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KANAE

YAMAMOTO

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE CREATIVE-PRINT movement, one figure, Kanae Yamamoto (1882-1946), looms above all the others. He produced not only Japan's first creative prints, but prints whose stature gave the whole movement a solid foundation, and even today look fresh and vital. They have none of the quaintness or mustiness that so often marks pioneer work, and on exhibition they can stand without protestation of historical importance.

Yamamoto's story properly starts with his grandfather, an attendant to the last of the Tokugawa shoguns, that long line of dictators who ruled Japan from 1603 to 1867 and effectively sealed the country against foreign intercourse for most of that period. It was a regime already weakened by dry rot when Commodore Perry's bold challenge shook it, and within a few years the powerful southwestern clans, rallying under the name of the emperor, toppled it and set up a new government.

Since Yamamoto's grandfather fought on the side of the Tokugawas when they went down to final defeat, he thereafter found himself on the outside looking in, and with the country in the hands of a new and revolutionary regime he found it difficult to support his family and raise his three sons. Financial difficulty was probably one of the reasons why Kanae's father, one of those three sons, was adopted into the Yamamoto family to assume their name and marry their daughter, although this is a common enough arrangement in Japan. The Yamamotos were a long line of doctors and their new son set out to follow the family profession. He went to Shinshu (now Nagano Prefecture), in the mountainous area of central Japan, to learn medicine as an assistant to Dr. Ogai Mori, a physician who attained fame as an author.

While Kanae was a baby his mother lived with her parents in Okazaki but when he was five she moved to Tokyo to be a little closer to Shinshu. The boy was still young when his father thed and his mother had to turn to housework to drudge out a living. Kanae went through elementary school but that was all the thin family-purse would allow, and at eleven, perhaps by chance, but if so very lucky chance, he was apprenticed to an illustrator and wood engraver. So he learned, not the technique of Japanese ukiyoe, but that of Western wood engraving. The two are diametrically opposed, not only with regard to the block (cut along the grain for ukiyoe and across the grain for wood engraving, as already explained), but also in the carving. In ukiyoe the method is by black lines on white paper, achieved by cutting away the block on both sides of the line, leaving the line to print. But in wood engraving the artist works with white lines against an area of black ink, and the method is to carve out the line itself so that it will show white against the surrounding black.

The resulting blocks are amazingly disparate in yet another way: an ukiyoe block, properly carved and cared for, is good for about one thousand clean impressions, in five hand-printings of two hundred each, with time between to let the blocks dry out; but the little wood-engraving block, with its fine lines delicately engraved on the end of the grain, can be put in a printing press for two hundred thousand impressions, easily outlasting a photoengraved copper plate. Photoengraving had other advantages which were soon to make it supreme, but when Yamamoto was a boy there was still a great market for the skill of the wood engraver, as one can see by a glance at the copiously illustrated books and magazines of that day. He was an apt pupil, and by the time he had finished his apprenticeship and the obligatory year which followed, he was able to get a good job.

He went to work as a wood engraver and illustrator for the forerunner of the present Yomiuri newspapers, and then at twenty-one, not wanting to remain a technician all his life, he entered the government art academy at Ueno in Tokyo. While going through art school he continued to support himself by his wood engraving. He graduated in 1906, a promising young artist.

Concerning this period, the reminiscences of Tsuruzo Ishii (born 1887) make delightful listening. A man of amazing versatility, Ishii is an oil painter, Japanese water-colorist, sculptor in both wood and clay, and a creative-print artist who made his mark so firmly in the early days that today he is by acclamation president of the Hanga Association. His older brother, Hakutei Ishii (born 1882), is also a distinguished artist and a major figure in the beginnings of the creative print.

"Yamamoto was already in his fourth year when I entered the academy at Ueno," says Ishii, "but he lived at our house as one of the family, and few were ever as close to him as Hakutei and I. He was the first to combine great talent in both oil painting and wood engraving, and he was the first to make a creative print in Japan.

"There had been creative hanga before, not woodprints but etchings and lithographs. You can trace creative etchings back even before Meiji. The lithographic process came to Japan during early Meiji and a few men, my father among them, did some creative work with it. I don't mean that they were conscious of starting a movement, but they did create a feeling, an atmosphere, and into this atmosphere came Kanae Yamamoto.

"Kanae made his first creative print in 1904. He had gone on a sketching trip to Choshi in Chiba and when he came back he made the print from a sketch of a fisherman in the costume they put on to celebrate a big catch. He carved with the technique of wood engraving but he used a Japanese-style block, cut with the grain. It wasn't a big print, maybe four by six inches. It was in two colors, and for his two blocks he carved both sides of the same board. I'm sure I have that block somewhere in the house. It would be interesting to run another print from it—but on second thought I don't think I'd want to. Wherever he is, Heaven or elsewhere, Kanae would probably raise violent objections." (The print is reproduced as print 3.)

"Hakutei published this print in the magazine Myojo, where he was an editor, labeling it a toga, a knife picture. It wasn't until several years later that they invented the word hanga."

Ishii's remark brings to mind one of Koshiro Onchi's stories which illustrates both the difficulties of the early days and the complexities of the language. The word hanga has the same pronunciation as an expression meaning "half picture." In 1915, after the word had been invented, a small group called the Tokyo Hanga Club held an exhibition. Every exhibition of that period had to be passed by a police board of censorship, and one of the prints appeared to the inspector to be unfinished. This suspicion was confirmed in his mind when he recalled that it had been called a hanga, which he interpreted to mean half picture. Holding that it was improper to exhibit unfinished work, he ordered the print down and, still unsatisfied, went to the artist's home and confiscated the block.

Yamamoto's early enthusiasm was contagious, and Hakutei Ishii found himself becoming nostalgic for the glories of ukiyoe. Remarking that "we cannot bear to stand by and see this death of an art which was once the pride of Japan," he published a series of prints called Twelve Views of Tokyo. In good ukiyoe tradition, these turned out to be pictures of beautiful women from different sections of the city. Also in ukiyoe tradition, Hakutei, who lacked Yamamoto's training as a wood engraver, turned to artisans for help, but the day of the creative print had come, and Hakutei Ishii was one of the first to recognize it.

By the time Yamamoto graduated from Ueno, he was deeply excited about creative woodprints and was the driving force behind the whole movement. It was he who gave the early prints their distinctive look when he pioneered the use of the curved-blade chisel, which was the mark of creative hanga for many years. To ukiyoe artisans this chisel, with a blade shaped something like a flour scoop, was only a tool to clean up the block, but in Yamamoto's hands it became a major instrument of virtuosity, as demonstrated by On the Deck (print 1). There is a striking development from Fisherman (print 3) to On the Deck. Fisherman was carved as a wood engraver would carve, in the Western style, cutting out white lines against the black background. In On the Deck he pushed this concept much further, carving out the white to create not lines, but planes, shadows, and mass.

In 1907, Yamamoto, Hakutei Ishii, and a few others started the magazine Hosun, and for the four years of its life they filled its pages with their own creative hanga and comment. This slim magazine, whose title meant "a little thing," is the first great landmark of the creative-print movement, and with the group Pan, of which it was the unofficial voice, forms a fascinating chapter in the history of Japanese art in the early years of the century.

Pan achieved notoriety as a boisterous, uninhibited, sake-loving crowd of artists, but behind the rowdyism it was to the artists a serious effort to assimilate the new modernism of the West without sacrificing their Japanese nature. Devoted to ukiyoe and to the spirit which produced it, they chose a meeting place in what had been the heart of old Edo (the former name for Tokyo), close by the Sumida River, and here they came to grips with the issue which still plagues Japanese art. If they failed to gain a final solution to their problem, they at least recognized it, faced up to it, and more often than not gained temporary victory by drinking it under the table.

It probably goes without saying that they invited the attention of the police, who were only too inclined to see a socialist under every beret. The irreverence of their caricatures in Hosun (Yamamoto, who admired Hokusai, was not backward in this department) was a constant incitement to the official mind, but their greatest fame was achieved when, in the course of a party called to condole a couple of members on their imminent induction into the army, they draped the pictures of the new privates with black to signify their demise, a piece of blasphemy which was promptly splashed on the front pages by an offended newspaperman. The police and the military were furious, but the public thought it very funny.

In the years after his graduation, Yamamoto devoted himself almost entirely to creative hanga, and then in 1912, amid speculation that he was running away to heal a broken heart, he went to Paris. He stayed in Europe until late 1916 and artistically these years were among the most productive of his life. He sent back prints to repay those who had helped finance his journey and he supported himself by his prints and oils and his old skill at illustration by wood engraving. Many of his finest prints were made in Paris from 1912 to 1914, among them On the Deck (print 1), A Small Bay in Brittany (print 2), and Yanchin, a picture of three Chinese courtesans. He had another burst of activity just after he returned to Japan, including Woman of Brittany (print 5) and the Moscow prints (prints 6 and 7), the latter inspired by his homeward journey through Russia. That was a fateful journey for Yamamoto because he saw in Russia some schools for peasants which excited him about the possibilities of adult education for farmers. He lingered there, fascinated by those schools.

Back in Japan, he plunged again into the growing creative-print movement. He was the central figure in organizing the hanga artists into the association which still exists, and in preparing the association's first show, held during January 1919 at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi. It was a good beginning, a big and successful exhibit of the work of twenty-five artists, including two Englishmen then resident in Japan, Bernard Leach and W. Westley Manning.

And then in 1919 Yamamoto embarked on another crusade. He could not get over his dream of a school for farm people. He went to Shinshu, to the village of Oya where his father had practiced medicine. In that country, high in the central mountains, the long cold winters brought dullness and apathy, with little to do but sit in the kotatsu, the pit in the floor where the charcoal fire underneath the blankets kept at least the lower body warm. To Yamamoto this waste of life was an irresistible challenge. His solution was a school where the people could learn the kind of art and handicrafts which would both enrich their lives and make it possible for them to augment their meager incomes during the slack winter.

He gathered a staff of instructors and started an ambitious program of woodcarving, textile weaving and dyeing, and some painting and print-making. Yamamoto was not a man of small ideas, and he did not envision his school on a small scale. He solicited help from both government and private agencies, and among his largest grants were four thousand yen each from the Education Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry, and the Mitsubishi interests. These were annual pledges, and not inconsiderable money for those days when the yen was worth about half a dollar and the dollar rather more than it is today. But Yamamoto found it harder to maintain interest than to excite it in the first place. His big subsidies dwindled to half the original figure and, after five years, stopped. And in Oya the mayor of the village, who had been an enthusiastic supporter, went bankrupt. The school charged no fees, support was increasingly scarce, and finances became an overriding worry. Always there was the nagging necessity to hunt for patrons.

That was not his only trouble. Because he had gotten his idea in Russia, the police always suspected that he was teaching communism and continually harassed him on that score. Un'ichi Hiratsuka, who for a while taught frame-making at the school, recalls that when he was preparing for his first trip to Shinshu he received a letter from Yamamoto. Yamamoto described his difficulties with the police and diffidently asked Hiratsuka, who is deeply conservative but who likes to work in a Russian-style jacket, if he would forego that costume at Shinshu. And, he added, the police seemed to mistrust long hair and would Hiratsuka mind too much getting a haircut.

"Yamamoto was a fine artist but a terrible businessman," says Tsuruzo Ishii. "When he started the school I told him that he should restrict his activity to teaching art and crafts, but he thought he would fail if he couldn't prove to the farmers that they could make money out of what they were learning. So he was continually involved in trying to sell their products, and all these efforts lost money.

"It was the same with his other crusade. He threw himself into a campaign to change the methods of teaching art in the public schools. He called it free art, the idea being that students were to sketch from nature instead of copying the pictures in textbooks. Of course he stirred up a battle with the textbook people and old-line art teachers, but his campaign was finally scuttled by an unfortunate business deal: his only interest was to make a better quality of art supplies available to students, but the whole thing ended in bankruptcy. Both the Shinshu school and the free-art movement were good ideas doomed by bad management.

"I was always trying to get him to give up these crusades of his and do some painting. He was a stubborn and a dedicated man, but after fifteen years of struggling and with both ventures failing, he was tired out, and in 1935 he did settle down in Tokyo. For the first time since Paris he seriously worked at his own art. In the next five or six years he did some fine work, oils and water colors, and he climaxed this activity with a one-man show at Mitsukoshi in January 1940."

The show opened in an aura of good feeling. The antagonisms and bitterness of the past were forgotten, and both long-time friends and former enemies rallied around to celebrate his return to art with an impressive testimonial dinner. Yamamoto was in a happy and expansive mood when he rose to say: "I shall live until I'm eighty-five. I shall live until May of my eighty-fifth year. Therefore, I am going to sit back now, and drink sake, and paint to my heart's content."

He was a poor prophet. Two years later he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage, which ended his career. In the spring he was taken back to Shinshu in the hope that the mountains would aid his convalescence, but he never fully recovered, and he died in October 1946 at the age of sixty-four.

It was near the end of his illness that he got out of bed and took a hatchet to the blocks for his woodprints. He had carved them of solid sakura and undoubtedly many more prints could have been run off from them. If this was the thought that got him up to destroy them, it was in character. For a man who believed so deeply in creative prints it must have been anathema that somebody else might print from his blocks, and a final act of passionate conviction is a fitting end to his story.

That he was thwarted in this, as he had been so often before, is perhaps only consistent with the pattern of his life. Years before, when they were closing up the school at Oya, they had found there the blocks for his great print of Moscow (print 6). A friend who was helping asked for them, and Yamamoto gave them to him. Today there are plans to run some more prints from these blocks.

"What kind of man was he?"

Ishii reflected. "When an idea excited him he would bury himself in it. Sacrifice meant nothing. It was the same with creative hanga, his school, and his free-art movement. He was a selfless man, a passionate man, a man of great sensitivity. I guess if I had to describe him in one word it would be—artist."

2. A Small Bay in Brittany (1913?)

3. Fisherman (1904)

4. French Pastoral in Spring (1913?)

5. Woman of Brittany (1920)

6. Moscow Street (1916?)

7. Moscow (1917?)