Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle describes the efforts of art theorist and educator Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) to develop a national painting style in Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912). It focuses on the ways in which that goal manifested itself in the educational institutions and painting themes and styles he was involved in creating in association with his collaborator Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908). Victoria Weston’s extensive research, coupled with her concise writing style, places Okakura and his group within the heightened consciousness of national identity that defines the Meiji era and adds depth to an understanding of how that period’s strategies for national identity construction applied to art making and art criticism.

One of the primary catalysts for political change in Japan in the mid-nineteenth century was the introduction of Western concepts of nation building. During the Edo period (1615–1868), the ruling Tokugawa shogunate’s governing power came from its domestic military and financial supremacy over other warrior elites. During roughly the same period, European and American nations began securing their economic and political strength internationally through colonization and through aggressive promotion of their national identities. The shogunate did not have the financial or political capital to challenge these nationalist and imperialist tactics. In 1868, the Meiji government initiated an era of statecraft in Japan in which international affairs became a significant focus of national policy making.

Meiji leaders sought to block European and American domination of Japan by undertaking their own symbol making and imperialist ventures. They engaged in nation and empire building in a number of ways, for example, by instilling national consciousness through a nationwide system of education (1871), by establishing an army and navy (1872), and by appropriating colonies (beginning with Taiwan in 1895). Iconographic transformations included adopting national symbols such as a flag (1870) and an anthem (1893), and commissioning official portraits of the emperor and empress. It is the history of Okakura’s contribution to a new national visual vocabulary that Weston tracks in her study.

Weston approaches Okakura’s construction of a new visual language from a number of different methodological perspectives: institutional history, the study of painting themes, formal analysis, and examination of critical reception both in Japan and abroad. The first three chapters explore the creation of an institutional framework that embodied Fenollosa and Okakura’s arts ideology. Weston lays the groundwork for the study by explaining how Fenollosa and Okakura proposed a new system of arts education in Japan that would combine the teaching of traditional themes and techniques with an emphasis on originality of interpretation. Hired to teach philosophy, logic, and political economy at the newly established Tokyo Imperial University, Fenollosa initially arrived in Japan prepared to tout the wonders of Western art, but soon turned to supporting a revival of Japanese art. Fenollosa and Okakura, who initially acted as Fenollosa’s translator and later became his colleague, spread their message through different media: lectures and critiques at gatherings of the Kangakai, the “painting appreciation society” they helped organize in 1884; educational programs developed as employees of the Art Bureau of the Ministry of Education; and editorials, journal articles, and books in both Japanese and English.

The development of art education in primary and secondary schools is explored in chapter 2. It also includes brief synopses of the educational backgrounds of painters who ultimately trained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which was established in 1889 under Okakura and Fenollosa’s direction as the culminating educational experience for artists in the new system. Chapter 3 describes the specific workings of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts: the curriculum, the faculty, and the artistic outcomes for students. A section of the chapter is devoted to the school’s involvement in staging the Japanese government’s entry to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. As Weston states, “the World’s Columbian Exposition provided the Tokyo School of Fine Arts with its first significant opportunity to play a role in national affairs” (108), underscoring the linkage she seeks to emphasize between visual representation and international political maneuvering by the government.

Weston analyzes the visual results of Okakura’s discourse in the next two chapters. Chapter 4 details the establishment of competitive exhibitions by Okakura in Tokyo and how “morally edifying historical themes” became popular subjects for painters trying to imbue their paintings with “social consciousness,” which Okakura saw as a necessary ingredient in modern Japanese painting (128–9). For example, fūzokuga (genre painting) in the hands of Okakura’s students, such as Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1959), became celebrations of the Japanese past—and, therein, indications of the longevity of Japanese culture—rather than examinations of the present as they had been during the Momoyama (1573–1615) and Edo periods (150). As Weston writes, “Genre themes were occasions of recovery, salvaging the past for the sake of the present” (150).

In chapter 5, Weston introduces the dilemma of positing mōrōtai (“hazy style”) painting as an expression of Japanese national identity. Defined by the use of gradated color to suggest three-dimensional form, mōrōtai was the disparaging label originally applied by critics to the style that came to be identified with the painters of the Japan Art Institute, founded by Okakura in 1898 when he left the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. According to Weston, the style’s lack of linear structure looked derivative of Western techniques to both Japanese art critics and laypeople (175). Thus, mōrōtai did not seem to suggest a unique Japanese artistic vision to those in Japan; however, it did to many abroad.

Weston uses the reception of mōrōtai as the turning point in her discussion of reception, through which she shifts her gaze from domestic to international views. Chapter 6 gauges the reception of Okakura’s thinking—and Okakura himself—by artists, critics, scholars, and collectors in India, Europe, and the United States. Weston describes mōrōtai’s positive reception abroad and how Institute painters were perceived as harbingers of a new Japanese art based in tradition. She also solidifies the significance of this reception by pointing out that Okakura and Fenollosa’s interpretations of Meiji painting histories continue to be accepted today as conventional wisdom (261). The evolution of Okakura’s ideas in the words and work of his disciples after their return to Japan in 1905 is presented in chapter 7. The epilogue summarizes the significance of Okakura’s ideas by presenting their visual and ideological reverberations in the years following his death in 1913.

This book is not an epistemological study of modern Japan, such as Stefan Tanaka’s New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), which examines the impact of a reconsideration of time on Meiji history writing through the study of various scholars’ (including Okakura’s) conceptualizations of the past. Weston provides a case study of the visual representation of national identity through a practical and tangible history that illustrates precisely how Okakura instituted his ideas about a new national Japanese painting style and the specific ways in which artists manifested concepts of national identity in their choices of painting themes and styles. Throughout the book, she is methodical in asserting how each section supports her thesis.

There are a few points raised in the book that warrant further investigation. There is a subtle tendency to trace modern developments to the Meiji era. For example, the coining of the term nihonga is traced to that period (3). In fact, the use of the term nihonga to differentiate a painter’s art from that of a Chinese artist or from a Japanese artist who may have used a different designation such as yamatoe (“pictures of Yamato”) to define a painting style seems to date from the Edo period (Paul Berry, “The Origins of the Term Nihonga,” in Michiyo Morioka and Paul Berry, Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions, Nihonga from the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection, Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1999, 19). The term also continues to be used in a number of ways today. This tendency surfaces as well in the assertion that “public exhibitions” were “new to the Meiji period” (129). Public exhibitions of painting and calligraphy were staged throughout the late Edo period, not to mention the exhibitions staged by the shogunate and, independently, by Saga Domain in Paris in 1867 (see Akai Tatsurō, Kyō no bijutsu to geinō: jōdo kara ukiyo e, Kyoto: Kyōto Shinbunsha, 1990, for a discussion of Edo-period exhibitions).

There is also a question about the lack of mention of the term rekishiga (history painting) in chapter 4 (it is finally mentioned in the text in chapter 5 ¹⁷⁴). Even though a variety of types of historically oriented themes such as Buddhist painting and fūzokuga are discussed, the term rekishiga, which originated around 1890, is not treated at all. It is not even included in the index, although there are three lines dedicated to “historical painting.” Due to the term’s origins in the period and Weston’s interest in linking social and artistic trends, discussion of the term rekishiga and how its usage evolved seems relevant to the fourth chapter’s topic (for more on rekishiga, see Satō Dōshin, Meiji kokka to kindai bijutsu, Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1999; and Yamanashi Toshio, Egakareta rekishi: Nihon kindai to “rekishiga” no jiba, Tokyo: Seiunsha, 2005).

Overall, however, Weston presents a well-researched study and useful discussion of the materialization of national identity in the visual culture of the Meiji era. This book is important not only for its value in understanding art-historical events, nation-building, and institution formation during the Meiji era, but also in terms of assessing the traces of those undertakings in contemporary interpretations of Japanese art history.