Dumplings are more important than cherry blossom

 

 

We learned this Japanese proverb from a calligraphic work by Kumagai Morikazu (1880-1977) in the municipal museum built on the site of Kumagai’s former home where a collection of his works donated by his daughter Kumagai Kaya is dispalyed. Apparently, the title is a humorous version of a proverb hana yori dango (dumplings rather than flowers), which suggests that the food and drink that accompany viewing cherry blossom are more significant than the beauty of the blossoms. The prover may be interpreted as a mere statement of the utilitarian (we all need food and drink, but can live without beauty), or an implicit critique of that attitude.

 

Kumagai: Frog

 

Visits to single-artist museums have become a theme of this visit to Japan. Our first was the former home of Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), a leading early exponent of the nihonga Japanese style). Artists in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and on into the 20^th-century, generally chose one of two career/style paths: nihonga or “western style”. Under Emperor Meiji Japan sought to match the imperial power of western democracies by despatching practitioners in various fields to Europe and the USA to learn western approaches. Japan also imported western experts (architects, artists, engineers etc.) to teach Japanese students western skills.

 

Yokoyama Taikan: Peony, 1904

 

Yokoyama Taikan.

As his income permitted, Yokoyama built a substantial Japanese-style home with a traditional garden, close to Shinobazuno Pond in Ueno Park, now in the busy heart of downtown Tokyo. The home was destroyed in the 1945 firebombing, but rebuilt by Yokoyama himself (only an ancient wooden sculpture of a deity or spiritual being survived because it had been removed for safety and is once again on display). Yokoyama had a spacious studio with a view over the garden, working mostly on the floor in brush and charcoal ink. Unfortunately, only a very few of his works were on display in his house. Yokoyama received patronage from the Japanese government, and was sent to Italy as a representative of Japanese artists. He also received prestigious rewards. His habit was to paint all day and drank sake to relax in the evening in a room designed for that purpose.

Yokoyama: Snowy Peak with Cranes.

 

The following, rainy, day we headed to Yanaka, a district known for its huge cemetery where several notable figures are buried. Close to the cemetery is the home and workshop of Asakura Fumio (1883-1964), a sculptor who was of the realist school. The building is of two parts. The studio, a study where sketches made by one of his daughters are displayed, and accompanying rooms for teaching students, are of reinforced concrete, and three storeys tall. The studio room is the full three-storeys high. An electric elevator platform from the basement was installed to enable Asakura to work on over-sized portrait sculptures several metres tall. Tokyo’s first roof garden is on the roof of this part of the building (closed the day we visited because of rain). The studio contains a library inherited from an art historian friend of Asakura. The collection includes classics of art history: Vasari, Ruskin, works on western masters such as Veláquez; in short, a copious primer on western art.

Asakura: The Gravekeeper, his prize-winning masterpiece.

 

 

   Asakura's studio.

 

 

 

The study.

The traditional, residential part of the building is a Japanese style home, built in exquisite and demanding taste. The principal materials are cedar, bamboo, and panels of crushed agate and shell. Asakura slept in a bedroom with sliding windows that open onto the garden for his quiet contemplation in the morning. He similarly arranged the guest entrance of his home so that, as guests walked up a few steps, they were treated to a view of his garden, with a fountain and a pond full of carp. He not only designed some of the bamboo windows, but made a number of them.

The Asahi room in Asakura's Japanese house.

 

Asakura’s work includes a giant statue of Shigenobu Okuma, the founder of Waseda University, and, judging from Asakura’s portrayal, a forbidding character. The version in the museum – a plaster cast we were told by a charming volunteer, a retired banker – stands on the platform of the electric elevator. A still more imposing work (again in plaster) is a seated portrayal of a lawyer, dressed in formal western-style clothing, who served in the foreign affairs ministry during the Meiji period and negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire), which settled the war with Russia. The lawyer later renegotiated the treaty to remove unfavourable tariff provisions (rather topical). His life-size works in bronze included a number of male and female nudes (including a version of the Three Graces with Japanese features), several of Tokyo’s first police dog, and many of cats (Asakura lived with a large number and planned an exhibition of cat sculptures shortly before his death).

Asakura Fumio.

 

A photo of Asakura and his family with his friend, the American art historian and archaeologist Langdon Warner, provides a hint of why, unlike Yokoyama, Asakura’s house escaped the firebombing. Warner is reputed by some to have been the adviser who advised the US government where not to bomb. This is disputed by some scholars, but nevertheless there are several grateful monuments to Warner in Japan.

 

It seems that the Nasagaki district of Toshima City, where we are staying, and an area called Ochiai, to our South, attracted communities of artists and writers in the early decades of the 20th century. A writer whose pseudonym was Edogawa Ranpo (he was a fan of Edgar Allan Poe – pronounced Edogā Aran Pō in Japanese) was attracted to the area by its plum-groves, azaleas, soil, grasses, and an artificial hill – although this must now seem improbable to the commuter travelling out from contemporary Ikebukuro station.

 

One of the Nagasaki district artists was Kumagai Morikazu, who, in contrast to Yokoyama and Asakura, was the very image of the struggling artist, seeking his own aesthetic and failing to achieve official recognition in his lifetime. A museum devoted to his work is a short walk from our apartment. The museum is a brutalist concrete structure far removed from the delicate traditional homes of Yokoyama and Asakura. When Kumagai lived here, however, his family occupied a wooden house and a verdant garden. Kumagai seems to have been an inquisitive and somewhat eccentric character. Unlike Yokoyama who studied and devoted his life to the nihonga style, Kumagai experimented restlessly with approaches to his art. His earlier works include landscapes influenced by Impressionism, works reminiscent of Matisse, and others of Picasso. None of these brought him success, so he was always short of money. Marriage and five children did not help matters. Distractions from his art (a year spent calculating the frequency of sound; or taking apart clocks and cameras to understand how they worked) cannot have alleviated financial pressures. Photos that show him smoking his pipe and playing his cello (both on display in the museum) depict a man at ease with himself who enjoyed his pleasures.

Kumagai: The moon at night.

 

However, after the war tragedy struck the Kumagai family. Shortages and poverty led to the death of three of his children. Kumagai marked the death of his daughter Man(sic) with an anguished drawing and a Buddhist calligraphy scroll. The death of his son prompted a ferociously painted oil portrait with heavy impasto and strong colours: the viewer can feel the anguish and anger. Other works include a Matisse-like butterfly; a quiet observation of the moon at night using four areas of colour, no doubt a scene viewed from his garden; a serene Sakura depicting blossoms and a bird; or ants and a frog in his later simle Japanese style. The paintings, together with photographs of Kumagai relaxing in his garden with his pipe, on a beach with his wife in later years, or smiling while a young grandchild climbed over him, give a much more human feel of the artist than our two previous visits. An amiable quirky man, who preferred his own artistic vision to prizes and official patronage.

Kumagai: Sakura.

 

Within walking distance from Shiinamachi, the next station down the line to Ikebukuro we found yet another atelier (a term apparently preferred to studio) museum, this time of a very tortured character, whose short life was marked by tragedy. The Atelier Museum of Saeki Yuzo (1898-1928) chronicles his life in a space which he used for only a few years of his brief career. Unlike Yokoyama, Saeki took lessons in western art from another painter, Akamatsu Rinsaku, and then from Tokyo Fine Arts School Faculty of Western Painting.

The interior of Saeki's atelier. The painting depicts the land on which Saeki built his house and atelier.

 

 

After graduating in 1923 he and his wife Ikeda Yoneko, a fellow painter, and their daughter Yachiko set sail for Paris. There he sought out Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), a landscape painter. Alas, Vlaminck was very critical of Saeki’s painting of a nude for being too academic. In response, Saeki changed his subject matter to self-portraits and portraits of other people. Vlaminck damned these with faint praise: Saeki was a “very excellent colorist although the material sense is poor”. During a brief visit to Japan, Saeki received an award at a prestigious competitive art exhibition in Tokyo: his career seemed to be taking off. Back in Paris, Saeki persisted with his painting despite ill health (tuberculosis), but in June 1928 attempted suicide and was consigned to a mental hospital, where he died of tuberculosis on 16 August, promptly followed by the death of his daughter two weeks later. Yoneko lived on in their Tokyo home, painting there until her death in 1972. Since the studio was clearly used by both Saeki and Yoneko, it is no doubt indicative of the omission of women from history that Yoneko gets only a small mention and the museum's title mentions only her husband.

A model of Saeki's house and atelier.

 

An equally tragic destiny awaited another painter in the western style, Nakamura Tsune (1887-1924), who knew Saeki and whose atelier (now also a museum) was built in the same style as his friend’s. Nakamura had not intended to become a painter, instead following his two brothers into the army, but he contracted tuberculosis and was unable to complete the military training. He trained as a western-style painter and moved in artistic circles. His work won prizes, and the wealthy owners of a Shinjuko food business supported him. But just as his career was gathering momentum, Nakamura fell in love with Sōma Toshiko, the eldest daughter of his patrons. She became his model, but her parents adamantly opposed the match and expelled Nakamura from the studio they provided.

 

Nakamura moved to the studio which is now his memorial. Unlike Saeki, he never travelled outside Japan, no doubt because his persistent ill health prevented travel. However, his continued success in official exhibitions and his circle of artist friends helped him to continue to build his reputation.  Although he never set foot outside Japan, developments in European art inspired him: he was especially impressed by a Renoir landscape owned by Imamura Shigezo, a wealthy graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and an educator.

 

Nakamura’s emotional life took a further blow in 1919, when his great love Toshiko married Rash Behari Bose, an Indian opponent of British rule who fled to Tokyo to escape arrest. Nakamura continued to paint despite declining health, completing his masterpiece, a portrait of the blind Russian poet Vasili Eroshenko in 1922.

The Nakamura atelier.

 

Our next stop after Nakamura’s studio was a different experience, the former home of the famous Japanese writer Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951) and her husband, the artist Ryokubin Tezuka. “Hayashi's mother worked as a chambermaid at a hot springs inn before [she] was pregnant. A high-spirited woman, she cared little for social convention and already had three children by two different men.”*  At some point she married a merchant, but divorced him before Hayashi was born. “Hayashi was born on December 31, 1903, in a rented room above a tin shop in Moji City, at the northern tip of the island of Kyushu. Her father was a peddler, and opened a secondhand [sic] thrift store in the nearby city of Shimonoseki soon after her birth.”* Hayashi's parents never married.

 

Hayashi’s early life was one of considerable poverty. Perhaps it was her upbringing that made Hayashi a determined free spirit. In 1922 she moved to Tokyo, where she lived with several men before marrying Ryokubin in 1926. In 1928 she published a story in a magazine, and in 1929 a collection of poetry. Then in 1930, Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki) became a bestseller. Such was her fame, that editors would arrive at her house at 10am to collect manuscripts or commission work from her. She would keep them waiting on her pleasure in the small vestibule, except for those editors she favoured who were admitted into the house proper. Hayashi often pretended not to be at home in order to avoid editors.

T

The Hayashi house and garden.

 

Hayashi bought 900m² of land for her home in 1939. At that time regulations limited the size of a person’s new home, but Hayashi and her husband got round the rules by each applying to build a (supposedly) separa tehome. The two buildings were late connected. Hayashi, by her own account, read nearly 200 books on how to build a house, drew a plan of her home and then hired the architect Yamaguchi Bunzo, who worked on the designs for more than a year, and the best carpenters she could. A small display of photographs documents the construction of the house: in one we see an almost impossibly intricate wooden skeleton of the building. Hayashi wrote that “it was really important to make it a sweet and beautiful house. She spent the bulk of her budget on the living room, bathroom, toilet and kitchen. She was a good cook and was particularly proud of the polished artificial stone kitchen floor and sink. There was also a refrigerator, one of those three sacred treasures we learned about at the Shitamachi Museum

Hayashi's study.

 

As we’ve discovered in other museums we have visited, the World War II (what the Japanese call the Greater East Asia War) is quietly omitted from any displays. Jan, however, found a piece my Mark Weston* that Hayasahi had a controversial war. Although she had been jailed in 1933 for subscribing to a Communist newspaper, she reported the Japanese invasion of China for the Mainichi Shimbun, failing to report any of Japan’s was crimes. But then censorship and reporting what Japanese troops had done was probably very unwise indeed.

As we wandered through the streets of modern Mejiro/Ochiai, we noticed a number of buildings marked as ateliers, an art institute, and a futuristic concrete marked as the Mejiro Art Studio. The artist communities of the early 20^th century may be gone, but their energy seems to live on.

 

 

Note: Mark Weston, HAYASHI FUMIKO, 1903-1951: Modern Japan's Most Popular Woman Writer (https://archive.mith.umd.edu/gcr/text/text_62546234.html). The leaflet given to us at the Hayashi home states that the precise date of her birth is not known.