Modern Japanese Prints - Statler - Oliver Statler

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government.

      Since Yamamoto's grandfather fought on the side of the Tokugawas when they went down to final defeat, he thereafter found himself on the outside looking in, and with the country in the hands of a new and revolutionary regime he found it difficult to support his family and raise his three sons. Financial difficulty was probably one of the reasons why Kanae's father, one of those three sons, was adopted into the Yamamoto family to assume their name and marry their daughter, although this is a common enough arrangement in Japan. The Yamamotos were a long line of doctors and their new son set out to follow the family profession. He went to Shinshu (now Nagano Prefecture), in the mountainous area of central Japan, to learn medicine as an assistant to Dr. Ogai Mori, a physician who attained fame as an author.

      While Kanae was a baby his mother lived with her parents in Okazaki but when he was five she moved to Tokyo to be a little closer to Shinshu. The boy was still young when his father thed and his mother had to turn to housework to drudge out a living. Kanae went through elementary school but that was all the thin family-purse would allow, and at eleven, perhaps by chance, but if so very lucky chance, he was apprenticed to an illustrator and wood engraver. So he learned, not the technique of Japanese ukiyoe, but that of Western wood engraving. The two are diametrically opposed, not only with regard to the block (cut along the grain for ukiyoe and across the grain for wood engraving, as already explained), but also in the carving. In ukiyoe the method is by black lines on white paper, achieved by cutting away the block on both sides of the line, leaving the line to print. But in wood engraving the artist works with white lines against an area of black ink, and the method is to carve out the line itself so that it will show white against the surrounding black.

      The resulting blocks are amazingly disparate in yet another way: an ukiyoe block, properly carved and cared for, is good for about one thousand clean impressions, in five hand-printings of two hundred each, with time between to let the blocks dry out; but the little wood-engraving block, with its fine lines delicately engraved on the end of the grain, can be put in a printing press for two hundred thousand impressions, easily outlasting a photoengraved copper plate. Photoengraving had other advantages which were soon to make it supreme, but when Yamamoto was a boy there was still a great market for the skill of the wood engraver, as one can see by a glance at the copiously illustrated books and magazines of that day. He was an apt pupil, and by the time he had finished his apprenticeship and the obligatory year which followed, he was able to get a good job.

      He went to work as a wood engraver and illustrator for the forerunner of the present Yomiuri newspapers, and then at twenty-one, not wanting to remain a technician all his life, he entered the government art academy at Ueno in Tokyo. While going through art school he continued to support himself by his wood engraving. He graduated in 1906, a promising young artist.

      Concerning this period, the reminiscences of Tsuruzo Ishii (born 1887) make delightful listening. A man of amazing versatility, Ishii is an oil painter, Japanese water-colorist, sculptor in both wood and clay, and a creative-print artist who made his mark so firmly in the early days that today he is by acclamation president of the Hanga Association. His older brother, Hakutei Ishii (born 1882), is also a distinguished artist and a major figure in the beginnings of the creative print.

      "Yamamoto was already in his fourth year when I entered the academy at Ueno," says Ishii, "but he lived at our house as one of the family, and few were ever as close to him as Hakutei and I. He was the first to combine great talent in both oil painting and wood engraving, and he was the first to make a creative print in Japan.

      "There had been creative hanga before, not woodprints but etchings and lithographs. You can trace creative etchings back even before Meiji. The lithographic process came to Japan during early Meiji and a few men, my father among them, did some creative work with it. I don't mean that they were conscious of starting a movement, but they did create a feeling, an atmosphere, and into this atmosphere came Kanae Yamamoto.

      "Kanae made his first creative print in 1904. He had gone on a sketching trip to Choshi in Chiba and when he came back he made the print from a sketch of a fisherman in the costume they put on to celebrate a big catch. He carved with the technique of wood engraving but he used a Japanese-style block, cut with the grain. It wasn't a big print, maybe four by six inches. It was in two colors, and for his two blocks he carved both sides of the same board. I'm sure I have that block somewhere in the house. It would be interesting to run another print from it—but on second thought I don't think I'd want to. Wherever he is, Heaven or elsewhere, Kanae would probably raise violent objections." (The print is reproduced as print 3.)

      "Hakutei published this print in the magazine Myojo, where he was an editor, labeling it a toga, a knife picture. It wasn't until several years later that they invented the word hanga."

      Ishii's remark brings to mind one of Koshiro Onchi's stories which illustrates both the difficulties of the early days and the complexities of the language. The word hanga has the same pronunciation as an expression meaning "half picture." In 1915, after the word had been invented, a small group called the Tokyo Hanga Club held an exhibition. Every exhibition of that period had to be passed by a police board of censorship, and one of the prints appeared to the inspector to be unfinished. This suspicion was confirmed in his mind when he recalled that it had been called a hanga, which he interpreted to mean half picture. Holding that it was improper to exhibit unfinished work, he ordered the print down and, still unsatisfied, went to the artist's home and confiscated the block.

      Yamamoto's early enthusiasm was contagious, and Hakutei Ishii found himself becoming nostalgic for the glories of ukiyoe. Remarking that "we cannot bear to stand by and see this death of an art which was once the pride of Japan," he published a series of prints called Twelve Views of Tokyo. In good ukiyoe tradition, these turned out to be pictures of beautiful women from different sections of the city. Also in ukiyoe tradition, Hakutei, who lacked Yamamoto's training as a wood engraver, turned to artisans for help, but the day of the creative print had come, and Hakutei Ishii was one of the first to recognize it.

      By the time Yamamoto graduated from Ueno, he was deeply excited about creative woodprints and was the driving force behind the whole movement. It was he who gave the early prints their distinctive look when he pioneered the use of the curved-blade chisel, which was the mark of creative hanga for many years. To ukiyoe artisans this chisel, with a blade shaped something like a flour scoop, was only a tool to clean up the block, but in Yamamoto's hands it became a major instrument of virtuosity, as demonstrated by On the Deck (print 1). There is a striking development from Fisherman (print 3) to On the Deck. Fisherman was carved as a wood engraver would carve, in the Western style, cutting out white lines against the black background. In On the Deck he pushed this concept much further, carving out the white to create not lines, but planes, shadows, and mass.

      In 1907, Yamamoto, Hakutei Ishii, and a few others started the magazine Hosun, and for the four years of its life they filled its pages with their own creative hanga and comment. This slim magazine, whose title meant "a little thing," is the first great landmark of the creative-print movement, and with the group Pan, of which it was the unofficial voice, forms a fascinating chapter in the history of Japanese art in the early years of the century.

      Pan achieved notoriety as a boisterous, uninhibited, sake-loving crowd of artists, but behind the rowdyism it was to the artists a serious effort to assimilate the new modernism of the West without sacrificing their Japanese nature. Devoted to ukiyoe and to the spirit which produced it, they chose a meeting place in what had been the heart of old Edo (the former name for Tokyo), close by the Sumida River, and here they came to grips with the issue which still plagues Japanese art. If they failed to gain a final solution to their problem, they at least recognized it, faced up to it, and more often than not gained temporary victory by drinking it under the table.

      It probably goes without saying that they invited the attention of the police, who were only too inclined to see a socialist under every beret. The irreverence of their caricatures in Hosun (Yamamoto, who admired Hokusai, was not backward in this department) was a constant incitement to the official mind, but their greatest fame was achieved when, in the course of a party called to condole a couple of members on their imminent induction into the army, they draped the pictures of the new privates with black to signify their demise, a piece of blasphemy which was promptly splashed on the front

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