Chats on Japanese Prints. Arthur Davison Ficke
Dynasty; so that during the whole period of print production Japan was a land of gorgeous feudal splendour, regulated by inflexible rules of conduct and manners that amounted almost to caste regulations.
That subtle interpreter of the ideals of the East, the late Kakuzo Okakura, thus analyses the state of society at that time: "The Tokugawas," he writes, "in their eagerness for consolidation and discipline, crushed out the vital spark from art and life.... In their prime of power, the whole of society—and art was not exempt—was cast in a single mould. The spirit which secluded Japan from all foreign intercourse, and regulated every daily routine, from that of the daimyo to that of the lowest peasant, narrowed and cramped artistic creativeness also. The Kano academies of painting—filled with the disciplinary instincts of Iyeyasu—of which four were under the direct patronage of the Shogun and sixteen under the Tokugawa Government, were constituted on the plan of regular feudal tenures. Each academy had its hereditary lord, who followed his profession, and, whether or not he was an indifferent artist, had under him students who flocked from various parts of the country, and who were, in their turn, official painters to different daimyos in the provinces. After graduating at Yedo (Tokyo), it was de rigueur for these students, returning to the country, to conduct their work there on the methods, and according to the models given them during their instruction. The students who were not vassals of daimyos were, in a sense, hereditary fiefs of the Kano lords. Each had to pursue the course of studies laid down by Tannyu and Tsunenobu, and each painted and drew certain subjects in a certain manner. From this routine, departure meant ostracism, which would reduce the artist to the position of a common craftsman."
Yet it would convey a wrong impression of the Tokugawa period to suggest that bureaucratic tightness of regime was its sole or most vital characteristic. The age was marked as strongly by its expansive powers as by the restraints that attempted to direct them. For in this epoch, the common people, set apart in a class distinct from the warriors and aristocracy, rose to a vigour and cultivation that was almost a new thing in Japanese history. "It was," writes Fenollosa, "like the rise of the industrial classes in the free cities of Europe in those middle centuries when the old feudal system was breaking up. There, too, could be seen armoured lords of castles flourishing side by side with burghers and guilders. It is the same duality which forms the keynote of Tokugawa culture taken as a whole.... The keynote of Tokugawa life and art is their broad division into two main streams—the aristocratic and the plebeian. These two flowed on side by side with comparatively little intermingling. On the one side select companies of gentlemen and ladies congregated in gorgeous castles and yashikis, daimyos and samurai, exercising, studying their own and China's past, weaving martial codes of honour, surrounding themselves with wonderful utensils of lacquer, porcelain, embroidery, and cunningly wrought bronze; and on the other side great cities like Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Yedo, swarming with manufacturers, artizans, and merchants, sharing little in the castle privileges, but devising for themselves methods of self-expression in local government, schools, science, literature, and art."
Examining into the history of Japanese colour-prints, one must leave entirely aside the interesting and sometimes sublime art of the cultivated and aristocratic classes and their tradition-hallowed schools of painting. The prints were solely the product of the popular school; they were in a way allied to those delicate Japanese handicrafts, such as bronze and lacquer, which are characteristically the output of the common people.
The Tokugawa regime was one of national peace. The country, long disturbed by both internal and external wars, settled down at last under the strong Tokugawa banner to two centuries and a half of tranquillity. The vital activity of this time was not diffused and scattered over the whole country, but was chiefly centred upon one spot, the ancient "Capital of the East," Yedo, now called Tokyo. Here, under the dominance of the great Iyeyasu, the life of the empire was brought to a focus. Iyeyasu forced all the great nobles, living customarily on their estates scattered throughout the empire, to come to Yedo and remain there in residence for at least half of each year, in order that he might keep his hand upon them and prevent them from springing up to rival power. The natural effect of this regulation was to give Yedo a supreme importance in the realm, and to cultivate in Yedo the growth of every form of popular activity. There, in the metropolitan centre, all the agencies of pleasure burst into luxurious bloom; the tea-houses, the theatres, the riverside gardens, and the Yoshiwara or courtesans' quarter, all took on a new and alluring splendour; and Yedo became the great city and the great art centre of Japan.
At this time, aristocratic art, in the hands of the later generations of the Kano School of painters, was not only largely inaccessible to the common people, but was also no longer in its prime. The giants of the Kano School were long since dead. In the place of their vigorous inspiration only superficiality and formalism remained. Long since dead was that lofty idealistic art, best known to us in the work of Sesshu, which had distinguished the preceding Ashikaga Period—an art which, to quote Mr. Laurence Binyon, "deals little in human figures and has no concern with the physical beauty of men and women, contenting itself mainly with the contemplation of wide prospects over lake and mountain, mist and torrent, or a spray of sensitive blossoms trembling in the air." Yet even though the earlier greatness of the aristocratic schools of painting was passing or had passed in this seventeenth and eighteenth century epoch, still the authority derived by the Kano painters from their connection with the court of the Shogun gave them dictatorship over matters of art; and their academy imposed its technique upon all aspirants for the favour of the aristocracy. The rival school of the Tosas, associated closely with the court of the Emperor in Kyoto, was no less careful of tradition and discipline. Thus the moribund art of the upper classes stood alone like a little island, shut out from the art of the people, unable to influence it or to be influenced by it.
Therefore Japan, at the time when the popular school came into existence, was in a curious state: subject to a strict disciplinary system that kept the common people and the aristocracy apart; enjoying a period of peace and a centralization of resources that gave the common people in their isolation a favourable opportunity to develop a culture of their own; and suffering from a growing degeneracy in the classical schools of painting that might be counted on to drive at least an occasional aristocratic artist out into the ranks of the people were any interesting opportunity offered there.
At this juncture, early in the seventeenth century, there arose in Yedo a new movement which later was to produce the colour-print.
This new movement was called the Ukioye School. The real gap between it and the older classical schools has been by many writers grossly exaggerated. One might well gather from them that the Ukioye artists were the first in all Japanese art to draw subjects selected from real life and to paint with vivid humanism. This is by no means the fact. All the subjects treated by the Ukioye painters had been at some time used by the painters of the older schools; and certainly the usual subject of the Kano or Tosa painter was as real and vivid to him as were any of the themes of the popular artists to these creators. Each painted his customary environment—what was closest to his experience and dearest to his æsthetic perceptions: on the one hand, traditionary and religious figures, scenes from poetry, reflections of Chinese or old Japanese art; and on the other hand, the pulsing life of Yedo streets, the tea-gardens of the Sumida River, the theatres, and the brilliant houses of pleasure. Yet having suggested that the gap between the two was not immeasurable, we may grant that it was nevertheless real. Ukioye concerned itself with contemporary plebeian life, its shows and festivals and favourites of the hour, to an extent alien to the more restrained and almost monastic tradition of the older art. Ukioye means "Passing-world Picture"; there is implied in the word a reproach and an accusation of triviality. It suggests values not recognized by that orthodox Buddhistic attitude of contemplation which regards life as a show of shadows, a region of temporal desire and illusion and misery, a vigil to be endured only by keeping fixedly before the vision pictures of the desireless calm of Nirvana. But no such profound philosophy of despair and abnegation as this could find real root in the hearts of a lively populace like that of Japan; in that nation, the lonely minds of sequestered aristocrats alone could give it more than nominal habitation. The Ukioye School, since it was a popular school, remained as unshadowed by Buddhism as modern French poster-art is by Christianity; and the distance between the spiritual attitudes of Giotto and Aubrey Beardsley is no greater than that between the attitudes of Kanaoka and Utamaro. All that aureole of moral idealism