The Art of Persistence : Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan / Charlotte Eubanks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eubanks, Ellen (Charlotte Ellen), Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Maruki, Toshi, 1912-2000.

Maruki, Toshi.

Painters--Japan--Biography.

Painters.

Art--Political aspects--Japan--History--20th century.

Art.

Art and social action--Japan--History--20th century.

Art and social action.

Atomic bomb in art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 314 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The Art of Persistence examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912-2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu's lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, pesistence signals a commitment to not disappearing-a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter in Japan. She later worked as a governess in the home of a Moscow diplomat and traveled to the Japanese Mandate in Micronesia before returning home to write and illustrate children's books set in the Pacific. She married the surrealist poet and painter Maruki Iri (1901-1995), and together in 1948-and in defiance of Occupation censorship-they began creating and exhibiting the Nuclear Series, some of the most influential and powerful artwork depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. For the next forty or more years, the couple toured the world to protest war and nuclear proliferation and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.With abundant excerpts and drawings from Akamatsu's journals and sketchbooks, The Art of Persistence offers a bridge between scholarship on imperial Japan and postwar memory cultures, arguing for the importance of each individual's historical agency. While uncovering the longue durée of Japan's visual cultures of war, it charts the development of the national(ist) "literature for little citizens" movement and Japan's postwar reorientation toward global multiculturalism. Finally, the work proposes ways to enlist artwork generally, and the museum specifically, as a site of ethical engagement.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Conventions

Introduction: Akamatsu Toshiko, Microhistory, and the Art of Persistence in Transwar Japan

1. From "Northern Gate" to "Southern Advance": Envisioning the North-South Expansion of Colonial Japan

2. Creating "Culture for Little Countrymen": The Total Mobilization of Toshi's Micronesian Experience

3. Red Shift: Pre-1945 Visual Culture, Heterochronicity, and Proletarian Eastern Time

4. Bare Naked Aesthetics: Postwar Arts and Toshi's Populist Manifesto

5. Art as War Crime: Artistic Wartime Responsibility and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

6. Art as Direct Action: Hiroshima and the Nuclear Panels

Afterword: Double Time and the Art of Seeing through Empire

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-302) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780824882310

0824882318

9780824882303

082488230X

OCLC:

1138546693