flying twigs

My father introduced me to Japanese art of Ukiyo-e when I was a kid. He fought in the Second World War, and when the war ended he came home. Money was tight and he signed up to Z Reserve for which he got eight shillings a week for being the first to go if there was another war. No one thought there would be another war, so he thought Z Reserve was a safe bet.

But war did break out and he was called up and served in Korea. He caught meningitis there and was invalided out to Japan. I’ve still got the telegrams from the War Office to my mother saying my father was gravely ill, and then that he was recovering. He spent a year in Japan and he brought some small souvenirs back with him when he came home in 1952.

They included a family of wooden Japanese dolls, two or three inches high. a sitting brass Buddha with an incense burner and a box of incense, a bamboo and brass pipe and a model of a boat with buckets lined up in it and a man standing with a long-handled scoop. My father told me it was a sanitation boat that collected excrement from houses – hence the long handle.

He also brought back a roof tile from Hiroshima. One half of it was a smooth where it had been covered by another tile, and the other half was crazed with the effect of the heat from the Atom bomb.

I took it to school where we tested it with a Geiger counter for radioactivity, and it was ‘clean’. 

The incense my father brought back had a lovely smell and I can still smell it now. I kept the incense sticks for years and burned them a tiny piece at a time until they were all gone. Years later, when I went to Japan, I went looking for that incense. I found one that was very near it but not exactly that one.

When I was nineteen or twenty, I bought a book, Masters of the Japanese Print. Years later I went to Japan and I had a good fortune to stay with 23 different families – from office workers, to farmers, to members of parliament. So I feel I can talk a little about the style of art that interests me.

Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e means ‘pictures of the floating world’ – a way of seeing life as ever-changing, with bittersweet fleeting moments. Nothing was out of bounds – theatres, brothels, tea houses, labourers, travellers, artists, prostitutes, lovers. And always the fact that life was ephemeral and impossible to grasp.

The art for developed when the population of Edo (the old name for Tokyo) grew and a new merchant class appeared. They had aspirations to acquire art, affordable art that they could relate to. Ukiyo-e artists responded with woodblock prints that could be printed from again and again.

Ukiyo-e and Edo influenced each other, Ukiyo-e captured the essence of Edo’s culture and lifestyle. And Edo provided the buyers and the money for the development of Ukiyo-e.

Ukiyo-e artists used bright colours, bold outlines, and stylised flat shapes. And the art grew without being influenced from outside Japan because Japan was cut off from the rest of the world for centuries.

This was not accidental but the policy of the Government. Sakoku is a Japanese word that means to cut off extraneous inputs so as to allow one to think more freely And so it continued until it was brought to an end from outside. 

Kurogune means Black Ships and symbolises the end of isolation because of a superior force. The Black Ships were the Western ships arriving in Japan. In particular, kurofune refers to four ships, the Mississippi, Plymouth, Saratoga, and Susquehanna under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry. They arrived in Japan on July 14, 1853, and it was obvious to the Japanese that the foreigners superior technology meant Japan could not remain isolated.

Black was the black colour of the foreign sailing ships, and the black smoke from the coal-fired steam engines of the American ships. In this sense. So kurofune became a symbol of the ending of isolation.

When Japan opened to the West in the 19th century, the flat perspective in Japanese art dazzled the Impressionist and post-Impressionists. It became know as the Japonisme movement. Van Gogh used Japanese themes with a flat perspective. Cezanne destroyed the standard Western technique of showing depth, and mixed the foreground and background into a flattened perspective as though the scene was viewed from several viewpoints simultaneously.

But just as the world outside Japan was influenced by Ukiyo-e, so Japan could hold onto that perspective on life only as long as it held off the rest of the world.

Printing Methods

Ukiyo-e artists used multi-coloured woodblocks to produce a print. Printing was a collaboration between the artist, the woodblock carver, and the printer. The artist created a design and the carver transferred the design to a set of woodblocks. The printer then inked the blocks and pressed them onto paper one at a time to build up the final print.

This was mass production, making prints more affordable than unique art. In other words, the production of their art could scale.

When Japanese art reached Europe, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in France used the same technique. It was a way to bring their art to the attention of the public, and it was the beginning of the democratisation of art in Europe. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec and his risqué Folies Bergère posters. Think of the advertisements for Parisian cafes. And now we have a name for the reproduction of art on every conceivable surface – chocolate box art. This too was a legacy of Ukiyo-e print making.

The Outside World

Ukiyo-e had meaning as long as Japan had only itself to examine. That changed with the opening of Japan by the United States under Commodore Perry that marked the end of the country’s isolationist policies.

Prior to the mid 19th century, Japan was largely isolated from the rest of the world. It has only limited trade with the Dutch and Chinese. However, the United States wanted to expand its influence in Asia. It believed that Japan would be an important trading partner. So in 1853, President Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry and a fleet of four steamships to Japan. Their missions was to negotiate the opening of Japanese ports to American trade. It was an uneven negotiation in that United States technology far outclassed Japanese military technology.

Perry arrived in Japan with a letter from President Fillmore addressed to the Emperor of Japan. The request was for the establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations. After several months of negotiations, the Japanese government agreed to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. That opened two ports to American ships and the establishment of a US consulate in Japan.

This treaty was the beginning of Japan’s dealings with the outside world, followed by similar treaties with other Western powers.

President Fillmore, the man who sent Commodore Perry on his mission, is noted in history for having sided with the pro-slavery members in his party in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. His poor handling of that issue was a one of the important causes that led to the American Civil War.

And yet Fillmore gave the order to Commodore Perry to open up Japan. And who can properly understand the consequences of that decision, even one hundred and seventy-five years later.

Ironically, the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco where many counter-culture bands played in the 1960s and 70s is named after President Fillmore.

Ukiyo-e And The Outside World

The opening of Japan to foreign trade and foreign culture influenced the country’s culture and society and eventually brought Ukiyo-e in Japanese art to an end. Japan modernised and Westernised in technology, fashion, and education. The Ukiyo-e culture that underpinned Japanese art was swept away.

From there one can see the arc of history that led to the Russo-Japanese War, the imperial aspirations in the twenties and thirties, the Second World War in the Pacific, and the rise of Japan after the war.

If you are interested in browsing images of Japanese art from the Ukiyo-e period you could look at art by these Japaneses artists:

• Toyohara Kunichika
• Utamaro Kitagawa
• Tanigami Konan
• Goyō Hashiguch
• Bijutsu Sekai
• Keisai Eisen
• Utagawa Kuniyoshi
• Utagawa Kunisada
• Kogyo Tsukioka
• Shibata Zeshin
• Ohara Koson
• Ishida Yūtei