CHAPTER THREE

PURE LAND BUDDHISM AND CREATIVE ARTS

This chapter, which explores the role played by Pure Land Buddhism in the field of creative arts and aesthetics, is mainly focused on two influential and famous Japanese personalities, the woodblock artist Munakata Shikō and Yanagi Muneyoshi, the founder of the mingei movement and art critic. In particular, the idea of tariki, other-power, will be considered here as an inspirational creative force and, together with other elements of Pure Land Buddhism, as a basis for the development of a Buddhist aesthetics which provided further support to Yanagi’s mingei theory. What I call ‘tariki art’ (and ‘tariki aesthetics’), namely a conception of the artistic work as derived from such ‘external’ religious power, other-power, will be analysed in the following. Besides, in order to offer a sample of the presence of this religious tradition in recent Japanese artistic trends, the last section is dedicated to visual representations of the Pure Land as found in contemporary works of art both within and outside , and presented in different environments both inside and outside temples, such as the installation entitled “Pure Land” by Mori Mariko, a Japanese multimedia artist who lives between Japan and the United States.

Aesthetics and Religion in Yanagi Muneyoshi

Yanagi Muneyoshi, better known as Yanagi Sōetsu 柳宗悦 (1889–1961),1 was the founder and leading exponent of the mingei 民藝 (folk crafts) movement, which was destined to gain great popularity both within Japan and abroad. In Great Britain, for example, the movement headed by Yanagi’s friend, the potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979) and the so- called “Leach Tradition” of Anglo-Oriental style developed from the 1920s, after Leach’s return from a lengthy stay in Japan.2 Leach

1 Muneyoshi is the original given name, and the Chinese-derived pronunciation of the same characters was later used in some cases to create an aura of greater formality. 2 Kikuchi Yuko. Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism. London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004, pp. 233ff.

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was an influential figure and his book A Potter’s Book (1940) notably affected modern , while in Japan his contribution to the development of the mingei movement in the post-war period was also highly significant.3 With reference to his role within this movement, Kikuchi Yuko has pointed out that “Leach was a loyal spokesman for Yanagi, reinforcing the mystification ofMingei theory”,4 and in analysing cultural nationalistic connotations of the mingei movement, she has further asserted: “Just as the Mingei movement thrived during the Second World War, the ‘Leach Tradition’ was in harmony with the political and practical propaganda that surrounded an idealized image of England in which its vernacular crafts and countryside were regarded as a cradle of ‘tradition’ ”.5 A more detailed account of the construction of a discourse based on the opposition ‘Orient’/‘Occident’ and Japan/ Other Asian countries as related to the mingei theory will be provided below. The mingei movement developed in the 1920s through the efforts of Yanagi to propagate an “art of the people”. In explaining the ori- gin of the word mingei, which is an abbreviation of minshūteki kōgei 民衆的工芸, Leach claimed that Yanagi had coined this himself so as to express the “equivalent term for peasant or folk art, in Japanese”.6 Yet, it appears that this was a result of a discussion between Yanagi and his friends Kawai Kanjirō 河井寛次郎 and Hamada Shōji 濱田庄司,7 during a field trip in Wakayama prefecture in 1925 in order to study traces of the wandering monk Mokujiki Shōnin 木喰上人 (1718– 1810).8

Bernard Leach stayed in Japan from 1909 until 1920, when he came back to England accompanied by Hamada Shōji and set up a pottery in St. Ives (Cornwall). Hamada returned to Japan in 1923. 3 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 4 Ibid., p. 233. 5 Ibid., pp. 234–235. 6 Sōetsu Yanagi. The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (adapted by Bernard Leach). , New York, London: Kodansha International, 1989 [1972], p. 94. 7 Kawai Kanjirō (potter and artist, 1890–1966) and Hamada Shōji (potter, 1894–1978) both belonged to the mingei movement. 8 See, for example, Ogyū Shinzō 尾久彰三. “Yanagi Muneyoshi to mingei undō ni tsuite 柳宗悦と民藝運動について” (On Yanagi Muneyoshi and the mingei movement), p. 10. In Yanagi Muneyoshi no mingei to kyoshōtachi ten 柳宗悦の民藝と巨匠たち展 (catalogue of the exhibition held in Kyoto 17 Dec. 2005–29 Jan. 2006 at the Museum of Kyoto [京都文化博物館]), pp. 6–13; Teiko Utsumi. “Mingei and the Life of Soetsu Yanagi”, p. 150. In ibid., pp. 147–155; Ogyū Shinzō (editor-in-chief). Yanagi Muneyoshi

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