Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Noriko Murai Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan. By Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 332 pages. ISBN: 9780674975163 (hardcover, also available as softcover). Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan is possibly the most conceptually innovative and ambitious book on Meiji aesthetics and art to have been published in [End Page 395] English in recent years. Carefully working through a diverse range of textual and visual materials, including novels, published debates, World's Fair exhibits, photographs, magazine and book illustrations, and paintings, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit conducts a relentless investigation of bi (beauty) at the intersection of bijin (beautiful woman) and bijutsu (fine arts), both coveted embodiments of Japan's modernity. Lippit states that "because beauty is subjective, aesthetics should be thought of not as the study of something beautiful, but as a 'meta-aesthetic,' the study of the practice of aesthetic appreciation" (p. 18; italics added). She identifies the bijin as the quintessential "aesthetic figure through which one can track how aesthetic appreciation was conceived and developed" (p. 18) in Meiji Japan around the beginning of the twentieth century. The association of beauty, art, and femininity became a naturalized feature of modern culture and is perpetuated in many parts of the world to this day. Japan is certainly an elaborate—but in no way an exceptional—case where the beautiful, the artistic, and the feminine have been conflated and integrated into the national, designed to win both domestic and international approval as an idealized image of the nation. One of the major contributions of Aesthetic Life resides in its sophisticated and multifaceted account of how this ideology emerged and developed. The book is organized thematically into seven chapters that present "an array of Meiji reflections on and ideologies of modern Japanese beauty (bi)," which collectively "examine the origins of the bijin that emerged in the final years of the Meiji period as the subject of the Nihonga painting genre of bijinga" (p. 19). Chapters 1 and 2 examine the consolidation of the national image of Japan in the West during what Lippit calls "the era of Japonisme" (p. 31) that began in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By the start of the twentieth century, "the geisha epitomized a living work of art" (p. 34) and "the figure of the Japanese woman and Japanese artistic creations were fully conflated" (p. 35). In this discourse, Japan appears both as bijutsu and as bijin. Lippit emphasizes, however, that "turning itself into a feminine artifact" was only one side of Japan's "hybrid countenance" (p. 67). The Japanese self-presentation at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War demonstrates her point that "the West may have thought of Japan as feminine … a tendency that can still be seen today—but Japan was, in fact, merely simulating the feminine style, as it, in turn, encroached on other parts of Asia. Japan was never so much a woman, as it was playing at being like a woman" (pp. 24–25; italics in original). Lippit later reiterates more strongly that "the modern nation was increasingly identified abroad with the public image of the seductive bijin-geisha—a face that the nation, often masquerading as a feminized subject while behaving as a masculine conquistador, actively cultivated" (p. 105). In other words, the self-objectification of "Japan" as art, which Lippit identifies, for instance, in the art critic Okakura Kakuzō's speech at the 1904 World's Fair, was a masculinist project that allowed elite Japanese men to dictate the terms of Japan's national interests as they saw fit, whether in culture, diplomacy, or war. Lippit's analysis pivots on several conceptual pairs, including art and nature, word and image, East and West, and Nihonga and yōga (modern Japanese paintings created [End Page 396] in the so-defined "Japanese" and "Western" media, respectively). Chapter 3 addresses the dichotomy between art and nature. Lippit postulates that the concept of nature, especially human beauty, was largely theorized as a product of the West at the time...