Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, mingei scholarship has been accumulating cross-cultural and transnational knowledge driven by a young generation of scholars in Japan and abroad in different disciplines including sociology, anthropology and art/design history. Though methodologies differ, they question the long-existing notion of mingei as representing the ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ of Japanese culture.1 It is therefore surprising to find, at the outset of her book, Brandt claims that ‘[t]here has been relatively little attention to the mingei endeavour as a larger, collective enterprise. Those relatively few studies that have ventured to treat mingei as a larger movement or project have tended to focus primarily on its contributions to the history of Japanese art’ (p. 6). Moreover, her study has clearly been enriched by the postcolonial interest exhibited by the recent mingei scholarship on cultural nationalism, imperialism and modernity with which the mingei movement successfully negotiated during the course of its development. Brandt's study therefore largely overlaps with the works of the scholars noted above to an extent that has not been acknowledged in the detail of her text. For example, Brandt discusses Japanese discourse on folk art as ‘Oriental orientalism’ (p. 3) and later on ‘Orientalism for the Orientals’ (p. 27), introducing her discussions as if there had been no other study in the topic, yet Moeran (1984) ignited the discussions on this perspective, they were developed by de Waal (1997) and Takenaka (1999) and became a central argument in Kikuchi (2004). Brandt's failure to locate her work within the current mingei scholarship results in a missed opportunity to engage with other scholarship.

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