Modern Japanese printmakers wanted to do everything themselves

A young Japanese woman sits on the edge of the billiard table, cue straight up, ready to headbutt. She wears western clothes, her hair short. She is clearly one of the modan garu, as the Japanese called young, Western-influenced independent women in post-World War I Japan. They were miles away from the traditional Japanese woman in kimono.

This contrast can be seen nicely in the exhibition Sōsaku hanga. Creative Printmaking from Japan in the Japan Museum Sieboldhuis in Leiden. There hangs a woodcut of the cool billiards Japanese, from 1933, by Nakagawa Isaku. There is also a beautiful woodcut by Kamei Tobei from 1935, of a kneeling Japanese, in a colorful kimono with traditionally pinned hair. She trims her toenails.

What both woodcuts have in common, with the 150 others in the exhibition, is that they are not traditional Japanese prints. They were all carved, printed and published by the artists themselves – as is customary in Western printmaking. And not, as with traditional Japanese prints, invented by a publisher, drawn by an artist, copied by separate woodcutters and printed by printers.

wave of modernization

Just like the modan garu (or moga) these self-printing artists are a sign of the great Japanese wave of modernization around 1900. To make up for the shortfall after more than two centuries of isolation, Japan opened up to the West – also in the field of art. Western artists came to visit, Japanese artists traveled through Europe. Traditional printmaking, often with images of nightlife, ukiyo-e, they thought the ‘pictures of the floating world’ were old-fashioned. The new printmakers wanted to control the entire creative process themselves.

An overview of this Japanese art movement can now be seen for the first time in Europe in the Sieboldhuis. Maureen de Vries, who also wrote the catalogue, compiled the chronological exhibition from Elise Wessels’ print collection. It gives a beautiful picture of how these artists sought their way between the Japanese and Western traditions while carving wood.

There are pictures that have a western feel, such as Village on the banks of the Seine by Yamamoto Kanae. Or a female nude that appears on Manets Olympia seems: Bare skin on white canvas by Onchi Koshiro. There are also circus scenes and cityscapes, which resemble European Expressionist woodcuts. There are cityscapes that fit in with the old printmaking tradition, but with new buildings – including modern ruins, for example from Hiratsu Uniki after the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo. He also made a modest print of rubble in Nagasaki after the second American atomic bomb was detonated there.

Ban on Mount Fuji Prints

The exhibition thus also addresses the undercurrent in these Japanese creative prints, made between 1910 and 1962: they show how modernization and liberalization, and the Western influences in Japan, resulted in an ultra-nationalist reaction. Belligerent soldiers came to power from 1936, and partly in the name of the emperor plunged the country into the Second World War. There was censorship, art had to be patriotic, and portray beautiful Japan. Including conquered areas like Manchuria. Examples of this can be seen. There is also a nice large print by Sekino Junichiro, Village by the sea from 1942, drawn in a more traditional Japanese style. The propagandistic, patriotic charge that this art had then is sometimes difficult to trace with our Western eyes: we mainly see a beautiful landscape. In the novel An artist of the floating world Kazuo Ishiguro beautifully describes how such a patriotic artist fared in Japan after the war.

Images of Japan’s sacred Mount Fuji were so ultra-nationalistically tainted that American occupiers initially banned them after WWII, the catalog says. Nevertheless, appreciation for the new creative Japanese printmaking grew after 1945, ironically partly due to the interest of the American victors. This also led to an innovation in the traditional Japanese woodcut art, shin hanga, which will be discussed in a follow-up exhibition in the Sieboldhuis.