The arts of the Momoyama period in Japan

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1996 by Bruce Arthur Coats

Hideyoshi rose from a common foot soldier in the 1550s to become the military dictator of Japan in the 1590s. He helped to unify the country after a century of warfare and then reshape the capital city of Kyoto through his extensive building projects and lavish patronage of the arts, which, incidentally, were important ways for the newly empowered military to assert cultural as well as political hegemony. Shortly after Hideyoshi's death in 1598, Emperor Go-Yozei (1571-1617) declared him a Shinto deity named Hokoku daimyojin (Great Luminous Deity of Our Bountiful Country).

An exhibition of Momoyama art at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, comprises 156 works in a variety of mediums, many commissioned by Hideyoshi or produced by artists who did other works for him. The exhibition is therefore very much a window into his vibrant personality and spectacular projects. The posthumous portrait in Plate V, for example, depicts him in elegant court robes, seated on a ceremonial mat. The artist is unknown, but the painting follows a stylistic pattern established by the famous Kano studio of Kyoto, which Hideyoshi patronized. Such portraits were installed in shrines throughout the country dedicated to Hideyoshi's spirit.

As the son of a low-ranking foot soldier, Hideyoshi's childhood is undocumented, and later legends - many of which he promoted - about his miraculous birth and extraordinary rise to power have added mystery and excitement to his biography.(1) Concerning his conception he wrote in 1593, When I was about to enter my dear mothers womb, she had an auspicious dream. That night the sunlight filled her room so that it was like noontime inside it. All were overwhelmed with astonishment. The attendants gathered, and the diviner proclaimed, "This is a wondrous sign that when the child reaches his prime, his virtue will shine over the Four Seas, and he will radiate his glory to the ten thousand directions."(2)

Hideyoshi first served as a common foot soldier for the ruthless Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), who affectionately called him "Monkey." His political enemies had other nicknames for this ambitious warrior, who soon became one of Nobunaga's most trusted generals. Both men were quick to take advantage of recently introduced European-style firearms and to devise battle tactics for the swift deployment of troops. Swords and armor were redesigned to fit the rapid evolution of warfare, and shinto (new swords) and lighter-weight tosei gusoku (modern equipment) are part of the Dallas exhibition. A teppo (matchlock-style gun)(3) owned by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), Hideyoshi's successor as dictator of Japan, demonstrates how the Japanese copied and improved on European inventions even in the sixteenth century.

Portuguese traders came to Japan about 1543, introducing matchlocks and other trade goods, and the Jesuit Francis Xavier (1506-1552) began missionary efforts in 1549. Initially, the Japanese were most interested in guns and chain-mail armor, but with the arrival of more trading ships from European colonies in Asia, the impact of outside cultures broadened. Imported textiles and clothing accessories were coveted and quickly copied. Depictions of the Nambanjin (southern barbarians) became extremely popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with scenes of foreigners and galleons decorating fans and folding screens (see Pl. XI).

When Hideyoshi conducted military campaigns in Kyushu, Japan, and Korea he brought artists with him from Kyoto, and members of the Kano studio may have actually seen European priests, traders, sailors, and ships in Nagasaki, Japan. However, as is noted in the catalogue to the exhibition:

Objective recording of the appearance and activities of the "Southern Barbarians" was not a major consideration in Namban screens. Artists strove rather to capitalize on the publics fascination with and fear of the world beyond Japanese shores by accentuating the exotic appearance and unfamiliar customs of these alien peoples. In so doing they often conflated stereotyped images of Portuguese, Chinese and even Koreans.(4)

In the example shown in Plate XI a Portuguese sea captain, attended by a dark-skinned servant, walks along the street of a port town to greet a priest who is standing in the gate at the right. In the background are a Catholic chapel and missionary residence. Japanese shopkeepers look on but do not seem involved with the strangers. Hideyoshi himself had mixed reactions to the foreigners, at times welcoming their trade and information and at other times severely restricting their movements and expelling their priests. Finally, in 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu limited foreign trade to a few Dutch ships in Nagasaki each year, and forbade the practice of Christianity.

Japanese castles were influenced by the design of imported European weapons and reports of European castle architecture. Towering donjons and stone-walled moats were patterned in part on foreign designs but were built using purely Japanese construction methods. The Japanese castles contained richly decorated rooms with vast murals and elaborately carved wooden panels. Nobunaga began building the first grand castle, Azuchi, in 1576, and Hideyoshi built three - in Kyoto, Osaka, and Momoyama. None of these fortified pleasure palaces remain, but two works in the exhibition are by Kano Eitoku, who provided paintings for three of the castles (Pls. VI, VIII). Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons (Pl. VI) is part of a sixteen-panel panoramic landscape done about 1566 for a Zen temple in Kyoto. Nearly sixty feet long, it covers three walls of a chapel, with the fourth side open to a mossy stone garden that creates a continuity between indoors and outdoors. The painting contains delicately rendered birds and seasonal flowers beneath enormous pine boughs. Eitoku depicted the gnarled roots and jagged limbs of the old pines with broad, bold brush strokes that twist and turn to emphasize the rough surfaces. Such vigorous brushwork proved popular for castle interiors since it seemed to capture the spirit of the warrior clients and large-scale paintings could be quickly executed, thus being both symbolically apt and cost effective. Eitoku's style predominated in late sixteenth-century Japanese painting, and the Kano studio of artists was commissioned to decorate castles, palaces, temples, and shrines for Kyoto's wealthiest and most powerful patrons.