The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks Max Ward (bio) The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2020. xviii, 314 pages. $72.00. In the last decade, scholars have started to explore the explosion of artistic activity in Japan following the defeat of militarism and the collapse of Japan's empire in 1945. This activity was part of a wider cultural project carried out by writers, intellectuals, and others to find new forms of political subjectivity to account for the past and to develop new liberatory [End Page 527] modes of cultural and social practice. Indeed, recent scholarship has revealed that some of the most intense debates over political responsibility and subjectivity took place in the domain of cultural production, both in the immediate postwar period and continuing later into the 1960s, including William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines (2013), Namiko Kunimoto, The Stakes of Exposure (2017), and Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (2018), among others.1 Whereas much of this recent work has focused on the politics of artist groups and their collaborations in the postwar period, Charlotte Eubanks's well-written and extensively researched new book The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan focuses on an individual artist and extends the historical scope to the "transwar" period—roughly 1930–60—in order to explore the ways in which one "might have attempted … to live a socially engaged life as an artist across the ages of empire, war, defeat and protest politics" (p. 4). Eubanks's approach thus counters one of the dominant assumptions informing art historical (and historical) scholarship on Japan, in which 1945 functions as a clear divide, distributing artists and their creative works into clean pre- and postwar periodizations, what Namiko Kunimoto has called elsewhere the "postwar paradigm."2 Such a paradigm also elides the more complicated task of understanding the messy political valences across what might be called Japan's "long transwar" period between 1920 and 1960. Writing against this paradigm, Acts of Persistence thus not only contributes to art historical scholarship but can also be read along with other histories—literary, intellectual, and political—that have explored the experiences of imperialism and war mobilization in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, and the reckoning with such mobilizations in the postwar period.3 The Art of Persistence centers on the experiences, writings, and artwork of Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2000)—more commonly known as Maruki Toshiko—across the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods. Eubanks analyzes an impressive amount of sources that include Akamatsu's formal artworks and sketches, but also her travel diaries, publications, and manifestos, [End Page 528] thus combining artistic/visual analysis with close textual readings. Eubanks traces Akamatsu's settler-colonial upbringing in Hokkaido and her travels to Japan's South Seas Mandate (chapter 1), her work illustrating children's books during the Pacific War (chapter 2), travels to the Soviet Union (chapter 3), Akamatsu's political transformations and activities during the Allied occupation (chapters 4 and 5), through to what Akamatsu is best known for: her postwar pacifist artwork (chapter 6), in particular her Genbaku no zu (Nuclear panels, 1950–52), created and exhibited with her husband Maruki Iri (1901–95).4 Similar to Namiko Kunimoto's analysis of Katsura Yuki's (1913–91) transwar artistic activities,5 Eubanks hopes to expand our understanding of Akamatsu beyond just her postwar art and activism by exploring Akamatsu's "wartime activity and its moral implications" (p. 5), not to indict or vindicate, but to "narrat[e] a social history of art" (p. 3) through Akamatsu's individual experiences. To this end, Eubanks proposes a "microhistorical" analysis in which Akamatsu's "lived experience" between 1930 and 1960 and the artworks she produced open into larger "issues in modern Japanese history and visual culture: empire, colonialism, violence, and gender" (pp. 2–3). At times, Eubanks returns to a more conventional biographical mode of analysis whereby she contextualizes Akamatsu's primary sources by citing secondary scholarship on particular historical...