Finding the extraordinary in the everyday - Japanese folk crafts; various artists, various galleries

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Janet Koplos

Japanese folk crafts evolved in premodern times, but their appearance is sometimes surprisingly congenial to Western modernist tastes. These everyday goods of merchants, farmers and workers, such as ceramic bowls, brass braziers, bamboo baskets, cotton jackets, iron kettles and lacquered wooden boxes, may have a clarity of form that seems straight out of MOMA's "good design" program. Yet most were produced by provincial artisans to meet such rudimentary needs as water storage where there was no plumbing and warmth where there was no wool. Two large exhibitions of these crafts--one from a Japanese museum and the other from a European private collection--are crisscrossing the U.S. this year, offering American audiences an unusual opportunity to see the simple and beautiful goods in depth. (In addition, a show of Japanese traditional textiles concentrating on folk examples and an exhibition comparing Japanese and Shaker objects recently concluded U.S. tours.(1))

The Japanese crafts are preserved and known largely thanks to one man, Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961), a member of the elite who attended the Peers School in Tokyo (a teacher and thereafter mentor was Daisetsu Suzuki) and the Imperial University, where he took a degree in philosophy. Yanagi was one of a number of advanced young men hungry for Western ideas in the early years of the 20th century. Japan had opened to the West in the second half of the 19th century after 250 years of enforced seclusion under the shogunate. By Yanagi's time the nation had gone through a period of abandoning Japanese traditions in favor of Western science, art and even clothing, followed by a reactionary retrenchment and then a gradual reopening to Western ideas.

Yanagi became the youngest editor at a literary magazine called Shirakaba (White Birch), which introduced Western artists and writers to Japan--among them Cezanne, van Gogh, Rodin and Whitman--as well as Western philosophy and the precepts of Christianity. Yanagi himself wrote about Beardsley, Rodin, Renoir, Hogarth and Matisse, among others. At the age of 24 he published a nearly 800-page book on the art and writings of William Blake.

His collecting of Japanese folk crafts was the consequence of a circuitous chain of events, but it was also a sign of his time--a period sometimes called the "Taisho Democracy," when well-bred young men were establishing Tolstoian communes for the common folk and pursuing other idealistic projects.(2) Yanagi's fancy was caught by a little Korean vase, a faceted form glazed in white with a sprig of grasses painted on it in blue, which he received as a gift. He was struck by its beauty, and beauty was something he associated with fine art and refined traditional crafts, but not with such humble stuff.

He began to collect Korean folk crafts, finding in them naturalness, unselfconsciousness and relaxed imperfection, which he regarded as admirable. With private funding by donation, he founded a museum of folk crafts in Seoul in 1924, the first such institution in all of Asia. His embrace of Korean artifacts came at an awkward time, because Japan had invaded Korea in 1910 and was, in fact, attempting to obliterate Korean culture by such measures as requiring the speaking of Japanese. In that context, his behavior was bravely humanitarian.

Only after this Korean inspiration did he discover the folk crafts of his homeland, things that were at the time mostly valueless remainders used primarily in isolated and backward parts of Japan. Yanagi acquired much of his collection for little or nothing, simply by showing interest. Most of these functional objects dated from the 19th century; although form and style might be much older, earlier examples had been used up or worn out. Along with several close friends who shared his discovery--the Japanese ceramists Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai and, on occasion, the English etcher-turned-potter Bernard Leach(3)--Yanagi was soon foraging throughout Japan. In 1920 he coined the word mingei (pronounced min-gay, and short for "people's craft or art") and began to plan for the establishment of the Nihon Mingeikan (Japan Folk Crafts Museum). The museum opened in Tokyo in 1936. Other Mingeikans were later opened in Osaka, Kurashiki and elsewhere. Mingei became a movement and Yanagi was launched on a crusade to establish a "new standard of beauty," which occupied the rest of his life.

Yanagi praised Mingei for its "healthy" beauty. He defined Mingei not only by how a thing looked, but how it was made and how it was used. Mingei, as he saw it, was utilitarian; traditional; a communal rather than individual invention made of natural materials by using simple and appropriate techniques; inexpensive; and made in quantity so as to be available to the masses for daily use. Rarity, preciousness and signature were outside the realm of Mingei.(4) Some items were produced by farm families for their own use, such as the straw back cushions (seate) farmers used in the days when the most common pack animal on the difficult Japanese terrain was the farmer himself. But most metalware, ceramics and textiles were essentially mass-produced by artisan families for an extensive national market that has been described as "proto-industrial rather than pre-industrial in economic terms."(5)