Beauty and Violence , Art and War : Some Reflections on the Visual Cultures of Imperial Japan (original) (raw)

Beauty and Violence" was an admirably descriptive name for an early-1990s exhibition of strikingly dichotomous pictures by the Japanese woodblock print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), who came to prominence in what was, by any measure, an age of extremes. His source material was rich-the bloody civil war that ended the Tokugawa shogunate, followed by the new regime of the Meiji Emperor (1852-1912) with its program of modernization. Rocked by ongoing political and social upheaval, the Japanese populace voraciously devoured Yoshitoshi's seemingly innumerable and infinitely varied images of their world in flux. To those of us living through the upheavals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it may seem that our own presentday world of images is saturated with violence, and ever increasingly and gratuitously so (Game of Thrones, anyone?). But the graphic intensity of these nineteenth-century Japanese pictures of war and warriors was something I had never seen, at least back in 1992. 1 Perhaps more unsettling yet was the exhibition's casual juxtaposition of Yoshitoshi's images of war with his pictures of beautiful women-he had the audacity, 1 "Beauty and Violence: Japanese Prints by Yoshitoshi, 1839-1892" traveled to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunstmuseum in Dusseldorf, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it opened in the print galleries in December 1992 (see the exhibition catalogue by Eric van den Ing and Robert Schaap [1992]). The Philadelphia Museum of Art rehung a number of these works, drawn from its collection, in the 2019 exhibition "Yoshitoshi: Spirit and Spectacle." Cross-Currents 31 | 233 The topic of the collecting and display of war pictures naturally raises critical issues of reception, history, and memory, all the more so given ongoing geopolitical tensions and sensitivities related to Japan's imperial past. Such issues, regrettably, are generally not touched upon in Conflicts of Interest. It briefly mentions Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan's war dead, as a site for the display of war prints today (20)-though this has by no means been diplomatically unproblematic during the seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War. A heavy-handed woodblock triptych of 1894 helps explain why. Booty of Chinese Implements of War Displayed on the Grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine in Kudan and Various Kinds of Unused Artillery (cat. 26) not only provided the (Japanese) viewer with privileged visual access to such captured war booty as Qing battle flags and Korean women's tunics on public display at Yasukuni Shrine, it also showcases three bound Chinese prostrating themselves in defeat to a group of gloating Japanese army officers. Similar sentiments of cultural superiority in satirical prints designed by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) in partnership with satirist Nishimori Takeki (1862-1913) are discussed in Hotwagner's chapter on war and satire. The preponderance of objects in Conflicts of Interest were produced and consumed in response to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), though they are supplemented by items created earlier and later in order to situate them within a larger narrative arc of Japan's imperial project, which stretched from the late 1860s to 1945. An initial grouping of prints, mostly color woodblock triptychs but also lithographs, that were made between 1866 and the start of the Sino-Japanese War nearly thirty years later, conveys the energy and momentum of nascent Japanese nationalism. Images of the 1868-1869 Boshin War (disguised as a sixteenthcentury battle due to the Tokugawa ban on depicting contemporary events), the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion (including one work by Yoshitoshi), and the 1882 Korean Incident are chockablock with signs and symbols of Japan's growing military prowess and sense of national pride: great warships, firing cannons, valiant officers in their military finest, and, almost ubiquitously, the national flag (the only distinctively Japanese motif, though it was as Euro-American in origin as the others). Ogata Gekkō's (1859-1920) suguroku board game Warlike Spirit (1893, cat. 19), which asked its young (male) players to make their way to glory in an imagined military career-aiming, in life, to become a decorated general or, in death, a deified soul at Yasukuni Shrine-really brings this point home. The modern iconography and associated meanings of nation and war, and of valor and sacrifice, were already codified and naturalized, even before the first shot in the Sino-Japanese War was fired. 2 Prints were a commercial product to be sold in large numbers and at a profit, as Andreas Marks confirms in his essay on Meiji war prints and their publishers. And, for a Japanese public heady with jingoistic fervor, the more dramatic and sensational the 2 Yasukuni Shrine is represented visually in Gekkō's Warlike Spirit (cat. 19) by the famous statue of Ōmura Masujirō (1824-1869), who founded the Imperial Japanese Army. The first modern Japanese bronze statue, it was erected in 1893 (the same year the print was produced) and remains in situ today.