is dealt with elsewhere in this volume, but to explore what these issues meant to the colonizers, the Japanese. In order to clarify this, the essay first examines the development of the concept of a modern landscape in Japan, then presents the attitudes towards the Taiwanese landscape of two Japanese artists, Ishikawa Kin’ichirō and Fujishima Takeji, and finally analyzes the development of the concept of nanyō (the South Seas) and Taiwan’s role within this. Establishment of a New “Modern” View of Nature in Japan (1880–1930) Roughly between 1880 and 1930, a new “modern” view of nature was established in Japan that challenged the existing ones.1 The representation of nature in Japanese traditional arts frequently includes the depiction of meisho, famous places. The meisho concept originated in poems that were recited to praise the gods of a particular place and pray for the safety of the traveler. The poems made these places famous, so later poets and artists visited them in order to immerse themselves in the atmosphere depicted by the ancient artists and poets, making the places even more famous, as more and more memorable poems and pictures accrued to them. The cult of meisho increased in scale during the Edo period from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the increasing ease of travel and the rise in related publications. Nonetheless, an alternative view, which led to the “modern” perception 68 | toshio watanabe of nature, was in existence by the end of the nineteenth century. This alternative tradition, which ran counter to the idea of meisho and was less burdened with cultural baggage, was not a late nineteenth-century invention , as is often claimed. During the eighteenth century and alongside the increasing popularity of meisho, there was a certain growing tendency to avoid this immersion in the atmosphere of famous places. Journeys were undertaken as expeditions rather than for esthetic purposes. Here the intention was to record local customs, vegetation, geology, etc. These trips were motivated by a desire for knowledge and by an urge to observe and to record. This brought with it a tendency to objectify nature rather than to immerse oneself in it. The introduction of Western ideas on nature during the second half of the nineteenth century accelerated the development of this observational attitude to nature. Works by the artists of the so-called Watercolor Movement in Japan, who are still greatly underrated, constitute one of the most significant manifestationsofthisnewmodernlandscape,whichstartedtoplayamajor role during the 1880s. After the turn of the century, watercolor became one of the most popular art forms across Japan, and many of these artists had strong sympathies with British watercolor and art theory. The Ruskinian view of art and nature had a great impact in Japan and affected not only the development of landscape painting in Japan, but also that of mountaineering . In this case the mountain is not seen as a place of literary or religious association, but as a geological phenomenon and a site for leisure use by the urban population. In 1905 Ōshita Tōjirō, author of the groundbreaking bestseller Suisaiga no shiori (A guidebook to watercolor painting, 1901), began publishing a magazine Mizue (Watercolor), which became a major forum for artistic debate , especially relating to British art, watercolor and landscape paintings. The artists of the Watercolor Movement tried to establish watercolor as a distinct art form within the context of the domination of the oil painters. They seem to have had a more conciliatory attitude towards the Japanesestylenihonga painters.The affinitybetweenthe twogroupswasoftenmentioned and the reason given was usually that they shared the technique of using water-soluble pigments.2 It was also argued, however, that watercolor was particularly suited to Japanese culture. Maruyama Banka, for example, encouraged the painting of watercolors on kakemono (hanging scrolls) or byōbu (screens) instead of putting them within frames and under glass.3 Indeed, the artist Ioki Bunsai , for example, painted a number of spectacular watercolor landscapes strewn with myriad alpine flowers as kakemono. Ōshita maintained that oil Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan | 69 painting was often regarded as too heavy for the Japanese, whereas watercolor suited Japanese taste very well and that, unlike watercolor...