RECKONING WITH WAR IN THE MUSEUM

Abstract

How do people handle their regret at having believed that a foolish war was not just acceptable but necessary? Japan after World War II provides an instructive example. Many contrite Japanese revisited the aesthetic realm, looking for ways to interpret culture that did not convey the values of fascism, such as glorifying willing surrender to a powerful leader. They saw their task as engendering an individual aesthetic and therefore political subjectivity, so that Japanese would in the future more bravely resist state violence at home and abroad. These individuals saw culture as intrinsically political rather than as a refuge from politics. Recognizing the difficulty in countering fascist culture through ideas alone, they also created what economists today call “capacity building” institutions to help them do so, such as Japan's first museum dedicated solely to modern art, the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, established in 1951. The founders of the Kamakura Museum self-consciously set out to create a new institution that would embody a democratic aesthetic and so prevent—they hoped—Japan from repeating the disastrous experience of war. The curators argued for diverse and dynamic modernities, a concept that parried both the idea that artistically Japan was a pale copy of modern Europe and the notion of a single national culture in Japan or elsewhere. At the same time, however, the legacy of the war was visible in an entirely different and less admirable way in the museum curators’ stance toward Asian modernity beyond Japan and its evasion of Japan's responsibility for the wartime devastation of China.

Notes

¹Maruyama 1963, xii.

²Tansman 2009, 7.

³Ibid.

⁴Barshay 2004; Hein 2004. Karube (2008, 138–39) points out that later in life Maruyama increasingly saw people as being driven by their personal logics, which were sometimes incomprehensible to others.

⁵Sontag 1972, 91.

⁶Koschmann 1996.

⁷Although the formal Japanese name of the museum is the Kanagawa Prefectural Modern Art Museum, exhibit posters and other materials often call it the Kamakura Modern Art Museum because the official name suggested to many people that the museum was in Yokohama. Sakai 2001, 15–16. The official English translation of the museum's name became The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama when a new building was added in 2003.

⁸Ikeda 2001 (1952), 83.

⁹Yagyū 2001, 68–70.

¹⁰Sasaki 1982, 12.

¹¹Yagyū 2001, 68.

¹²Ikeda 2001 (1952), 81–84.

¹³Osaragi 2001 (1995), 75.

¹⁴Sakakura 1951, 90–91. For more on Sandberg, see Petersen 2004.

¹⁵Hijikata 1952b. 221. The curators also drew on the example ofMoMAin their desire to “change the very nature of museum culture and its future development in Japan,” and their inclusion of all forms of visual expression, including architecture, photography, commercial and industrial design, cinema, and theater-set design. Yet their thinking did not exactly parallel that of the New York museum's benefactors and staff. Like most Japanese intellectuals of the day, the museum founders were very critical of the cold war and American intellectual and art-world support of those policies. The museum hosted almost no American art for decades but hung many shows from Eastern as well as Western Europe.

¹⁶Satō Kei, “Gendai Bijutsukan e no kibō,” Asahi, 6 March 1951, quoted in Sasaki 1982, 14.

¹⁷Sakakura 1951, 92–93.

¹⁸Emphasis in original. Hijikata Teiichi, “Nittenhyō—kore wa hitotsu no jōzetsu saidan” (Review of Nitten show—one loquacious judgment), Bijutsu, April 1946, quoted in Kon 1992, 5–6.

¹⁹Hijikata Teiichi, 1945 diary, quoted in Kon 1992, 5–6.

²⁰Hijikata 1951, 58.

²¹Roberts 1997.

²²Sakai 2001, 13; Tsuruta 1983.

²³Bennett 1995.

²⁴Satō Kei, “Gendai Bijutsukan e no kibō,” Asahi, 6 March 1951, quoted in Sasaki 1982, 16.

²⁵Sasaki 1982, 17.

²⁶Yagyū 1982, 18.

²⁷Sakai 2001, 30.

²⁸Most exhibits were up for five to six weeks. Yagyū 2001, 69.

²⁹Yagyū 1982, 17–20.

³⁰Author interview with Sakai Tadayasu, Setagaya Museum of Art. 24 February 2009. Unfortunately the museum retained almost no documentation of its early exhibits. Most catalogs consisted only of a single sheet of paper listing the works exhibited and the museum has no correspondence files from the 1950s.

³¹For the debate see Mitsuda 2006 and, briefly, Winther-Tamaki 2001, 16–17.

³²Hijikata 1947, 27–28.

³³Murata 1952, 165. “Paris Exhibiting Nippon Ceramics,” Nippon Times, 18 December 1950. Beginning in 1954, the national museum in Ueno displayed “homecoming shows” (satogaeri ten) of Japanese art that had first toured overseas., but Hijikata's writing does not reveal the same desire to rehabilitate Japan's image in the world that Shimizu finds elsewhere. Shimizu 2001, 123–34, esp. 129. Shimizu's argument on this point is somewhat undercut by the fact that, as he reports, the government officials in charge of choosing the works to send overseas initially wanted to send a motley collection of artifacts that they themselves did not think of as “masterpieces.” See also Cohen 1992.

³⁴Hijikata 1952a.

³⁵Winther-Tamaki 2001, ch. 4, esp. 140.

³⁶He was influenced by exhibits elsewhere organized around this theme. Yagyū 1982, 17–20.

³⁷Hijikata 1976, 435.

³⁸Hijikata 1951, 57–58.

³⁹Sakai 2001, 28.

⁴⁰Hijikata 1972; Kanagawa Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed. 1972.

⁴¹Hijikata 1970, ix-xiv, esp. ix.

⁴²Author and Yamanashi Emiko interview with Kagesato Tetsurō, Totsuka, 3 April 2009. Recently, scholars have argued that Takahashi, among others of his generation, went back to Tokugawa themes later in his life out of both a sense of nostalgia and a responsibility to record a now-vanished past. Yet this important intervention does not negate Hijikata's conclusions. Yamanashi 2009.

⁴³Sakai (2001, 29) notes that this was not only Hijikata's “resistance” to national narratives of art history, but also displayed his excellent “journalistic sense.”

⁴⁴The exhibits are listed in Kanagawa Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, ed. 1982.

⁴⁵Kusano 1981, 43–44.

⁴⁶Hijikata's status may have changed from civilian to Army officer at that time too. Takeda Taijun identified him as having military rank, quoted in Ōkochi 2001, 71.

⁴⁷The 1954 show on Buddhist art built on this experience without ever mentioning it. Fujita 1981, 84–86.

⁴⁸Tang 2008; Sullivan 1996, 80–82.

⁴⁹Hijikata 1977, 373–92.

⁵⁰Tang 2008, 116.

⁵¹See Hijikata 1948b. Although Hijikata states in several places, such as on pp. 376–77 of this source, that the essay woodcuts appeared even earlier, in Chūgoku Bunka 2 (1948), a journal published by the Chūgoku Bunka Kyōkai, it is not there.

⁵²Rouault was not yet well known in Japan then but the exhibit attracted 6,267 visitors. Yagyū 1982, 20.

⁵³Kon 1992, 6. Similarly, as David Tucker has argued, Sakakura Junzō's postwar international architectural vision was rooted in his wartime service in the empire, particularly designing buildings for the puppet government of Manchukuo (Tucker 2003, 179). Sakakura also designed prefabricated housing for the Navy during the war. The preparatory drawings were part of the exhibit “Junzo Sakakura, Architect. 30 May – 6 September 2009,” at the Kamakura and Hayama Museum of Modern Art. These experiences obviously informed his postwar designs.

⁵⁴Late in life Hijikata often spoke of China as having been a bigger influence on his thinking than the Germanic countries and declared his intention to write about Japan's wartime activities there, giving a strong impression that China was unfinished business for him. Author interview with Hijikata Yukue, Kamakura, 27 February 2009.

⁵⁵Uchiyama donated 348 prints to the museum, its first major gift.

⁵⁶Ōkochi 2001, 73.