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12 Japanese Masters
Preface by Alex Kerr Since the mid-19th century, Japan, supreme among all other Asian nations, has captured and held the imagination of the West. Japan's strong aesthetic influence has endured for a century and a half, each time taking a new form--from the prints that influenced the Impressionists of the 1880s, through the tea houses that inspired Bauhaus architecture of the 1920s, to the manga comics and animation that excite a new generation today. Even the revival of China and Southeast Asia, which took place at the end of the 20th century, failed to dislodge Japan from her throne. No sooner did the other nations of Asia modernize than they too began to fall under Japan's spell. Throughout the dramatic ups and downs of Japan's recent history, the power of design might even be said to be the one unshakable constant. From this point of view, this book introduces twelve great postwar designers and touches on something of essential importance, both to Japan and to the world at large. When Maggie Saiki refers to the precious "window of opportunity"--the period after World War II (from about 1945 to 1965)--during which the basic forms of modern Japanese design took shape, she describes a time of rapid change when artists still had access to their traditional culture, but also vivid new forms arriving from the West, primarily the United States. The challenge for these twelve designers was not to reconcile the two cultures, but to rebuild their nation using the resources of each. There is much to ponder in their successes. One might, for example, question the true role of America, which Saiki points out was in acting as more of a catalyst than a critical ingredient. Design has always been important in Japan -from the Heian court, which worried more about whether a certain shade of pink was right for the season than about governance per se- on through the Edo period, where unbridled consumerism ruled the cities, and townsmen were obsessed with style. In the field of calligraphy, for example, Japan invented many forms unknown in China for the sole purpose of producing striking signs and book formats, i.e. for graphic design. Whether under the influence of China or America, Japan has excelled in creating brash and dramatic combinations, often out of quite unexpected elements. This is still true today, where Japanese technology excels in such syncretism -- from the Walkman, to T-shirts through which one absorbs vitamins. And it applies very much to design, which has been free from the "rational" and codified systems of China and the West. A piece of cloth becomes a dress. Ordinary kitchen utensils become a motorcycle. Literally anything goes. This outrageous ability to combine things that we never thought could be combined, is the single most powerful feature that makes Japan seem so modern in our eyes. From this point of view, America's influence, strong as it appears on the surface, may turn out in hindsight to have been in fact minimal. America provided only a new vocabulary for an old design ethos, which long preceded America's influence in Japan--and will long outlive it. Fashion and design have always held a high social place in Japan. This came about as a response to, and also as a result of, the removal of fashion and design from politics and propaganda. Jesuit visitors arriving from gray uniform Beijing in the 17th century were amazed at the flowing sleeves and towering hairdos of Japan, and this led them to the erroneous belief that Japan was a freer, more open nation than China. Quite the reverse was true. Japan was arguably the most strictly controlled society on earth. Fancy hairdos were one of the few means of escape. The same mistake is made today by observers who see the dashing experiments of fashion designers and manga creators -- or wacky youth hair styles -- and imagine that fundamental social change has come. (Odd that four hundred years later hair is still central to the West's conception of Japan.) Rather, as conformism tightens its grip on the society, design spurts forth ever more imaginatively. Design is steam escaping from the pressure cooker. How successful were these 12 designers in changing Japan? Certainly the older generation among them believed that it was their mission to "modernize" Japan, to bring design to bear on Japan's transformation into democracy and (whether they liked it or not) American consumerism. While the way people ate, slept, and spent their money changed, the designers' dreams of a New Japan, and the images they created for it, developed at a tangent from the reality emerging around them. It is related that when consulting the I Ching, Confucius once received the hexagram "Grace," which refers to art -- and he felt very uncomfortable about it. "Grace has success only in small matters," says the I Ching, and in this lies the crux of Japan's paradox at the beginning of the 21st century: Despite the aesthetic genius and near superhuman energy of these designers, and thousands of other creative artists in Japan, they did not, in the end, make their nation beautiful. The disassociation of design from politics, which has been such a creative strength in Japan, also has had its dangers. Designers strove to integrate traditional crafts into their work, but as society continued to adopt an "industrial mode," crafts languished. This is apparent as recently as the work of Toshiyuki Kita and Takenobu Igarashi shown here, though this aspect of their work did not have the effect they envisioned. Today most designers have abandoned the cause of traditional materials. Designers also felt a oneness with nature, but they were powerless before a construction industry run rampant. While their elegant fashions and striking posters stun the cognoscenti in New York and Paris, back at home, Japan is quietly losing its rivers, coasts, mountains, and valleys under an advancing shield of cement. There's a real question whether the next generation of designers, unknowing of the past, and brought up in plastic cities and concreted countryside, will measure up to the achievements of the post-war giants. We can hear intimations of this in the grumblings of some of the 12 masters, who feel Japanese design has descended from a golden age to bronze, or even clay. They may be wrong. Perhaps it will turn out that there is something deep within Japanese society itself, which transcends and precedes outward forms, in which case the environment will prove irrelevant. Plastic and concrete could themselves become unexpected and surprising ingredients in a new synthesis. But then again, maybe not. These new ingredients may not have the power to move the soul that the old ones did. In that case, Japan will have to struggle very hard to find new paths -- or find its way back to the old paths -- in order to create advanced art and design. These twelve masters, most of whom are still active, will live out their lives as towering figures from an age that can never be repeated. As the last generation who drew their inspiration from Japan's ancient culture and landscape, their work is a signpost -- and a promise for the future. BIO Alex Kerr was born in 1952. He grew up in Japan and now lives in Kyoto and Bangkok. He was educated at Yale, Oxford and Keio universities. Lost Japan (1993), which he wrote originally in Japanese, was the first by a foreigner to win the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize for non-fiction. His most recent book, Dogs and Demons (2001) is a hard-hitting account of Japan's modern cultural and environmental crises. His next project: a Kabuki play. | Back | |
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