DESIGN THEORY AND HISTORY OF MODERN JAPAN Haruhiko Fujita 1. Introduction It is my honor to have an opportunity to give a lecture at the Residenza di Studi Superiori for the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna. I am very grateful to Professor Alessandro Freddi for his invitation and leadership in our project. I am also thankful to Professor Raffaele Milani for his friendship and scholarship. We first met several years ago in Turkey. Therefore, we are relatively new friends, but very kindred, specializing in landscape and environmental aesthetics, with a strong interest in design. (Slide 1) This is the jacket of my new book entitled ICONOLOGY OF THE UNIVERS, Macrocosm and Microcosm in Western Art. The picture is the Battle of Issus by a German painter, Albrecht Altdorfer. I met Professor Milani around there on an after-congress tour and we together climbed up to the top of a mountain, Nemrutdagi which looks very much like this conical mountain painted by Altdorfer. On the top of the mountain, there are huge statues of a king of Konmagene and gods and a goddess. Kingdom of Konmagene was a small kingdom existed between the East and the West in 2-1 century B.C. after the empire of Alexander the Great and before the Roman empire. There are a few statues of the sun god, Mithras, which is also Apolon in an inscription on the back of the statue. They made two sets of the same statues and erected toward the east and toward the west on the mountaintop. Therefore, it was a very appropriate place where a landscape aesthetics specialist of the West and that of the East first met. Anyway, I described a history of images of the sun, the moon, the earth, and stars, in western art, started from Greek architecture and vase painting, through many Italian examples such as mosaic paintings of Ravenna and Roma, paintings of Girogio Vasari, Rudovico Cigoli, a close friend of Galileo Galilei, Claude Lorrain or Donato Creti of Bologna, to some modern painters of the 20 th century. As a token of our friendship, I presented a copy to Professor Freddi, another to Professor Milani, and would like to present the other to your library. Unfortunately, it is only in Japanese. But, I hope some of you can read Japanese, or you could decipher Japanese texts with the help of more than 200 figures. Anyway, this was to show what I am doing and it is an introduction to my lecture, Design Theory and History of Modern Japan.
2. The Kobu Bijutsu Gakko and Italian artists. 1876 I would like to start with Japan s encounter with Western art represented by a few Italian artists in the 1870 s. In 1870, a few years after the Meiji Restoration, Department of Public Works was created to undertake a variety of new national projects including railway, shipbuilding, mining industry, iron and steel manufacture, telephone and telegraph, as well as lighthouse system. Next year, the Imperial College of Engineering was established in Tokyo to educate engineers for services in the Department of Public Works. Almost of all officers of the newly-opened Imperial College was from Britain. Principal Henry Dyer was from the University of Glasgow, Professor of Natural Philosophy was from University College, London; Professor of Mathematics was from the University of Edinburgh; Professor of Chemistry was from Queen s University, Ireland; Professor of Drawing was from Royal School of Mines, London; and Professor of English Language & Literature was from the University of Aberdeen. In 1874, however, Minister of Public Works, Hirobumi Ito, proposed to hire three Italian teachers for the Imperial College of Engineering. Ito had got an advice from Conte Alessandro Fe, an Italian envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. Conte Fe emphasized the importance of art and the superiority of Italian art. In response to Japan s request, Italian government chose Antonio Fontanesi (1818-82) for painting, Vincenzo Ragusa (1841-1927) for sculpture, and Giovanni Vincenzo Cappeletti (n.d.-1887) for architectural drawing. Among three Italian teachers, Fontanesi was most respected, and left considerable influence among the first generation of Western-style painting in Meiji Japan. He first introduced the materials, techniques, and theory of Western oil painting to Japan. Fontanesi was born in Reggio d Emilia and educated in its academy. He fought twice for Italian independence from Austria in 1848 and 1859. He was in Bologna during early and late summer of 1859. He became professor of landscape painting at the Turin Academy of Art from 1869 to 1876 when he joined Ragusa and Cappelletti as one of three art instructors for the Imperial College of Enginnering. Art School of the Imperial College of Enginnering was opened in November 1876. There were Division of Painting and Division of Sculpture. There was no architecture division. Cappelletti taught drawing. Because of serious illness, Fontanesi returned to Turin in 1878, and resumed teaching there again, but died four years later. In Tokyo, in 1883, government economies and doubts about rapid Westernization closed down the Art School of Imperial College
of Engineering which belonged to the Department of Public Works. The history of art education in Japan was going to be restarted in several years by the Ministry of Education instead, on a non-western principle. After more than 120 years from its closing down, the Art School of the Department of Public Works could be now reinterpreted as a pioneering design school rather than art school in Japan. This is not only because they were for the Imperial College of Engineering, but also because they brought up at least two important painters who played very significant roles in the history of design education in Japan. Chu Asai who had studied under Fontanesi became the first professor of design at the Kyoto Higher School of Art and Technology founded in 1902, Hisashi Matsuoka, a classmate of Asai at the Art School, who afterward studied in Rome, became the first principal of the Tokyo Higher School of Art and Technology founded in 1924. Therefore, the genealogy of the two governmental design schools in Kyoto and Tokyo could be traced back to the Art School of the Imperial College of Engineering run by the Department of Public Works. 3. After the Kobu Bijutsu Gakko (Governmental Zuan achools) Because the Art School of the Department of Public Works was short-lived, it is often treated as a pre-history of official history of art education in Japan. More official history started with Tenshin Okakura (1862-1913) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), an American lecturer at the University of Tokyo and an admirer of Japanese art. Met with Fenollosa as a student, Okakura decided to restore the value of Japanese art. He first entered the Ministry of Education and organized a protection of old Japanese art. He founded in 1890 the first Japanese art academy, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko. When the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko was founded in 1887, it consisted of kaiga, chokoku, and zuan departments. Kaiga department was for Japanese painting, chokoku department was for mostly wooden Japanese sculpture, and zuan department was for design. As were the cases of painting and sculpture departments, zuan department was perhaps for Japanese design. However, the term zuan itself was a newly coined term for design when Japan participated in the World Exposition of Vienna in 1873. Zu means drawing, and an means plan or idea. While Japanese painting kaiga and Japanese sculpture chokoku departments got an enough number of students, design zuan department failed to attract young people. So, the zuan department was changed into kogei department for craft. It was perhaps too early for Japanese society to introduce a division of art labor into designer and craftsman. Japanese craftsman was a designer-craftsman.
At that time, however, Japanese society was drastically changing. Within a decade, three governmental schools opened zuan-ka which means the department of design. The first one was the academy of art, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko itself. The school started by Okakura and Fenollosa could not keep its pure Japanese line. There was a pressure from Westernization fractions. There was a new rise of young generation who studied painting in Paris. They introduced western painting at the academy, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko in 1896, when the department of design zuan-ka was also started or re-started. In 1897, kogyo-zuan-ka was established at the Tokyo School of Technology, later Tokyo Higher School of Technology. Kogyo-zuan literally means Industrial Design. It was perhaps one of the first departments of industrial design in the world. In 1902, another department of design was established at the newly opened Kyoto Higher School of Art and Technology where Japanese teachers who had studied in Paris and London became first professors. It was perhaps this school where a young American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited in 1905 and criticized their collection. Wright wrote, I quote, the collection of this school consists of the worst of French, German and Renaissance, rows of foreign horrors. I almost believe that this Renaissance was not Italian Renaissance but the so-called neo-renaissance made in some other Western countries. 4. Isho versus Zuan As I mentioned, zuan is a Japanese equivalent for English design. But, there was another comparable term in Japan, which is isho. While zuan was a coined term introduced in the Meiji era, isho was a kind of old or quaint word used since the eleventh century. Because its use was rather limited among intellectuals, it was nearly forgotten in the Meiji era, years of rapid Westernization. In 1888, a law for design protection was legislated in Japan. It was isho-ho, Design Act or Design Protection Act based on similar acts in Western countries such as Britain s Patents, Designs, and Trade Marks Act laid down in 1883. A member of government committee explained it in the Diet as follows: The isho-ho is a new act that is necessary for the progress of things and affairs. Because we do not have any equivalent word for Design in English, we decided to use the term isho for it. Isho was a quaint word excavated and adopted as a Japanese equivalent for English design, when there was hardly any design activity in Western or English meaning in Japan. But, it is difficult to believe that there was no design activity in Japan before the Meiji era. How about the ukiyoe prints of the Edo period? How about
the world renowned Katsura palace built in the early 17 th century? The explanation of isho for the Diet in 1888 was in a sense correct. Isho is not exactly the same as design. Or, we may be able to say that isho is similar to design, but quite different in some very important aspects. In this sense, it was unfortunate that the word isho was adopted as an Japanese equivalent for English design.