Utagawa Kuniyoshi works in New York

Early 19th-Century Japan was a society on the verge of momentous change. The Tokugawa Shogunate had ruled it since 1603 as perhaps the most isolated major society on earth. Trade and contact with the outside world were strictly regulated, with a warrior elite, the Samurai, maintaining a traditional feudal ethos and an intimidating presence in towns and cities.

So determined were the Tokugawa to preserve a medieval order that they successfully banned firearms, which had been widely used in Japan's lawless 16th Century. Any reckless civilian could fire a gun, but no one could expertly wield a sword without years of training and discipline, and the Samurai alone were permitted to possess one.

The world couldn't be kept at bay indefinitely, however, and the West, having conquered India, was now battering at the gates of China. Japan, too, was in its sights. Swordsmen would prove no match for Commodore Perry's cannon.

At the same time, an increasingly sophisticated urban population chafed at— and sometimes laughed at— the Tokugawa's restrictions. Between internal and external pressure, the shogunate was more and more vulnerable to that sharpest of all swords, satire and ridicule. Like all beleaguered regimes, it resorted to a vacillating censorship, at once heavy-handed and inconsistent, that only invited clever challenge.

Tokyo's pleasure quarters

It was at this juncture that the four great artists who chronicled the pleasure quarters of Tokyo's so-called "floating world" (ukiyo-e) emerged. Two of them, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), are well known in the West, the former especially for his much-celebrated views of Mt. Fuji. Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864) was no less esteemed by the Japanese public of his time, particularly for his portrayal of Kabuki actors, a favorite ukiyo-e genre.

Equally skilled and productive but even more extravagantly imaginative was Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), certainly one of the 19th Century's most brilliant artists anywhere in the world. He is the subject of a current exhibition at New York's Japan Society, largely culled from the collection of Arthur R. Miller.

Like his fellow ukiyo-e artists, Kuniyoshi worked in woodblock prints, a form that required highly skilled collaborators and could sell in editions of many thousands. This was art aimed at a cosmopolitan public that commanded a wide range of cultural and historical allusion, and could skillfully decipher references to personalities and events whose direct depiction was forbidden by government censors.

Those vigilant censors

There was little, indeed, that the censors didn't find reason to curb or prohibit at one time or another. Geishas and Kabuki actors were objectionable not only on moral grounds, but because they represented artifice and hence concealed (or duplicitous) meaning.

References of any kind to the Tokugawa's predecessor, the feudal magnate Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), were strictly forbidden. What the censors did want, they said, was work that would promote "loyalty," "fidelity" and "virtue."

Censorship can be effective in the short run. It's always ineffective in the long run, because, as Freud noted in another context, the repressed will always return, and often doubled in strength. Put another way, as Timothy Clark does in his illuminating catalogue discussion of Kuniyoshi's work, censorship acted in fact "as a catalyst of radical change."

Samurai suicide

Kuniyoshi would be in the forefront of that change. A fine example of how he turned censorship to critical ends appears in his Biographies of Loyal and Righteous Samurai (1847), a depiction of the mass suicide of 47 loyal retainers of the Ako fief, who killed themselves in 1703 rather than face perceived dishonor.

This well-known episode was a classic embodiment of the Samurai ethos— everything one could ask, indeed, of loyalty, fidelity and virtue— but in the context of the increasingly enfeebled shogunate, it could just as well be interpreted as a stinging reproach to the regime, if it didn't demand to be read so. The proscribed Hideyoshi, too, figures in many of Kuniyoshi's prints, his exploits clearly alluded to in representations of various battles and hunting scenes.

History, legend, and mythology are in fact often bound up in Kuniyoshi, making him a particularly elusive target for the censor. His world is one of ghosts, goblins, demons and animal monsters— an unstable, spectral field of play whose heroes face terrors as much psychological, not to say psychopathic, as anything else.

Death incarnate

Perhaps the most grotesque print in this genre is Mitsukumi Defies a Skeleton Specter, in which a giant, clawed skeleton, jaws agape, looms over the hero: death incarnate, an image at once comically over the top and genuinely hair-raising. In another, a demonic figure wears the face of a rat while, behind him, an army of giant rats, their eyes blank black saucers, prepares to surge forward.

Other prints feature gigantic animal and aquatic forms of every sort, some species-specific (a carp, a cat, a tiger), and some composite, like the crocodile-shark that menaces a boat hardly half its size on a sea it has thrashed to a furious, roiling blue. In some prints, a hero does battle with these monsters, or meets them with a menacing glare of his own; in others, human victims face rout or destruction.

These lurid apparitions have multiple significations, but their common theme is a disorder that threatens to overwhelm the community. In an unsettled time such as Kuniyoshi's, the political implications of such imagery were obvious, and in one print— The Earth Spider Conjures up Demons at the Mansion of Minamoto-Raiko— the cringing figure under siege was widely taken for the ineffectual shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi. Since, however, all such depictions were stereotypic, it was impossible to accuse Kuniyoshi of lèse-majesté.

Forerunner of comic strips

The ukiyo-e style was well developed— one might even say traditional— by the time Kuniyoshi practiced it. Even in its earliest days it had its antecedents in Chinese scroll painting, for all the novelty of its demimondaine subject matter.

At the same time, it looked forward, particularly in Kuniyoshi, to a quite startling modernity. With his heroes and monsters in stylized yet intensely dramatic combat, Kuniyoshi anticipates the comic strip and, on a more painterly level, the flattened, dynamically charged surfaces of much 20th-Century art.

At the same time, he reflects a Western influence already beginning to make its presence felt in late Tokugawa art, an influence that would be refracted back to its origin with the vogue for Japanese prints in late 19th-Century European painting. As Kuniyoshi stood at the tipping-point of Japanese social and political history— the Meiji Restoration that inaugurated Japan's modern history would occur only seven years after his death— so too he stood at a critical juncture in the development of artistic modernism, and his work represents as perhaps no other the cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western art. If the globalization of culture itself is regarded as the touchstone of modernity, his stature and significance is sure to grow.

Antic humor, too

I don't mean, however, to make a monument of Kuniyoshi. The first and last thing to say about his art is how sheerly enjoyable it is. His endlessly fertile imagination, antic humor, and shrewd social observation— think Daumier with a dash of Alfred Kubin— is balanced by a remarkable tenderness, especially in the depiction of female subjects.

Arthur Miller, himself a man of extraordinary parts— eminent legal scholar and attorney, and Emmy award-winning TV personality—displays here the best of a peerless collection. This show is tops in every respect. Treat yourself to it.♦


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