The Mingei Movement and the West

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The Meiji Restoration, the end of 700 years of samurai rule, was brought about by American gunships. The Japanese hadn't lost a military conflict, hadn't had to submit to more potent foreigners, since the Korean influx nearly two millenia before. The country became very westernised over the next half-century - men in suits instead of kimonos, dropping a number of things, introducing democracy, industrialising and so on.

There was a cultural cringe, a collapse in national pride, an assumption that Western culture was better in just about every way. Novelist Natsume Soseki talked about Western culture and ideas swamping the native culture. In this context, some theory on which to build national pride was needed. Mingei, the folk-crafts movement established by Yanagi Soetsu, tried to do this - its claims that naturalness, intuition and no intent to make art (indeed, the Zen idea of nothingness was repeatedly invoked) made for superior art was a way of claiming special status for Japanese arts.

Nonetheless, Yanagi's journals make it abundantly clear how delighted he was when any westerners (Bernard Leach most obviously) treated him as an equal, or even knew who he was, and he took the bulk of his ideas from Morris and Ruskin. Mingei's claims to traditional values were also strangely contradicted by the prominence of western designs in their early displays and promotional events: they built houses and rooms with stained glass, chairs and tables, tiled fireplaces and other things taken more or less straight from Morris's work. Additionally, a large proportion of his claims for the worth of Japanese folk-crafts could have come straight from a Western book on medieval art, especially discourses on gothic and romanesque sculpture.

It's also worth noting that this movement did not come out of nowhere. Very early in the Meiji period, Japan grasped that it was seen in Europe as a nation of handicrafts (as opposed to the industrialized West), and it promoted this heavily, especially at and following the Vienna International Exhibition in 1873. It also tried to incorporate methods of mass production into its crafts, sending engineers to Europe to learn their methods, and setting up many schools for disseminating such knowledge. Craft objects made up around 10% of Japan's exports in the years following. The difference between this and Mingei is largely that Mingei was aesthetic and philosophical, as against the commercial, pragmatic approach before that. It's also true that Japan industrialized around the turn of the century, and this left the old handicrafts in the commercially inferior position, so different reasons were needed to validate these forms. In addition, the Western taste in ceramics leaned heavily towards the colourful porcelains, Satsuma ware in particular. The government had created an honours system for 'art craft' - the titles have changed several times, and the appointees are now 'living national treasures'. We should also recall that 20th Century arts were characterised above all else by a proliferating art movements around the world, of manifestos proclaiming the only true modern approach, so we shouldn't be surprised that Japan had some of its own.

Also, the Mingei movement was always keen on the ordinary anonymous craftsman, not the big name artists; and crafts made for ordinary domestic buyers, not for art patrons or export. Having said that, the likes of Shoji Hamada became big name artists, selling their one-off ceramics for large prices - and indeed, while and even by preaching the values of humble anonymity, Yasagi was wealthy and famous.

Yanagi's analysis of the crafts of the Ainu, of Taiwan and even of Korea and Manchuria resembles Van Gogh's patronising comments about Japanese prints - talk of simplicity, naturalness and so on. He is affectionate, and spoke out against the viciousness of Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria - but the ethnic essentialising of his discussion does promote the idea that these are primitive, unsophisticated peoples, which reinforces the idea that they need the care and civilizing influence of the more advanced Japanese, so his ideas supported Japan's new-found colonial impetus.

In the context of this article, English potter Bernard Leach's links to the Mingei movement are particularly interesting. He was a key formative influence, introducing the ideas of the Arts & Crafts movement to Yanagi, as well as other Western artistic and philosophical ideas. He also to some degree represented the West to Yanagi: something to aspire to, contend against, look up to and assert equality with, something new to measure Japaneseness against. Leach brought back Yanagi's mix of William Morris and Zen aesthetics back to England, and his work has been a key touchstone of UK ceramics ever since. This was partly by publicising Mingei thinking, and therefore having a deep effect on the West's view of Japan, not just its crafts but its thinking, its place in the world. Similarly, in Japan he was a major source of the way Japan believed the West perceived it.

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