Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955-1980

by Thomas R.H. Havens

Overview

This work explains how and why Japan supports a community of professional dancers, musicians, production companies, and visual artists that has nearly tripled in size during the past 25 years.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691641812
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #709
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan

Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955-1980

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By Thomas R.H. Havens

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05363-9

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CHAPTER 1

Art for Society's Sake

"These are nonsense pictures," shouted a young Tokyo artist late one afternoon in November 1980. "They are worthless junk!" With a meter-long pipe, Yamashita Kaname systematically slashed thirty-seven works by Umehara Ryuzaburo and other leading Japanese painters at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art; he managed to rip three million dollars' worth of oils and watercolors before he was stopped. "I want to become a famous artist," he told the security officers who seized him. "Umehara's paintings are nothing but coloring-book drawings." Why did people consider the twenty-three Umeharas he had just gashed so valuable, the attacker wondered, when his own impressionist works that had once won him a prize in Osaka were shunned in Tokyo?

The criminal pleaded guilty the next January, and curators assured the court that the damage would be repaired. This Cromwellian episode raised questions about art in contemporary Japanese life that were seldom discussed during the comfortable 1960s and 1970s: Is there an accredited view of culture, maintained by an establishment of arts officials, in or out of government? What value does society place on the artist's work: the expression of beauty, the interpretation of timeless human emotions, and criticism of the surroundings? How — and how well — do the Japanese support and reward their artists?

Now so well as one might expect, according to Seiji Ozawa, the most internationally recognized Japanese artist of the 1970s: "one of the defects of Japanese society is that ordinary citizens do not feel proud of the arts and contribute to them." It is true that individuals rarely make gifts directly to art institutions in Japan, nor do foundations or corporations take up much of the slack. During the seventies the national government increased its appropriations to modern performing-arts groups, but by the end of the decade the subsidies for fresh works still amounted to just $5.7 million. As of 1980 the official Agency for Cultural Affairs devoted 40 percent of its total budget of $200.12 million to the arts as a whole; most of the rest was used for historical preservation, protecting important cultural assets, and related programs. Prefectural and municipal bodies each made proportionately smaller provisions for the arts.

These modest but hardly insignificant figures offer only a hint of the true scope and variety of the arts in Japan today. Although direct patronage in the form of subsidies is still underdeveloped, market support for nearly every genre is very substantial. Serious music, dance, theater, and the visual arts in Japan are overwhelmingly commercial: they are mostly financed by income earned from ticket sales, advertising, recording, radio and television, the sale of products and services, and revenues from professional instruction." This is equally true for the traditional performing arts, which are just as marketable as the modern genres introduced from Europe during the past century. And it is also true for the more popular forms of art.

For perhaps as long as any other nation, Japan has had a thriving popular culture. Even in so prosperous and media-saturated a society as contemporary Japan, higher culture and popular culture have not become indistinguishable; there is much vitality and satisfaction in each. Whether the nonprofit, higher-culture sector is still elitist, as it once was, seems doubtful. If elitist means achieving excellence and populist means providing access, to borrow the formula of Livingston L. Biddie, Jr., the postwar Japanese arts have almost certainly become both. Now that 90 percent of the population considers itself middle class, a huge audience exists for the arts in the broadest sense — popular and higher, live and recorded, verbal and nonverbal, literary as well as plastic and performed arts. Cultural life in the form of attendance or participation in an art activity has grown more diversified and more widely diffused throughout the country during the past thirty years than at any time in Japan's history.

The pages that follow offer an introduction to the social history of the arts in postwar Japan, mainly painting, sculpture, print making, and the live performing arts, both traditional and modern. The focus is on the relatively narrow nonprofit portion of the total industry where the greatest risks, both of innovation and revival, are taken in the name of art. A great deal of interesting art lies outside this focus, but the genres treated here are useful prisms for refracting the modern experience of the arts in Japanese culture as a whole.

The aim is to show how and why the Japanese have supported the arts, especially those that are the most commercially precarious, during the period from the mid-1950s to 1980. The mid-fifties seem a useful starting point for several reasons. The economy regained its prewar level of output in 1955 and began to grow, almost without pause, at an average rate in real terms of 11 percent a year until the world oil crisis in 1973. (From 1973 to 1980 Japan continued to outperform the other main industrial economies.) The first all-new stage for modern drama, the Haiyuza, opened in Tokyo in April 1954 and initiated a new phase in Western-style theater in Japan. The contemporary era in dance dates precisely from Martha Graham's visit to Japan in November 1955, and the following year was the first major exhibit that presented Japanese artists side by side with their counterparts from abroad. The mid-1950s also mark the beginnings of the postwar arts establishment, an informal but very tangible system that has rewarded those who succeed by its rules but frustrated others, such as the painting slasher Yamashita.

This inquiry into the social nature of art is not meant to be an essay in art criticism, although interpretive remarks are sprinkled here and there. In thinking about art and life in contemporary Japan, it is worth remembering W. H. Auden's observation that the historian of society can say why Shakespeare's poetry is different from Browning's but not why it is better. Without seeking esthetic judgments, readers of history are invited to consider the place of art in postwar Japan, confident that they can "look for social meaning without soiling the face of beauty."

The Compass of Middle-Class Culture

If the philosopher Suzanne Langer is correct that "all art is the creation of perceptible forms expressive of human feelings," astonishingly diverse forms of expression, reflecting people's esthetic and emotional needs at various levels of taste, have appeared in Japan since World War Two. Statistics are scarce, but there is no doubt that the arts sector in the widest sense has generally flourished, although not uniformly for each of its components, during the past three decades.

The visual and performing arts as gainful occupations underwent a considerable transformation after the mid-1950s. Today there are about 30,000 professional visual artists in Japan, double the number in 1955, and there are another 170,000 amateurs who produce art objects for exhibition. Only a few hundred artists, at best, make a living exclusively from selling their works. Nearly all those who are considered professionals have side jobs in teaching, commercial design, advertising, or the other commercial mass media. About 1,000 sculptors currently turn out works for sale, of whom lino Kiichi, president of the Contemporary Sculpture Center in Tokyo, considers only thirty "true professionals." Many thousands of persons produce prints, but only 500 or 600 of them regard print making as their main occupation. Perhaps 2,500 professionals create calligraphy and another 3,500 work at crafts. Many people in Japan, as elsewhere, use more than one medium, but most of the country's visual artists are painters — more than 20,000 of them classed as professionals — who produce for a domestic art market estimated in 1980 at $750 million. About half of them paint in the modern Western style, with oils and other contemporary materials, and the other half work in the Japanese style, mainly using watercolors but also ink. But the distinction between Western and Japanese styles has become one basically of artistic factions since World War Two. In theme and technique the two are often indistinguishable, and between them Japan has been producing more paintings than any other country for at least twenty years.

Not even dealers are sure how many persons buy and sell art for a living in Japan, but a good guess is that there are about 1,500 art galleries in Tokyo and 2,000 in the whole country. Something like four-fifths of them are exclusively for rent, without stock on consignment or by commission, where artists can hold shows of their own and hope to catch the attention of critics as well as customers. At least two-thirds of the galleries opened in the 1970s when the Japanese art market soared. Nine of every ten works sold during that decade were produced by Japanese artists.

Corporate and individual collectors accounted for most of the purchases, since Japan in 1980 still had relatively few public or private art museums — especially for contemporary works. In that year there were 313 art museums of all types, almost double the number in 1967, but more than two-thirds were privately operated and usually had small collections. Only two institutions as of 1980 had holdings greater than 10,000 items, the Tokyo National Museum and the Tenri Sankokan. Total attendance at art museums in 1974 was just under 10 million, and another 30 million visited general, scientific, and historical museums. There is little doubt that the numbers who went to see standing exhibits at art museums grew somewhat during the seventies, but special shows at department stores and public exhibit halls continued to attract the largest crowds, as they had in the 1950s and 1960s, especially when the theme was European art of the past century.

National census figures show that theater and dance have expanded side by side with the visual arts. Between 1955 and 1975 the combined number of actors, actresses, and dancers increased by two-thirds to 37,400 — even though live drama lost 40 percent of its audience. Presumably employment as television actors and actresses, especially in advertisements, more than covered the dropoff, since there are still many more professional actors and actresses than dancers even today.

Commercial theater since the war has been dominated by two large entertainment corporations, each of which also produces movies and supplies talent to radio and television. The larger of the two in aggregate revenues, Toho, has specialized in modern plays and musicals since the late sixties, leaving kabuki and its derivatives to Shochiku. Thanks to Shochiku's support, with help also from the national theater after 1966, kabuki is once again solvent for the first time in forty years. Its success allowed Shochiku to outearn Toho from the live stage in the late 1970s. Commercial theater audiences began to grow again after 1975, and Okochi Takeshi, manager of Toho's Imperial Theater in downtown Tokyo, estimated in 1980 that paid admissions in the capital were approaching 8 million. The figure for the country as a whole is at least twice this size.

Among traditional genres, bunraku puppet theater had the most parlous existence after the war. When Shochiku could no longer prop it up, the government and NHK, the public broadcasting corporation, began subsidizing bunraku's revival together with the city and prefecture of Osaka. Today almost 100 performers belong to the bunraku association, which presents two-week programs four times a year in Tokyo, and the same in Osaka, to a total audience of about 150,000. Performances of no theater that are open to the public attract roughly the same numbers. Kabuki, by contrast, has about 350 actors, all but fifty of them under direct or indirect contract to Shochiku. Kabuki plays ten months a year at the Kabukiza theater in Tokyo, eight at the national theater, and shorter engagements elsewhere in Tokyo as well as in Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka before 1.5 million customers. Its modern offshoot, shinpa, is likewise viable because of Shochiku's entrepreneurship. Founded in 1887 and already considered a traditional art today, shinpa has about sixty-five actors and normally operates six months a year at the newly rebuilt Shinbashi Enbujo theater in Tokyo.

For all its hand-crafted inefficiency, live theater is still the artistic core of drama, and in Japan the modern theatrical movement known as shingeki is the artistic core of live theater. Shingeki, which began in the first decade of this century, presents nonmusical plays, whether by Japanese or foreign play wrights, done in the manner of the modern Western stage. In practice all European and American drama short of the contemporary avant-garde, including Euripides and Shakespeare, is considered shingeki. With strong support from organized labor, shingeki grew robust after the war and drew large audiences to its realistic productions throughout the fifties. After being whipped by factionalism, commercialism, television, and new underground troupes in the 1960s, Japan's modern theater sought out fresh audiences in the seventies and today attracts more than 2 million customers nationwide. Virtually all its plays are staged not by performers chosen through auditions but by permanent production companies, which perform for set engagements because theater space is tight and Japanese promoters shirk the indefiniteness of an open-ended run. Although many avant-garde or underground productions are of the highest artistic significance in the Japanese theater world, the combined attendance at all such performances probably does not exceed 100,000 per year.

Even slimmer audiences turn out for concerts of contemporary music, most of them offering works by the two or three dozen most active Japanese composers. Altogether perhaps 150 persons compose art-music in Japan today, nearly all of it in the current international idiom, but many of them write for traditional Japanese instruments as well. Tokyo is unquestionably the music capital of the country, with hundreds of concerts and recitals each month in contemporary, classical Western, and traditional Japanese music. Iwaki Hiroyuki, lifetime conductor of the NHK orchestra, thinks that "Tokyo is probably the world's biggest music city." The 1975 census showed that 45 percent of the country's 65,600 professional musicians were clustered in the Tokyo region. Most of the increase in the national total (triple the 1955 figure) came about because 30,000 additional women became professional musicians during 1960-1975: by the mid-seventies one-third of all musicians were women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. Another 20,000 persons, many of them women, teach music in elementary and secondary schools.

Tokyo is the home of eight full-scale symphony orchestras playing regular seasons for subscribers, but the number is misleading because the country as a whole supports only fifteen orchestras that can be considered professional. There are another forty off-campus amateur orchestral groups. The Tokyo orchestras average three performances a week and go on the road regularly to build audiences throughout the country. Koshimura Sadanao, manager of the Japan Orchestra Association, puts the annual audience for the nation's professional orchestras at 3 million, about what it was in 1970 but now more geographically spread out.

Japanese instrumentalists, especially string players, perform with major orchestras and chamber groups around the world. By one estimate, 400 Japanese musicians are currently employed in Europe and another 100 in the United States. On the other hand, the number of foreign performers visiting Japan for brief engagements reached the remarkable sum of 20,000 in 1980, triple the number a decade earlier and a major worry to domestic musicians and their unions. Although many of them are jazz combos from neighboring Asian countries playing small-town cabarets, one performance of classical Western music out of every five is now given by foreign musicians — who typically draw larger crowds, for more than twice the ticket price, than their Japanese counterparts.

"The national audience for opera is gradually increasing," according to Kawachi Shozo, the executive director of Japan's largest opera company, Nikikai. He estimates that the country's eleven main opera groups draw 100,000 persons to their performances each year, and other more informal companies and chamber operas have their own smaller audiences. Since Nikikai was formed in 1953, there has been a larger increase in the annual number of performances than in the national pool of opera-goers, which is about 10,000 for domestic performances and three times that number when a famous company visits from abroad.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan by Thomas R.H. Havens. Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• A NOTE OF THANKS, pg. vii
• CHAPTER I. Art for Society's Sake, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 2. A Poverty of Patrons, pg. 28
• CHAPTER 3. Arts and the State, pg. 57
• CHAPTER 4. Arts to the People, pg. 80
• CHAPTER 5. The Visual Arts: Show and Sell, pg. 105
• CHAPTER 6. Theater: Playing Safe, pg. 144
• CHAPTER 7. Music: Cultivated Clienteles, pg. 181
• CHAPTER 8. Dance: Contemporary Classics, pg. 216
• CHAPTER 9. The Vertical Mosaic, pg. 244
• BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES, pg. 253
• SOURCES CITED, pg. 293
• INDEX, pg. 311