Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2002

By REBECCA SALTER

Special to The Japan Times

LONDON -- In 1945, as the Japanese contemplated defeat, devastation and occupation by a foreign power for the first time, the future must have seemed bleak and uncertain. But along with the terrible toll on life and property, the war years damaged Japanese society in ways that were harder to see.

Ernst Hacker's "Portrait of Lucia Vernarelli" (1950?-1960)

Koshiro Onchi's "After the Bath" (1946) PHOTOS COURTESY OF © THE BRITISH MUSEUM

The military regime had distorted the fabric of Japanese culture to serve its own ends. Nihonga, traditional Japanese-style painting, was especially favored and so suffered a backlash at the war's end. Previously innocuous national symbols, such as Mount Fuji, a favorite subject of earlier woodblock artists, were appropriated and became sensitive in the postwar years.

Along with the physical rebuilding of the country came artistic renewal. A new exhibition here at The British Museum (accompanied by a fine book by Lawrence Smith, Keeper Emeritus of the museum) explores in detail how a group of printmakers -- with Japanese and international members -- tentatively began to create a new Japanese cultural identity from the ruins.

The war years were a time of great privation on all levels for most Japanese, but artists faced the additional problem of finding materials. Complicating the matter was the delicate issue of how each artist collaborated with the military machine -- voluntarily or only with extreme reluctance. In the CVs of many artists of this period, there is a telling gap. A total refusal to cooperate meant no supplies and an inability to work.

Many artists faced the psychological burden of leading a double life -- doing enough government-approved work to get by, while preserving artistic integrity in pieces created privately. Shiko Munakata, one of the finest printmakers of the 20th century, managed to survive the war years with relative ease, although he lost most of his woodblocks in the bombing of Tokyo. His subject matter -- Buddhist or drawing on East Asian myths and folklore -- appeared to satisfy the prevailing supremacist view of Japan's position in relation to Asia.

After Japan's defeat, though, printmakers looked back to their medium's prewar traditions and combined these with Western elements introduced by the occupying forces. Surprisingly quickly, artistic relationships developed to parallel the commercial relationships between the occupied and the occupiers. These helped orient artists in the new and unfamiliar cultural environment of postwar Japan.

One of the most interesting relationships was that which sprang up between the de facto leader of the Japanese printmakers, Koshiro Onchi (1891-1955), and Ernst Hacker (1917-87), an American graphic artist of Viennese origin who was sent to Tokyo in early 1946 to produce posters and graphic material. As well as the American graphic tradition, Hacker also brought with him a knowledge of European printmaking from his Viennese childhood. Although his stay in Japan was relatively short, he became very close to Onchi (coincidentally a speaker of German) and his family, and rapidly learned from him the traditional Japanese woodblock technique. Through Onchi, he also became familiar with the work of a number of contemporary printmakers. He purchased many examples, and it is his collection that forms the basis of the current exhibition.

The postwar revival of Japanese printmaking that Hacker witnessed had as its foundation the Sosaku Hanga (Creative Print), a prewar movement that survived the years of struggle to reach its artistic peak between 1950-70. This group represented the more liberal wing of Japanese printmaking and was devoted to the print as an expressive medium for the individual, based on the European model.

Onchi, as the group's effective leader for 30 years, nursed its ideals through the dark years and piloted it through the early part of the Occupation. His social position (his father had been employed by the Imperial Household), relative affluence and large living quarters made him a magnet for young printmakers.

In 1939, this informal grouping became the First Thursday Society -- named after the day they met each month -- offering a haven of relative artistic freedom. The artists would assemble at Onchi's house at about 2 p.m., bringing their own packed lunches. In 1944, in difficult circumstances, they produced the first of a series of collections of their work, clearly using Onchi's connections (and possibly his money) to obtain materials. With almost total censorship at that stage of the war, it is no surprise that the subject matter chosen was inoffensive, predominantly landscapes and flowers.

By the time of the second collection in April 1946, Hacker and two fellow Americans Alonzo Freeman and John D. Sheppard had learned Japanese woodblock printing sufficiently well to have their work included. The remaining collections through to 1950 are an interesting record of the growing confidence of the artists as they explored their postwar freedom.

The subjects chosen by the artists in the early years of the Occupation offer an insight into the struggle to express a Japanese identity freed from military distortion. Prior to the war, printmaking had been a predominantly urban activity, but many artists were forced back to their home towns in the countryside in order to survive. Landscape became a subject of choice, and to some extent consolation, as an idealized symbol of the Japanese soul. An interest in folk traditions reinforced this tendency to look back in order to move forward -- and coincidentally proved popular with foreign buyers.

Tougher subjects, such as the war itself and its aftermath, did not really emerge until the 1950s. Fumio Kitaoka, a prominent postwar artist evacuated from Manchuria in 1946, did produce gritty Social Realist-style prints recounting the experience, but with the West's political shift against communism and a marked lack of foreign buyers, his style changed. The engagement of these artists with the struggle to see their culture as their own and to reflect how others saw it, forms an undercurrent to this exhibition. These printmakers' works display a wistful portrayal of the past combined with a fresh interpretation of the new reality around them -- a process no doubt similar to that occurring in the minds of the occupiers, also striving to interpret and shape what they saw around them.

For connoisseurs of Japanese woodblock in its earlier vibrant prime, there is a rather poignant modesty, almost diffidence, about the work in this show. It is like finding a dear friend in reduced circumstances.

However, the very simplicity of Japanese woodblock and the fact that, though scarce, the materials and tools it required were more readily available than those of other printmaking methods and art forms, meant that the artists were at least able to produce work. The old thrifty tricks of the printmaking trade familiar to Edo printers -- printing one color over another to produce a third -- were revived.

But the works on display here nonetheless leave visitors with the impression that this period of frugality was only temporary, and that beneath its surface the creative energy, which would find its outlet in the next generation of artists, such as Akira Kurosaki and Tetsuya Noda, was already stirring.

And when Japan once again found its place in the world, these artists exhibited and traveled abroad more widely as ambassadors for a reformed postwar culture. At their head was Munakata, who took first prize at the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1955.

The works shown here aren't simply a window onto one moment in the long history of Japanese printmaking, though. The tension experienced by the postwar printmakers, struggling with the artistic expression (and viewer's perception) of "Japaneseness" and "non-Japaneseness" has become less of an issue -- but it has not gone away. Rather, these two artistic worlds, unknown territory for Onchi and his colleagues, are inhabited with equal ease by modern Japanese artists.

"Japanese Prints of the Allied Occupation, 1945-52" runs till Dec. 1 at The British Museum, London. Open every day 10 a.m.-5.30 p.m. (till 8:30 p.m. on Thursday and Friday). Admission free. Rebecca Salter is a British artist who had a studio in Kyoto for six years in the early 1980s but is now living and working in London. She has recently published a practical technical manual, "Japanese Woodblock Printing" (A&C Black, London).

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