Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 18

Kuninosuke Matsuo and the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions (Part II)

In his previous column, Noi Sawaragi began exploring the links between the intellectual and newspaper correspondent, Kuninosuke Matsuo, and the Yomiuri Indépendent series of exhibitions that provided a key platform for the expression of post-war Japanese art.

Before going any further, I would like to reiterate that immediately after the end of the Second World War, Kuninosuke Matsuo was a figure who had close ties to Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita and Taro Okamoto, was familiar with the latest developments in the art world in France – on top of that with definite philosophical leanings towards anarchism – and who was employed in a key position at one of Japan’s leading newspaper companies. It is unimaginable that after returning to Japan such a figure would not come into contact with the Japanese art world, which had organized itself in a secluded fashion centered on the “painting circles” that had remained active despite the war.

Let me give an actual example. Onboard the ship returning from Europe at the end of the war, Matsuo is reported to have given the following speech. I am going to quote it at length, but bear with me as I think it is extremely significant in considering the origins of the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions. As well, for future reference, it would pay to remember the contents and language used in the speech.

“The reason we Japanese embarked on such a reckless war and ended up finding ourselves in such a wretched, miserable state of defeat is that we are feudal people confounded by superstition and religion, lacking in both a critical spirit and a spirit of independence as individuals, always thinking in absolutes and prone to totalitarianism: fundamental weaknesses that were cunningly exploited by those in power. All things considered, the war was contrived by those in power in the name of the emperor, and there were fundamental errors in that it was neither a war of the masses nor the work of a spontaneous individual. The public were deceived, and at the same time a powerful minority not only suppressed freedom of expression, proclaimed and forced on us an irrational politics based on the Way of the Gods and distorted the honest opinions of historical researchers, but also forced these beliefs on us through education, completely betraying the public.” (1)

If one were to substitute “nuclear accident” for “state of defeat” and “the peaceful use of atomic energy” for “the emperor,” the above would apply almost as it is to the present situation, which is why I emphasized the parts that I did. Have the Japanese not changed at all since those times? Just the thought of this makes me feel gloomy. But let us return to Matsuo’s speech:

“In this sense, this tragic defeat was, I think, inevitable. To put it briefly, we were all led astray by a fraudulent, fabricated version of history. I, too, was taken in by the myth of the 2600th anniversary of the founding of Japan, celebrated with such a show of festivity by the government, mentioning it in my graduation paper at the University of Paris only to be laughed at by the famous Japanese literature scholar, Professor Michel Revon. With the exception of a handful of academics before the war, no one spoke up about the fact that the reign lengths in the Nihon shoki were exaggerated by as many as 600 years, and the fact that no member of the public knew about this is just one extreme example of how the public were deceived. In Japan, the kind of rationalism, positivism and scientific spirit that developed in the West since the Renaissance was completely absent.(2)

Some people may say that it is only because Matsuo did not live in Japan during the bitter wartime years that he was able to criticize the Japanese so highhandedly. However, even if this were the case, it is difficult to find anything in what he said that is particularly mistaken. On the contrary, the real problem is that in Japan during the war people were completely incapable of giving voice to something so obvious. This also applies to the Japanese art world, where everything from the subject matter to the materials was controlled by the Imperial Army Communications Department. The premise that Matsuo was free to spot these things precisely because he had no experience whatsoever of wartime organization within Japan or of military service outside the country was certainly valid. At the same time, Foujita, who made it back to Japanese soil earlier than Matsuo after leaving Europe at the outbreak of war, became a standard-bearer for war art, while Okamoto served on the Chinese front, where he reluctantly produced portraits of his superior officers.

In this sense, when Matsuo set foot on his occupied homeland, he was able to apply what could be called “pure outside pressure.” However, Matsuo was not the type of person whose attention would turn first to politics or economics. His role, which he had worked long and hard at fulfilling during his time in France, was to shape cultural exchange in the true sense of the term between the peoples of Japan and France based on his own exchanges with some of France’s leading intellectuals and cultural figures, exchanges he had cultivated as Paris bureau chief for the Yomiuri Shimbun. It goes without saying that art was one of Matsuo’s greatest concerns. If Matsuo had been able to bring home to Japan at the end of the war the many artworks he had collected during his time in France, they would undoubtedly have constituted a substantial collection. When after returning to Japan Matsuo visited the artist Ikuma Arishima, a university classmate with whom Matsuo reestablished a friendship in Paris, he was asked by Arishima, “Did you bring back your paintings and sketches from Paris?” to which Matsuo replied as follows:

“Paintings? You must be joking! Everything, including the countless masterpieces I received from the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Dufy and André Lhote, was reduced to ashes in the wartime destruction in Berlin, and I came ashore like a gust of wind with nothing except my personal belongings. To have nothing is surprisingly liberating. What really irritates me and makes me think, Damn it! however, is that the bundle of handwritten letters I’d received from Gide, Romain Rolland, Henri de Régnier and the other 20-30 writers and philosophers who’d been kind enough to associate with me during the 26 years I lived in Europe was burnt to cinders in my Berlin lodgings during an attack by a British Mosquito bomber.”(3)

Given this background, it is no wonder that upon returning to Japan and seeing the painting circles that still exhibited strong feudalistic tendencies, Matsuo directed his attention to dismantling an archaic system that ran counter to his own principles and beliefs. As is well known, Taro Okamoto was among those who issued a similar bold challenge to these art circles after the war. At this point it is unclear whether Matsuo and Okamoto were reunited after returning to Japan, and if so, whether there was a concrete connection between them. However, after he was demobilized from the Chinese front, Okamoto unexpectedly turned on the Japanese art world, likening it to the stone age, and it would appear that there was a kind of “resonance” between this stern declaration of “war” and Matsuo’s “ideology.” In terms of Taro Okamoto’s relationship with the Culture Desk of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the friendship between Okamoto and Hideo Kaido that I touched on in my previous column is well known, and mentioned in more than a few records from the time. But in terms of a relationship with the head office of the Yomiuri Shimbun, which established the hotbed of the Yomiuri Indépendent Exhibitions that later became the vanguard of anarchic art, one could certainly not overlook the influence of Matsuo, who had by this time climbed to the position of deputy editor. In fact, Matsuo, who was also highly regarded by the company’s management, was actually in a position to exercise discretion with regard to the content and give the go ahead if a large-scale cultural program centered on the newspaper were to be initiated.

(To be continued)

 

 

    1. Matsuo Kuninosuke,

Burai kisha, sengo nihon wo utsu

    1. (A decadent reporter takes shots at post-war Japan) (Tokyo: Shakai hyoronsha, 2006) p.66, emphasis added.

  1. Ibid, p.66, emphasis added.
  2. Ibid, p.154.

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