The Genesis of the Kōgei (Craft) Genre and the Avant-Garde: Surrounding the Creation of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art

KITAZAWA Noriaki Translated by Chelsea Foxwell

Introduction

The Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku) website lists the

following academic departments under its Faculty of Fine Arts: Painting is first, followed

Sculpture and Craft, and succeeded by Design, Architecture, Intermedia Art, and

Aesthetics and Art History(Gakubu Kenkyūka 2015). This order is hardly arbitrary. We

might say that the genres are ranked in the order of Japanese society’s general perception

of their relative worth.

Painting’s position at the top of the hierarchy stems from the apprehension of the

fine arts (bijutsu 美術) concept as centering around the visual or plastic arts. This is

because, in the typical understanding, painting easily surpasses sculpture and craft in its

degree of visuality or opticality. Sculpture precedes craft because the latter carries the

prerequisite of functionality. Craft belongs to the fine arts inasmuch as it anticipates

appreciation of its visual qualities, but it also contains other attributes that are distinct

from aesthetic appreciation.

Now it must be emphasized that this ranking is a function of the modern

formulation of the fine arts, and even today there are various forms of moving image that

now surpass painting in their degree of visuality. Further, today there are also many types

of contemporary art that directly intervene in social realities in various ways beyond the

original realm of bijutsu based on aesthetic appreciation. In this sense, the ranking on the

website of the Tokyo University of the Arts reflects a value system that is already a thing

of the past.

What was the formation process of this hierarchy which persists so tenaciously to

the present day? If we chart this process through a number of specific cases, we can see

that first, the term bijutsu was created as a translation of Western terms, and then a

number of institutions were gradually constructed around that term. Originally, one

would not have assumed that the things we call kōgei (roughly translatable as craft工芸)

would have been incorporated so fully and exclusively into the domain of bijutsu, but

kōgei somehow became included in the realm of bijutsu as the result of several factors,

most notably (1) the cultural memes (bunka idenshi文化遺伝子; literally, the cultural

genes that allow ideas and practices to be transmitted between people) of making things,

and of the creation of form, in Japanese society (Dawkins 2006, 189-200); (2) the

emergence of an avant-garde in the Taishō era; and (3) the development of strains of

thought which emphasized life (sei or seimei).

With the following thoughts in mind, I would like to develop an investigation of

the genesis of the kōgei genre—its history and structure.

I. Bijutsu and its Institutions: With a Focus on the Relationship Between

Bijutsu and Kōgei

I-i A re-civilizing project patterned on the modern West

The Japanese word bijutsu corresponds to the English terms visual arts or plastic arts and

refers to the techniques (jutsu) of producing things of aesthetic value (bi). It also refers to

the institutions and social schema that stipulate or maintain the criteria of aesthetic

excellence. Since neither the word nor concept of bijutsu existed in Japan in the Edo

period and earlier, we do not encounter the familiar array of institutions surrounding

bijutsu in that period, either. The word bijutsu and its attendant institutions emerged at

the beginning of the Meiji period, when people initiated a re-civilizing project based on

the modern West. Specifically, bijutsu was created as a translation of words such as

Kunst and art when Japan began planning its submissions to the 1873 International

Exhibition in Vienna (Weltausstellung 1873 Wien). Relatedly, this period saw the

national project of establishing the institutions and facilities such as the temporary Art

Gallery (Bijutsukan) in Japan’s new Domestic Industrial Exhibitions (内国勧業博覧会),

or the Technical Fine Arts School (工部美術学校).1 That said, the concept of bijutsu at

the Vienna exhibition still included music and literature and was in that sense used to

mean “art” in the broader sense of the term. At the same time, through the construction of

a physical and conceptual infrastructure for art in these years, the term bijutsu began to

approach its present, more focused meaning (Kitazawa 2013, 13 – 14).

Cultural nationalism was the most prominent force in the construction of this

system of bijutsu, or fine arts, and its integration into Japanese society. Here, however,

the word nationalism requires further comment. To the extent that this system developed

around bijutsu, a term imported from the West, it also played a Westernizing role, and

launched an offensive on existing cultural forms, which, in contrast to Japan’s political or

economic sectors, tended to be deeply conservative. In this sense, the cultural nationalism

of bijutsu played an important role as a camouflaged form of Westernization.2

It was in the 1880s and early 1890s that the art institutions ushered in by cultural

nationalism bore some degree of fruit. In 1889, the same year that the Meiji constitutional

system was established, the government founded the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which

adopted the approach of cultural nationalism. This year also saw the formation of the

Meiji Art Society (明治美術会), a group of yōga (“Western-style painting”) artists, and

art journalism advanced with the establishment of the journal Kokka (国華 Flowers of the

Nation).

It was also in the same year that the Fine Arts section of the Domestic Industrial

Exhibition, which was the premiere stage for artists at the time, developed the genre

formulations that have persisted up to the present day. Up until that point, sculpture had

headed the list of genres in accordance with political interests that emphasized the

creation of national monuments. At the Third Domestic Industrial Exhibition, however,

painting was listed first, followed by sculpture and craft (kōgei) (Kitazawa 2013, 38-41).

This new hierarchy was based on exposition classifications in France, which were

founded on a modernist purism. Painting, which at the time represented the visual arts in

their purest form, was given the role of representing all the other arts (Kitazawa 2013, 41-

42).

I-ii Kōgei and bijutsu

The same logic appears to have motivated the last-place status accorded to kōgei,

or craft. The modern Japanese word kōgei differs from the ancient Chinese term denoting

expert workmanship. Instead, it has been used to denote a genre of hybrid objects that

combined aesthetic value and usefulness, in other words, “arts and crafts.”3 On account of

this hybridity, kōgei was ranked lower than painting and sculpture, which aimed for

aesthetic value alone. In short, to combine aesthetic and functional qualities was to exist

as both fine art and as industry. Kōgei was positioned at the border between bijutsu, the

creation of form that aimed for aesthetic value, and kōgyō (工業 industry), the creation of

form for functional purposes. This was manifest to an extreme degree at the Third

Domestic Industrial Exhibition, where kōgei was termed bijutsu-kōgyō, or “Art applied to

industry,” “art industry,” etc. (Kitazawa 2005, 223). This mode of existence did not sit

well with modernism’s aspirations toward purity. For that reason, the kōgei genre was

eliminated from the Ministry of Education Exhibition (文展) when it was founded in

1907.4

Calligraphy (書 sho) and architecture also combine aesthetics and practicality.

Like craft, architecture is profoundly related to industry. Calligraphy, by contrast, is a

traditional East Asian art form, while architecture is a form of kōgaku (工学 engineering).

Because of this, those genres ended up being treated separately. In contrast, kōgei

resembles painting and sculpture in that it uses handcraft to produce forms with aesthetic

value; at the same time, it resembles industry (kōgyō) in the aspect of creating functional

objects. In this way, it contains conspicuous aspects of both bijutsu and kōgyō. It is also

probably important to note that kōgei began to be associated with the fine arts through

European connoisseurs whose tastes tended toward Japonaiserie and had a strong interest

in craft objects.

From the above we can see that kōgei was allocated to the border zone of the fine

arts because of its affinities with industry (kōgyō). In fact, however, industry also played

a significant role in the genesis of the fine arts (bijutsu) as a genre. As I mentioned

earlier, the notion of bijutsu originally included literature, music, and other pursuits, but it

gradually came to center on the visual or plastic arts. That process of increased focus on

the visual was prompted in large part by the Industrial Revolution. As society’s values

began to be directed toward the industrial production of things, the production of a work

of art in the form of a thing, in this case painting and sculpture, came to represent the

notion of bijutsu or the fine arts as a whole.

In spite of having emerged in close relation to industrial production, bijutsu also

stood in opposition to industry, emphasizing aesthetic appeal and the hand crafted in

contrast to modern industry’s emphasis on mechanized production in factories. Because

of the similarities and differences between the two, their relationship resembled that of a

parent and child who had had a falling-out. This form of fundamental conflict between

bijutsu and modern industry is likely what marginalized the status of kōgei.

I-iii The art museum as the keystone of the system

In this way, the notion of bijutsu became cemented within society through the

establishment of several types of institutions that were founded beginning around 1889,

when the new constitutional system was taking hold. Yet the centerpieces of the effort to

establish bijutsu, namely, the creation of an official art exhibition and the construction of

an art museum for contemporary works, remained as projects to be tackled in the future.

A national salon or official exhibition did not appear until the establishment of the the

Ministry of Education Exhibition in 1907, while a museum for contemporary art was first

created only with the opening of the Tokyo Municipal Museum (東京府美術館) in 1926.

The national salon played a key role in helping bijutsu to take root as a subsystem

of society. In addition to deepening the public’s awareness of exhibition as a social

system, the Bunten produced many results in Japanese society, including the creation of a

modern audience, the modernization of the art market, and the enlivening of the field of

art journalism.

The national art exhibition was also deeply related to the challenges surrounding

the construction of an art museum. The Bunten was furnished with a system for the

purchase of art works, but the nation lacked a museum in which to house them. Further,

Japan at that time lacked a permanent facility that was suitable for a national salon. The

founding of the Bunten only heightened the demand for such a facility. In other words,

the absence of a museum to display and store contemporary art hovered the background

of the Bunten’s creation. Yet this non-existent museum was itself supposed to be the

keystone of the system of the fine arts, and without it, the arch --the system of bijutsu--

would never be completed. The movement to construct an art museum, which had been

inspired by the creation of the Bunten, gradually converged in the construction of the

Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art (Pak 2012, 104 – 124).

Despite its name, the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art was less a museum than a

hall available for rental, and from the moment of its founding criticism was directed

toward the use of the term bijutsukan (美術館museum of art). Yet it was highly

significant that the municipal government had decided to append the name bijutsu-kan to

Japan’s first permanent facility for the art of the present day.5 The newly built museum’s

permanent facilities for the display of present-day art complemented the existing

permanent exhibition space for art historical collections at the Imperial Museum (帝室博

物館), which had its origins in the Ministry of Education Museum (文部省博物館) that

had been founded in 1872. With this addition and that of the Ōkura Shūkokan (大倉集古

館 founded in 1917), the system of bijutsu took its shape.

The Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art should have been the keystone that

established bijutsu in its present-day sense as a modern social system. Yet at the same

time as the work to insert this keystone had begun, a challenge to the system of bijutsu

had already begun to churn at the outer periphery of what we can think of as the series of

concentric circles that surrounded the arch. This was the emergence of the avant-garde.

II. The Tokyo Municipal Museum and the Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde

II-i Simultaneous avant-garde movements and the construction of the art museum

Curiously, the process of building the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art almost exactly

paralleled the rise and fall of the avant-garde. Just when it seemed that the system of

bijutsu had been firmly established with the realization of the art world’s long-cherished

dream of a museum for present-day art, the avant-garde reared its head under the banner

of anti-bijutsu.

The origins of the two were simultaneous. One year after the establishment of the

Futurist Art Association (未来派美術協会) in 1920, the much-desired art museum

headed on its winding road toward completion after receiving a large donation of funds

from the businessman Satō Keitarō (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 233-239).

The Futurist Art Association was founded by the artist Fumon Gyō after he failed to have his work accepted to the Second Section Exhibition (二科展), at the time a bastion of artistic modernism. In 1922, Fumon established an exhibition called the Sanka (the

Third Section) Independent. It has been suggested that this “Third Section” was meant to indicate that the exhibition was even newer than the modernist Second Section and thereby contained elements of an oppositional or peripheral mentality vis-a-vis modernism, which was understood as already formed.6 Further, the Second Section Exhibition had grown out of the Second Section Society, a group of oil painters exploring new trends. These painters wanted the oil painting section of the Bunten to split into two groups, a conservative First Section and a progressive Second Section. When this plan was withdrawn, the Second Section was disenfranchised [and separated from the Bunten] (Ishii 1933, 5-16). In this sense, Third Section stood for a group that was on the outer margin of the official exhibitions, which were located at the center of bijutsu.

II-ii　The escalation of the avant-garde: the secession from bijutsu

In this way, [the art world] developed in concentric circles around the institution

of the public exhibition, but in 1923, just prior to the Great Kantō Earthquake, there

emerged a radical avant-garde group that surpassed all of it. This was MAVO.7

In this group, which was formed by Murayama Tomoyoshi shortly after his return

from study in Europe, the notion of the avant-garde took on a meaning that transcended

the notion of the front lines or vanguard of bijutsu. That is, it broke through the limits of

bijutsu, which had referred to the visual or plastic arts, and the avant-garde even

exceeded the limits of art (geijutsu), with its goal of aeshetic appreciation. The front

“line” on which the avant-garde was situated was in fact not so much a line as it was

a border zone, a place where art and non-art clashed and challenged each other, at times

intermingling. And because of that, the avant-garde was forced to inhabit an ambivalent

state that belonged to the categories of both art and non-art. Murayama’s MAVO group

epitomized this trend.

In May of 1925, a month after the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the

Municipal Museum of Art, an event called the Third Section of the Theater (劇場の三

科) took place at the Tsukiji Little Theater [in Tokyo]. Performances filled with violence

and commotion unfolded in quick succession. One year prior, a group of avant-garde

members banded together to form a lively group called the Third Section Plastic Art

Association (三科造形美術協会). In this way, concentric circles ranged in order of

degree of their peripheral status with respect to the official exhibitions formed and

became estranged from the concept of bijutsu. This estrangement, in turn, expressed itself

as a pragmatic critique of the central zone of bijutsu. The Tokyo Municipal Museum of

Art came into being just as the presence of a disaffected avant-garde became more

palpable.

II-iii The death of the avant-garde and the inauguration of the art museum

The activities of the avant-garde peaked around 1923, the year of the Great Kantō

Earthquake, and these years were succeeded by a period of decline. Just before the Third

Section of the Theater, the Third Section Plastic Art Association held its first exhibition

in the Matsuya department store in Ginza. In September of the same year, it held its

second exhibition at the Tokyo Self-Governing Association Meeting Hall (東京市自治会

館), but the group disbanded as a result of an internal dispute that broke out during the

exhibition. Subsequently, although a group called the Unified Third Section (単位三科)

was formed, it never mustered the energy of the earlier groups.

A number of avant-gardists with socialist leanings formed a group called

Zōkei(造形) which sought to return favor to the traditional artistic mediums of painting

and sculpture and, seeking to build stronger ties to the people as a proletariat, made a

pronounced veer toward realism. This trend, which might almost be called a recanting of

earlier commitments, was not unique to the group Zōkei but became prominent among

avant-gardists in general (Kitazawa 1980 169 – 171). The avant-garde movement

that had been developing at the front lines of art shifted to become the political avant-

garde.

Zōkei held its first group exhibition in March of 1926, just as the Tokyo

Municipal Museum of Art was having its dedication ceremony. The museum, whose

plans were launched at the same time as the Futurist Art Association, progressed steadily

toward completion throughout the period when avant-garde activities were intensifying,

and the museum was completed just as the movements were approaching their demise.

This development might at first appear as the act of reconstructing bijutsu after it had

been destroyed, but that was not the case. This is because the avant-garde movements

paralleled the construction process of the Tokyo Municipal Museum and had been

intensifying the entire time.

III The Cultural Memes of Zōkei: Craft and the Avant-Garde

III-i The avant-garde within the nation of “craft” (kōgei)

In this way, in modern Japan, the system of bijutsu reached one form of

completion just as the avant-garde art and cultural movements broke out. This timing,

which might be described as jumping the gun, is characteristic of the avant-garde

movements in Japan. In other words, it was not a movement attacking bijutsu as the

status quo which had already been completed as a system; rather, the new movement

sought to intervene in order to contain or impede the establishment of that system. In that

sense, it can be posited that the construction of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art was

a major impetus that actually triggered the avant-garde movements and increased their

intensity.

Why was it necessary to impede or contain the establishment of the system of

bijutsu? It is here that Japan’s cultural memes related to the production of form or the

production of things in general (zōkei) are involved.

In the history of the production of form (the history of zōkei) up until the Edo

period, extremely few objects were made for purely aesthetic appreciation. Most were in

some way connected to use in daily life. For example, we might consider the case of a

large ceramic platter with a picture on it. Although its connection to functionality may in

some cases be merely formal or superficial, the fact that the object takes the form of a

functional vessel in the first place can also be seen as an expression of an irresistible need

to acknowledge functionality. If we could sum up the history of Japanese zōkei in a

phrase, we might say that this history developed in a way that privileged craft. In The

Characteristics of Japanese Art (日本美術の特質,1943), Yashiro Yukio called Japan

“the nation of craft” (工芸国) in response to a similar understanding of the supremacy of

craft within the history of Japanese zōkei (Yashiro 1965, 184).

In the same book, Yashiro cites the term Ramenlosigkeit, which was used by

Tsuzumi Tsuneyoshi in his book Research on the styles of Japanese art (日本芸術様式

の研究,1929) (Yashiro 1965, 450). This word refers to the heart of the craft-like spirit of

Japanese creativity, which has no barrier between art and life. Tsuzumi calls this a

boundary-less quality, a transcendent mode of being (Tsuzumi 1936, 73).

In fact, however, Tsuzumi’s book was the Japanese translation of a book called

Die Kunst Japans and published by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in the year 1929 (Tsudzumi

1929) This publication year is coupled with the year that the book was issued in Europe

and necessarily sparks our curiosity. Constructivism and the Bauhaus had passed their

great peaks, and attendant with the rise of fascism, Futurism (Futurismo) and Aeropittura

were being promoted. In other words, this book was published during a tumultuous

period for the avant-garde, amidst alternating surges of fascism and nationalism (or

racism). This was surely no coincidence. Research on the styles of Japanese art embodies

the fusion of cultural naturalism and avant-garde approaches to the creation of form.

III-ii The proximity of kōgei and the avant-garde

The border-crossing or transregional nature of Tsuzumi Tsuneyoshi’s portrayal of

the distinctiveness of Japan’s visual arts was also characteristic of the avant-garde. And

like kōgei, this was because the avant-garde, too, came into being from a position that

was peripheral to bijutsu and by gaining elicit entrance into the world outside bijutsu. The

similarities between kōgei and the avant-garde did not end here. They can also be seen in

the specifics of the border-crossing nature of each. Kōgei and the avant-garde each

occupied a place at the border zone between art and industry.

As I mentioned earlier, the front lines occupied by the avant-garde were a border

zone where art and non-art (bijutsu and non-bijutsu) were entangled. Non-art is the

complementary set yielded when everthing in the whole world related to “bijutsu” is

subtracted. Theoretically speaking, the forefront of bijutsu necessarily abuts non-bijutsu

on all sides. But when we recall that the modern period centers around industry as its

main form of production, then it becomes apparent that the particularity of bijutsu as a

form of the plastic arts lies in the fact that non-bijutsu was essentially defined as industry

(kōgyō). Similarly, the two came to coexist as two genres separated along the lines of

functionality and aesthetics. Given this, the liminal territory occupied by the avant-garde

is also a contentious border zone where art (bijutsu) and industry clash with each other. In

other words, the avant-garde ties together the two distinct realms of bijutsu and kōgyō, as

is exemplified in the extreme by Futurism and Constructivism. The representative

qualities of the Taishō avant-garde are also of a piece with them.

Seen in this light, craft and the avant-garde, while they might seem different from

the outside, are actually united by deep similarities. Each occupies a border zone between

art and industry, and each contains some of the features of both art and industry. And

these are also the reasons why each was treated as an outsider by the core of bijutsu. The

aggressive avant-garde was seen as a threatening, antagonistic presence, while mild-

mannered craft was the object of distain.

III-iii The tumultuous movement of cultural memes

Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that the simultaneity of the avant-

garde movements and the mature period of the system of bijutsu is no mere coincidence.

This system of bijutsu centered on notions of purity and autonomy to separate the realm

of aesthetic appreciation that sustained the work of art from practical functionality related

to daily living. The fact that the avant-garde movements asserted themselves at the very

moment of the system of bijutsu’s full integration into Japanese society may in fact

indicate the triggering presence of cultural memes already found within Japanese society.

It may be, then, that the avant-garde is a variant of kōgei, which is based on Japanese

cultural memes. By assuming this kind of perspective, it finally becomes possible to

accurately position the avant-garde within the history of making things in Japanese

society, or the production of forms (zōkei).

One example of the mutual similarity between the avant-garde and cultural

memes that are already predisposed toward “craft” can be seen in the line of argument

taken up by the MAVO artist Murayama Tomoyoshi, in his discussion of industrialism

(産業主義) in Studies in Constructivism (Kōsei-ha kenkyū published February 1926).

Writing about Russian art immediately after the revolution, Muramaya noted the rise of

“industrialism” and wrote as follows:

Industrialism

declared full-on war against pure art.

Sounding the death knell for artistic individualism, it hailed collectivism.

It said that art (geijutsu) without some form of actual function or effect was not art at all.

And constructivism was born out of this industrialism (Murayama 1926, 40).

With the idea of Constructivism in his head, Murayama began using the word sangyō

shugi (industrialism; literally, the -ism of making or manufacturing). It becomes clear

from Murayama’s reference to “actual functionality” (実際的効用) that this notion was

consonant with that of kōgei. Even the move from “individualism” to “collectivism” can

be found in the notion of “folkish handicrafts” (民衆的工芸) –the ideas around so-called

Mingei-- that Yanagai Muneyoshi heralded around the same time as Murayama’s book

was published. Yanagi repudiated art that relied on individual expression and upheld the

creation of form by collective means (Kikuchi 2004).

But it is also necessary to note the gap between industrialism and existing notions

of kōgei at the time. Yanagi’s view of craft in Mingei tended toward nostalgic ideas based

on the idealization of the peoples’ handmade products prior to the Edo period. There

were also some decisive differences between the arts and crafts (kōgei), which relied on

existing artistic genres, and the avant-garde, which envisioned itself as breaking free from

bijutsu.

III-iv Zōkei = the creation of form: craft (kōgei) after the avant-garde

Three months after the publication of Kōsei-ha kenkyū (Studies in

Constructivism), the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art opened with an inaugural

exhibition entitled A Fine Arts Exhibition Dedicated in Praise of Shōtoku Taishi (聖徳太

子奉賛美術展覧会). This exhibition, which became the initial event at the Tokyo

Municipal Museum of Art, was noteworthy due to the presence of a craft (kōgei) section

in addition to sections for painting and sculpture. Murayama Tomoyoshi wrote a review

of this craft section. Maintaining that the exhibition should have a “practical arts” (実用

芸術) section, he asserted that the crafts (kōgei) exhibited as works of art in the craft

section were but one portion of the practical arts (Murayama 1926, 49). As examples of

the practical arts, Murayama listed toilets, barbershop chairs, celuloid dolls, signboards or

towers for advertising, dog collars, and other things that generally had little relation to the

category of kōgei. It was a strategy to deliberately confuse craft products with industrial

ones, and to confuse “arts and crafts” with craft; here we can witness his will to blur or

eliminate the boundary between art and non-art.

To be sure, the concept of the avant-garde originated in the twentieth-century

West, and in order to understand the motives behind the emergence and development of

the avant-garde in Japanese society, it is also necessary to consider the operation of

existing cultural memes that may have been triggered by the transplant of the avant-garde

concept from the West.8 That is why I mentioned earlier that the avant-garde is a variant

of kōgei, which is based on Japanese cultural memes.

At that time, the avant-garde in Japan frequently employed the word zōkei, which

means the creation of form or plasticity, as in the title of the group The Third Section

Association for the Plastic Arts (三科造形美術協会). This is a key concept in

Murayama’s above-cited critique. Murayama thought about the fine arts (bijutsu) as one

portion of the broader semantic terrain of zōkei, the creation of form. The avant-garde

objets which had no practical function, and even painting and sculpture, were all

contained within the broader concept of zōkei. In other words, any act of making, of

creating forms, could be included in this category. Consequently, the term was capable of

subsuming the opposed genres of industrial production and fine arts within itself. This

fortold the unification of all forms of making under the heading of zōkei.

Murayama’s view of kōgei may seem forced, a mere avant-gardism which sought

to emphasize affinities with industrial production. Here, however, it is necessary to

remember that in the early Meiji period, the word kōgei did in fact have the meaning of

an “industry.” (Kitazawa 2005, 230). The word kōgyō, used in Japan since the early

modern period, had such strong associations with manual labor or handicraft that in order

to get it to signify “industry” in the post-industrial revolution sense, it was seen as

necessary to create a new and dissimilar word. In the early twentieth century, when

Murayama was born and raised, kōgei had already acquired today’s meaning, yet at the

same time it retained the nuance of industry much more strongly than it does today.

IV The Genesis of the Kōgei Genre: The Border Zone of Bijutsu

IV-i The establishment of a craft section in the official exhibitions

The very nature of the kōgei genre as seen above might be described as

chimerical, and from the perspective of someone seeking to maintain the system of

bijutsu, we can see how dubious it must have appeared. For that reason, neither the the

Ministry of Education Exhibition nor the Imperial Fine Art Academy Exhibition (帝国美

術院展覧会) created a craft section. This meant that, although the third Domestic

Industrial Exhibition of 1890 and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, founded in 1889, each

established craft departments, the Bunten, which was supposed to be an important

monument to the systematization of the fine arts, nonetheless placed craft outside the

system of bijutsu. The official exhibitions were events that were supposed to swiftly and

effectively raise society’s awareness of the fine arts, so this kind of omission necessarily

dealt a significant blow to crafts. The crafts, which could be said to be a kind of womb

for the fine arts in Japan, were instead discarded like a placenta after the birth of “fine

arts” in Japan. One might also say that the Bunten suppressed craft’s inherent position of

supremacy within Japanese culture or possibly even planned a kind of genetic

modification to the cultural genes (the memes) of craft in Japan. In other words, the

Bunten effected a sort of cultural eugenics based on an imported Western standard.

Shortly after the first Bunten, craft artists petitioned the officials for the addition

of a craft section, but it would be two decades before those efforts bore fruit. A year after

a craft section was included in the inaugural exhibition dedicated to Shōtoku Taishi at the

Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art in 1926, the Eighth Teiten, which opened at the same

location, included a craft section for the first time. When it is described in the above

manner, it might appear that the Teiten followed the example of the Shōtoku Taishi

exhibition. In fact, however, it was the reverse. The establishment of a craft section for

the Teiten had already been decided at the end of 1923 at the Imperial Fine Art Academy

General Meeting.9 The nature of the debate about craft that may have occurred in the

preparation phase of the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition is unclear today, but considering that

Masaaki Naohiko, the director-general of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy, was also at

the center of the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition planing efforts,10 it is impossible to think that

he would have been unaware of the developments being planned for the Teiten.

IV-ii A bridge from life to art

The foregoing account might suffice as far as the causal relationship is concerned,

but historical investigation must not content itself with establishing causal relations; it

must also attend to the relative positions of the event and its surrounding circumstances

and conditions. In other words, the historian must also consider the field that is brought

into being by certain circumstances. What, then, is the broader historical field in which a

craft section was created at the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition and the Teiten?

From the late Meiji through Taishō periods, the arts and the field of thought

(shisō) in general exhibit a profound concern with the relationship to life (sei; seikatsu) .11

A similar trend can also be found in the field of fine art, and it went on to elicit interest in

the formal qualities of implements of daily life. The mingei movement, which

emphasized the nature of craft objects that were intimately related to the people’s daily

life, is a perfect example of that trend. The concerns of the times can also be seen the

handicrafts (ie applique, embroidery) of Fujii Tatsukichi, a member of the Fusain

Society (Fusain-kai), which was dedicated to the expression of one’s inner life.12 These

trends merged directly into Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “practical arts” (jitsuyō geijutsu),

which sought to eliminate all distinctions between the industrial product and kōgei.

Murayama emphasized that life within modern industrialized society should be shaped by

industry as such.

The craft sections at the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition and the Teiten were

established within the above-described intellectual context. But there was no way that the

powers vested in maintaining the fine arts (bijutsu) as a system would have consented to

admit the full range of acts of making–zōkei, in the language of the times—into their

ambit. Still more, it was impossible to ask the system of bijutsu to accept the avant-garde,

with its oppositional mentality toward bijutsu. This was because the value of bijutsu in

societal terms was based on its status as an elite portion of all acts of making. That said,

the notion of understanding art as an expression of one’s inner life, was, coupled with the

advent of Expressionism, an unignorable trend within the art world and one that was in

the process of taking many forms.13 This put bijutsu in the position of needing to

continually redraw its own borders.

IV-iii The Border Zone of Bijutsu: The Break Between Kōgei and the Avant-Garde

As I have already pointed out, the concept of zōkei on which the avant-garde

relies is supposed to encompass all acts of making (or the production of form) , but if we

limit ourselves for a moment to the portion of made things which are at the margin of

bijutsu and thereby help to define bijutsu’s borders, we can notice some genres –namely,

craft (kōgei)-- which are attracted to bijutsu by a sort of centripetal force, and others –

namely, the avant-garde- which distanced themselves from bijutsu as if by centrifugal

force. The narrow belt between these two constituted bijutsu’s border zone in the Taishō

era. To restate, if we return to the metaphor of the concentric circles around the Bunten,

the avant-garde would be located in the outermost position, about to dissolve into zōkei,

the general category for all made things. Toward the middle of the concentric circles, at

the border of bijutsu’s circle of influence, we would find kōgei. Reinterpreted in a more

dynamic fashion, this means that while the outer ring, the avant-garde, exerted a

centrifugal force through its denial of bijutsu, while the inner ring, kōgei, drew

comparataively closer to bijutsu.

In this way, the political consciousness behind the system of the fine arts –which

might also be a subconscious political consciousness-- took advantage of the opportunity

inherent in the dynamic that had been created by the Bunten system, using it to shift the

boundaries of bijutsu so that, by including kōgei within the inner ring, the domain where

art abutted “life” would be included within its own sphere of influence. This occurred

with the founding of the Crafts section at the eighth Teiten in 1927. Until that point, the

fine arts as a system had been allocating kōgei to the border zone on the outskirts of

bijutsu. Now, however, it moved to incorporate kōgei within itself, making a bridge to

“life” while strategically separating itself from the avant-garde.

In sum, if we understand the avant-garde as a mutant form of the cultural genes or

memes of zōkei that had been cultivated within Japanese society, we could also rephrase

the foregoing situation in the following manner. The process from the avant-garde’s

initial rebellions to its eventual death is synonymous with the process of kōgei’s

incorporation into the realm of bijutsu. This death, in turn, was a form of apoptosis which

enabled bijutsu to be incorporated into [Japan’s] existing cultural framework.

Conclusion: The Art Museum (Bijutsukan) and the Transformation of Bijutsu

Having been inaugurated with the Exhibition in Praise of Shōtoku Taishi, the

Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art followed the general framework that had been set up

through that exhibition. Painting and sculpture were placed in the center, while craft was

located in the border zone. At the same time, however, the record of exhibitions held at

the Municipal Museum included calligraphy, bonsai, children’s drawings, posters,

photography, and so forth, and in this way it departed greatly from the framework of the

the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition. By taking in so many forms of zōkei, the museum might

have seemed to be confounding its own status as a keystone of the system of the fine arts.

Yet it could be said that the museum just barely managed to preserve the integrity of the

fine arts system. It expelled the avant-garde, which was filled with destructive, malicious

intent toward bijutsu, and it positioned “pure” industrial manufactures as crude outliers.

In 1943, when Tokyo was reincorporated as a metropolis, the museum was

renamed the Tokyo Metrpolitan Museum of Art (東京都美術館), and even after Japan’s

defeat in the war, the museum’s basic stance and profile remained unchanged for quite

some time. In 1949, the Yomiuri newspaper company founded the Nihon Independent

Exhibition (日本アンデパンダン展; retitled 読売アンデパンダン展 after 1957), and

when the avant-garde reared its head around 1960 with an attack on bijutsu, the museum

repelled it through the creation of a document entitled “An Outline of Standards and

Criteria for the Display of Works in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art” (東京都美

術館陳列作品企画基準要網) (Segi 1996, 279). And in 1970, when Nakahara Yūsuke,

acting as the sole organizer of the 10th Tokyo Biennale (日本国際美術展) attempted to

include the avant-garde in the museum under the concept heading “Between Man and

Matter” (人間と物質の間), [the museum], cleaving to its existing stance, attempted to

sabotage his efforts through the enactment of various new regulations.14 In these ways,

bijutsu impeded the limitless expansion of zōkei, and this, the nation’s first museum

dedicated to the arts of the present day, used the mechanisms of expulsion and

assimilation to direct peripheral power unrelentingly toward its center.

In the 1980s, however, the situation changed drastically. The prewar and postwar

avant-gardes had become historical and were incorporated into the Tokyo Metropolitan

Museum of Art in the form of special exhibitions. First, a retrospective of the Taishō

avant-garde was mounted (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 1988). Then, the

museum, with its same bygone “standards and criteria” (規範基準) still on the books

from the old days, offered the works of the 1960s avant-garde to public view (Tokyo

Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 1983). The exhibition about the 1920s even exhibited

actual industrial manufactures.

Yet this does not mean that the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art experienced a

postwar conversion. In these years, the avant-garde had already come to assume a place

within the center of bijutsu, since it was now impossible to treat the arts of the present

day under the museum’s original rubric of painting and sculture at the center and crafts at

the periphery. Further, the contemporary world was beginning to change from an

industrial society to an information society. In other words, the entire enterprise of

producing physical objects (zōkei) - whether as industry or fine arts- was beginning to

move rapidly away from the core of society as a whole.

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1Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Bijutsu’ gainen no keisei to riarizumu no ten’i” (The Formation of the “Bijutsu” Concept and the Changing Status of Realism) in Kitazawa 2005, 291 -311; Satō 1999. 2 Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Nihonga’ gainen no keisei ni kansuru shiron” (A Hypothesis Concerning the Formation of the Nihonga Concept) in Kitazawa 2005, 152 – 156.

3 The first definition under the entry for kōgei (craft) states: “A form of art based on manual labor” (kōsaku jō no gigei); the second definition reads: “the production of items of daily use such as woven or dyed textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, etc., which harmonize the qualities of ‘function’ and ‘decoration.” (Grand Dictionary of Japanese 2001, 255)

4 Article 2 of “Bijutsu tenrankai kitei” (Regulations for art exhibitions) (1907) declares: “Submissions must fall under [one of] the following three categories: nihonga, yōga, sculpture.” (Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed. 1980, 545).

5 Article one of the “Tokyo-fu bijutsukan shiyō kitei” (Guidelines for the use of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art)(1926) stipulates the reasons for use, beginning, “1) The display of creations related to the fine arts” (bijutsu ni kan suru sōsaku no tankan). (Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., 1982, 659).6 Honma Masayoshi, “Mirai-ha Bijutsu Kyōkai oboegaki,” in Honma 1988, 94 – 95.7 In English, please see Weisenfeld 2002.8Kitazawa Noriaki, “Suichoku na hashi: Bijutsushi kenkyū no aporia to shite no (Avuangyarudo)” (A Vertical Bridge: The Avant-Garde as Aporia in Art History Studies)　 in Kitazawa 2003, 245 – 283.9 “Teiten Nenpyō 2” (Teiten Timeline 2) in Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai ed. 1982, 665.10 Saitō Yasuyoshi, “Tokyo-fu Bijutsukan no jidai,” in Tokyo-fu Bijutsukan no jidai, 1926－1970, 2005, 10. 11 Suzuki Sadami, “Taishō seimei shugi to wa nani ka” (What is Taishō Vitalism?) in Suzuki ed. 1995, 2-15.12 Catalog of the first Fusain-kai Exhibition, in Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo ed. 2002, 200. 13 Kitazawa 1993, 45-78; Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Hyōgen’ no kaiga,” in Zen’ei to modan, vol. 17 of Tsuji Nobuo, Takeo Izumi, Yuji Yamashita, and Kiyonobu Itakura eds 2014, 181 – 182. 14 Nakahara Yūsuke, “Keika hōkoku: Jyakkan no oboegaki,” in Nakahara/Nakahara Yūsuke Bijutsu Hihyō Senshū Henshū Iinkai 2011, 16 – 21.