Introduction
When we look at Nakamura Hiroshi’s 1958 painting Civil War Era (内乱期) (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1958; Figure 1), we are confronted with an immense, contorted mass of machinery that dominates the frame, dwarfing and obscuring the ruined landscape behind it. In the background, we find what appears to be a nineteenth-century train, but as our eyes are propelled forward by the dark gray dumbbell-shaped cogs, the machinery becomes ambiguous – sterile – with only the harsh black and yellow reminiscent of the radiation warning symbol providing a clue as to the use of this behemoth. The cogs create a sense of progression, and the painting can be read as depicting progress—not the optimistic progress of a liberal idealist but perhaps the progress that confronts Walter Benjamin’s (via Paul Klee) Angel of History: “He sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… this storm irresistibly propels him into the future… this storm is what we call progress.” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2019: 201).
Civil War Era by Nakamura Hiroshi (Reference Nakamura1958). Oil and Pencil on Plywood. Courtesy of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.
This article puts Nakamura’s paintings in conversation with essays from the politics and literature debate that took place in Japan’s immediate post-World War II era, focusing specifically on the exchange between Kurahara Korehito and the writers associated with the Kindai bungaku literary journal. A key topic that was contested in these essays is that of subjectivity, and reading Nakamura’s early postwar era work through these essays allows us to trace how subjectivity is mediated in his paintings. The way subjectivity manifests in these works shifts along with the historical developments of the postwar era, and we will trace these manifestations through three paintings: In Sunagawa No. 5, it is found in the focus on the agency of the protestors as they defend their land from the encroachment of a US Air Force base; in Gunned Down (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1957), subjectivity hovers between the wretched and macabre subject of the painting and the subjective viewpoint of the artist; and lastly, in Omens of a Place (1961), the focus shifts almost entirely toward the artist’s subjectivity, as Nakamura retreats into his own interiority and memories, bringing our discussion to a pessimistic yet engaging close. Nakamura wrote his first critical essay in response to an essay by the major left-wing art critic Hariu Ichirō, whose own essays take up the theme of subjectivity first articulated during the politics and literature debate. Furthermore, Nakamura closely followed the ronsō published in mid-1950s editions of New Japanese Literature and Akahata—two journals in which Kurahara published frequently—and he even mentions Kurahara in passing in one of his own essays. However, this mention is very brief: Nakamura accuses his interlocutor, the art critic Nakahara Yūsuke, of having confused his own views with “theories of realism that came after Kurahara Korehito’s theories” (Nakamura Reference Nakamura2003: 28)Footnote 1 before moving on to clarify his own views for Nakahara. Thus, while Nakamura was likely aware of the postwar discourse around subjectivity, realism, and art in a broad sense, we have no evidence that he had read the essays by Kurahara that were taken up by Kindai bungaku, and it is highly unlikely he read any of the essays written by the Kindai bungaku writers. History is the decisive influence in the development of Nakamura’s painting. This specific debate has been selected because it operates as a lens through which to better understand how history manifests in Nakamura’s work and the role of subjectivity in his painting and, alternatively, provides us with a chance to see how the predictions about postwar art in those early essays actually played out in the postwar era.
Why was subjectivity such a hotly debated topic in the immediate postwar era? J. Victor Koschmann notes that the debate had its roots in prewar Marxist circles (Koschmann Reference Koschmann1996: 3), but key to both the prewar and postwar discourses was an anxiety over Japan’s status as a “feudal” or “premodern” nation that never had a bourgeois revolution. Depending on who you asked, Japanese intellectuals feared that the people either lacked the individualistic subjectivity necessary for capitalist modernity or the proletarian subjectivity or class consciousness necessary for socialist revolution, and they were all concerned that it was this lack of subjectivity that had allowed fascism to take root in Japan. This debate was given urgency by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP)’s democratic reforms that promised to, at least in theory, radically reconstitute the Japanese nation state and the role of the people within it.
The early postwar period was a time of considerable change for Japan. After the end of World War II and the dropping of two atomic bombs, the country was occupied by the United States from 1945 to 1952 and went through a rapid modernization the likes of which had not been seen since the Meiji Restoration. The tumultuous decade was pockmarked by various skirmishes and demonstrations from both the far left and the far right, culminating in the massive Anpo protests of 1960 that sought to put a stop to the ratification of the United States–Japan security treaty, which would allow the United States to maintain military bases in Japan.
In the midst of this conflict, there arose a group of young leftwing radicals who strove to depict through art the injustices and anxieties of postwar Japanese society—and, through these depictions, instigate radical change. Among these were writer Abe Kōbō, filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi, and the painters Yamashita Kikuji and Nakamura Hiroshi, who together helmed the artistic movement known as Reportage. In Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts, Thomas Havens writes that “Reportage works often reflected both the external conscious reality of society and the internal unconscious reality of the artist’s psyche, as informed by surrealism” (Reference Havens2006: 33); in other words, the movement was in part a search for a radical form fit for radical content.
The method of Reportage might be better clarified after we turn to another area in the postwar cultural sphere: the politics and literature debate. In the background of the US occupation forces’ sweeping democratic reforms, these debates, or ronsō, were fought between (usually left-leaning) Japanese intellectuals, many of whom were active in the prewar era. They debated over topics such as war responsibility, the proper relationship between politics and literature, and the elusive concept of shutaisei (主体性; subjectivity). In his book on the debates entitled Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, J. Victor Koschmann (Reference Koschmann1996) centers his discussion on this last topic in particular, and we will maintain this focus on subjectivity in this article, as well. According to Itō Toru, the word shutaisei in its modern meaning was first used in the 1930s to translate the German word Subjektivität as it appeared in philosophical works, and its first appearance in this meaning was likely in Miki Kiyoshi’s 1932 work Rekishi Tetsugaku. It is worth noting that, in this work, Miki carefully distinguishes between shutai and shukan, despite the fact that the two words can be reliably translated into English as “subject” (or into German as Subjekt). As Itō explains, “In distinction with a self-existence that is called in this case shukan—conceived as that which observes or in other words mainly performs cognitive functions—shutai as it is used in the above-cited passage emphasizes the aspect of action.” (Reference Itō2014: 14).Footnote 2 Given that politics was one of the key themes of this debate, this emphasis on action or praxis is worth keeping in mind. In the specific case of the ronsō between Kindai bungaku and Kurahara, Itō writes that “Shutaisei functioned in this case as a word that pointed to the personal meanings and values that could not be expressed by the theory of party factions.” (Reference Itō2014: 14). As we will see, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it is enough to orient our discussion for now.
Kurahara had been the central theorist of the Japanese proletarian literature movement in the late 1920s to early 1930s until his arrest in 1932. Imprisoned for eight years until he was released due to poor health in 1940, he was one of the only leaders in the movement who did not commit forced conversion, or tenkō, while in prison. Almost immediately after the war ended in December 1945, he founded the New Japanese Literature Association (Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai), and it is at this point that he would come into conflict with the Kindai bungaku faction. Kurahara argued for a literary realism informed by the prevailing Stalinist theories of literature that were dominant in the Soviet Union at that time. He directed writers to write from an “objective” standpoint to reality, a standpoint that should be reached by immersing oneself in the study of dialectical materialism. Writers were encouraged to adopt the perspective of the people (minshū), who would lead Japan in a democratic revolution.
On the other side were the Kindai bungaku writers. Their first issue was released in January 1946, and this journal, as well as its founding contributors such as Honda Shūgo, Ara Masahito, and Hirano Ken, would play central roles in the politics and literature debate of the immediate postwar era. Honda and others had been active in the prewar proletarian literature movement, but after its destruction at the hands of the Imperial authorities and the tenkō of many of the movement’s leaders, the Kindai bungaku writers now sought to distance themselves from proletarian literature and articulate a postwar literature free from what they saw as the movement’s strict ideological constraints. As Ara Masahito wrote, “Great art does not have to be forced; it is capable on its own of corresponding with sound politics, and furthermore, politics follows the way of art” (Ara Reference Ara1983: 35; Ara Reference Ara and Ueda2017a: 34). Honda, in a direct response to Kurahara, argued ardently against Kurahara’s demand that petty bourgeois writers should abandon their subjectivity and write from the perspective of the masses: “How is one to live and struggle with the people in literature? To put it simply, there is no literary way for petit bourgeois writers… to do this except by devoting themselves to being petit bourgeois writers.” (Honda Reference Honda and Ueda2017: 10; Honda Reference Honda and Ōoka2003).
The choice to discuss a debate over literary theory in an article about painting may seem strange, but as Atsuko Ueda et al. put it in their book on the politics and literature debate, “We are also mindful of the fact that bungei hihyō, translated here as ‘literary criticism,’ extends far beyond the realm of literature and what we might associate with this term in English. Bungei hihyō was a site where multifarious social and political issues such as human subjectivity and war responsibility were vigorously debated” (Ueda Reference Ueda2017: 4). Ming Tiampo has pointed out the importance of acknowledging the politics and literature debate “as a significant interpretative context for postwar vanguard Japanese art,” and she specifically cites the Kindai bungaku writers’ work on subjectivity as an important contribution to this context. Paying close attention to the recurrence of the kanji character tai (体) meaning “body,” she notes that this debate “responded to the wartime use of ‘national body’ (kokutai) as a metaphor for national unity, and defined the ‘autonomous body’ (shutaisei, also translated as subjective autonomy) and the ‘carnal body’ (nikutai) as a postwar antidote to fascism” (Tiampo Reference Tiampo, Ikeda and Mcdonald2013: 339). It is in the interdisciplinary spirit of these scholars’ interventions that the following discussion will be conducted.
The Reportage style of Nakamura and others, with its combining of “the external conscious reality of society and the internal unconscious reality of the artist’s psyche,” can now be seen as something of a middle point between the two positions articulated by Kindai bungaku and Kurahara. While deeply concerned with political issues, the influence of European modernist art movements—surrealism in particular—put this art far out of bounds of the strict adherence to realism dictated by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) at the time. In a 1948 essay, Kurahara himself criticized modernist art (cubism, expressionism, futurism, surrealism, etc.) for “diverting, through antirealistic works, the attention of the people from the realities of class conflict in society toward sensual interests and idealistic issues related to the subject.”Footnote 3 Though the party’s art policies shifted rapidly over the first half of the 1950s, we can already see in Kurahara’s essay the potential for friction between older party officials and the young Reportage artists.
A perfect example of the Reportage style is perhaps Yamashita Kikuji’s 1953 painting The Tale of Akebono Village (Figure 2). Yamashita participated in “mountain village operations units” established by the JCP, and the painting was completed after the artist travelled to the eponymous village to depict the class struggle of the villagers there. Though the painting depicts real events, it collapses events that had taken place over a long period into a single frame filled with grotesque animals, decaying corpses, and a stark red pool of blood. This combination of social engagement and macabre imagery makes the work a prime example of Reportage painting, and many works in the style would be produced after the artist had traveled to a site of political struggle or injustice. But Yamashita’s embrace of surrealist technique also leaves the painting far removed from the realism championed by the Japanese Communist Party. In 1955 tensions with party mandates over art—as well as a dramatic shift away from the militant strategy of armed struggle adopted by the party in 1951—would lead many young artists, as Honda Shūgo had earlier, to cut ties with the JCP and attempt to set out on their own (Jesty Reference Jesty2018: 84). Nakamura Hiroshi, the subject of this essay, would continue producing works in the Reportage style long after his contemporaries had abandoned it, and his career became a mirror through which to understand Japanese political consciousness in the early postwar period. Nakamura was born in 1932 in Shizuoka Prefecture. During World War II his hometown was firebombed during the extensive air raids carried out by the US military toward the end of the war. In college he became interested in Marxism and joined the Zen’ei Bijutsu Kai (Avant-garde Art Society),Footnote 4 becoming involved in activism and protests. Through the 1950s and beyond, he would go on to create a large and varied body of paintings—deeply political as they were deeply personal—that were intrinsically connected to the struggles and birth pangs of the new Japanese society after the war.
The Tale of Akebono Village by Yamashita Kikuji (Reference Yamashita1953). Oil on Jute. Courtesy of Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art.
In her study of the body in postwar Japanese art, Namiko Kunimoto writes, “for Nakamura, art was a way of negotiating and discovering new political selfhoods, not just representing them” (Kunimoto Reference Kunimoto2017: 70), and Nakamura himself had this to say about subjectivity: “In fact the creativity of the tableau is born out of the sensitivity that belongs to the process of appreciation, and this is precisely the point at which the artist acquires his or her subjectivity.” (Kunimoto Reference Kunimoto2017: 93). Considering these quotes together, we can see that, in Nakamura’s paintings, the sense of subjectivity of the artist or the viewer is changed through a dialectical encounter between the self and the art object: We can come to know ourselves through our encounters with art. The problem of subjectivity dovetails with the debate between realism and modernism that raged in postwar art circles, as the crux of these discussions often centered on the role of the artist’s subjectivity in their artwork: Should the artist focus on expressing their own usually “petit bourgeois” subjectivity, or should they set aside their own interests to depict the struggles of the proletariat or the people? As noted above, these ideas were hotly debated in the essays of Kurahara and the Kindai bungaku writers, and close readings of their essays will help inform our readings of Nakamura’s paintings. It is these two contested meanings of subjectivity—the interiority of the artist and viewer mediated through their encounter with the art object and the historical subjectivity of classes as arbiters of radical change—that will be the focus here.
Sunagawa No. 5 and Gunned Down
The first of Nakamura’s major works in the Reportage style, and still his most famous painting, is Sunagawa No. 5 (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1955; Figure 3). It depicts a clash between a united front of farmers, activists, and Buddhist priests against stoic Japanese policemen during a protest against the expansion of the Tachikawa Military Base. Lasting from 1955 to 1959, the dispute arose over the seizure of farmland from local farmers to construct the base, and after four years of vociferous protest, construction was canceled in a rare victory for the Japanese Left (as well as the locals of Sunagawa).
Sunagawa No. 5 by Nakamura Hiroshi (Reference Nakamura1955). Oil on plywood. Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
The painting maintains a considerable degree of realism, and this fact alongside the politically charged content and the focus on large numbers of bodies brings to mind the socialist realist murals of Diego Rivera, an artist whose work Nakamura was able to see at the Tokyo National Museum in 1955 (Kunimoto Reference Kunimoto2017: 86). However, there are details that distinguish the work from the elder painter’s style. Though the clear leading lines of the runway impart the painting with a certain amount of realistic perspective, the electrical towers and police cars in the middle ground lean at unnatural angles, as if the soil itself were rebelling against its appropriation for violence and imperialism. As the two clear streams of protestors and policemen meet in the middle at the front of the frame, they impart a dueling line of perspective with the runway, an effect that positions the human actors as elements that provide form and symmetry to the painting and emphasizes their subjectivity in the event. As Kunimoto notes in her analysis of the painting, the Japanese word genba (現場; “actual place”) is a central aspect of the work, and it “conveys the notion of authenticity and suggests that locale is bound up with that authenticity” (Kunimoto Reference Kunimoto2017: 81). The embodied locality and active resistance of the Sunagawa farmers is paralleled in an embodied historical subjectivity in the now, and Nakamura, by depicting the social reality of the Sunagawa event, created a work of art that recenters the historical subjectivity of the people depicted therein.
Yet, beyond the perspective and locality of the work, notice that, rather than giving the protesting farmers dignified and noble faces as with the proletariat of a Diego Rivera mural, they appear almost grotesque, with bulging eyes and gaping mouths, as if their dispossession is made visible in the strained features of their faces. Compared with the policemen, however, whose eyes are invisible under their helmets, the pain and humanity present in the protestors’ eyes still elicit pathos from the viewer, and it is clear that that is where the painter’s sympathies lie, as Nakamura himself took part in the protests against the base’s expansion. It is a politically engaged painting, but in Sunagawa No. 5, we encounter politics as seen sideways through the eye of the artist.
At this point, we need to return to Kurahara Korehito’s postwar essays to situate Nakamura’s work in the context of the politics and literature debate, and indeed, out of the paintings discussed here, Sunagawa No. 5 comes the closest to conforming to Kurahara’s directives (though not entirely). In his essay “The Social Foundations of a New Japanese Literature” (Shin Nihon bungaku no shakaiteki kiso) written in January and February 1946 and published in the first issue of Shin Nihon Bungaku, Kurahara declares that, in the same way that the Meiji, Taishō, and prewar Shōwa periods had distinct literatures, “a new society demands a new literature” that is appropriate to the sweeping democratic reforms Japan is now experiencing, and that “a democratic literature becomes possible only when literature joins the effort to build a democratic society” (Kurahara Reference Kurahara and Ueda2017: 171–2). The actual shape of this new literature is better explained in his essay “The Starting Point of a New Literature (Atarashii bungaku e no shuppatsu) published a few months earlier in November 1945. Here, Kurahara writes “first of all, writers must recover the element of reality that has been missing from literature and reproduce within literary works the true circumstances and voice of the people… our writers should know reality, and in order to know reality they must live and fight with, and share the happiness and misery of, the people.”Footnote 5
The method outlined here seems to be a companion to the “mountain village operations units” in which artists affiliated with the JCP participated, and as mentioned earlier, Nakamura did in fact go to Sunagawa and participate in the protest along with the farmers. Yamashita, the painter of the Tale of Akebono Village, did the same, as this was a defining technique of the Reportage style. But implicit in Kurahara’s directive is that the “element of reality” should be depicted through strict adherence to realism, and though Kurahara is specifically writing about literary realism here, the grotesque faces of the protestors coupled with the off-kilter perspective and proportions in Sunagawa No. 5 clearly place Nakamura’s painting outside the bounds of that for which Kurahara is advocating. Although Kunimoto refers to both Sunagawa No. 5 and Gunned Down, which will be discussed shortly, as “socialist realist works” (Kunimoto Reference Kunimoto2017: 89), such a use of the term is extremely strained in the case of the former and untenable in the case of the latter, particularly when compared with the writings of a Communist Party theorist on the matter and other works of actual socialist realism being produced around the same time. One can compare Sunagawa No. 5 with Mita Genjirō’s People of Sunagawa (1957)Footnote 6 to see how strongly the latter’s strict adherence to socialist realism contrasts with Nakamura’s work. In the latter, the weather-worn faces of the farmers are depicted in gritty, realistic detail as they stare defiantly to the left of the canvas in a manner similar to Stalinist and Maoist socialist realist propaganda posters. In comparison, Nakamura’s work is downright avant-garde.
Another key painting for understanding Nakamura’s approach to subjectivity as well as his art’s relationship with politics is Gunned Down (Figure 4). Painted in 1957, it depicts the murder of Sakai Naka, a Japanese woman who was fatally shot by US soldier William Girard while collecting spent bullet casings to sell for scrap metal at the Sōmagahara Air Force Base in Gunma Prefecture. The murder prompted massive outrage among the Japanese population, and the controversy surrounding whether Girard would be tried by US or Japanese courts received widespread coverage by the media. While Nakamura’s depiction of the peasants in Sunagawa No. 5 may have bordered on the grotesque, in this work we find him fully engaged in this style of depiction. Sakai’s hunched-over body lies contorted and angular on the ground in the center of the frame. Her buttocks and one foot are inflated far larger than the other parts of her body, and the phallic rifle barrels coupled with the grenade shell contacting her buttocks (in the real incident, it hit her in the back) create a subconscious scene of penetration or even sexual assault. Her face is disfigured, and the features are depicted in an unsettling Cubist geometric formation. No matter how we approach it, it seems that the subject was intentionally depicted without any semblance of humanistic dignity. Rather, it is as if the cruelty of Sakai’s murder overdetermines the depiction of the subject therein. The impossible positions of Sakai’s body as well as the various rifle barrels give the impression that we are seeing this event not as it actually occurred, but rather the various elements of the event as they were reconstructed within Nakamura’s mind, pointing to the influence of surrealism.
Gunned Down by Nakamura Hiroshi (Reference Nakamura1957). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Koriyama City Museum of Art.
The strong presence of the genba found in Sunagawa No. 5 is absent, as the background melts away into a nightmarish landscape with only a stunted barbed wire fence and a few hills establishing the mise-en-scène, a mere suggestion of an airbase. Justin Jesty notes that Nakamura’s deemphasizing of the genba in this painting marks “a major change in the conceptualization of realist and documentary practice” (Jesty Reference Jesty2018: 118) in postwar avant-garde art. The transformative experience of going to a place and fighting with the people, as Kurahara had encouraged, was replaced with a greater focus on interiority and the art object as “the focal point that received ontological priority” (Jesty Reference Jesty2018: 120). Gunned Down was painted after Nakamura’s disillusionment with the JCP,Footnote 7 and in 1957, the same year in which Gunned Down was painted, Nakamura wrote his first critical essay entitled “Suspicious Self-Criticism” (Fushin no jikohihan).
This essay was written in response to calls from left-wing journals and organizations for self-criticism in wake of the JCP’s pivot away from violent direct action. The main text taken up by Nakamura is an essay by the prominent left-wing art critic Hariu Ichirō entitled “William Tell’s Apple” (Viruherumu Teru no ringo) published in the April 1956 edition of Bijutsu hihyō.Footnote 8 At first glance, it is a strange essay for Nakamura to take up in his grand statement against the left-wing art criticism establishment. Hariu’s essay was itself part of a larger ronsō Footnote 9 with Takei Teruo and other critics, and Hariu spends large portions of the text defending himself from personal attacks and accusing Takei of merely parroting Hanada Kiyoteru’s theoretical positions. He says the reason he finds it difficult to even argue with Takei is because, regardless of what he is saying, “since a distinct subjective consciousness is lacking [shutai no ishiki], there can be no talk of a thesis or antithesis to his arguments” (Kumagai and Mitsuda Reference Kumagai and Mitsuda2021: 159; my translation) In Hariu’s view, the problem with Takei is that he lacks subjectivity. Hariu’s discussion in this essay ends up crystallizing around how artists and critics should develop the relationship between the outer world (gaibu sekai) and inner world (naibu sekai) in their work, and he writes that “the structures of consciousness and subjectivity [shutai] of each and every man of letters is included among these problems, and they deserve persistent and strict criticism… they do not have the power to transform the exterior world through the examination and criticism of their interiority” (Kumagai and Mitsuda Reference Kumagai and Mitsuda2021: 162–2).
It is statements such as this that seem to have particularly bothered Nakamura. In “Suspicious Self-Criticism,” Nakamura strongly refuses the call for self-criticism and sharply criticizes socialist realism, arguing:
When one compares the weakness and falsity of the so-called postwar socialist realist painters with the dissolution of the proletarian arts movement—whose artists committed tenkō and created war paintings—one discovers simply too many similarities. The definite cause of this lay in the artist’s failure to take the contradictions and laws of society as being internal to themselves. Postwar socialist realism was criticized and reconsidered not simply as an external phenomenon, but by keeping in mind that “the external, in other words, political character of art must be grasped together with the artist’s interiority (subjectivity [shutaisei]) and the artwork’s form.” (Nakamura Reference Nakamura2003: 14)Footnote 10
In a sense, Nakamura is in agreement with Hariu. They both suggest that the problems with contemporary left-wing art are the lack of subjectivity in those involved. This passage points to the importance Nakamura puts particularly into the subjectivity of the artist, the necessity for the artist to interrogate the dialectical mediation between himself and society, and the manifestation of that dialectic in the artwork. Although Gunned Down depicts a real event and this “documentary” aspect recalls the Reportage method, it is clear that here Nakamura prioritizes his own interiority as an artist over depicting the historical subjectivity of “the people.”
Starting with this first essay and continuing for decades, Nakamura began developing his theory of the “tableau.” The French word from which the Japanese term is derived refers to the physical surface on which a painting is made, and Nakamura seems to have been drawn to the term for its emphasis on the materiality of the art object as well as its independence from politics. In his next essay, also written in 1957 and entitled “Painting Manifesto (1) The Isolated Tableau,” Nakamura writes, “if an art movement is political, then the tableau rejects the political utility of art… if an art movement is popular (taishūteki), then the tableau emphasizes anti-popularity” (Nakamura Reference Nakamura2003: 21). Such remarks are clearly a sharp refusal of party dictates that art be accessible, or even legible to, the masses. The tableau is a site in which the viewer encounters the materiality of the canvas mediated through the interiority of the artist, and thus brings focus to the formation of subjectivity through the encounter with art. In “Suspicious Self-Criticism,” the word “tableau” is almost always followed in parentheses by the word busshitsu (matter). As matter, the tableau cannot undertake self-criticism. The essay ends with the following assertion: “Politicians engage in self-criticism. That is because they can. The self-criticism of art—that declares the termination, the annihilation of art. The tableau, in other words, matter, does not engage in self-criticism” (Nakamura Reference Nakamura2003: 15). Although Nakamura and Hariu agree that the lack of subjectivity in the Japanese art world must be overcome, for Nakamura, self-criticism is not the answer. The answer lies in orienting oneself toward the materiality of the artwork.
Nakamura’s essays paired with the unrelenting grimness of Gunned Down call to mind the writings of Ara Masahito, one of the Kindai bungaku critics writing against Kurahara. As Koschmann writes, “Ara’s was perhaps the most powerful and evocative statement of… the theme of a sublime experience of negativity—death, pain, degradation—that leads to heightened subjective awareness and vitality” (Koschmann Reference Koschmann1996: 55). See for instance, a characteristic passage from Ara’s 1946 essay “Second Youth” (Daini no seishun) published in the second edition of Kindai bungaku: “Humans are egoistic, humans are ugly and repulsive, and everything that humans do converges in a meaningless nothing [kyomu]—let us be painfully aware of this. Everything begins from that.” (Ara Reference Ara1983: 30; Ara Reference Ara and Ueda2017a: 32). For Ara, the idealistic humanism he associates as much with the Narodniks of mid-nineteenth-century Russia as with his contemporaries in the Japanese Communist Party must pass through the nihilistic depths of egoism (egoizumu) to emerge as a mature, tempered humanism capable of contending with the poverty and devastation of Japan in the immediate postwar era. In a kind of Nietzschean reversal of values, egoism is raised to the level of a virtue, and implicit in this appraisal is a defense of the writer’s subjectivity against Kurahara’s insistence that writers should adopt the subjective standpoint of “the people” (minshū).
In his 1946 essay “Who Are the People?” (Minshū to wa dare ka), which serves as a sequel to Daini no seishun, Ara points out the difficulty of defining such a nebulous category as minshū as well as the hypocrisy he perceives in many progressives who profess a commitment to the masses yet simultaneously feel themselves to be intellectually superior to those masses. Once again, he argues that this hypocrisy is best cured with a healthy dose of egoism: “it is above all else the egoism of the petite bourgeoisie that can become an expression of sorrowful love for the people, and that is humanism in its greatest form” (Ara Reference Ara1983: 67; Ara Reference Ara and Ueda2017b: 62). Note that, while Ara is writing in opposition to Kurahara, he still feels himself to be defending the subjectivity of the “petite bourgeoisie,” a class category from Marxist theory that is pulled between identification with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie proper. As Tiampo notes, for Ara and the other Kindai bungaku writers, “the absence of the modern subject (or ‘ego’, to use Ara’s word) was thus held accountable for the mass psychology of Japan under militarism” (Tiampo Reference Tiampo, Ikeda and Mcdonald2013: 342). This perspective may help make sense of Ara’s incongruous mix of bourgeois snobbery with Marxist terminology, as Ara conceived of his writings on egoism as part of a project to mount a left-wing critique of fascism, even if the terms in which he articulates his critique may at times seem incompatible.
A fuller critical appraisal of Ara’s literary theory will be saved for the conclusion. Here, the persistence of the theme of subjectivity—first interrogated by the Kindai bungaku writers—in the mid-1950s essays of Nakamura and Hariu is worth noting. Similar to Ara in the immediate aftermath of World War II, both still believed that the lack of subjectivity had to be overcome through art in their own time. And regarding Nakamura’s painting, what is particularly relevant to Gunned Down is the place Ara reserves for an experience of “sublime negativity” in the creation of art. For Ara, the ultimate example comes from the life of Dostoevsky who, after being sentenced to death at the age of 28 years, was pardoned at the last minute and thus experienced in Ara’s words “the abyss of life.” The postwar situation in Japan is likened to just such an abyss, as Ara argues that “what we now know after the lesson of defeat is not the least bit inferior to the experience of that great nineteenth-century Russian author” (Kapur Reference Kapur2018: 176)Gunned Down is just such a depiction of the injustice, even horror, experienced by the populace of Japan in the shadow of the American occupation. In a sense, Nakamura did have to internalize a profound negativity—in this case, the cruelty of this cold-blooded murder—to paint such a shocking work. This emphasis on interiority and negativity would become central to his later paintings.
Omens of a Place and Anpo
The failure of the 1960 Anpo protests to block the ratification of the security treaty between the United States and Japan coincided with, in Nick Kapur’s words, “the emergence of a remarkable variety of new trends in literature, film, and the arts.” It also led to the collapse of the coalition of opposition parties, grassroots and student organizations, progressive intellectuals, and labor unions that made such a massive protest movement possible. The momentum of Anpo was in part the culmination of the anger over the presence of US military bases throughout the 1950s that Nakamura had depicted so vividly in Sunagawa No. 5 and Gunned Down, but it had failed. Artists, writers, and filmmakers were left with the task of working through that failure in their work, a process that in many cases led to radically new developments in their respective fields.Footnote 11 Our final painting, Omens of a Place (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1961; Figure 5), signals a shift in Nakamura’s work that reflects the disillusionment he felt over the failure of Anpo.
Omens of a Place by Nakamura Hiroshi (Reference Nakamura1961). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Hamamatsu Municipal Museum of Art.
Omens of a Place is divided between a stark landscape covered in pale foliage and an ominous black sky filled with imposing crimson clouds. In an interview with Linda Hoaglund, Nakamura states that “I doubt I would have made paintings with bright red clouds if I hadn’t lived through the firebombing,” and though the painting does not feature any human subjects, it still engages with political and societal concerns in the postwar era.
Take, for instance, the distinctive shape of the red cloud. Its curvature calls to mind the iconic wave of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Reference Katsushika1831; Figure 6), one of the most famous and instantly recognizable works of Japanese art ever produced (a side-by-side comparison of the works reveals that the shape and contour of Nakamura’s clouds is almost exactly the same as Hokusai’s wave). Thus, while Nakamura is engaging with his own memory of the horrors of the Allied invasion of Japan, he is also engaging with Japanese artistic and national history. This throughline from the ukiyo-e art genre to Nakamura’s surrealism calls into question how we construct narratives of art and culture, as well as what becomes of these narratives in the face of such horrific destruction. Although there is no record of Nakamura showing any specific interest in ukiyo-e—at least as far as the author of this article is aware—the startling correspondence between Hokusai’s wave and Nakamura’s cloud may at the very least point toward some kind of unconscious appropriation with Hokusai. Certainly, the dream-like atmosphere of Nakamura’s painting invites such an association.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai (Reference Katsushika1831). Wood-block print. Public domain.
Hoaglund (Reference Hoaglund2012) notes that we can also consider these clouds as representing the mushroom clouds of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, further deepening this reading of the painting as intimately concerned with the history of Japan. Thus, the image of the clouds is “overdetermined” in a Freudian sense, as one image stands in place for Hokusai’s Wave, the firebombings, and the atomic bomb. This deeply personal painting inspired by Nakamura’s own experiences during World War II becomes a powerful statement about the mediation between the human subject and the forces of history. Yet, as in Civil War Era, the painting with which we began our discussion, the conception of history depicted in Omens of a Place is certainly not of history as progress. If Hokusai’s Wave represented the destructive powers of nature indifferently tossing the fishermen in their little boats aside, and if the firebombings and the atomic bomb represent wartime atrocities, then what links all of these images together is surely the experience of catastrophe.
Here, for our final citation of the politics and literature debate, we will turn to Honda Shūgo’s essay in the inaugural issue of Kindai bungaku. Out of the Kindai bungaku critics, Honda’s is perhaps the most direct response to Kurahara’s directives, and he even quotes directly from “Atarashii bungaku e no shuppatsu.” Honda begins by writing that “art dies when there is no interest or joy welling within the artist’s interiority, [naibu] no passion springing from his innermost ‘self ’ [kojin]” (Honda Reference Honda and Ueda2017: 3; Honda Reference Honda and Ōoka2003: 348).Footnote 12 He cites Max Weber’s argument that the work of the natural sciences quickly becomes obsolete, while great works of art remain great for all time. He argues that it is the individuality of the artist that gives art this eternal appeal, and he criticizes Kurahara for attempting to apply scientific criteria of judgement to art. In response to Kurahara’s dictate that writers should “depict reality correctly,” Honda instead argues that “as I see it, the real in art arises in the very place where art, without passing through any intermediaries, makes direct contact with being [jitsuzai], the foundation, the essence, the origin of everything, from which history and philosophy must draw their vitality” (Honda Reference Honda and Ueda2017: 9; Honda Reference Honda and Ōoka2003: 355). Against Kurahara’s dictate that writers should “live and struggle with the people,” Honda instead argues that, “even petit bourgeois writers… can contribute something to our common humanity, but only when they depict what is intrinsically inevitable [naiteki hisshi] in their identities qua petit bourgeois writers” (Honda Reference Honda and Ueda2017: 10; Honda Reference Honda and Ōoka2003: 356).
Honda’s position is clear: The artist must above all preserve his individuality, particularly against political commitments that would require him to set that individuality aside to achieve a political goal. Omens of a Place is a deeply personal painting for Nakamura, and it is the only one of the paintings discussed here that is not based on a specific event, i.e., the Sunagawa protests or the murder of Sakai. Rather the surreal landscape merely evokes or suggests historical relevance to the firebombings, the atomic bombs, or Hokusai, and as such, it is here that the viewer comes the closest to experiencing the artist’s interiority—“the artist’s self,” in Honda’s words.
If Sunagawa No. 5 can be said to conform closest to the realism advocated for by Kurahara, and if Gunned Down is somewhere between the two, then Omens of the Place is the closest of the three paintings to the Kindai bungaku group’s theories. It is here that we find the artist developing on the canvas a reflection of his own interiority rather than any broader social class or movement.
Conclusions
Hopefully, the thesis of this article has become clear: our close readings of Nakamura’s paintings and essays selected from the exchange between Kurahara and Kindai bungaku allow us to trace the development of subjectivity in Nakamura’s works as it passes through the crucible of Japanese postwar history, and we have seen how a focus on the historical subjectivity of “the people” in his work gives way to an increasing concentration on the interiorities of the artist and viewer mediated through the artwork. Now, we will turn briefly to an evaluation of Kurahara and the Kindai bungaku writers’ theories before proceeding to a conclusion on the role of subjectivity in reading Nakamura’s work.
The central issues with Kurahara’s art theory are likely already obvious to the reader. Indeed, most of us today are uncomfortable with the idea of a political party issuing mandates about the proper form of literature, and a literature written strictly from “the objective viewpoint of the people” would necessarily be very limited in content, scope, and form. Within Japanese postwar literary criticism, Kurahara’s unwavering commitment to social justice is an important counterpoint to the individualism—bordering on solipsism—professed by Honda and Ara in these essays,Footnote 13 but the inflexibility of his directives to writers found therein points to one of the main weaknesses of Kurahara’s theoretical work, namely an insistence on “scientific” objectivity in art that most artists were completely unwilling to adhere to. The potentialities of literary realism have gone unconsidered by Western critics for a long time, but Kurahara does not make a strong case for them in the essays discussed here.
When it comes to Kindai bungaku, it should be noted that their critical essays—combining lyrical prose with generous references to Russian, Japanese, and German literatures as well as literary vignettes of an exhausted, disillusioned Japan in the immediate aftermath of the unconditional surrender—are a rich, poetic testament to an era of Japanese history in which everything fell apart and anything could be built in the ashes. However, in the midst of this engaging prose, the literary theory they put forward is relatively abstract and never culminates in any systematic method for understanding literary texts. Ara is well known for his advocacy of egoism in the construction of a better humanism, but neither of these terms are ever properly defined. At one point, Ara calls the Biblical prophet Moses “the eminent humanist of ancient times” (Ara Reference Ara and Ueda2017b: 34), and one cannot help but feel that, by stretching humanism over such stretches of space and time, it starts to lose any concrete meaning. Similarly, Honda’s Heideggerian insistence that literature be grounded in Being is also rather abstract and difficult to imagine as a convincing basis for a theory of literature. Perhaps what is most unsatisfactory about both Ara’s egoism and Honda’s Being is that they place the site at which meaning is constructed outside of the literary text. It seems that, in attempting to counter Kurahara’s dictum that artists write from the perspective of the people, Ara and Honda went too far in the other direction in emphasizing the role of the individuality of the author in the construction of a literary text. Both writers seem to argue that this retreat into the self and development of the ego would ultimately result in better politics, but neither stopped to consider the possibility that the subject may decide to never return back to the world from that solipsism, rendering political engagement impossible.
There is still considerable research to be done regarding the continuities between the politics and literature debate and postwar art criticism (and, by extension, postwar art). For instance, Kurahara Korehito, Honda Shūgo, and Hariu Ichirō were all members of Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai in the 1950s, and thus it is highly likely that Kurahara and Honda influenced the work of the younger members and that those members consciously took up some of the issues in the politics and literature debate in their own ronsō. Hariu’s concern with subjectivity in “William Tell’s Apple” seems to pay testament to this fact. However, the exact nature of this influence is impossible to pin down without further research. If this hypothesis is correct, then the fact that Nakamura Hiroshi wrote his first critical essay in response to Hariu suggests that the legacy of the politics and literature debate—particularly their concern with subjectivity—had at the very least an indirect influence on Nakamura’s art in the sense that that debate first articulated the themes that many left-wing Japanese artists and critics would be concerned with until the shock of the failed Anpo protests in 1960 shifted the zeitgeist toward new and different concerns.
At this point, the historical gap between the politics and literature debates and Nakamura’s paintings should be emphasized: In 1946, the American occupiers were welcomed by many on the Left as a liberation army, and the critics of this time really believed that there would be sweeping democratic reforms. As early as 1947, however, between the Allies’ Reverse Course policy and the conservativism of the Yoshida cabinet, it was clear that this would not be the case. In the immediate postwar era, the country was in flux, and it was really possible to imagine that a grand societal upheaval could take place. Nakamura was painting in the aftermath of that early postwar optimism, when the unwelcome presence of US military bases and the dominance of conservative politics had made it clear that the country was not headed in the direction of a democratic revolution.
What we find in these paintings, then, is the inner working of subjectivity posed against the various upheavals of Japan’s postwar era as the country shifted from fascism to America’s stalwart ally in the Cold War, and from a war-torn “semi-feudal” nation to a modern consumerist society. Nakamura’s work—at times stark and grotesque while at others eerie and beguiling—is a site at which the artist and the viewer both negotiate their subjectivity through engagement with the artwork. As actual artistic artifacts from Japan’s postwar era, it is in these paintings that we find what becomes of issues central to the debates between Kurahara and Kindai bungaku—such as political commitment and the role of the artist’s self in the meaning of the artwork—when these issues are plunged into the storm of history and mediated through the work of an artist who attempted, and then perhaps refused, to create art that could meet the challenges of his historical moment. Such work reminds us of the interstices between art, politics, and history, as well as the difficulty of creating a theory of artistic work that addresses these multifarious complexities.
However, while Nakamura’s works in the 1960s such as Crashlanding (1963), Circular Train A: Telescope Train (1968), or Problems of Art and Nation as They Relate to Schoolgirls (1967), with their surreal imagery and lush colors, are deeply evocative canvases, one cannot help but feel disappointed by their complete retreat from political concerns into a focus on the dark interiority of the Japanese individual (as well as Nakamura’s occasional sexualization of high school girls). At the end of his chapter on Reportage painters, Justin Jesty writes:
As the social movement fell away the structures of violence that were taken to be lurking on the inside began to lose any worldly attachment beyond their channeling into the biomechanical machinery of the national consumer economy. With this, war came to be on the inside, and the only way to address it was by purge or parody, which became endless repetitions of their own. (Jesty Reference Jesty2018: 126)
If for the Kindai bungaku writers a focus on individualism was seen as the antidote to the feudalistic fascism of interwar Japan, the problem was that it was completely compatible with, and even actively reinforced, the system that would come to characterize postwar Japanese society: consumer capitalism. As the traditional social bonds that tied the Japanese people together were swept away by Japan’s rapid postwar modernization, the individualism that came with it brought the isolation and despair depicted in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not an enlightened bourgeois sensibility for “Being.” Anti-capitalist critique of modern society’s “dark side” such as those found in Nakamura’s work in the 1960s can be easily reintegrated into the very system it is supposed to oppose. Perhaps the task of our time is to find a way to answer the Kurahara’s challenge, though not exactly on his own terms: to articulate a positive art that can rally collectives while preserving free expression.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rachel DiNitto at the University of Oregon and Tristan Grunow at Nagoya University for their help in preparing the manuscript. I would also like to thank all the museums that kindly allowed me to use artwork in their collections and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Financial Support
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Competing interests
Sophia Lewis declares no conflicts of interest.
Author Biography
Sophia Lewis is a research student in the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University. Her proposed dissertation will explore the global emergence of the novel form through Meiji-era Japanese writers’ encounters with Russian literature. Her research interests also include literary theory, political economy, and German idealism.
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