Cipango - French Journal of JapaneseStudies
English Selection
1 | 2012

The Invention of “Folk Crafts”: Yanagi Sōetsu andMingei

Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: anew contextualisation
Yanagi Sōetsu et l’invention des « arts populaires » : remise en perspective
Christophe Marquet

Édition électroniqueURL : https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/244
DOI : 10.4000/cjs.244
ISSN : 2268-1744
Éditeur
INALCO
Référence électronique
Christophe Marquet, « Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation »,Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies [En ligne], 1 | 2012, mis en ligne le 24 mai 2013, consultéle 08 juillet 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cjs/244 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cjs.244

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.

Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.

Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of“folk crafts”: a newcontextualisation
Yanagi Sōetsu et l’invention des « arts populaires » : remise en perspective
Christophe Marquet

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR
Original release: Christophe Marquet, « Yanagi Sōetsu et l’invention des « arts
populaires » : remise en perspective », Cipango [En ligne], 16 | 2009, mis en ligne le 15
novembre 2011, DOI: 10.4000/cipango.371.
1The exhibition The Mingei Spirit in Japan,1 curated by Germain Viatte and Shiraha Akemi
for the Musée du Quai Branly, provided the occasion to introduce a largely unknown
section of Japanese art to the French public, as well as one aspect of the work of Yanagi
Muneyoshi (also known by his pen name, Sōetsu) 柳宗悦 (1889-1961). In this respect,
the exhibition was undoubtedly one of the most interesting events devoted to Japanese
art to be organised in Paris in 2008.

2The approach chosen by the exhibition’s organisers – as the subtitle “from folk craft todesign” indicates – aimed to illustrate the continuity between the Folk Crafts
Movement (mingei undō 民藝運動), launched in the 1920s, and modern design. A large
section was thus devoted to Yanagi Sōetsu’s eldest son, the designer Yanagi Sōri 柳宗理(1915-2011),2 and the international links established with designers such as Bruno Taut,Charlotte Perriand and Isamu Noguchi between the 1930s and 1950s.

3Yanagi was also featured at another exhibition on Japanese design just metres awayfrom the Musée du Quai Branly – Wa: The Spirit of Harmony and Japanese Design Today –, atthe Japan Cultural Institute in Paris (Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris), lending
further weight to the idea that he had initiated a rediscovery of Japanese crafts thatCipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 1 | 20121Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

had helped to revive modern industrial design. In fact, the catalogue for this exhibition
presented Yanagi’s views on the necessary coexistence of craftsmanship and industrial
design as the “archetype of the vision driving design today”. 3
4This interpretation led the organisers of the Musée du Quai Branly exhibition to playdown certain important aspects of the Folk Crafts Movement, such as its Western
intellectual and aesthetic origins, its links to Buddhism and its pictorial dimension. In
this respect, the exhibition differed significantly from the first two major mingei
exhibitions: held in the United States from 1995 to 1997 at the instigation of the Japan
Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan),4 and at the Museum of Asian Arts in Nice
(Musée des arts asiatiques) in 2000 and based on a private collection. 55Moreover, we have recently witnessed the emergence of new interpretations of themovement focusing on the ideological principles that underpinned Yanagi’s work.
Notable examples include Kikuchi Yuko and Kim Brandt, authors of two publications
that retrace the history of the Mingei movement in a colonial context, seeing it
primarily as a kind of “cultural nationalism” or a contribution to the creation of a“modern national style”.6 Other research, such as that of Inaga Shigemi, has attempted
to reveal the sequence of events that led Yanagi to “invent” an Asian aesthetic traditionin the context of colonial Japan.7

6

Other more radical analyses challenge the humanist interpretation of Yanagi’s work,
even going as far as seeing a parallel between certain aspects of his views on folk crafts
and the “fascist aesthetic” of the 1930s and wartime Europe. 8 Yanagi’s views during thisperiod are presented as those of a “reactionary modernist” – an expression used by thehistorian Jeffrey Herf to describe the Nazi German and Fascist Italian regimes – 9
someone who rejected the individualism of modern society and criticised the “frail”
nature of contemporary art.

7

Whilst acknowledging such interpretations, this volume of Cipango chiefly aims to put
Yanagi’s work into perspective by shedding light on those aspects of the Folk Crafts
Movement overlooked by the Musée du Quai Branly exhibition. It follows a Yanagi
Sōetsu-themed workshop held at INALCO on 15 January 2009, organised as part of aCentre for Japanese Studies (Centre d’Études Japonaises) seminar and attended byGermain Viatte and Shiraha Akemi.

8The majority of the papers presented at the workshop can be found here, in addition totwo new research articles and a translation dealing with closely related issues. A
presentation of these contributions is preceded by a brief review of the nature andimplications of the Mingei movement founded by Yanagi.

Yanagi and the Folk Crafts Movement
9Yanagi Sōetsu occupied a unique position on Japan’s intellectual and artistic scene
during the first half of the twentieth century. Neither an artist nor an art historian in ascholarly sense, he was often described as a “thinker” specialising in aesthetics andreligious philosophy. He was above all the founding father and spokesperson of theFolk Crafts Movement, or mingei undō. The term mingei 民藝 was coined in 1925 byYanagi and two potters, Kawai Kanjirō and Hamada Shōji, with the aim of promoting
the “functional beauty” of peasant pottery produced by anonymous craftspeople.

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10The term has been interpreted variously as “folk art” (minzoku geijutsu 民俗藝術),“peasant art” (nōmin bijutsu, 農民美術), and even “art of the people” (minshū geijutsu 民衆藝術). Yanagi refuted such interpretations,10 objecting in particular to the term “art”(bijutsu, geijutsu), which was coloured by a definition based on Western art categories
imported to Japan during the Meiji era and which, in his eyes, had distorted the way
ordinary objects were perceived. Yanagi understood his neologism to mean “crafts”(gei) “of the people” (min). He further advocated the use of less ambiguous and more
concrete terms such as getemono 下手物 (“common object”) – a slang term used bystallholders at the flea markets he frequented in Kyoto during the 1920s – minki 民器(“object of the people”), or even zakki 雑器 (“miscellaneous object”), though none ofthese enjoyed the same success as mingei.11

11

In practical terms, mingei was a generic term encompassing all manner of domestic
utensils and objects, furniture or even clothing and textiles crafted by hand using
traditional techniques that were either lost or dying out at the beginning of thetwentieth century. It mainly referred to local creations from the late Edo or early Meiji
eras, although much older objects – such as stone sculptures from the Jōmon period –would later capture Yanagi’s attention for their primitiveness.

12Yanagi was quick to define mingei as being chiefly: anonymous creations, utilitarian inpurpose, produced in large amounts, low in cost, plain and destined for commonpeople, in contrast to crafts or works of art assigned to a particular artist, unique,luxurious and produced for the upper classes.

13

At first sight this definition emphasising the usability of objects differs little from theone used by folklorists to define folk crafts in other countries, notably in France. Take
the work of Georges Henri Rivière12 at the National Museum of Popular Arts andTraditions, Paris (Musée des arts et traditions populaires) from the end of the 1930s,
and that of his successor Jean Cuisenier, for example.13 Furthermore, let us not forgetthat in 1928 an International Commission on Folk Arts and Folklore 14 was established in
Prague and joined by Japan. Created under the aegis of the League of Nations, thecommission aimed to “catalogue surviving traditions” and consider “how to protect
those that still existed”.

14However, Yanagi took pains to point out what distinguished his project from
ethnographic museums such as the Nordiska Museum in Stockholm, which he visited in
1929 during a visit to Europe.15 His initiative differed from the ethnographic approachin that, rather than collecting a vast number of “reference works” in order to showcase
a practice, history or milieu, it consisting in making a qualitative selection based on
subjective aesthetic criteria. Nonetheless, the formal qualities of the object wereconsidered from a functional perspective, thus giving rise to the well-known
expression “functional beauty”, yō no bi 用の美.

15

Furthermore, one of the main objectives of Yanagi and proponents of his movement
was to establish a collection of items chosen as models for creating new arts and crafts,
new architecture or even a new form of figurative pictorial art. 16 These latter two
aspects of the movement were less successful and in consequence are probably less wellknown.

16The Mingei movement gathered momentum with a planned museum in 1926, whichbecame a reality in 1936 with the opening of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo.
Although an aesthetic, rather than a methodical and scientific, approach lay behind

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Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

this endeavour, the exhibits were nonetheless selected according to a range of criteria.
The pioneering nature of this privately funded undertaking must be stressed, giventhat it came about at a time when Japan’s national museums had no interest in folk
crafts, since they did not fit into the quest to construct a national identity founded on
the “aristocratic arts” promoted by these institutions. In fact, Yanagi pointed out that
his offer in the late 1920s to make his collections available to the Tokyo Imperial
Museum (now the Tokyo National Museum) went without a response. 1717

According to Yanagi, in order to qualify as mingei the objects had to possess certain
qualities, in particular by displaying an “honesty with regards their intended use”. This
excluded manufactured or needlessly ornate objects. This stipulation was in part areaction to the decline of traditional crafts and the industrial standardisation of
everyday goods since the Meiji era.18

18

Nevertheless, although mingei – according to Yanagi – had to possess this practicalvalue rather than simply being objects for aesthetic appreciation, they were not merely
utilitarian. They were also required to fulfil a “criterion of beauty”, thus introducing acertain ambiguity into Yanagi’s project. As with so-called “primitive art”, this raised
the question of the object’s autonomy and recognition of its artistic value beyond its
practical value. Moreover, the involvement of artists making what were often
expensive creations – including several individuals who were designated Living
National Treasures after the war – is one of the movement’s many contradictions.

19

The establishment of the emblematic term mingei aimed to encompass a novel
movement combining a reinterpretation, or rediscovery, of the crafts of the past with apromotion of contemporary design, with one enriching the other. This quest to inventa craft tradition can also be considered in light of its role in re-evaluating the history ofJapanese art by taking into account its most popular forms.

20The Folk Crafts Movement continues its activities today thanks to a network of regional
associations located across Japan and some thirty or more affiliated museums, all ofwhich come under the umbrella of the Japan Folk Crafts Association (Nihon mingei
kyōkai 日本民藝協会). Note that it also enjoys an international reputation due to theconcept having been exported, as it were, particularly to the United States. One
pertinent example is the experiment carried out by the Mingei International Museum,founded in San Diego (California) in 1978 by Martha Longenecker, 19 a potter andprofessor of art at the University of San Diego who worked in Japan with Hamada Shōjiand was acquainted with Yanagi. By applying the ideas of the Folk Crafts Movement,
this non-profit public institution is “dedicated to the understanding and appreciationof “art of the people” (mingei) from all cultures of the world” and organises many highquality exhibitions in this field.

Contributions to this volume21

The Folk Crafts Movement can be analysed from a variety of perspectives: its
contribution to modern design – which is the approach favoured by the Musée du Quai
Branly exhibition – its reinterpretation of Japanese art (in particular from the Edoperiod), and its aesthetic or even social dimension. It raises a number of questions, suchas its relationship with ethnology or its position concerning colonialism. While it does

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Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

not claim to respond to each of these questions, this volume attempts to shed light onmatters of recent debate.
22Michael Lucken re-explores the important issue of the movement’s intellectual andaesthetic origins, for although it seems possible to speak of an abrupt change inYanagi’s interests in the mid-1910s, when he began to turn his eye towards Korean folkart, his models remained for the most part Western. The Mingei movement has often
been presented as anti-modern, the antithesis of the Western concept of individualist
art. However, it should be remembered that this reinterpretation of the Japaneseartistic tradition was based partly on ideas taken from late nineteenth-century
European thinkers such as William Morris – founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement –and on the themes covered by art magazines like The Studio. 20

23Yanagi’s fascination for various forms of figurative folk arts – from Korean paintings toŌtsu-e to votive plaques – is tackled by Christophe Marquet. At first glance this field ofart may seem the furthest removed from the Folk Crafts Movement’s criteria offunctionality and anonymity. However, Yanagi’s approach had the virtue of revealing
an entire set of works disregarded by scholarly research for being “popular prints”, andstudying their characteristics, function and history.

24

François Macé examines the vital role played by Yanagi at the beginning of the 1920s in
rediscovering Mokujiki 木喰 (1718-1810), an eighteenth-century monk and sculptor
who had been ignored previously by Buddhist art historians because his work “did notconform to the criteria of beauty”. This discovery, coming just before the concept ofmingei was developed, demonstrates the nature of Yanagi’s research method and above
all his keen and pertinent eye, capable of finding a “new beauty in the ugly”, a beauty
that did not reside in technical virtuosity.

25

Finally, the early 1940s’ debate between Yanagi Sōetsu and the prominent folklorist
Yanagita Kunio 柳田國男 (1875-1962) is analysed in detail by Damien Kunik. It provides
a clearer understanding of the methodological and ideological differences separating
folk studies from the Folk Crafts Movement, which were occasionally confused at thetime, no doubt because both in part took an interest in the same type of objects. At thesame time, it is clear just how much both movements helped reappraise thecontribution of ordinary people (min) to Japanese culture in general, and this during aperiod that bookended the Second World War. Kunik, in association with Jean-Michel
Butel, also provides a translation of Yanagi and Yanagita’s only public debate(broadcast on the radio in 1940), thus enabling readers to judge the nature of thedebate between these two intellectuals and their respective stances concerning thematerials common to both of their fields of investigation.

26

This text suggests that the folklorist Yanagita sided with descriptive science andrefused to entangle himself in political debate (at least with regards to his research),
since his movement did not intend to “influence culture”. In fact, the reality is more
complicated, although Yanagita’s stance does reveal a difference between the two
disciplines. While not completely lacking a scientific aspiration, Yanagi considered theFolk Crafts Movement above all as a means of establishing aesthetic standards. His
activities implied value judgments and making selections. In contrast, the approach offolklorists and archaeologists was to make observations based on a study of thematerials.

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Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

27

This volume concludes with Coralie Castel’s critical analysis of three Japanese art
exhibitions held in Paris in 2008 – including the Musée du Quai Branly exhibition –focusing on the ideas and representations conveyed with regards to “Japaneseidentity”.

NOTES
1. Germain Viatte (ed.), L’esprit mingei au Japon (The Mingei Spirit in Japan), Actes Sud, Musée duQuai Branly, 2008. Catalogue for the exhibition The Mingei Spirit in Japan. From Folk Craft to Design,presented in the Musée du Quai Branly garden gallery from 30 September 2008 to 11 January
2009.
2. After studying Western art at Tokyo University of the Arts, Yanagi Sōri worked as Charlotte
Perriand’s assistant between 1940 and 1942. In 1950 he set up the Yanagi Industrial Design
Institute (Yanagi indasutoriaru dezain kenkyūjo) where he created numerous everyday objects
using traditional techniques and reflecting the mingei spirit. In 1977 he took charge of the JapanFolk Crafts Museum (Mingeikan) founded by his father in Tokyo. See the exhibition catalogue
Yanagi Sōri. Seikatsu no naka no dezain 柳宗理 — 生活のなかのデザイン (Yanagi Sōri. Design inEveryday Life), The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2007, and in particular the essay byKida Takuya 木田拓也, entitled “Yanagi Sōri no dezain to mingei” 柳宗理のデザインと民藝(Mingei and the Designs of Yanagi Sōri), pp. 12-14.
3. Fukagawa Masafumi, « Visages du “Wa”. Harmonie dans le design de produits au Japon » (TheDifferent Faces of ‘Wa’. Harmony in Japanese Product Design) in Kashiwagi Hiroshi et al., Wa:l’harmonie au quotidien. Design japonais d’aujourd’hui (Wa: The Spirit of Harmony and Japanese
Design Today), Paris, Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris, 2008, p. 23.
4. Mingei. Two Centuries of Japanese Folk Art (Peabody Essex Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Asian Art
Museum of San Francisco, Fort Worth Museum of Science and History), The Japan Folk Crafts
Museum, 1995. This exhibition aimed to present the various aspects of Japanese folk crafts
through a 140-piece collection dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, classified
according to their medium (textile, pottery, lacquerware, wood, metal and painting).
5. Marie-Pierre Foissy-Aufrère, Eliza Barrère, Dominique Buisson and Robert Moes, Mingei de lacollection Montgomery. Beauté du quotidien au Japon (Mingei from the Montgomery Collection.
Everyday Beauty in Japan), Nice, Musée des arts asiatiques, 2000.
6. Yuko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory. Cultural Nationalism and Oriental
Orientalism, New York, Routledge Curzon, 2004; Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty. Mingei and thePolitics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, Durham, Duke University Press, 2007. See the review of thislast book in Cipango. Cahiers d’études japonaises, n°16, p. 149-155. (http://cipango.revues.org/270)
7. Inaga Shigemi, “Reconsidering the Mingei Undō as a Colonial Discourse: The Politics ofVisualizing Asian ‘Folk Craft’”, Asiatische Studien, 1999, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 219-230.
8. Noriko Aso, “Mediating the Masses: Yanagi Sōetsu and Fascism”, in Alan Tansman and MarilynIvy (eds.), The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009, pp 139-154; AlanTansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009, and inparticular, “A Vision of Beautiful Things: Yanagi Sōetsu”, pp. 107-118.
9. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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6Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

10. See his text “Mingei no shushi” 民藝の趣旨 (The Meaning of Mingei), 1933, in Yanagi Sōetsu,Mingei yonjū-nen 民藝四十年 (Four Decades of the Folk Crafts Movement), Tokyo, 1958, reissued
by Iwanami Shoten, Iwanami Bunko collection, 1984, pp. 159-173. This text was translated into
French by Anne Bayard-Sakai in L’esprit mingei au Japon (The Mingei Spirit in Japan), op cit.,p. 13-24.
11. For an analysis of such terminological matters see Élisabeth Frolet in Yanagi Sōetsu ou leséléments d’une renaissance artistique au Japon (Yanagi Sōetsu: Elements of an Artistic Revival inJapan), Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986, p. 74-76.
12. See Nina Gorgus, Le magicien des vitrines. Le muséologue Georges Henri Rivière (The Museologist
Georges Henri Rivière: Showcase Magician), Paris, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
2003.
13. See, among others, Jean Cuisenier, L’art populaire en France. Rayonnement, modèles et sources(French Folk Art, its Influence, Models and Origins), Fribourg, Office du Livre, 1975.
14. See Nina Gorgus, « Georges Henri Rivière et l’Europe » (Georges Henri Rivière and Europe), in
Jacqueline Christophe, Denis-Michel Boëll and Régis Meyran, Du folklore à l’ethnologie (FromFolklore to Ethnology), Paris, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009, p. 370. In 1964
the commission became the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore.
15. See Yanagi Sōetsu, “Mingeikan no seiritsu”, 民藝館の生立 (Birth of the Japan Folk CraftsMuseum), 1935, published in Yanagi Sōetsu Zenshū 柳宗悦全集 (The Complete Works of Yanagi
Sōetsu, referred to hereafter as YSZ), vol. 16, Tokyo, Chikuma Shobō, 1981, pp. 52-53.
16. Note that the concept of the “artistic role” of ethnographic museums, in which the exhibits
were a source of inspiration for artists and helped to disseminate unknown techniques, was notdissimilar to the plan developed by Georges Henri Rivière in 1931. See Nina Gorgus, Le magicien
des vitrines, op cit., p. 55.
17. See Yanagi Sōetsu, « La beauté en quête de critères » (Towards a Standard of Beauty), in
Artisan et inconnu. La beauté dans l’esthétique japonaise (published in English as The Unknown
Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty), adapted by Bernard Leach, translated by Mathilde
Bellaigue, Paris, L’Asiathèque, 1992, p. 17.
18. Ibid., p. 19.
19. Martha Longenecker is the author of, among others, Mingei of Japan. The Legacy of the Founders.
Sōetsu Yanagi, Shōji Yamada, Kanjirō Kawai, San Diego, Mingei International Museum, 2006.
20. The hybrid nature of the Mingei movement was highlighted by Élisabeth Frolet in « Yanagi
Sōetsu et son mouvement d’art populaire, le mingei undō. Le rôle ambigu de l’Europe et de sa
modernité dans la formation d’un mouvement artistique japonais dans les années 30 » (Yanagi
Sōetsu and his Folk Crafts Movement, mingei undō. The Ambiguous Role of Europe and its
Modernity in Creating a Japanese Art Movement in the 1930s), Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 109,
no 1417, February 1987, p. 87-96.

RÉSUMÉS
Introduction au dossier sur le mingei undō (mouvement des Arts populaires) et son fondateur,Yanagi Sōetsu, fruit d'une rencontre qui s'est tenue le 15 janvier 2009 à l'I NALCO.
Introduction to the issue on mingei undō (Folk Art movement) and its founder, Yanagi Sōetsu,
which is the result of a symposium held at INALCO on January 15, 2009.

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Yanagi Sōetsu and the invention of “folk crafts”: a new contextualisation

INDEX
Mots-clés : mingei – mouvement artistique, culture populaire, arts populaires, folklore, Yanagi
Sōetsu (1889-1961), objets, culture matérielle, objets usuels
Thèmes : ethnologie, anthropologie, histoire de l'art
Index chronologique : Shōwa
キーワード : minshū geijutsu 民衆芸術, busshitsu bunka 物質文化, taishū bunka 大衆文化,
minzoku 民俗, mingei undō 民芸運動, nichiyōhin 日用品, mingeihin 民芸品, Yanagi Sōetsu 柳宗悦 (1889-1961), jinruigaku 人類学, minzokugaku 民族学, bijutsushi 美術史, Taishō jidai 大正時代
(1912-1926), Shōwa jidai 昭和時代 (1926-1989)
Keywords : utensils, material culture, folk art, popular culture, Mingei, Yanagi Sōetsu
(1889-1961), anthropology, ethnology

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