Communicating Vessels:

The Surrealist Movement in Japan, 1923-1970.

Majella Munro

The Enzo Press

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Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan, 1923-1970

Published in the UK by Enzo Arts and Publishing Limited
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First edition 2012
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ISBN (print edition): 978-1-909046-03-0
Cover image: Kitawaki Noboru, Structure of Meaning (A+B)2, 1940 (detail).
Reproduced courtesy of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Contents

Biographies of Japanese practitioners discussed

Glossary
Preface

Introduction:

Surrealism in Japan: A late-developing periphery?

Eroticism and Psychoanalysis

Surrealism within Japanese Culture

Politics in the Japanese Movement

Impact of Occupation

In conclusion

5
9

11
13

Chapter 1: Colonalism, Totalitarianism, Francophonie: the global spread of Surrealism and its
scholarly reception as an international movement
27

Czechoslovakia

Martinique
Chapter 2: Encounters with the West

Horiguchi Daigaku and the first Surrealist translations

Travels in Europe: Okamoto Tar, Nishiwaki Junzabur, and Fukuzawa Ichir

Nishiwaki and his influence on the first Surrealist experiments

Fukuzawa

1932: The Paris-Tokyo League of Emerging Artists Exhibition

The Internationalisation of Surrealism, 1933-37

Seligmann in Japan

1937: The Exhibition of Surrealist Works from Overseas

Regional practice

The Imagined Community

39

73

Chapter 3: Excavating the Subconscious: Psychoanalysis in Japan and the Surrealist Response 99

Psychoanalysis in the Japanese Context

The Legend of Urashima Tar

Surrealism and the Shinkankakuha

A Page of Madness

Automatism: Takiguchis supremacy

Chapter 4: Surrealism in Japan: dialectics and pre-modern aesthetics

Dada in Japan

Shinkichi and Zen

MAVO radicalism

GGPG

Surrealism and Japanese Culture

Surrealism and Buddhism

Kitawaki Noboru

Komaki Gentar

Anti-academicism

The institutional history

Avant-garde Nihonga and the influence of Surrealism

117

Chapter 5: The Surrealist Incident

The Second Manifesto of Surrealism

The Aragon Incident

Nippona Artista Proleta Federaci

The Surrealist Jikken:

Takiguchi Shz

The Kobe Poets Club

Rien

In Hiroshima

Fukuzawa and the investigation of the Art Culture Society

161

Conclusion

245

Acknowledgements

263

Chapter 6: Post-war Continuities

The Political Situation of Post-war Japan

A New Myth

Isamu Noguchi

Epilogue: The Discovery of the Image: Surrealist cinema in Japan

Cinepoem

Post-war Experiments

Kitasono Katsue and Yamamoto Kansuke

The Art Theatre Guild
Bibliography

197

249

Glossary

Ens: a circle, painted in a continuous stroke as an active meditation; the fundamental iconography
of Buddhist art.
Kanji: Chinese logographs used in written Japanese.
Katakana: Phonetic text used in written Japanese, often to transliterate European words.
Genbunichi: series of reforms of written language instituted from the mid-nineteenth century onwards
in order to reduce the number of kanji in circulation and thereby improve literacy.
Shunga (meaning spring pictures): term used to indicate erotic woodcuts produced in Edo period
(1603-1858) Japan.
Ssaku hanga (creative prints): autograph prints movement at the turn of the twentieth century in
Japan; emphasised print making as an artistic, rather than artisanal, technique.
Jikken: incident, a euphemistic term for political controversies.
Tokonoma: an alcove in domestic architecture in which calligraphy and flower arrangements are
displayed.
Namban (Southern barbarian): refers to Portuguese traders and their cultural influence during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Namban painting is strongly influenced by European art.
Nihonga (Japanese painting): term used from the mid-nineteenth century to indicate Japanese-style
painting.
Haikai (comic/unorthodox): poetic form heavily influenced by Bash Matsuos (1644-94) interest in
vernacular subject matters. Aesthetically, characterised by economic and restricted syllable structures,
vulgarity, and spontaneity.
Hiragana: Phonetic text used in written Japanese.
Manji: a religious icon used throughout Asia; also known as a swastika.
Yga (Western Painting): used to described painting in modern styles using oil paint, in opposition
to Nihonga.

Preface

Histories of Surrealism typically concentrate on the provocations of French practitioners against

the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, but the case of Japan, where Surrealists were directly imprisoned
by wartime authorities, presents an apposite study of the interaction of state and avant-garde.
Japan forms an excellent case study in the tensions and problematics inherent in Surrealism, since it
encompasses tensions between East and West; Imperialism and anti-colonialism; totalitarianism and
avant-garde radicalism; and issues of cultural assimilation and exchange.

Investigating the specific cultural and political contexts of Japanese Surrealism contributes

to an understanding of the Surrealist movement as an international whole. Japanese practitioners

were thought to be isolated from the Parisian core of the movement, but the relationships of
Japanese artists with prominent European Surrealists allows the provincial, derivative character given
to Japanese Surrealism in previous accounts to be confronted, and opens the critical reception and
transmutation of European ideas to enquiry. By examining France and Japan comparatively, this
volume provides a model of the dialogue between the Parisian core and the Japanese periphery.

This volume, positioned at an intersection between discourse on the Surrealist movement as

an international collective; on Japanese modernism; and on the non-western avant-garde, contributes

to several emergent areas of enquiry, and interrogates how cultural movements might transcend
nation and ideology during times of conflict.

Notes

All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

Names of Japanese Surrealists are rendered surname first. Names of Japanese scholars writing in
English are given in the order in which they appear in the cited text.

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction
6

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

Introduction

I insist on the fact that surrealism can be understood historically only in relation to the
war [...]1
Andr Breton

The Second World War ended in Japan. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, to date,
the only deployments of atomic weaponry during conflict, and these events consistently provide
the final punctuation to narratives of the war. Yet, aside from this exception, the Japanese wartime
experience remains marginalised, particularly from the European perspective. The modern Japanese
state is an intriguing object of study. Its status as the first Asian global economic power belies the
tensions and dichotomies inherent in its rise to prominence. Japan resisted the advance of Western
Imperialism by willingly importing Western culture; took an anti-Imperialist stance to disguise its own
colonial adventurism; and was accepted as an ally by Axis powers despite its racial identity. Japan, as a
totalitarian, Imperialist state, represented the antithesis of Surrealist ideals; yet Japan also conformed
to a Surrealist conception of the Orient, the fantasised location of an alternative knowledge-system
which, if discovered, could be used to undermine Western civilisation.2 The Japanese movement
raises important issues about the development of Surrealism outside France; in countries that were
non-Western; and under totalitarian regimes, making it a rich and complex case study.

The period under consideration here (1923-1970) falls mainly under the Shwa period (19261989), the dates of which correspond to the reign of the Emperor Hirohito. Shwa followed the
supposedly liberal Taish era (1912-1926), during which Japan tried to carve an identity for itself as a
modern, industrial power; an era characterised by protest, debate and radical political experimentation
in the public sphere. In response to the confused and, at times, violent radicalism of Taish, the Shwa
government attempted to stabilise the fledgling Japanese democracy, adopting a conservative stance
which, for some historians, marked a descent into Fascism. The colonial expansion and devastating
defeat that contain the Pacific War; the Occupation of Japan by US troops; and the emergence of
Japan as a global economic hegemon, are encompassed by this historical period. Tensions between
Westernisation and a nationalistic desire to maintain an Asian identity oscillated throughout the
period, making modern Japanese history almost an object lesson in the historical dialectic.

It was in this dynamic and tense context that Surrealism arrived in Japan. Amongst avant-

1
Breton, Situation of Surrealism Between the Two World Wars, quoted in Breton, What is Surrealism, Franklin
Rosemont, ed., Pluto Press, London, 1978, p243.
2
As evidenced by the Surrealist mandate to champion East against West. See Gerard Durozoi, History of the
Surrealist Movement, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p84.

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

garde movements, Surrealism has particular relevance to discussion of international modernist

dialogue since it had, as Anthony White has claimed, the most pronounced international reception
of all the European historical avant-gardes.3 Given the broad international spread of the Surrealist
movement, it is curious that accounts continue to privilege France. Surrealism enjoyed an enthusiastic
reception in Japan; David Pellegrini ranks it, alongside abstraction, as one of two dominating trends
in the pre-war art world.4 Yet Japanese Surrealism remains under-researched. Scholarship is
dominated by publications arising from exhibitions of Japanese Surrealist painting held in both Japan
and Europe from the 1960s onwards:5 as a result, discourse on Japanese Surrealism has been brief,
generalised and restricted to the introductory pages of exhibition catalogues. As Alexandra Monroe
has complained, the restriction of scholarship to this format has "perpetuated the notion, both at
home and abroad, that Japanese modernism is essentially discontinuous and ahistorical."6 Through
these essays, a conventional account of the movement has emerged. Isolated by geography, language
barriers and a Fascist government, Japanese Surrealists were prohibited from gaining proper insight
into the intellectual structures of Surrealism and, as a consequence, their production is deemed either
substandard or derivative: furthermore, the retarded introduction of Surrealism (commonly dated
to the late 1930s) and the almost immediate investigation of Surrealists by military police in 1941 is
held to have delayed full realisation until the post-war period. The good personal and professional
links established between French and Japanese Surrealists during the 1920s and thirties would seem
to undermine this conventional reading. In fact, the 1941 police investigation of prominent theorist
Takiguchi Shz (1903-79) on suspicion of involvement in Communism interrogated his personal
connection to Andr Breton (1896-1966),7 allowing Japanese Surrealism to be positioned in an
international nexus.

However, the relationship was not, to paraphrase William Gardner, a 'one-way conversation',
where Japanese practitioners were aware of avant-garde experiments in Europe, but Europeans
remained exclusively interested in traditional Japanese culture.8 In his Dictionnaire du surralisme
of 1973, Jos Pierre named a canon of Japanese Surrealists, including Koga Harue, Fukuzawa Ichir,
Okamoto Tar, Shigeru Imai, Noboru Kitazato,9 R. Otsuka, Shimozato Yoshio, Ayako Suzuki, Jiro

3
White, Terra Incognita: Surrealism and the Pacific Region, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 6, Autumn 2007, p2,
available at http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal6/index.htm, accessed 10th December 2010.
4
Pellegrini, Avant-garde East and West: A Comparison of Prewar German and Japanese Avant-garde Art and
Performance, unpublished PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p7.
5
For a description of these, see Annika A. Culver, Between Distant Realities: The Japanese Avant-Garde,
Surrealism, and the Colonies, 1924-1943, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007, p10.
6
Monroe, Introduction, in Monroe, ed., Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Harry N. Abrams,
Inc., ex. cat., 1994, pp19-25, p20.
7
Takiguchi, Chronology in my Own Hand, quoted in John Clark, Artistic Subjectivity in the Taisho and Early Showa
Avant-Garde, in Monroe, ed.,1994, pp41-5, p48.
8
Gardner, writing on the relationship of Japanese modern culture to that of the West, in Advertising Tower:
Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s, Harvard University Press, London, 2006, p82.
9
This possibly refers to Kitawaki Noboru.

Oyamada and Masao Tsuruoka.10 The list overlaps with that given by Breton and Paul luard (18951952) in their Dictionnaire abrg du surralisme (1938), which featured four reproductions of
Japanese Surrealist works; this list had been provided to Breton by Takiguchi and mainly featured his
close associates.11 luard, Georges Hugnet (1906-74) and Roland Penrose (1900-84) assisted Japanese
practitioners in curating the 1937 International Exposition of Surrealism, held in Tokyo, Kyoto and
Osaka. In fact, Japanese Surrealists had been invited to exhibit in one of the earliest Surrealist
international exhibitions, held in London in 1936, but this invitation failed to be taken up. A document
issued on the occasion of this exhibition signed by English and French Surrealists, including Breton,
noted the late emergence of an English Surrealist group relative to the development of the movement
in a handful of other countries, including Japan.12 Breton further cited Japan as evidence of continuing
international interest in Surrealism post-war.13 Practitioners loosely associated with Surrealism, such
as Ezra Pound, also esteemed Japanese practice, praising The NEW Japan. Surrealism without the
half-baked ignorance of the French young.14

This contemporary interest is in marked contrast to a retrospective disregard. Inside Japan,
the most impressive interventions have been restricted to cataloguing or reproducing source material.
The number of monographs dedicated to Japanese Surrealism is limited, and on the whole these do
not take issue with the denigratory convention summarised above. Tsuchibuchi Nobuhiko, leading
collector and curator of Takiguchis work, explains that: some scholars may well say that there wasnt
Surrealism in Japan [other than] the devoted efforts of Takiguchi Shuz, for political or [...] other
15
reasons. This would be an interesting point for study.

The view Tsuchibuchi paraphrases is found, for example, in the work of ka Makoto, who
described Surrealism as influencing the technique of a small number of very young poets during
the 1930s.16 A marked majority of Japanese scholars remain resistant to acknowledging a Japanese
17
Surrealist practice, speaking instead of the superficial influence of Surrealism on the avant-garde.
Gardner, in his work on Japanese literary modernism, describes the denigration of Japan by Western
scholars as: [not] an objective value judgement, [but] predetermined by an interpretative system
in which truly authentic modernism and modernity can have occurred only in the West,18 but this
10
Pierre, Dictionary of Surrealism, translated by W.J. Strachan, Eyre Methuen, 1974, p90. Original French
publication 1973.
11
For example, Ayako Suzuki, who is rarely mentioned in any discourse on Surrealism, was Takiguchis wife: her
inclusion depended on their personal relationship, rather than her renown as a Surrealist painter. Yoshio Shimosato is
also known to have enjoyed a close friendship with Takiguchi.
12
International Bulletin of Surrealism, no.4, 1936, reproduced in Breton, 1978, p243.
13
Polizzotti, trans., Conversations: the Autobiography of Surrealism, Paragon, New York, 1993, p120.
14
Pound, letter to Kitazono Katsue, quoted in Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, Stanford
University Press, 1999, p81.
15
Tsuchibuchi in correspondence with the author, 23rd October 2009.
16
ka, Takiguchi Shuzo et le surralism au Japon, Andr Breton et le Surralisme International, special edition of
Opus International, no. 123-4, April/May 1991, pp124-129, p126.
17
Tsuchibuchi in correspondence, 23rd October 2009.
18
Gardner, 2006, p13.

10

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

problem of authenticity is not exclusive to Western scholarship; given the dependence of Japanese
accounts on Western art-historical models and the impact of the post-war US Occupation on the
Japanese academy, which discouraged research into artistic radicalism and international exchange in
pre-war Japan for ideological reasons, it is a problem also found in Japanese critiques.

However, over the last twenty years some valuable and insightful accounts have emerged. A
reassessment of Japanese Surrealism commenced with the 1990 exhibition Nihon no Shururearisumu
1925-45 (Japans Surrealism 1925-45) at the Nagoya City Art Museum, curated by Yamada Satoshi.
The accompanying catalogue reproduces a variety of images, journals and extracts from texts,
presenting a comprehensive inter-disciplinary survey of Surrealism and affiliated movements.19
Similarly, the encyclopedic catalogue to the Tokyo Montparnasse and Surrealism exhibition provides
biographical outlines and examples of works for every Japanese painter affiliated to Surrealism,20
making it an extremely significant resource. There has been a trend in Japanese scholarship towards
the cataloguing and reproduction of information about Surrealism without analysis or commentary.
1999 saw the publication of the first volumes of Wada Hirofumi's Korekushon Nihon Shururearisumu
(Japanese Surrealism Collection),21 a fifteen-volume compilation of facsimiles of 1920s and 30s
Japanese art periodicals, accompanied by scant commentary.22 However, an earlier text on Japanese
Surrealism by Hirofumi, co-authored with Sawa Masahiro, does give biographies of key practitioners
and commentaries on their work.23 More recently, curator Otani Shogo at the Museum of Modern
Art in Tokyo has succeeded in making original, revisionist contributions to scholarship through
articles reconsidering the erotic elements of Japanese Surrealism and the experience of war.24 The
first critical, book-length analysis of Japanese Surrealist painting, Hayami Yutaka's Shururrearisumu
Kaiga to Nihon,25 appeared in 2009, a meticulously researched formal analysis of works by a
small 'canon' of Japanese Surrealist painters. Thus the reassessment of Japanese Surrealism is
a burgeoning undertaking, not only amongst Western scholars of Surrealism, but also in Japan.

Aside from contemporary commentaries, one of the earliest examinations of Japanese

Surrealism is found in Jean-Louis Bdouins 1961 history of Surrealism, which included brief
mention of the contribution of Japan, and of the challenges to existing conceptions of Surrealism
19
Yamada, ed., Nihon no Shururearisumu 1925-45, Nagoya Shi Bijutsukan, 1990. The catalogue is impressive in
its scope; however, that it has only been issued in Japanese has limited its usefulness as source material for researchers
internationally. My only criticism of this catalogue is that the period covered spans from 1927 to 1941; the promise to
represent wartime production implied by the title is not upheld.
20
Tokyo Monaprunasu to Shururearisumu, ex. cat., Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1985.
21
Wada, ed., Korekushon Nihon Shururearisumu, Hon no Tomosha, Tokyo, 1999-2001.
22
Several of the facsimilies are partial, including texts from publications without the accompanying illustrations,
which compounds the scholarly divorce of painting and literature. Several volumes are dedicated to the oeuvres of
individual practitioners but again fail to represent accurately the extent of those practitioners interventions.
23
Sawa and Wada, eds, Nihon no Shururearisumu (Japans Surrealism), Sekai Shicsha, 1995.
24
See Otani, Images of Sex and Death in the Works of Japanese Painters who were under the influence of
Surrealism: QEi, Hironobu Yazaki, and Hamao Hamada, Bulletin of the study of Philosophy and History of Art in
University of Tsukuba, no. 22, 2005, pp25-48, p27.
25
Hayami Yutaka, Shururearisumu Kaiga to Nihon: Imeji no juy to Sz, NHK Books, Tokyo, 2009.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

11

PAGES FROM BRETON AND LUARDS

DICTIONNAIRE ABRG DU SURRALISME
(GALERIE BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS, 1938)
SHOWING (LEFT) SHIGERU IMAIS A LA
VOLE (1935) AND (BELOW) YOSHIO
SHIMOSATO, LEXAMEN DE MINUIT
(1936); AYAKO SUZUKI, LE PAYSAGE (1935)
AND R. OTSUKA, LES ATAVISMES DU
CRPUSCULE (1936).
REPRODUCED BY KIND PERMISSION OF
DITIONS CORTI, PARIS.

12

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

that the inclusion of Japan within an international discourse presented.26 Bdouin's insightful
account was based on information provided by Takiguchi,27 who wrote to congratulate Bdouin on
his scholarship, complaining that previous accounts of Japanese Surrealism had been filled with
errors and improprieties.28 Bdouins contribution seems not to have impacted subsequent
Western scholarship. However, in the late twentieth century, three significant studies appeared. The
first of these, Vra Lnhartovs pioneering Dada et surralisme au Japon (1987), provides Frenchlanguage translations of important poetic and theoretical texts, with perceptive commentaries on
the contributions of key practitioners, including Takiguchi, Fukuzawa, and Kitawaki Noboru.29 The
second, John Clarks Surrealism in Japan (1997),30 gives a good overview of Japanese practice but
is of limited length and has received limited circulation. The contributions of John Solt to the study
of Japanese Surrealism, through his intellectual biographies of Kitazono Katsue, also merit mention
here, and his critique of an ideological bias amongst US scholars towards studies of post-war Japanese
art provides an excellent overview of the debates and obfuscations active in the field.31 The most
significant contribution to the field is Miryam Sas's Fault Lines, which aimed to revise misconceptions
active in the field. Sas examined Japanese deviation from French precedent in terms of memory and
misprision, emphasising processes of misreading that allowed original poetic forms, distinct from
those of the influence, to be created in Japan.32 Despite its utility for discussing development within
cultures, this anxiety of influence can be problematic in discussion of influence across cultures, as
Solt has noted: innovative theorizing is necessary to better account for what it means to import
literary theory from one culture to another.33 In place of methodologies that emphasise the reception
of Surrealism as a French cultural phenomenon, instead this volume will attend to Surrealism as a
collaborative, discursive practice undertaken by an international imagined community. Indeed, it is
not possible to describe Surrealism as being received as a fully formed influence by the Japanese, as
it was still in a process of formation throughout the 1930s, as Sas implies in describing Surrealism as
inscribe[d] in the very process of its making.34 Deviations from French precedent are not, therefore,
distortions of Surrealism, but rather contributions to its development. That Surrealism should have a
different character in Japan than in France is better explained by a dialectically-orientated analysis of
practice and context. Despite these reservations over methodology, Sas work remains remarkable for
suggesting the possibility of revising the Japanese movement within an international context, and her
26
Bdouin, Vingt Ans de Surralisme 1939-1959, Denel, Paris, 1961, p102.
27
As suggested by letters from Roger van Hecke to Breton, August 1958, in the collection of the Jacques Doucet
library, Paris; and from Breton to Takiguchi in the same year in the Keio University Art Center archive, Tokyo.
28
Takiguchi to Bdouin, September 1962, Keio University Art Center archive, Tokyo.
29
Lnhartov, Dada et Surralisme au Japon, Publications Orientalistes de France, 1987.
30
Clark, 1994, and Michael Lloyd, ed., Surrealism: Revolution by Night, ex. cat., Optus Communications, 1993,
pp204-14.
31
Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: Kitazono Katue, Harvard University Press, 1999, and The Category
Pre-World War Two Avant-Garde Japanese Art and Its Mysterious Disappearance in the United States, available at
http://www.literatureandarts.com/soltlacma.html, accessed 23rd March 2010.
32
See Sas, p38.
33
Solt, 1999, p5.
34
Ibid.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

13

investigations and suggestions have facilitated the scholarly scope of this enquiry.

Sass text deals with Surrealism exclusively as a literary movement and accounts of Japanese
production have been biased towards literary studies. Inside Japan, Tsuruoka Yoshihisas benchmark
studies have exclusively attended to literature. While Japanese Surrealist literary experimentation
is recognised as having commenced in 1925,35 Surrealist painting is thought to have reached
its apogee in 1938; David Elliott even dated the "remarkable, if late flowering" of Surrealism in
Japan to "the late 1940s".36 Such statements allow Japanese Surrealist painting to be seen as latedeveloping and, by implication, sub-standard, relative to both international artistic developments
and domestic literary advances. The 1937 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, which toured
Japan, has been privileged as a foundational event in the movement there. This volume will propose
an alternative chronology of visual practice, and question the viability of divorcing literature and
art. The Surrealist experiment was interdisciplinary, and in order to properly present the historical
development of Surrealism in Japan it is necessary to re-integrate art and literature in a single
narrative. Most recently, Annika Culver's research on Surrealism in Japanese colonies has analysed
painting and poetry in tandem.37 Despite these significant scholarly contributions we still, as Michael
Richardson has lamented, lack access to a proper scholarly survey of the movement.38 In order to
address this, it is critical to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, examining the movement both within
the Japanese historical context, and from the perspective of international Surrealist production.

The account given here engages closely with both domestic and international contexts in
the pre and post-Second World War periods. Four distinct, but mutually informing, areas of enquiry
are investigated; firstly, the benefits and limitations of studying Surrealism as several movements in
isolation or as an international whole are critically discussed. Secondly, an account of the particular
development of Surrealism in Japan, referencing both domestic and international contexts, is given.
Thirdly, by engaging closely with the arrests of prominent Surrealists, I aim to clarify the political
position of the Japanese movement, and to root the arrests in a context of international intellectual
exchange. Finally, the account spans the caesura of the war to argue for historical continuity. Together,
these enquiries re-evaluate the contribution of pre-war Japanese Surrealists to the international
movement.

35
Otani Shogo cites the emergence of Japanese Surrealist poetry to 1925; many other commentators cite
Horiguchi Daigakus 1925 Surrealist translations as the starting point of literary experimentation: it is therefore a
consensus that Japanese Surrealist literature commenced c.1925. See Dreams of the Horizon- Introduction, Dreams of
the Horizon, ex. cat., National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2003, pp20-9.
36
Elliott, Introduction, in Elliott and Kaido, eds, Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945-1965, ex. cat.,
1985, p10.
37
See op. cit. note 5.
38
Richardson, Drifting Objects of Dreams: The Collection of Shuzo Takiguchi, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 4,
Winter 2005, pp1-5, p2, available at www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal4/acrobat%20files/
richardsonpdf.pdf, accessed 29th January 2007.

14

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

Surrealism in Japan: a late-developing periphery?

Aside from the geographical remove of Japan from France, cultural and language barriers
have allowed a lack of rapprochement between Japanese and French Surrealists to be assumed.
Marc Dachy, for instance, the only westerner to produce a monograph on Japanese Dada, described
Japan as more isolated by language thanby geography,39 a statement which mars his systematic
investigation of dialogue between German and Japanese Dadaists. Continued adherence to a putative
absence of contact with European avant-gardists, in spite of evidence to the contrary, allows Japanese
experimentations to be dismissed as poorly informed. The idea that Japanese Surrealists lacked access
to the French art world is undermined by the presence in Paris of leading practitioners, including
Okamoto Tar (1911-96) and Fukuzawa Ichir (1898-1992). Poet and theorist Yamanaka Tiroux (190577) corresponded with a range of European Surrealists from the 1920s onwards. Though Takiguchi
did not have opportunity to meet his French counterpart, Andr Breton (1896-1966), until 1958, they
maintained an ongoing correspondence from at least the 1930s. These international exchanges are
integral to my account, and it is for this reason that this volume attends to those Japanese practitioners
engaged in international discourse, rather than the more diffuse influence of Surrealism throughout
the Japanese avant-garde.40

The second chapter of this volume, therefore, reconstructs dialogue between French and
Japanese Surrealists, using unpublished correspondence and previously untranslated publications to
construct a new chronology of the advent of Surrealism in Japan, and to examine the reception of
Japanese Surrealists by their international counterparts. In particular, the 1932 Paris-Tokio League
of Rising Art Exhibition, curated by Breton and showcasing work by several European Surrealists,
emphasises that Surrealist work was exhibited in Japan prior to the 1937 International Exposition. This
chapter draws on Benedict Andersons work to place Japan within Surrealisms imagined community
as an antidote to the denigratory core-periphery relationship discussed in the previous chapter.
From this account of literary publications and correspondence I move on to discuss the impact of
touring exhibitions of Surrealist painting, using these to account for the disaggregate and regionalised
character of Japanese Surrealism, a characteristic which is integral to the movements identity in
Japan and allows the full range and diversity of Japanese production to be appreciated.
Eroticism and Psychoanalysis

Despite close contact with French Surrealism, many commentators perceive there to have

39
Plus isol tant par la language que par la gographie. Dachy, Dada au Japon: Segments dadas et neo-dadas
dans les avant-gardes japonaises, Press Universitaire de France, Paris, 2002, p50.
40
Access to resources is also a significant issue in determining the oeuvres to be examined. Lack of archival
resources is the reason for the marginalisation of the significant Japanese Surrealist painters Ai Mitsu and Migishi Ktar
in this volume, while the lesser-known painters Shimozato Yoshio and Hamada Hamao are included on the basis of their
well- preserved archives.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

15

been oversights in the Japanese reception of Surrealism. For instance, Hoshino Moriyuki has observed
that the theme of eroticism, or even that of political engagement, themes crucial for the French
Surrealists, were virtually inexistent in the Japanese Surrealist camp.41 This overlooks extensive debate
amongst contemporary Japanese avant-gardists on the appropriate degree of political commitment
for Surrealists, a debate which led to the division of the Japanese movement into a radical and an
apolitical camp, while the absence of a recognised Japanese Psychoanalytic Society until the post-war
period has impacted on discussion of their psychosexual works. Solt argues that: In Japan, Freudian
psychology was not widely practised or understood. Rather than being interested in the unconscious
per se, artists and writers in the movement were excited by [Western] surrealist imagery.42 This
raises the question of whether an interest in the subconscious was disseminated amongst Surrealist
artists as a direct response to their reading of Freuds texts, or were instead influenced by these ideas
as they were manifested in contemporary art production. Since Bretons application of psychoanalysis
undermined Freud by celebrating mental disturbance (which perhaps accounts for the dim view
Freud reportedly took of Surrealism), fidelity to Freudian concepts within the Surrealism as a whole is
problematic. The criticism that the enquiry of Japanese Surrealist artists into the subconscious was a
tokenistic exploration of dreams, sexuality, and the uncanny through imagery, rather than a considered
response to advanced psychoanalytic knowledge, can equally be levelled at the French movement.
The idea that there was a lack of psychoanalytic knowledge in Japan must also be challenged, as
Sas has suggested.43 Scholarship on the Japanese reception of psychoanalysis is extremely limited,
perhaps accounting for its marginalisation in existing art historical accounts. However, as I will outline,
Freudian ideas were in circulation in Japan from at least 1926 and enjoyed some popularity during
the 1930s, though the specific tendency of Japanese artists, psychoanalysts and commentators to link
Freudian theory to indigenous ethical and religious systems has served to conceal the extent of their
interest.
Surrealism within Japanese Culture

Clark has noted that Japanese modernity is [...] not just Japanese but forms a historical
trajectory which runs in and out of European modernism itself,44 pointing to a need to examine several
different contexts: those under consideration here include its relation to the French and international
movements, the historical development of modernism in Japan, and the position of Surrealism within
Japanese art history, rooting this discussion within both international and domestic frames of reference.
Two art-historical contexts are of specific importance: the emergence of anti-academic radicalism in
41
Le thme de lrotisme, ou celui de lengagement politique, thmes cruciaux pour les surralistes franais,
[...] taient quasiment inexistants dans le champ surraliste japonais. Hoshino, Le Surralisme au Japon: Rupture
et Continuit, in Kato, Haruhisa, ed., La modernit franaise dans lAsie littraire (China, Core, Japon), Presses
Universitaire de France, 2004, pp233-246, 2004, p237.
42
Solt, 2001.
43
Sas, 1999, p104.
44
Clark, Introduction, in Menzies, Jackie, ed, Modern Boy and Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 19101935, ex. cat., Thames and Hudson, 1998, pp15-24, p21.

16

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

the 1920s-30s avant-garde, as exemplified by the MAVO movement, and the synthesis with traditional
culture found in Japanese Dada. The blending of contemporary French art with indigenous referents
is understood by some commentators as an attempt by the Japanese Surrealists to comply with the
nationalist orientation of the Shwa state, but I will argue that the use of premodern precedent was
also common to European Surrealism and Japanese Dadaist experiments made during the liberal
1920s. While the Japanese Surrealist movement did not directly secede from Dadaism as it did in
France, Takiguchi did accord importance to the anarchism of Dada in clearing ground for the more
positively creative experiments of Surrealism, describing it as a total insubordination on the artistic
plane,45 taking a similar (but less pejorative) stance on the role of Dada as a predecessor to that of
Breton. Dada provides a context for the development of Surrealism in Japan, rather than its immediate
origin: Dada has not, therefore, been included in my narrative of the introduction of Surrealism to
Japan, but instead informs discussion of the development of the Japanese academy; the emergence
of a critical, anti-academic avant-garde; and the Japanese Surrealist interest in dialectics, through
which I will argue that concern with expressing national character was a problem within Japanese
modernity from its inception, and which came to acquire anti-academic potential in the hands of the
Surrealists.
Politics in the Japanese Movement

Complaints about a lack of radicalism amongst Japanese Surrealists raise significant questions:
what were the defining characteristics of Surrealism, and how were these treated in Japan? Does the
absence of particular characteristics preclude designation of the Japanese movement as Surrealist?
The precepts of Surrealism as set forth by Breton in his First Manifesto (1924) provide frequently-cited
working definitions of the intentions and potential manifestations of Surrealism. Less well known is
Bretons Limites non-frontires du surrealisme, which he was prompted to write by the London Surrealist
Exposition, in direct response to a need to delimit Surrealism in the wake of its international spread.
Interests in dialectic materialism, social revolution, psychic life and automatism were identified as key
features.46 While an interest in social revolution was fulfilled by Parisian Surrealists through sporadic
affiliation to the French Communist Party, this experiment ultimately failed. The political radicalism
of Japanese Surrealism - or the lack thereof - has not been adequately addressed. This is curious
since, as Culver has noted, fevered contemporary debate on the assimilation of Surrealism dominated
Japanese periodicals.47 A lack of formal affiliation to political institutions extra to the movement, as
there was in France, has made scholars such as Culver hesitate to confront the politics of Japanese
Surrealism, but its pivotal importance to a proper understanding of the movement cannot be ignored.
45
Un insubordination totale sur le plan artistique [...] Takiguchi, Chgenjitsushugi Kaiga no Hk ni Tsuite (On
the Orientations of Surrealist Painting), August 1935 in Shih, quoted in Andr Breton et Surrealisme International, 1991,
p127.
46
Quoted in Bernard Lecherbonnier, Surralisme et Francophonie: La chair du verbe: Histoire et potique des
Surralismes de langue Franaise, Editions Publisud, France, 1992, p27.
47
Culver, p21.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

17

Chapter five addresses this lacuna.

In order to gauge the radicalism of the movement, it is necessary to juxtapose it not only to
French Surrealism, but also to other radical groups in the Japanese art world. The Proletarian Artists
League, which was explicitly concerned with Communism, forms an ideal point of comparison.48
Amongst commentators, there is an inability to decide whether Japanese Surrealism was radical or
not, and whether a lack of wider social concern calls its validity into question. For instance Solts essay
on the politics of Surrealist photographer Yamamoto Kansuke (1914-1987) elides the inconsistencies
that arise from a simultaneous emphasis on both a perceived lack of political interest amongst
Japanese Surrealists and the arrests of leading practitioners through a claim that [surrealism] was
too western, and that was reason enough for Japanese to reject it.49 The Japanese state did not,
however, discriminate on the basis of style: Western-influenced styles were, for example, used in the
production of official wartime propaganda painting, making this explanation questionable.

While historical debates concerning the political orientation of the Japanese state are too
exhaustive to confront within this volume, where state policy directly impacted on the development of
art there exists a finite area of intersection which can be given detailed consideration. The supposition
that the Japanese state was uniformly hostile towards the avant-garde arises from an assumption
that all totalitarian states behave in similar ways towards free expression. The Japanese state did not
undertake the same kind of rigid, systematic censorship as that showcased in the infamous Entartete
Kunst exhibition, staged by its NAZI allies in 1937 (in response to which the French Surrealists codified
their opposition to totalitarian art policies50). Japanese enforcers therefore did, to some extent,
perceive a divorce between style and ideology. The implications of this are critical.

Assessing the extent of Japanese state interference in the art world is also crucial to determining
whether the Surrealist movement did indeed decline under government repression. While some have
dated the decline of Japanese Surrealism - under state pressure - to the years 1937-1940,51 for others
this period represents the apogee of production.52 This type of contradiction exposes problems arising
from a failure to examine the interaction of the state and the Surrealists in an objective manner.
Accounts tend to conform to one of two readings: either the ignorance of Japanese practitioners
to French Surrealist politics or the repressive nature of the wartime government circumscribe the
radicalism of the Japanese movement; or a connection to Communism resulted in its systematic
48
See Culver, 2007, p25.
49
Solt, 2001.
50
See Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938-68, Thames and Hudson, 2005.
51
Durozois summary provides an apposite example of the second school of explanations: The relations between
the surrealists and the Japanese communists led in 1940 to such extreme police repression that the surrealist movement
in Japan died out. Typical in its brevity, this does nothing to illuminate the subtle political contexts of wartime Japan
(and, in fact, the arrests of Surrealists did not take place until 1941). See Durozoi, p336.
52
For example, in Lnhartov, Au Japon, La Plannte Affole, ex. cat., Direction des Muses de Marseille/
ditions Flammarion, 1986, pp263-6, p264.

18

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

eradication by the state. The two readings conflict with each other, since one presents the movement
as apolitical, while the other presents it as highly radical, necessitating clarification.53 The nuanced
political situation of Japanese Surrealism can be clarified through discussion of individual practitioners
on a case-by-case basis, following Sass assertion that it is impossible to coalesce Japanese Surrealism
into a single ideological force.54
Impact of Occupation

Gardner notes that the intrusion of politics into art practice during the early twentieth century
is a highly contested and ambiguous matter. For Taish era modernists [...] even an explicitly apolitical
position would be perceived in political terms by critics on both the right and left [...],55 making it
impossible for artists to avoid a political interpretation of their activities and hinting at a crucial issue:
the discussion of political involvement on the part of the Japanese avant-garde is as much, if not more,
to do with perception as with their intent. The particularly emotive narrative of Japan's involvement
in WWII makes an objective assessment of Taish and Shwa history difficult, and as a result specific
historiographic issues, rather than production itself, determine whether scholars understand the
Japanese Surrealist movement as avant-garde or modern, radical or apolitical. As Takeba Joe has
summarised "[...] tying [...] development [...] to social phenomena and historical events risks distorting
historical fact, individual aesthetics, and the actual conditions of the times [...].56

The emergence of a Japanese-generated discourse on Shwa history was delayed until after
the death of Hirohito in 1989,57 out of respect for the Emperor who had reigned during the Second
World War. Mark Sandler observes that this led to the actions and thoughts of an entire generation of
Japanese artists during the war years remain[ing] largely unexamined in public.58 As a result American
scholars, influenced by Occupation ideologies, were effectively given a monopoly on the production of
historical discourse on modern Japan, creating models and arguments which were assimilated by their
Japanese counterparts.59 Justification for the Occupation of Japan depended on presenting Shwa
as a Fascist state, distancing isolated, nationalistic, pre-war Japan from the world-leading economic
hegemon it was intended to become.60 In art historical enquiry, this translates into a presentation
of the Shwa government as hostile to any free expression, which could only fully flourish under
53
Durozoi, p336.
54
Sas, p1.
55
Gardner, 2006, p47.
56
Takeba, The Age of Modernism: From Visualization to Socialization, in The History of Japanese Photography,
Jane Tucker, ed., ex. cat., Yale University Press, 2003, pp 142-83, p144.
57
Mayu Tsuruya, Sens Sakusen Kirokuga (War Campaign Documentary Painting): Japans National Imagery of the
Holy War, 1937-1945, unpublished PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2005, p27.
58
Sandler, The Living Artist: Matsumoto Shunsukes Reply to the State, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 3, Autumn 1996,
pp74-82, p79.
59
As H.D. Harootunian put it, Japan became Echo to Americas Narcissus. In Harootunian, Americas Japan/
Japans Japan, Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds, Japan in the World, Duke University Press, 1993, pp196-221, p207.
60
See also Harootunian, 1993, p201.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

19

Allied leadership, a view which Japanese commentator Michiaki Kawakita assimilates and expounds:
[avant-garde] artists did not achieve prominence until the postwar period, when the new democratic
spirit engendered in Japan by the occupation removed the restraints from avant-garde art and started
literally dozens of new movements in various fields of modern painting.61

Occupation historiography places Japanese Surrealism in an extremely difficult
position. The arrests of Fukuzawa and Takiguchi are cited to prove that Japanese Surrealists were
not collaborationist, allowing the rehabilitation of Surrealism in the post-war period. However,
the immediate start of the Cold War meant that any argument for radical left-wing tendencies in
the movement also had to be underplayed. Thus the movement has to be presented as sufficiently
critical to have been oppositional to the state, but insufficiently radical to have adhered to the Marxist
politics of its French counterpart. This creates a historiographic vacuum in which the political nature
of the movement cannot be assessed. A reluctance to admit that some Japanese Surrealists may
have supported the state, or that others may have been sympathetic to Communism, has led to
an emphasis on formal analysis, inadvertently presenting the movement as ideologically deprived.
While it is plausible that some practitioners may not have had developed political ideas, and may
have executed their Surrealist works without any anticipation that these would further a particular
revolutionary cause, the theory that the movement was apolitical needs to be investigated and
evidenced, rather than posited as a way of avoiding issues that may be uncomfortable to analyse.62
Following the investigation of political orientation undertaken in chapter five, chapter six gives
a critical account of this ideological influence on post-war scholarship of Japanese avant-gardism.

A denial of continuity between pre- and post-war movements gives post-war Surrealist
experimentation the character of a powerful revival after total decline. Of course, that Surrealism
declined during the war is not unique to the Japanese case: the Second World War is also supposed to
have stifled French production. But in contrast to the French case, where Surrealism is presented as a
spent force after the war, in Japan post-war contributions have enjoyed a much higher profile than the
pre-war movement. This is partly to do with the historiographic considerations outlined above, but
is also due to new opportunities for state patronage and for international exposure in the post-war
period, as in Okamotos production of monumental public sculptures for the 1970 Osaka Worlds Fair, or
the performances of the Gutai group at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Aside from Irmtraud SchaarschmidtRichters assertion that Japanese Surrealism reached its zenith in the years just before, during and
after World War II,63 which hints at a continuity of practice, pre- and post-war Surrealism have rarely
been analysed in a single historical trajectory. Not only does this create a period of missing years
61
Michiaki Kawakita, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, New York, Weatherhill, 1974, p130.
62
As Sas has also observed, to dismiss Japanese Surrealist production as apolitical is an oversimplification. See
Sas, p20.
63
Schaarschmidt-Richter, The Growth of Modern Japanese Painting, in Schaarschmidt-Richter, ed., Japanese
Modern Art. Painting from 1910 to 1970, Edition Stemmle, 1999, pp13-18, p13.

20

Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970

Introduction

during the so-called confusion era64 of

the early Occupation, it has also prevented
a comprehensive analysis of the political
stance of the movement: discussing
pre- and post-war Surrealism in tandem
exposes the possible range of expression
available to Japanese Surrealists operating
under a variety of political regimes, a
task which I undertake in chapter six.
In conclusion

In one respect or another, each
of the scholars discussed here asserts that
Japanese practice does not fit a definition
of Surrealism. This view is common to both Western and Japanese scholarship, with Joseph Love
claiming that there is [not] a Japanese Surrealism in the same sense of Surrealism in France,65
while Ozaki Shinzin goes as far as describing it as not so much a real as a pseudo-Surrealism [...].66
However, a normative Surrealism is not articulated, making the validity of these analyses difficult
to assess. I assume that the benchmark against which Japanese production fails is taken from
French Surrealism, but this implied comparison is never made explicit. Surrealist ideas were readily
adapted to different contexts, as in Hoshinos insightful observation that the reality of Surrealism
was at each turn reinvented in different historical contexts.67 An international account of Surrealism
can, as Jindich Toman has argued in connection to the Czechoslovakian movement, challenge a
conventional definition of Surrealism as anti-bourgeois, anti-social, interested in sexual taboo, and
affectionate towards the Soviet Union,68 productively distancing commentary from a Paris-centric
view of the movement. While interest in Surrealism in its international manifestations is burgeoning,
Japan continues to be excluded from the discussion,69 making this volume a timely intervention.
OKAMOTO, TAIY NO T (TOWER OF THE SUN), CONSTRUCTED
BEFORE 1970 FOR EXPO70, OSAKA, JAPAN.

64
As it is referred to by Sandler in The Confusion Era: Art and Culture of Japan During the Allied Occupation, 19451952, ex. cat., Smithsonian Institution, 1997.
65
Love, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 30, no. 1, spring 1975, pp96-8, p97.
66
Ozaki, Japanese Surrealism in the late 1930s: The Space of Formless Matter and the Space of Microscopic
Creatures, in Japanese Modern Art, ex cat, 1993, pp53-63, p53.
67
lActualit du surralisme a t chaque fois rinvente dans diffrents tournants historiques. Moriyuki, 2004,
p233.
68
Toman, Prague 1900-1938 Capitale Secrte des avant-gardes, Muse des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, ex. cat., 1997, p274.
69
Recent publications and conferences dedicated to International Surrealism have tended to maintain a
focus on Western European production, with perhaps additions of papers on Czechoslovakian or North American
Surrealism (such as the Across the Frontiers: International Surrealism conference at the University of Cambridge, 13th
of November 2009). Japanese, South America and other international movements continue to be excluded from the
discussion.
Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1923-1970
Introduction

21

Communicating Vessels:
The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1925-70
by Majella Munro

ADVANCE INFORMATION
Author: Majella Munro
Market: Art History/Japanese Art/Surrealism
ISBN: 978-1-909046-03-0
Publication date: November 2012
Extent: 280pp, 280mm x 216 mm,
portrait; 100 colour illustrations.
Binding: Paper Laminated Cover,
also available as an e-book
RRP: 39.95 $79.95

THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF SURREALIST ART PRODUCTION IN JAPAN

The first account to discuss Japanese Surrealism
both as part of an international Surrealist
movement and within its domestic art historical
context;
uses Japanese production as a case study
to advance understanding of Surrealism
internationally;
offers a critical account of ideological influences
active in previous scholarship on Japanese
Surrealism;
unprecedented examination of the reception of
the work of Japanese Surrealists by their French
counterparts;
contributes a new chronology of the
development of Surrealism in Japan;
the first examination of Surrealism in Japan

as a disaggregate movement with distinct

regional developments;
includes an important reassessment of the
political character of Surrealism in Japan,
France and elsewhere;
gives a new account of the extent and impact
of state intervention in Surrealism within
Japan;
offers the first intervention towards a cultural
history of psychoanalysis in Japan;
the first discussion of Japanese Surrealism
to include literary, sculptural, painterly and
photographic outputs.
includes 160 colour illustrations, many of
which are previously unpublished or by
artists unknown outside Japan.

Published by
ARTS AND PUBLISHING LIMITED
www.enzoarts.com/communicating-vessels
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ABOUT THE BOOK

From the early subversive poetic experiments of the 1920s avant-garde to the startling thematic and
aesthetic contributions of cinematic auteurs from the 1970s, Majella Munros history and analysis of the
influence of Surrealism in Japan presents many startling, provocative and important art works to Western
readers for the first time. Featuring work by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Terayama Shuji, Okamoto Taro, Takiguchi
Shuzo, Kawabata Yasunari, Yamamoto Kansuke and many others, this new publication uses the Surrealists
exploration of eroticism, the subconscious, and the nature of reality to provide an incisive and thoroughly
researched account of the development of modernism in Japan.

Histories of Surrealism typically concentrate on the provocations of French practitioners against
the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. The case of Japan, where Surrealists were directly imprisoned by
wartime authorities, presents an apposite study of the interaction of state and avant-garde, yet the Japanese
contribution is marginalised in existing accounts. Japan forms an excellent case study in the tensions and
problematics inherent in Surrealism, since it encompasses tensions between East and West; Imperialism and
anti-colonialism; totalitarianism and avant-garde radicalism; and issues of cultural assimilation and exchange.


Existing scholarship on Japanese Surrealism is limited, marred by inadequate attention to context;
by ideological and connoisseurial biases; and, in the case of international exchange, by a paucity of archival
research. Recently, increasing interest in Eastern European, Latin American and other Surrealist movements
has created a new context for scholarship, in which discourse can be geographically expanded, and in
which the Japanese movement can be reassessed. Investigating the specific cultural and political contexts
of Japanese Surrealism contributes to an understanding of the Surrealist movement as an international
whole. Japanese practitioners were thought to be isolated from the Parisian core of the movement, but
the relationships of Japanese artists with prominent European Surrealists allows the provincial, derivative
character given to Japanese Surrealism in previous accounts to be confronted, and opens the critical reception
and transmutation of European ideas to enquiry. By examining France and Japan comparatively, this new
publication provides a model of the dialogue between the Parisian core and the Japanese periphery.

Majella Munros incisive text also contributes to the wider field of Japanese art history. Scholarship
on Japanese art is dominated by enquiry into traditional, pre-modern art; research into modern and avantgarde art, particularly work produced before the end of World War II, has been less forthcoming. This new
volume, positioned at an intersection between discourse on the Surrealist movement as an international
collective; on Japanese modernism; and on the non-western avant-garde, contributes to several emergent
areas of enquiry, and interrogates how cultural movements might transcend nation and ideology during
times of conflict.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Majella Munro is an art historian, journalist and Japanologist whose research focuses on censorship
and cultural repression. She is interested in art production under totalitarian political regimes, inter- and
trans-national exchange within the avant-garde, and the sociological study of erotic art. After graduating
from the University of Cambridge with first class honours, she completed her Masters degree at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, specialising in the study of modern Japanese history;
this work was awarded Ivan Morris Prize in 2009. Majella concluded PhD research on the Japanese Surrealist movement under the supervision of Professor Dawn Ades at the University of Essex in 2011, where she
was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. During 2010 she was a Special Researcher at
Saitama University, Japan, where she conducted much of the research for the present volume. In late 2011
she was a visiting academic at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Understanding Shunga: A
Guide to Japanese Erotic Art (ER Books, 2008) and The Art Theatre Guild: Cinema and Subversion in Japan
(forthcoming, The Enzo Press).

Communicating Vessels is published by

ARTS AND PUBLISHING LIMITED
www.enzoarts.com/communicating-vessels
order@enzoarts.com
Nielsen booknet distributor code 00273070