Ceramics and Modernity in Japan

Meghen Jones, Louise Allison Cort, Meghen Jones, Louise Allison Cort

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429631993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Ceramics and Modernity in Japan offers a set of critical perspectives on the creation, patronage, circulation, and preservation of ceramics during Japan's most dramatic period of modernization, the 1860s to 1960s.

As in other parts of the world, ceramics in modern Japan developed along the three ontological trajectories of art, craft, and design. Yet, it is widely believed that no other modern nation was engaged with ceramics as much as Japan—a "potter's paradise"—in terms of creation, exhibition, and discourse. This book explores how Japanese ceramics came to achieve such a status and why they were such significant forms of cultural production. Its medium-specific focus encourages examination of issues regarding materials and practices unique to ceramics, including their distinct role throughout Japanese cultural history. Going beyond descriptive historical treatments of ceramics as the products of individuals or particular styles, the closely intertwined chapters also probe the relationship between ceramics and modernity, including the ways in which ceramics in Japan were related to their counterparts in Asia and Europe.

Featuring contributions by leading international specialists, this book will be useful to students and scholars of art history, design, and Japanese studies.

1 A potter’s paradise

The realm of ceramics in modern Japan

Meghen Jones

Released the year after the end of the Allied Occupation, Mizoguchi Kenji’s acclaimed 1953 film Ugetsu provokes reflections about a variety of issues concerning modernity and Japanese ceramics.¹ Setting the film in the war-torn sixteenth century, Mizoguchi brought together narratives stemming from several sources to tell a story about ambition, greed, and war’s toll on people from all walks of life. The film’s protagonist, Genjūrō, is a potter who is shown in one scene determinedly throwing a clay bowl on a wheel that his wife vigorously turns, while their son looks on. When invaders threaten their village, they risk their lives by staying at the kiln to protect their precious goods. Then, defying warnings in order to seek profit, Genjūrō travels to the market to sell his wares to rivaling soldiers. It is there that he encounters Lady Wakasa, a wealthy woman who makes a large purchase and invites him to her palace where he is served a meal using his pottery (fig. 1.1). Within the palace’s refined walls, Genjūrō’s rough, utilitarian vessels come to be seen as objects of high beauty. “The value of people and things truly depends on their setting,” Genjūrō utters, when Lady Wakasa compliments his work. But he becomes ensorcelled by her, and the narrative grows dark when it becomes apparent that she is a ghost. Like the fictional Genjūrō, many potters in modern Japan, even after the introduction of electric-powered pottery wheels, embraced anachronistic techniques such as turning the potter’s wheel by hand. And many potters, beginning in the 1930s, revived the styles of Momoyama period (1573–1615) Seto and Mino glazed stoneware, fired in wood-fueled kilns, as we see in the film. Studio potters throughout the world today continue to be inspired by Momoyama ceramics. And, like Genjūrō, modern Japanese potters have been renowned for their dedication to the production of utilitarian ceramic vessels, pursuit of success in the marketplace, and acclaim by patrons from the highest echelons of society.

Figure 1.1 Still from Ugetsu Monogatari, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953. Daiei, Kyoto Studio.

Since the end of World War II, the realm of ceramics in Japan has often been described as a “potter’s paradise.” The celebrated ceramic artist Tomimoto Kenkichi remarked in 1946 to readers of a popular women’s journal, “Superior quality ceramics permeate Japan, and probably no other nation’s people are interested in ceramics as much as the Japanese.”² To audiences in the United States in 1952, Mingei (folk craft) movement leader Yanagi Sōetsu stated:

Different from occidental countries, Japan is in a very blessed social condition in respect to the arts of pottery. Japan may be a paradise for potters; people have a special inclination and regard for ceramics; there are a great number of collectors and publications about pottery have never failed to sell. That is because of the traditional and typical culture of Japan.³

The culture Yanagi references is that of the ritualistic drinking of tea (chanoyu), flower arranging (ikebana), and cuisine. Many others in modern Japan have echoed such an exceptionalist claim regarding Japanese ceramics and culture. Koyama Fujio, too, greatly influenced the perception of ceramics in Japan and abroad, and referred to Japan as a “potter’s paradise,” as Kida Takuya discusses in his chapter here. More recently, in the catalogue for a major exhibition of Japanese ceramics in 1993, curator Frederick Baekeland proclaimed that “the West is a desert” in comparison to the rich heritage of ceramics in Japan.⁴ It is widely believed that no other modern nation was engaged with ceramics as much as Japan in terms of creation, exhibition, and discourse.

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, constructing a potter’s paradise in modern Japan involved diverse individuals and institutions negotiating the complex epistemological terrains of the past, the nation, and the outside world. Analysis of ceramics thus provides a window for understanding key aspects of modernity in Japan, particularly discernible in praxis, pedagogy, and patronage. Going beyond often-seen descriptive historical treatments of ceramics as simply the products of individuals or particular “schools,” the chapters that follow probe, in particular, the uses of ceramics as forms of cultural production and the ways in which ceramics in modern Japan relate to their counterparts in Asia and Europe. Each chapter uses a distinct methodological approach that untangles objects and ideas from rhetoric, exposing the mechanisms by which modern ceramics in Japan came to be. And the medium-specific focus here positions modern ceramics as part of the long continuum of ceramics in Japan. Our time span is the early Meiji era (1868–1912) to the mid-Showa era (1926–89), or what can be regarded as roughly the first hundred years of modernity in Japan. We set 1970 as our end date for this volume in order to limit the purview to only the early iterations of avant-garde sculptural ceramic vessels (obuje, Japanese for objet).⁵ Yet some of the makers and institutions discussed continue to thrive today, and the discourse these chapters examine is foundational to understanding contemporary Japanese ceramics.

Historicizing modern Japanese ceramics

“Modern Japan” generally refers to the period of industrialization and cultural transformation that occurred due to the so-called opening of Japan to the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century. Most historians agree that Japan entered this period formally in 1868 with the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the newly ensconced Meiji government’s rapid enactment of economic, social, and institutional changes intended to bring Japan into the international community of modern nations—in short, to put Japan on par with the West. Commodore Perry’s forced opening of Japan to trade with the United States in the 1850s was a major catalyst for these mass transformations in society. While definitions of modernity and modernism are highly contested, the view of modernity as disseminating from the West has given way to the acknowledgement of the presence of multiple modernities throughout the world. Thus, we approach Japan’s modernity as one, in the words of John Clark, “intrinsic to [its] culture by comparison with its various pasts.”⁶ Indeed, the study of modern Japanese ceramics provides fruitful opportunities for tracing Japan’s pasts.

Ceramics during the century of concern here—the Meiji era (1868–1912) to the mid-Showa era (1926–89)—are typically ordered according to several phases that do not fully account for the complexities of this history. The first is the Meiji era of vigorous government support of exports and the heyday of international expositions. The second is the Taisho era (1912–26) emergence of individualistic artistic expression, followed by the 1930s revivals of Momoyama period ceramics, sparked by archaeological excavations of kiln sites. And the last phase is the post-World War II avant-garde development of sculptural ceramic vessels, or obuje.⁷ But these phases are somewhat fluid, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. For example, Meiji era government support of ceramics can be seen as a continuation of patronage dating to that of daimyo (feudal lords) of the seventeenth century. Such support continued through the twentieth century, particularly in the 1950s when the government began granting stipends to so-called Living National Treasures. Individualistic expression championed in the Taisho era bore elements of modernist subjectivities, but recognition of individuals for their artistry in the medium dates far earlier, to the Kyoto potter Nonomura Ninsei (active ca. 1646–77) or the founder of the Raku dynasty, Chōjirō, in the 1580s. Further, while vanguardism is certainly a feature of postwar Japanese ceramics, it is rooted in changes in the way the ceramic vessel was understood in the early twentieth century, particularly in light of the display of ceramics at the national salon, discussed below. One other aspect of the postwar phase of Japanese ceramics, noted by Todate Kazuko in her recently published survey book, is the recognition of female ceramists; although women historically had actively participated in family-run workshops, their names, with rare exceptions, were not previously recorded in histories.⁸

The analyses in this book aim to offer alternatives to the conventional views of ceramics in modern Japan. Publications on ceramics in modern Japan have tended to fall into the categories of biographical portraits of makers, categorizations of works according to exhibition groups, and exegeses of critical issues related to craft.⁹ Makers, critics, curators, and collectors have also engaged in dialogue about ceramics and modernity on the pages of Japan’s numerous ceramics journals. Euro-American scholarship on modern Japanese ceramics has tended to focus on three fields: Meiji era ceramic commodities, mingei pottery, and post-World War II avant-garde ceramic art.¹⁰ Often omitted in Euro-American publications has been the period between 1912 and 1945—the Taisho era through the end of World War II. Another problematic tendency inside and outside Japan since the late nineteenth century has been inserting the history of modern Japanese ceramics within the rigid and problematic binaries of “East/West” and “tradition/modernity,” to be explored below.

Historicizing modern Japanese ceramics is challenged by the perpetuation of the myth that, in pockets of the archipelago, pottery techniques and forms have continued in ways completely untrammeled by modernity. A 1970 woodblock print by Mingei movement artist Serizawa Keisuke maps, as its inscription professes, “Traditional Rural Potteries in Present Japan” (fig. 1.2). This print, distributed by the Japan Folk Crafts Museum and based on a previous one published in Japanese, served as one of many lures of its time drawing in fans of pottery to Japan from the English-speaking world. Sprinkled over the archipelago are the major ceramics centers such as Arita and Seto, but also smaller villages where work has been made continuously for hundreds of years. At these locales, pottery has served as a potent channel for the past as, indeed, many potteries established centuries earlier have continued production through the twentieth century and in the present. It is a romantic vision of the past, however, to think that ceramics “tradition” is fixed and can directly channel the past, despite the attempts that have been made to construct this vision by leaders of the Mingei movement. As Brian Moeran has chronicled, the mingei “boom” of the late 1950s to early 1970s, primarily among tourists and urban women consumers, forever altered systems of production and local economies for small-scale pottery villages such as Onta in Kyushu.¹¹

Figure 1.2 Serizawa Keisuke, Map of Traditional Rural Potteries in Present Japan, 1970. Woodblock print, 59.1 x 71.1 cm framed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Halsey and Alice North.

Medium and craft

In this volume, the terms “ceramics” and “pottery” refer primarily to vessels made of clay fired to a temperature rendering it into irreversible hardness. Whether serving as tableware or objects primarily for appreciation, of concern here are works rooted in utilitarian forms like bowls, vases, and so on. The terms most often used for “ceramics” in Japanese are tōki 陶器, t...