Artistic Relations with the West

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The first Europeans arrived in Japan in 1542, when a Portugese ship landed there. The initial largest impacts were by introducing firearms to Japan - these were a huge factor in the civil wars through the later 16th Century - and by missionary efforts, though Christianity never caught on in a big way. But this was also the start of artistic interaction. The Dutch in particular brought painting, showing new approaches to this art. Oils had been unused in Japan (bar one odd very early exception); linear perspective was unknown (and was rarely treated as more than a cute novelty gimmick), and ciarascuro, indeed almost any use of shading, was not used. Early experimentation with and absorption of these ideas was curtailed after 1641, when foreigners (not just from the West) were almost completely excluded from Japan. The group that most interestingly attempted a synthesis of the Western and native painting styles was originated by Maruyama Okyo in the 18th Century. Later on, some Japanese painters adopted almost entirely Western styles.

There was one way in which the European arrival was exceptionally well timed. The West had developed a taste for Chinese porcelain, but at this point the Ming dynasty was collapsing and China was in something of a mess, and a new source was needed. Japan was pretty good at porcelain by this point, and took over much of the market. Indeed, late in the 16th Century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi orchestrated a brief invasion of Korea - its only success, and many say its actual purpose, was in grabbing a large number of Korean potters, who gave Japanese ceramics a significant boost. Some of Japan's normal production was popular for export, but they also produced large amounts specifically for European tastes, even including Christian images on some pieces. I should note here that although the country was forbidden to foreigners, there was some limited trade through the isolationist Edo period, and this included porcelains.

The greatest interaction came when Japan's borders were reopened - by force - late in the 19th Century. Most famously, Edo prints were commonly used as packing materials for porcelain exports (the bubblewrap of its day), and these were admired by the French impressionists, leading to the love of some Japanese arts known as 'Japonisme'. I discuss some of the specifics of the influence there in the painting section, but it's worth noting also that this Western love of prints fed back into greater valuing of them in Japan - they had been regarded as a pretty low form of art.

Other changes that came with westernisation included men stopping wearing traditional dress: suits replaced kimonos. This meant they had pockets, so inro became unnecessary and unwanted - this led to canny Westerners picking up wonderful collections of these glorious lacquered containers during the Japonisme fashion. Some workshops began to produce sumptuously over-decorated inro for export.

In the 20th Century, it's beyond me (or anyone, I would think) to list or disentangle the interactions between the West and Japan - in a lot of ways, they largely joined in with international modernism, and much Japanese art became less distinctively national - but I want to highlight a few specific cases. The biggest and most interesting is perhaps the following, worth a page of its own.

Mingei and the West

Comics were created in Japan in the wake of a Japanese version of Punch. They became bigger there than anywhere else in the world, partly due to the great Osamu Tezuka, who was inspired by the American comics and movies he saw, and changed manga radically. Japanese comics have been getting bigger and bigger in the West for some years, and have been a clear influence on several artists - Frank Miller is perhaps the most obvious example, who learned a great deal from Lone Wolf & Cub in particular. Tezuka was also a key figure in the growth of the gigantic Japanese animation industry (it's about half their movie output now), particularly by creating the first weekly animated TV show in Astro Boy. He was very keen on Disney, and Disney repaid the favout in a very backhanded way by making The Lion King, largely a copy of his Simba The White Lion. Obviously nowadays Japanese TV animation in particular is a huge part of children's TV in the West.

There are countless other movie links. For example, Akira Kurosawa, as well as turning a couple of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies into samurai movies, was a big admirer of John Ford's westerns. His own samurai stories were in turn remade as Westerns in the West - Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven, and Yojimbo became A Fistfull of Dollars. In recent years, the biggest Japanese hits in the West have tended to be horror films - I strongly suspect that their different horror traditions and memes make them fresher in the West than another US vampire movie can hope to be, but I'm not sure whether that is an advantage that will last, as we become more familiar with their ideas about ghosts and so on.