Conceptual issues

What do we talk about when we talk about Japanese traditional arts and crafts?

What types of objects are included in this category and what cultural, social and ideological meanings do they entail? And finally, how have they been invented and reinvented throughout the history of modern Japan in order to shape a unified and monolithic image of Japanese culture in a period of national identity making? In the previous chapter, I examined the genealogy of Western images of Japan, born from a dialectical process between the ideology of Orientalism and Japanese self-images. In this chapter, we will see how Japanese self-representations marked by the discourse of Japaneseness and cultural nationalism are reflected in the domestic discourse about traditional Japanese arts and crafts.

In popular imagination, the expression “traditional Japanese arts and crafts”

often entails cultural expressions connected with the past and that convey specific ideas of “Japaneseness”, such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, martial arts, woodblock prints, ceramics and many others¹. Since the aim of this chapter is not to discuss the origin and features of these arts, but instead to examine them in the context of an institutionalized national discourse that reflects historical, political and social processes involved in the making of images of Japan, if we dissect the expression

“traditional Japanese art” into the three words that compose it, we can immediately identify the problems arisen by it.

As explored in chapter one, in the last three decades scholars from the field of Japanese studies have questioned the notions of natural nation and ethnic homogeneity in the context of Japan disseminated by the Nihonjinron. Despite this,

1 In the website of The Virtual Museum of Japanese Arts, produced for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Kodansha International Ltd., Japanese arts are divided into six categories: fine arts (painting, sculpture, ukiyō-e, architecture and gardens); craft (wood and lacquerware, metalwork, ceramics, woven and dyed textiles, swords and armor); performing arts (kabuki, nō, kyōgen, bunraku, dance and music); pastime arts (flower arrangement, tea ceremony, calligraphy, bonsai); martial arts (sumō, judō, kendō, kyūdō, karate, aikido); and others (dolls, ninja, Japanese cuisine, zazen, tanka and haiku and festivals).

popular images of the country and its traditional culture still often show simplistic depictions that ignore historical, ethnical and regional variations. In this context, we might ask: should the arts of Okinawa or the Ainu region of Hokkaido be included in the category of traditional Japanese arts, since both these regions have only been incorporated into the Japanese national territory in the second half of the nineteenth century? While the answer to this question might not be considered very problematic today, more complicated issues arise if we look at the former Japanese imperial colonies, an issue which has been approached by Kikuchi (2010) through the lenses of crafts. In her study, the author shows how domestic ideas of “Japaneseness” have changed according to specific political agendas. Hence, the definition of “Japan” and

“Japanese” isn’t something fixed and, in some cases, it is still a matter of dispute.

Similar to the concept of nation, national identity and national culture, so the concept of tradition lacks a clear definition. The idea of tradition has been thoroughly problematized by Hobsbawm and Ranger in their seminal monograph The Invention of Traditions (1983). In this work, the authors argue that traditions that often seem or are considered old are actually quite recent, when not entirely invented. In this sense, the role of “invented traditions" reproduces that of the nation: to inculcate a set of normative values and behaviors by establishing continuity with the past. We might therefore ask: how old must an artistic expression be in order to be considered traditional? Morris-Suzuki (1994: 14) has pointed out that, in fact, most of the traditional local craft products sold today at souvenir shops around Japan have originated in the Tokugawa age, that is, no more than four centuries years ago. And according to the Association for the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries, to be recognized as Traditional Craft of Japan, a particular object must be manufactured by implementing traditional techniques of at least one hundred years old. Thus, in this chapter, we will see how some aspects of Japanese arts, often described in the media as “millenary traditions”, are actually quite recent or have been reinvented and restructured in the modern period.

As a result, the question of authenticity frequently arises when talking about culture and cultural traditions. And while no cultural practice is truly authentic, the Japanese government has taken an active part in reframing (trans)cultural practices within a quintessential and monolithic idea of “Japaneseness”. As such, the substantial

Chinese and Korean heritage present in many of the country’s centuries-old cultural practices is not usually acknowledged. In fact, emblematic Japanese craft techniques often seen as “traditional” or “quintessentially Japanese” have actually been introduced from the neighboring countries, one example being high-temperature wood-firing in climbing kilns (noborigama), imported from Korea after the Japanese military invasions of the country in the sixteenth century and the consequent capture of Korean craftsmen, who developed these techniques in Japan.

Furthermore, Morris-Suzuki (1994) has noted that, before the Meiji period, the country’s political decentralization, reflected in its division into competing economic units, lead to the development of a heterogeneity of styles and techniques in different regions, thus making it hard to refer to a homogenous and, even more so, atemporal

“Japanese style”. In fact, it was only after the Meiji Restoration that the Japanese government started making constant use of history with the goal of legitimating a sense of shared culture and the creation of a unified discourse on Japanese crafts had an important part to play in this process.

Finally, the definition of art has also been a field of ongoing dispute and often dominated by Eurocentric essentialist notions of geniality and creativity. According to the English Oxford Living Dictionaries, art consists of “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”. From a critical perspective, however, this reductionist conception has been regarded by several authors as a modern invention (Shiner, 2003) and as a cultural and social system (Geertz, 1976; Luhmann, 2000), with origins in the eighteenth century Europe. Furthermore, as a cultural product, traditional Japanese arts possess the same issues as other types of cultural practices, invariably shaped by history, society and political ideologies. The problematization of the concept of art as a material cultural practice will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.

Hence, in this chapter I will investigate the historical trajectories, political constructions and sociability nets that have contributed to the construction of a stereotyped image of traditional Japanese crafts predominant in the popular imagination, focusing on the national context from Meiji Restoration until today. The goal is to discuss the definition of traditional Japanese crafts and show how their

identity is actually intertwined with political ideologies, historical constructions and cultural representations. Following the first participations of Japan in the International Exhibitions of late nineteenth century, the rediscovery of old pottery kilns and the revival of tea ceremony amongst the urban elite in the 1920s, the folk crafts movement (mingei) of the prewar and postwar years, the creation of the title of Living National Treasure in the 1950s, the explosion of the domestic tourism in the 1970s and the more recent “Cool Japan” nation branding, this chapter will illustrate the main historical moments that have contributed to the definition, reinvention and revitalization of certain traditional Japanese arts in the last one hundred and fifty years.