Folk Art Potters of Japan

Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics

Brian Moeran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780700710393
• eBook ISBN: 9781136796807
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

This is a study of a group of potters living in a small community in the south of Japan, and about the problems they face in the production, marketing and aesthetic appraisal of a kind of stoneware pottery generally referred to as mingei, or folk art. It shows how different people in an art world bring to bear different sets of values as they negotiate the meaning of mingei and try to decide whether a pot is 'art', 'folk art', or mere 'craft'. At the same time, this book is an unusual monograph in that it reaches beyond the mere study of an isolated community to trace the origins and history of 'folk art' in general. By showing how a set of aesthetic ideals originating in Britain was taken to Japan, and thence back to Europe and the United States - as a result of the activities of people like William Morris, Yanagi So etsu, Bernard Leach and Hamada Sho ji - this book rewrites the history of contemporary western ceramics.

Chapter One

THE JAPANESE MINGEI MOVEMENT

Two events seen to be of vital significance to the development of nineteenth-century European thought were the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The development of Japanese thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was influenced by no less dramatic a series of events. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration brought an end to the feudal system that had characterized the country’s government for the previous three centuries, and laid Japan open for the first time to the influences of modern Western civilization. During the next few decades the country underwent a number of political, administrative, and economic changes that were the prelude to Japan’s emergence as a leading industrialized nation in the mid-twentieth century. Such events in both Europe and Japan had a major effect on people’s appreciation and understanding of art.¹

The British Arts and Crafts Movement

In his discussion of English culture and society, spanning nearly two centuries from the Industrial Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams writes:

An essential hypothesis in the development of the idea of culture is that the art of a period is closely and necessarily related to the generally prevalent ‘way of life’, and further that, in consequence, aesthetic, moral, and social judgements are closely interrelated. Such a hypothesis is now so generally accepted, as a matter of intellectual habit, that it is not easy to remember that it is, essentially, a product of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century.

(Williams 1958:137)

Isolating a number of key words that took on new and important meanings during this period, Williams proceeds to trace the idea of ‘culture’ as it was expressed in the social criticism of writers from William Cobbett to George Orwell. These key words include industry, democracy, class, art, and culture; among these, it is the concept of ‘art’ in particular that I wish to discuss in this book. The variety chosen has been labelled ‘folk art’ (mingei in Japanese), but – as is often the case with pre-packaged foods – it is not always easy to distinguish the taste of the contents of one label from those of other, similar labels. Thus, ‘communal art’, ‘decorative art’, ‘popular art’, ‘arts and crafts’, ‘art-craft’, ‘folk craft’, and the deceptively bland ‘craft’, are all blended into the pot-pourri of western and eastern aesthetics which now characterize not only mingei pottery in Japan, but so-called ‘studio’ pottery in England and the United States. Mingei is that variety of art which was once referred to by an American artist who visited Japan in 1886 as ‘the debris of civilization’ (La Farge 1986:84).

It is virtually impossible to ascertain exactly who is responsible for the formulation of the general aesthetic-cum-moral theory that now accompanies most discussion of ‘folk art’. However, during the last decades of the eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth century, a number of English writers began to discuss themes that later came to dominate the writings of Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961), the founder of the Japanese Mingei movement. This point is important, since it is often intimated that Japanese folk arts are somehow ‘unique’ and ‘different’ from what – to the uninitiated – might appear to be similar developments in other parts of the world. Here my argument is two-fold. On the one hand, I will suggest that Yanagi’s mingei philosophy was heavily influenced by the ideas of William Morris, ideas which were brought to Japan by men who later became friends of Yanagi – the Japanese potter, Tomimoto Kenkichi, and the English potter and etcher, Bernard Leach. On the other, I will propose that the philosophy of mingei is the sort of moral aesthetic that tends to arise in all industralizing societies that experience rapid urbanization and a shift from hand to mechanized methods of mass production.

Probably the earliest example of a folk art movement is that which occurred in England during the second half of the nineteenth century, approximately 100 years after that country had industrialized. What is known as the Arts and Crafts movement flourished in Britain during the 1880s and 1890s and aimed to counter some of the social, moral, and aesthetic disintegration that was seen to have been brought about by the industrial revolution, which was itself felt to be somehow ‘unnatural’. One of the first to speak out against the way in which, in his opinion, crafts were being destroyed by industry was Thomas Carlyle (who coined the word ‘industrialism’ [Williams 1958:85]). In 1829 he published a diatribe in The Edinburgh Review, in which he deplored what he saw as the mechanization of man’s hand, head, and heart:

Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the finger of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. For all earthly, and for some unearthly purpose, we have machines and mechanical furtherances … We remove mountains and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and by our restless engines, come off victorious and loaded with spoils … Not the external and physical alone is now managed by the machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here, too, nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods … The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions – for Mechanism of one sort of other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

(quoted in Williams 1958:86)

Another precursor of attitudes that were later adopted by the Arts and Crafts movement was the architect Pugin (1812–1852) who, in the late 1830s, published books in which he aimed to combat ‘the present decay of taste’. Pugin was also responsible for two ideas that were taken up by such later critics as Ruskin and Morris, and by Yanagi in Japan: first, that of the functional approach to beauty; second, the idea that the art of a period could be used to judge the quality of the society that was producing that art. John Ruskin (1819–1900) was essentially an art critic before he became a social critic, but the two aspects of his writings should be taken together and seen as a whole. His central concern was with beauty, a word that he usually spelled with a capital B and that was virtually interchangeable with Truth. Beauty was the absolute standard of perfection, not only in works of art but in man as well.

Ruskin followed Pugin in thinking that there was a close relation between the quality of a society and the quality of its art. What started out as a quest for Truth and Beauty, therefore, ended up as a moral indictment of Victorian society and of the new wealth generated by industrial capitalism.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them … On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once.

(Ruskin 1985:84–5)

Ruskin’s conception of art and society may be said to be organic in that he stressed their interrelation and interdependence. The beauty of form in art was connected with the fulfillment of its function; the fulfillment of function depended on the coherence and cooperation of all parts of the social organism. Ruskin argued that if a society was not regulated in such a way as to permit each man to fulfill his function, then the system was to blame. It was here – in his influential essay The Nature of Gothic – that he took issue with the idea that production should be geared to the laws of supply and demand.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.

(Ruskin 1963:180)

William Morris (1834–1896) – poet, designer, critic, and socialist – took over from where Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin left off. Born in 1834, Morris was intended by his parents to enter the Church, but decided to become an architect and artist instead. During an intensively active and full life of just over sixty years, he participated in projects that ranged from painting frescoes on the upper walls and roof of the debating hall of the Oxford Union to translating Icelandic sagas, and finally entering the political arena as a forceful spokesman for Socialism. During most of this time, he also ran the now famous Firm of ‘Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furnitures and the Metals’ for which he and his friends – in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and James Webb – designed quality work, in the belief that ‘good decoration, involving rather the luxury of taste than the luxury of costliness, will be found to be much less expensive than is generally supposed’ (Lindsay 1979:121–22).

Under such circumstances, perhaps, it is not surprising to find that Morris wrote about, as well as practised, art. Yet these writings could be deceptive for – strongly influenced by both Carlyle’s Past and Present and Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic – Morris felt that the ‘question of popular art was a social question, involving the happiness or misery of the greater part of the community’ (Morris 1962a: 139). In other words, his ideas about art were formed primarily as a means of working out his ideas about society – about problems of hand vis-à-vis machine work; about labour, cooperation and class; in short, about the effects of industrial capitalism in Victorian England.

Morris argued that man was being destroyed by industrialization. He saw people deprived of all joy in their work, saw them desecrating arts inherited from the time when that joy had been present in all its vitality. He called for a popular art, simple and functional, that was ‘to be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user’ (Morris 1902:33). Art was for everyone, not simply for a ‘narrow class who only care for it in a very languid way’ (1947:115), and the best things were ‘common wares, bought and sold in any market’.

Morris bitterly objected to what he called ‘the wretched anarchy of commercial war’, for he felt that commerce had by its supremacy entirely suppressed art. He also realized that nature was being polluted and destroyed by the competitive society in which he lived:

Is money to be gathered? Cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein.

(Morris 1902:16)

To Morris the laws of nature were the laws of art, and wherever nature worked there would be beauty. As I shall show at the end of this chapter, this connection between nature and beauty is just one of a number of parallels in the aesthetic theories of Morris and Yanagi Sōetsu. It also plays a large part in my study of the pottery community of Sarayama (Onta) which can be seen as a microcosm of the world of folk art potters generally in contemporary Japan.

The Japanese Mingei Movement

One of the effects of industralization in Britain, then, was the emergence of a stream of social criticism which advocated a utopian sense of community to counteract what was regarded as the moral disintegration of capitalist society. In Japan a number of people began to propound similar moral theories, partly in response to, but increasingly more as outright reaction against, the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Japanese society following the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895. As in England and other parts of Europe, these theories were for the most part highly romanticized, calling for a return to the sort of rural communalism whereby high and low, young and old, rich and poor would all live together as one large organic family. The countryside came to be seen as a repository of such ‘true’ values as frugality, altruism, harmony, and cooperation. Such social criticism led, on the one hand, to the establishment of the Tolstoy-inspired ‘new village’ movement and, on the other, to the development of agrarianism (nōhonshugi) as an ideology for Japan’s militarists in the 1930s. It may also be said to have had some influence on Yanagi Sōetsu’s concept of mingei.

The whole idea of ‘folk art’ first received public recognition in Japan in the late 1920s, when Yanagi published his first book, The Way of Crafts (Kōgei no Michi). Yanagi was born in 1889. His father was of high rank in the Japanese navy, but died when Muneyoshi² was only two years old, and the boy was brought up by his mother. He was sent to the Peers’ School (Gakushūin Kōtōka) before entering the Department of Philosophy and Letters at the Tokyo Imperial University in 1911.³

It was during his final year at the Peers’ School that Yanagi joined a number of friends and acquaintances, who were all interested in literature and art, to start publication of the now famous magazine Shirakaba (Silver Birch). Several members of this group – including Shiga Naoya, Mushakoji Saneatsu, Arishima Takeo, and Satomi Ton – later became well-known writers as a result of their contributions to this magazine. Although Yanagi himself was not at the centre of the group, he wrote more than seventy articles for the magazine, including poems, translations, and critical essays. Publication of the Shirakaba continued monthly for fourteen years, until the great Kantō earthquake of 1923. During this time the Shirakaba group saw itself as ‘children of the world’ and sought to introduce to its Japanese readers a wide range of western artists and writers. These included Rodin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Blake, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoy. It was undoubtedly Tolstoy’s work which inspired Mushakoji to set up the first of the ‘new villages’ (atarishiki mura) in Hyūga, Kyushu, in 1916.

In 1919, Yanagi was appointed Professor of Religious Studies at Tōyō University, and in the same year he published the first of a series of articles on Korean culture. Despite being harassed by Japanese police, Yanagi persisted in his praise of Korean things. His fondness for that country led to his planning, and eventually opening, the Korean People’s Art Gallery (Chōsen Minzoku Bijutsukan) in one of the old palace buildings in Seoul.

Yanagi’s early interest in Korea stemmed primarily from his liking for ceramics of the Yi dynasty. Indeed, the Japanese Mingei movement might be said to be partly a result of Yanagi’s enthusiasm for Korean pottery,⁴ for when he learned that Yi dynasty wares had for the most part been made by nameless craftsmen, he felt that there had to be a similar sort of art in Japan. He thus became interested in what initially he called ‘people’s art’ – for the way in which it accorded with his ideals of beauty. Once he discovered that there was such a popular art in his own country, Yanagi started planning a folk art museum for Japan.

Although, in the end, Yanagi’s mingei ideal was a combination of philosophical, religious, and aesthetic elements, in the early days he appears to have been primarily concerned with beauty. While he went around collecting all sorts of objects that fitted his idea of what was beautiful, he began t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Japanese Mingei Movement
• 2 A Pottery Community
• 3 Social Organization
• 4 Ecology and Social Structure
• 5 Labour Cooperation
• 6 Environmental and Social Change
• 7 The Mingei Boom and Economic Development
• 8 The Decline of Community Solidarity
• 9 Theory and Practice in Japanese Mingei
• 10 Folk Art, Industrialization and Orientalism
• Afterword: The Artworld of Japanese Ceramics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index