The realism debate and the politics of modern art in early postwar Japan

Abstract

This article examines the realism debate (riarizumu ronsō) that took place between 1946 and 1950 as a forum in which ideas on artistic form, the role of the artist in society, and the social relevance of art come into focus in a way that allows us to see how questions such as Japan's modernity, the recent experience of fascism, and the challenges of rebuilding culture during the early cold war were taken up by leading cultural figures in the field of the visual arts. Occurring alongside discussions of how the art world could be reformed to avoid the failures of fascism, the debate served as an occasion to re-examine the history of modern art in Europe and Japan and to consider the question of artistic representation in a way that opened the most fundamental question of art's relationship to the world and promised to begin the process of envisioning it anew. The debate involved three camps which I label social realism (represented by Hayashi Fumio and Nagai Kiyoshi), modernist realism (Hijikata Tei’ichi), and avant-garde realism (Uemura Takachiyo, Okamoto Tarō, and Hanada Kiyoteru). While assessing their points of agreement and disagreement, I argue that the debate set the stage for debates in the 1950s and beyond.