From Bloomberg comes this fascinating account of a well-known Japanese tempera painter, Sadamichi Hirasawa, who was convicted of mass murder during the American Occupation following World War II. It was called the Teigin Incident. As this short New York Times story on the occasion of Hirasawa’s death in 1987 recounts,

In the robbery, a man posing as a Government health worker entered a Teikoku Bank branch and told 16 employees that post-World War II occupation forces had ordered them to drink medicine because of an outbreak of dysentery. The workers obeyed, and, as they collapsed, the robber scooped up the equivalent of $600 and fled.

Twelve bank employees died. The drink was found to contain cyanide.

At the time, Hirasawa confessed but later claimed this was forced under torture. (As an aside, Japan has long had a problem with forced confessions.) At any rate, through various appeals and loopholes and indecision, he was never hanged for the crime and ended up spending 39 years in prison, 32 of them on death row. The NY Times article quoted above notes that at that time (1987) he had been on death row “longer than any other prisoner in the world.”

While the case is sensational no matter how you look at it, what caught my eye in the Bloomberg piece was the suspicion that someone from the infamous Unit 731 of the old Imperial Japanese Army might have been involved in the incident (called Teigin as the bank where it occurred was a branch of the Teikoku Ginko (Imperial Bank). This was written about in a book by William Triplett called Flowering of the Bamboo as well as in Mark Schreiber’s Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan.

According to this page (via Google Book Search) of Schreiber’s book, a “novel” by famed crime mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto that appeared in 1959 alleged that “a former member of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 [...] had been involved in the killings, but GHQ [the American occupying authorities] had given him a blanket amnesty in exchange for data on the experiments”.

Sadamichi Hirasawa being arrested in his hometown of Otaru (Hokkaido), 1948

There is a rather large Japanese site that deals with the incident, from which the two images used in this post come from. (I believe this is the “Society to Save Hirasawa” website but I’m not sure). Even if you can’t read the site, the photos of Hirasawa, the crime scene, and the evidence introduced that are in the photo gallery are fascinating to cycle through (click on the first link in the left column, and then the “next” arrow after that). The site also features a small selection of Hirasawa’s paintings, the majority of which, according to the Bloomberg article, have been lost. There are more Hirasawa works pictured throughout the site but they are not organized in any way. Your best bet is to browse via this Goo image search. (More Hirasawa work can also be seen here.)

60 of those works are now traveling in Japan as part of an exhibition organized by Hirasawa’s adopted son, Takehiko, which is what occasioned the Bloomberg piece. Takehiko is the biological son of one of Hirasawa’s most ardent defenders, writer Tetsuro Morikawa, who arranged for Hirasawa to adopt his son partly in an effort to help with the appeals process (according to Schreiber) . Morikawa was the founder of the Society to Save Hirasawa, and he was well-known for his books on Japanese history (tantalizingly, one of his books deals in part with the Yakuza presence in Manchuria). It is yet another twist in a fascinating and tragic episode in post-war Japanese history.

According to the Bloomberg piece, the exhibition will take place in Otaru from October 3 – 8 (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link), and there will also be a documentary about Hirasawa on Japan network TBS on September 30th.

Sadakichi Hartmann
Photographed by William M. Vander Weyde, 191?

One of the strangest and most original men of letters of the day — in the United States at all events — is Sadakichi Hartmann, the poet, art critic, and lecturer. He was born in the land of wistarias and chrysanthemums, and he sees life with that Japanese anarchy of perspective.

– Vance Thompson, Paris Herald, September, 1906

Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed poetry with Stephane Mallarme, and drank with John Barrymore, who described him as “a living freak… sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly.” W.C. Fields said the critic was “a no-good bum.” But though Hartmann might lift your watch (he was an accomplished pickpocket), his opinion was not for sale.

Born in Japan to a German merchant and his Japanese wife in 1867, he was disowned at 14 and shipped to a Philadelphia great-uncle, an incident that, as Hartmann said, was “…not apt to foster filial piety.” Largely self-educated, he published his first newspaper articles as an adolescent. After meeting Whitman, he wrote an article for the New York Herald quoting the poet’s opinions of other writers. Whitman denounced him for misquotation; Hartmann responded by expanding the article to a pamphlet. At 23, he wrote his first play, “Christ,” which was banned in Boston and publicly burned after Hartmann’s arrest for obscenity. A critic from the original New York Sun, James Gibbons Huneker, called “Christ” “the most daring of all decadent productions.”

– King of the Bohemians, Past & Present, By William Bryk, The New York Sun, January 26, 2005

More: See my collection of links at del.icio.us related to Hartmann.

Went to see the huge Hokusai exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum (Ueno) last Saturday, and it’s well worth seeing. However, do yourself a favor and don’t even contemplate going on a weekend (like I stupidly did) or holiday, unless you have some perverted desire to feel what cattle feel like being herded from one place to the next. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to queue at a museum, not on the outside, mind you (although we did have to do that, but only for about 10 minutes or so — a far cry from the 2 hours I once waited to get into the Uffizi, I seem to recall) but on the inside, as I entered each exhibition space or set of prints!

I felt thankful I had a height advantage and I could’ve viewed the entire exhibit that way, but the person I was with did not and so we dutifully queued up and slowly trudged our way through each gallery. My feet shuffling skills certainly improved over the course of the afternoon. One thing I noticed was that at the beginning of each series, there would be a queue or confused crush, but as one proceeded further down the wall/series, the crowd would soon thin out. So with some perserverence, it was possible to steal 5 or 10 seconds uninterrupted in front of a print, without feeling the immediate pressure to start shuffling again.

If I could do it all over again (with only 3 weeks remaining I can’t), not only would I go on a weekday but I would forego the heavy hitters of the show, namely the prints from the 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series (the exhibition was not surprisingly at its most gridlocked here, all roads leading to the wave), and go straight to the last galleries, which feature Hokusai’s work from the last 10 years or so of his life. Some unbelievably beautiful work here, work I had never seen before. This was his “Manji” period (overview with woefully inadequate samples at link), and it’s hard to fathom to creativity and artistry evidenced by someone in his 80′s (his last known work, done at age 89 or 90, depending on how you count it, is on view). Particularly striking were his Brush Painting Manual series of 10 paintings, so vivid they look like they were created yesterday (extremely tiny sample at the bottom of this page), and one particular painting on a scroll, the title of which escapes me, but which depicted a woman with a Mona Lisa smile on her face, her child behind her, and about 8 rice farmers in the background, all their heads face down in so that all you can see are shiny silver-ish discs representing their hats. Sublime!

Tokyo Museums – Grutt Pass 2004 (Japanese site here)

The “Grutt” pass in a nutshell is this: for ¥2,000 ($18USD), you get a booklet with free entrance coupons to 44 different art and history museums in the greater Tokyo area, as well as to zoos and aquariums. The entrance coupons are valid for two months from the date of your first use. This is one of those deals that’s so good you swear there’s some catch, or some fine print detail you’ve overlooked.

Naoko told me about this a while ago but I never followed through, and now I’m realizing the error of my ways. I finally bought one when we took Kaika to the Ueno Zoo last weekend (¥600 entry), and while I’ve only used it twice so far (for the zoo and for the Bridgestone (¥700)), I really only need to visit two or three more museums for the coupon booklet to have saved me money.

The list of participating institutions can be found here (in English). As I look over the list, I realize now that for many of them, the coupon will not only get me into the museum for free (eg. to see the Permanent collection), but also to Special Exhibitions. Can you see the yen savings I’m seeing in my head?

One of the nice things about this, as I discovered the other day at the Bridgestone, is that it helps to alleviate the feeling that one must see everything on display, lest one waste that sometimes hefty entrance fee. It gives one the mindset that the entrance was basically free, and lets one relax and see what one feels enough, reducing visual overload. Granted, there is a slight pressure to use the booklet, and to schedule museum visits regularly where one might not have before, but I tend to look at that as incentive rather than pressure, and I’m quite looking forward to taking in some of the more off-the-beaten path museums in the next two months. And when the two months are over, I’ll just buy another booklet. It really is a win-win as far as I can see it.

Whether you’re in town for a week or live here, this is a great deal. You can buy the pass booklet at any of the participating institutions (and use it right there and then), or at Lawson’s convenience stores, Ticket Pia, JTB offices, and a few other places. The program will run to January 31st, 2005, though as the program was done in 2003 one hopes it will continue next year as well.

Currently on view is the exhibition “Masterly Visions,” culled from the museum’s permanent collection. It begins with Rembrandt, and in 9 rooms makes it’s way at an Art Appreciation 101 pace to the abstractions of Miro and Klee. Additionally, there are two rooms of Japanese work from the first half of the 20th century, done in a Western style.

While the years and art periods went by at breakneck speed, the exhibition was curated in a way that it never seemed overwhelming, and while ultimately much of the work from the acknowledged “masters” failed to impress for its own reasons — in Renoir’s case, I realized that his work has become inseparable from kitsch for me; for Picasso, one sensed these were not among the artists’ stronger works or they tried too hard to illustrate the diversity of his career — there were some wonderful discoveries.

Raoul Dufy. That’s his Poiret’s Mannequins at the Race Track in 1923 (1943) pictured above, and while it can’t really be faithful to the real thing, hopefully one can get a sense of the wonderful color here. I latched onto this piece in part because earlier Renoir had turned me off to color, to his color, which seems so tawdry, so many gimcrack baubles. (Is that a fault of the work or the fault of the posters and calendars in the age of mechanical reproduction it’s hard to say. Not surprisingly, it is a Renoir female that graces the promotional material for this exhibition.) And then here comes Dufy with this overwhelming green, and garish red, and yet it works so well, it’s porous and celebratory, as one looks at it one feels like one is swimming in the ocean as the tentacles of seaweed part before you. And those mannequins, like mermaids, teetering between real and fantasy, are they the attraction here, the horse-racing a mere backdrop, or will they snap out of it and step aside so we can stomp on that verdant field?

Georges Rouault. The five Roualt pieces in the show shared a room with Picasso, but for me they dominated, not the other way around. The explanatory panels clue us in to Rouault’s Christianity, and how his work often resembles stained glass. This is true enough looking at them (and indeed, Rouault was apprenticed to a stained glass artist as a teen), especially the piece Christ at the Court of Justice (1935), with its thick black lines surrounding each figure and crystalizing them in ambivalent spatial relationships. But looking at his work, one can’t help but feel that were these stained-glass windows, they would be the windows tucked away, soot-covered and nearly opaque, celebration blunted like a pre-restoration Michelangelo Sistine Chapel.

The work reproduced above is called Christ in the Outskirts (1920-4), and was quite different from the other four Rouault works shown. Here is a De Chirico-esque landscape with tiny figures against a portentous backdrop, only minus the clean lines. I found this work rather unsettling, perhaps because my expectations of a painting with Christ in it were being challenged, upended. I couldn’t reconcile the title with the painting, or the figures, and the position of the figures left it ambiguous for me whether they were at the end of the road or the beginning. A painting I could look at a long time, but sadly the gift-shop postcard will have to suffice.

Other highlights for me included two small, delicate paintings by Odilon Redon, and a wonderful beach landscape by Eugene Boudin, which on account of its position next to a bank of Renoirs, helped to restore some sense of solemnity to those proceedings. It was these, and the Dufy’s, and Rouault’s, that proverbially stole the show for me, and so while I momentarily enjoyed the warm blanket of the well-known “masters,” it was these new discoveries that continued to warm me as I left the museum for the slightly colder world outside.

Last week we took a bicycle ride to the other side of our tiny city of Warabi to visit a small museum housed in a former residence. I wasn’t really paying attention earlier when Naoko explained the exhibit on view there, but as I began to walk around the first room after paying our 300 yen entry I was pleasantly surprised to find some exquisite ukiyo-e prints on the wall, in a distinctly different style from that of say Hiroshige or Utamaro. They were clearly of the 19th century, yet very fresh and alive. They reminded me a bit of Kuniyoshi or Hokusai’s manga.

When we were escorted to the makeshift cafe/bookstore after finishing looking at the exhibition, it all became clear, as there were various exhibition catalogues and books on the artist, who was none other than Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889). And as it turned out, the museum was the Kawanabe Kyosai Kinen Bijitsukan (Kawanabe Kyosai Memorial Museum). How it ended up that our humble little city — better known to most Japanese as one of the most densely populated spots in all of Japan, or for its reputation as a haven for yakuza — became host to this wonderful little treasure I do not know (presumably Kawanabe’s descendents eventually settled here and at some point the house was turned into a museum), but it heartens me that there exists this cultural oasis a bicycle ride away. Kawanabe’s great-granddaughter Kusumi Kawanabe is the director of the museum.

The exhibition we saw there (on view until October 25th) is entitled Edo • Meiji tanoshimu shomin or “The amusements of the ordinary folk of Edo (Tokyo) during the Meiji era” (roughly), and uses Kyosai’s work to focus on how Edo residents amused themselves in the beginning years of the Meiji Restoration. Elephant rides, childrens’ sumo, string games, hunting for mushrooms — these and other pastimes are depicted wittily by Kyosai. You can get an idea of the exhibition by clicking on the links on this page from the museum’s website (though be forewarned, an idea is all you get as these images are rather poor representations).

Kyosai is an interesting character, in part because after studying with Kuniyoshi (he entered into his apprenticeship with Kuniyoshi when he was only 6 years old!) and then breaking out on his own, he enjoyed rather free contacts with Westerners living in Japan (who were more influenced by he than he was by them, it should be noted). The most important of these, British architect Josiah Conder, learned printmaking from Kyosai, and later wrote the first English-language appreciation of Kyosai (in 1911).

There is scant decent reproductions of Kyosai’s work available online. For starters, you can try:

Waseda’s Database (30 images)
The Art of the Print (7 images)
Castle Fine Arts (5 images)

Or you can seek out Timothy Clark’s OOP Demon of Painting: the art of Kawanabe Kyosai.

On the museum’s English site (excuse the sloppiness) you’ll find directions complete with pictures on how to get to the museum (it’s only a half-hour outside of Tokyo, in Saitama).

It’s the start of the Aki (Fall) Sumo tournament here in Tokyo and after more or less taking the last basho off, I can feel myself getting back into the swing of things, and look forward to making it down to the Kokugikan for at least one if not two days of action this basho. Of course, the other days I will be glued to the nightly highlights show broadcast on NHK. (The basho runs from September 12 – 26.)

There are many compelling stories this basho, starting first and foremost with whether or not Yokozuna Asashoryu can win his fifth consecutive tournament and continue his quest to be the first rikishi in history to win all six bashos in a single calendar year. He is also attempting to break the record for the most bout victories in a year.

His 19 year old Mongolian countryman Hakuho is slowly but surely being touted as perhaps the next Yokozuna, and is coming off consecutive double-digit win tourneys. At Maegashira #3, Hakuho is now ranked high enough that he is virtually guaranteed to meet the Yokozuna for the first time on the doyho — in short, a most anticipated bout. Ozeki Tochiazuma seems to be finally fully healthy, and in my book is the leading contender to upset Asashoryu’s record-setting plans. Further down the banzuke, there are several newcomers to the top division that folks will be following, namely the Bulgarian Kotooshu who has already become a fan favorite due to his kawaii looks (the dreaded “David Beckham of Sumo” has been uttered more than a few times already).

The above ukiyo-e print is of a special exhibition bout between Koyonagi on the left (in the middle panel) and Arauma on the right, from sometime in the middle of the 19th century. Both rikishi had long, distinguished careers: Koyanagi was active from Tenpo 6 (1835) to Ansei 3 (1856), reaching as high as the Ozeki rank, while Arauma’s career spanned from Tenpo 3 (1832) to Kaei 7 (1854), his highest ranking being that of Sekiwake. (This was in an era which saw only two tournaments per year, with these being only 10 bouts long (in contrast to today’s 6 yearly tournaments of 15 bouts duration each).)

Interestingly enough, both rikishi hailed from the same part of Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo, and apparently this helped give rise to a spirited rivalry between the two which made them two of the most popular rikishi at the time. In fact, the pair were so popular that they were immortalized in the lyrics to a famous children’s song of the time. It is said that along with Ozeki Tsurugisan, who is one of the off-dohyo rikishi depicted in the far right panel of this print, the three were lauded as the preeminent rikishi of that time. (Tsurugisan sounds like he’s worthy of his own post: at one point in his career, he turned down a chance to become Yokozuna, claiming that his dohyo form wasn’t good enough. That didn’t stop him however from wrestling until the ripe age of 48!)

The above print triptych was done by Kunisada (Toyokuni III) sometime between the years 1844 to 1850 (based on the seal/signature analysis found on this page). Click on the above image for larger versions of the triptych.

There’s nothing left, sadly (the hotel’s main entrance hall and lobby are preserved at the Museum Meiji-Mura), but there was a small exhibit down in the basement documenting the construction and life of Wright’s Imperial (1923-1967), and one tidbit struck me (in addition to a nice photo of Gregory Peck holding court in the hotel bar): the grand opening of Wright’s hotel was the same day as The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and killed 140,000. Wright’s structure withstood the quake and was hailed as a great achievement in “aseismic” architectural planning.

I figured there was a bit more to this story that meets the eye, so I did some searching and came across this interesting (and accessibly written) analysis of Wright’s design and and why it might have been able to withstand such a huge quake, from the National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering at UC Berkeley:

If one were to choose the building whose performance in the 1923 earthquake had the greatest influence on architectural historians and journalists and therefore the mass audience, it would no doubt be the Imperial Hotel. But if one were to look at the structural performance which was most noted and discussed among engineers, or to single out the examples which had the greatest effect on both the development of the state-of-the-art of seismic design and on the evolution of the modern aseismic building code, then the Tokyo buildings designed by Dr. Tachu Naito would be the obvious choice.

The above is a cropped detail from a print entitled “Knowing the blessings of one’s parents,” by an unknown artist perhaps in 1882. The complete print depicts, from right to left, the 10 months of pregancy (above are months 4 to 7). This print comes from an online exhibition of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) and yamato-e (Japanese painting) called “Japanese Art on the Subject of Medicine”, from the Digital Clendening online archive. This archive is the digitized portion of the Clendening History of Medicine Library, at the Kansas University Medical Center.

In addition to the above print, there are two other prints depicting prenancy, here and here. The latter one, by Shoshi, is particularly fanciful, depicting a pregnant woman with six heads and 12 bodies, and therefore carrying 12 fetuses.

There are a couple of other exhibits in the Digital Clendening site that I found particularly worthwhile: Chinese Public Health Posters (the first one about cholera is a doozie), and Portrait Collection, an exhibit of over 500 portraits of physicians and scientists.

Above are two pages of manga by the originator of the term, ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai. I bought these yesterday for 3,000 yen ($24 USD) at Hara Shobo in Kanda-Jimbocho (I wrote briefly about this gallery here). I had been considering buying one of the gallery’s two-page spreads of manga sketches by Hokusai for a while now. The prints date from the Meiji era (roughly 1889, according to the gallery), but were struck from the original woodblocks. Hokusai in all created 15 volumes of manga in his lifetime. When he coined the term manga way back in 1814, he meant something akin to “whimsical sketches,” not necessarily a far cry from today’s popular manga, but certainly different nonetheless. Hokusai’s manga really were sketches, without much of a narrative element. As you can see from the above image (click for a larger image), there isn’t any real connection between the various scenes depicted (three separate ones in the case of this print).

There’s a wonderful humor to many of the sketches, often of quite a ribald nature. In the scene on the left, two people are laughing their heads off at a huge tengu (mountain goblin known for their long noses) mask that has been wrapped up in a furoshiki (wrapping cloth). On the right page, top, a women plays a shamisen and sings, lyric sheets in front of her. (Frankly, I’m not sure what the man to her right is doing, perhaps beating out a rhythm?) In the bottom right picture, a doctor is examining a patient, who has her tongue stuck out.