gender play in modern japanese painting 265

FROM MADONNA TO FEMME FATALE:

GENDER PLAY IN JAPANESE
NATIONAL PAINTING

Doris Croissant

A major concern of Meiji cultural reforms was the restructuring of

visual arts into a tool for national image building. After enthusiastic
attempts at importing Western art education, the success of Japanese
export-ware on the world market stimulated a reverse course of
native art promotion. As a remedy for the threat of Westernization,
the conception of New Japanese Painting (Shin-Nihonga) evolved dur-
ing the 1880s under the guidance of the American philosopher Ernest
F. Fenollosa (1858-1908), and was made into an academic discipline
by his disciple, Okakura KakuzÙ (1863-1913), director of the Tokyo
Art Academy between 1889 and 1898.1 While Fenollosa prophesized
that—contrary to the hopes of supporters of Western-style painting
(yÙga)—only the synthesis of Asian and Western painting would push
Japan to the forefront of world art, Okakura elaborated the princi-
ples that burdened Nihonga artists with the task of re-investing con-
ventional techniques and motifs with the spirit of the times.
One of the most pressing tasks for national representation con-
sisted in the severance of the female image from the “floating world”
of Edo popular culture. The long-standing affiliation of female beauty
with the courtesan—celebrated into the 1890s as the epitome of
refined sensuality, everyday elegance, and erotic charm—contrasted
sharply with the ideal Meiji woman who was supposed to embody
the womanly and motherly virtues thought essential to the “good
wife and wise mother” (ryÙsai kenbo) doctrine.2 In the early Meiji era,

1
Ellen P. Conant, ed., Nihonga. Transcending the Past: Japanese-Style Painting, 1868-
1968 (St. Louis: The St. Louis Art Museum 1995); Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting
and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and his Circle, (Ann Arbor: The Center for Japa-
nese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2004).
2
Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy Toward
Women, 1890-1945,” in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-
1945 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1991), pp. 151-174
266 doris croissant

the quest for historic exemplars of respectable women that could

serve as symbols of nationhood posed serious problems.3 Yet, around
the turn of the century, the ukiyo-e courtesan, who was celebrated as
the epitome of feminine erotic charm by the last ukiyo-e masters such
as Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), was giving way to the visual cliché
of the sexually passive housewife and daughter.4 All sorts of print
media, such as newspapers, magazines, posters, ads, and postcards,
commoditized the stereotype of the domestic middle-class bijin
(“beauty”), fashionably dressed in traditional kimono, but replete
with romantic sensitivity and sentimental pathos, no matter whether
represented with naturalistic detail, or modeled on the decorative
style of art nouveau.5 When the Nihonga-yÙga divide became institu-
tionalized in the governmental Bunten salon, initiated in 1907, ”pic-
tures of beautiful women” (bijinga) established itself as the generic
antithesis to yÙga nudes, which were displayed in a special room
(tokubetsu-shitsu) and accessible only to a privileged male elite of intel-
lectuals and connoisseurs who were supposed to be capable of dis-
criminating between voyeuristic pleasure and sexually disengaged
aesthetic judgment.6 As a result, the controversy over the difference
between Japanese and Western standards of artistic judgment
amounted to a war for and against the gendering of the male gaze.
As Donald Roden has noted, gender ambivalence pervaded TaishÙ
popular and high art, producing such examples as the all-female
Takarazuka theater (founded in 1913), and more refined versions in

3
See the chapter by Melanie Trede in this volume.
4
See John Stevenson, Yoshitoshi’s Women. The Wooblock-print Series Fåzoku SanjånisÙ
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, revised edition, 1995), p. 6.
5
For an overview of bijinga, see Hamanaka Shinji, “Bijinga no tanjÙ, soshite
gen’ei” [The birth and origin of bijinga], in Yamatane Bijutsukan, ed., The birth of
Bijinga (Bijinga no tanjÙ) (Tokyo: Yamatane Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 6-19 and p. 63;
Helen Merritt, Nanako Yamada, eds., Woodblock Kuchi-e Prints: Reflections of Meiji Cul-
ture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), pp. 125-132.
6
Tsuruta Migiwa, “Bunten to bijinga” [Bunten and bijinga], in Yamatane Bijut-
sukan, ed., The Birth of Bijinga, pp. 160-168; see also Asahi Shinbun-sha ed., Kindai
Nihon gaka ga egaita rekishi to roman no josei-bi ten [Feminine beauty in history and ro-
mances as painted by modern Nihonga artists] (1989); and Nakamura Giichi, “Bijutsu
ni okeru sei to kenryoku—ratai-ga ronsÙ” [Power and sexuality in art—the dispute
on nude painting], in Nakamura Giichi, Nihon kindai bijutsu ronsÙ-shi [The history of
the dispute surrounding modern Japanese art] (Tokyo: KyåryådÙ Library, 1981),
pp. 57-93. See also the essay by Jaqueline Berndt in this volume.