Yanagi Muneyoshi and Yamamoto Kanae: Their Arts and Identities

Abstract

Yanagi Muneyoshi's ”Folk Crafts” and Yamamoto Kanae's ”Farmers' Art” are not often compared, because of some differences in times, places, and characters of these two movements. However, Yanagi actually took up Yamamoto's ”Farmers' Art” in a few occasions. There is more than six years' difference between Yamamoto's ”Purport of starting the Farmers' Art Japan” and Yanagi's ”Purport of founding the Japan Folk Crafts Museum.” But, if we compare the former with Yanagi's ”About founding the Korean People's Art Museum,” there is only one year difference, published in November 1919 and January 1921 respectively. Two art specialists living In Tokyo, Yamamoto and Yanagi, started each ”reconstruction through art” project one after another in mountainous Nagano prefecture and far-off Seoul. Yanagi was critical against the Farmers' Art Institute and its Western-style building. Though severely criticized by Yanagi, Yamamoto still keeps significant positions in the history of art movements in modern Japan. First of all, he was the founder of creative prints. Secondly, he was one of the founding members of the art and literature magazine, Hosun which predated the Shirakaba, for which Yanagi acted as an editor and contributed numbers of articles. In adition to the Children's Free Painting and the Farmers' Art movements, he was also a major member of an alliance formed for the purpose of founding the museum, not for the past, but for the present and the future. Yamamoto identified himself with ”art” rather than ”craft.” It was perhaps because he was unlike John Ruskin or William Morris born without a silver spoon that he insisted on ”art.” Unlike Yanagi, it was probably because of the same that he preferred Europe to Asia. It was his limitation. However, we should not forget that Yamamoto was one of the most important movers toward real creative art in pre-war Japan, from its education to exhibition.