Posthistorical traditions in art, design, and architecture in 1950s Japan

Abstract

This article examines the discussions on tradition in art, design, and architecture in the 1950s Japan. It first explores the historical background of the discussions among artists, architects and art historians from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The article insists that they attached to Japanese traditions various meanings and values including what should be overcome in the process of Westernization, the roots to which Japanese people felt compelled to return in the age of modernity, and the sophisticated sensibility of the Japanese comparable to Western modern aesthetics. The article then investigates the postwar situations. Following European artists’ interest in primitivism, avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō advocated tradition to make it function as a key factor in the dynamism of the cultural order. Although discussions were not developed and deepened among designers, tradition was actively discussed in a field of architecture. Architects like Tange Kenzō and Shirai Seiichi elevated the tradition debate into the ideological issue, extracting the dichotomy of the Jōmon and the Yayoi and applying them to actual buildings and houses. The tradition debate in architecture meant a new departure in the postwar period, creating important discussions and movements on historical consciousness in the later period, such as the Metabolist movement in the 1960s and the ‘Ma: Space/Time in Japan’ exhibition in 1978. In this sense, the tradition conceived in the 1950s Japan is best regarded as posthistorical.

Keywords:

• Japanese art
• modern art
• modern design
• modern architecture
• tradition
• Okamoto Tarō
• Tange Kenzō
• modernity

Notes

1. For Japanese artists’ activities during the Second World War, see Kawata (2015) and Hariu et al. (2007).

2. Almost the only exception is Fujita Tsuguharu; see chapter 4, ‘Saraba Nihon’, in Kondō (2002).

3. On Kishida's return to Japan, see Kitazawa (1993: 184–206).

4. Kenchiku Gakkai, or the Institute of Japanese Architects in the then official English name, renamed itself as Nihon Kenchiku Gakkai and changed its English name to the Architectural Institute of Japan in 1947.

5. The symposium was published in Bungakukai 9, no. 9 (September 1942): 6–51 and no. 10 (October 1942): 2–112. It was reprinted in Kawakami and Takeuchi (1979).

6. See Nagao (1972) and Matsumoto, Saiga and Tsuji (2010). Architect Hara Hiroshi also mentioned the popularity of Révai's article among architecture students at the University of Tokyo in the mid-1950s; see Hara, Tsuji and Oshima (2012).

7. The ‘nDK model’, the layout scheme used in postwar Japanese public housing, derived from the wartime surveys of Nishiyama; see Sand (2003: 375–6).

8. This report was edited by Isozaki Arata, a first-year graduate student in the department of architecture at the University of Tokyo. An earlier version was published as ‘Nihon no gendai kenchiku ni okeru dentō no mondai’ [The problem of tradition in contemporary architecture in Japan], Kenchiku to Shakai 35, no. 7 (July 1954): 21–24.

9. The International Conference of Architectural Students prompted Japanese architectural students to organize the Japanese Association of Architectural Students. The first issue of the association's magazine Kaku includes an article by Ogura Tomoo, which was a pseudonym of Isozaki Arata, and the second issue published an article arguing against it by graduate students who were studying with Nishiyama at Kyoto University. See Ogura (1954) and Shin Nihon Kenchikuka Shūdan Kyōdai Daigakuin Gurūpu (1955). Both articles were reprinted in Nihon kenchiku gakusei kaigi jūnenshi [Ten years of the Japanese Association of Architectural Students] (n.p.: Nihon kenchiku gakusei kaigi, 1965), 79–94. As far as my research has been able to uncover, Isozaki's article is his earliest published work. I would like to express my gratitude to Isozaki Arata for confirming the authorship of this article, to Shin Misa and Someya Rie for their help in contacting Isozaki, and to Hino Naohiko for his suggestion of the Uzō Nishiyama Memorial Library, where I found the article.

10. Kitazawa Noriaki insisted that the tradition debate went against the wartime discussion on tradition in particular (2007: 104–05).