Folk experience
Tanya Harrod
Mngei was a neologism coined in 1925 by the Japanese philosopher and art critic Yanagi Soetsu and his two potter friends Kanjiro Kawai and Hamada Shoji to describe a family of objects that they collectively admired and which they feared would cease to be made in the face of rapid industrialisation. The European equivalent of mingei (from minshuteki kogei — 'art of the people') would be folk or popular art, while the mingei movement as it developed between the wars had a good deal in common with the Arts and Crafts Movement in late-19th-century England. But there were striking differences that become apparent once inside Yanagi Soetsu's Nihon Mingeikan (Japan Folk Craft Museum) in West Tokyo. The building alone is worth a visit as an antidote to the hallucinatory high-rise neon skyline of trendy Shibuya and Shinjuku. Since the museum opened in 1936, the chic little suburb of Komaba has sprung up around it, making its oya stone and wattle and daub walls, its magnificent timber interior inspired by the vernacular farmhouses of Japan, and its sweeping stonetile roof look especially romantic and incongruous.
The Mingeikan is not an ethnographic collection in the spirit of Skansen in Sweden or the Folk Craft Museum outside Oslo. It is more selective and, though dedicated to handwork, it is informed by a modernist spirit. Mingei and mingei objects are plainer and starker than anything produced or admired by the Arts and Crafts Movement at its height in the 1880s.
Yanagi Soetsu belonged to the avant-garde Shirakaba group of writers and intellectuals, and he wrote one of the first major studies of William Blake as well as passionately admiring Cezanne and German Expressionism.
The folk art he collected was strong on formal strength and testifies to the beauty of everyday objects in Japan and interwar colonised Korea. There are deerskin fireman's jackets with stencilled crests, casually drawn otsu-ye paintings sold at Otsu to pilgrims, emblematic carved shop signs, cast-iron kettles and massive sculptured blocks of wood carved into hook shapes from which these kettles were suspended. One real surprise are the objects from Britain dotted about the museum — a selection of Windsor chairs, a couple of long-case clocks, mediaeval jugs and country slipware and embroidered samplers, as well as weaving and ceramics by interwar craftsmen and women such as Ethel Mairet, Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach.
Bernard Leach is, of course, the link. He lived in Japan from 1909 until 1920 and was a close friend of all the mingei leaders, especially Yanagi and Hamada. Although he subsequently became something of a bore about Japan, writing in a cloudy mystical way about the union of East and West, it was there that he found real artistic fulfilment and where he never lacked patrons and admirers. In fact, the Mingeikan forms the starting point for a mingei trail round Japan full of surprises and delight.
First go north to Mashiko (best reached by car, though a train and a bus will take you there) to see the remarkable Mashiko Reference Collection, housed in a group of beautiful thatched traditional buildings bought and reassembled there by the potter Hamada Shoji in the 1930s. Hamada collected an extraordinary group of objects from all over the world — Pueblo baskets, Persian bowls, Korean moon jars, Aboriginal art, English gate-legged tables and, of course, a group of Windsor chairs.
Another fascinating mingei museum is attached to the Sakuma family pottery and there is also the Mashiko Ceramic Art Centre, which has fine displays of work by most of the local potters.
Heading south to Kyoto, Kanjiro Kawai's house is maintained faithfully as a museum by his daughter and granddaughters. It is deeply atmospheric, as if Kawai had just walked out of the door, and bears witness to that shared, distinctive mingei taste — more massive wooden kettle hooks collected for their sculptural beauty, a Korean stove and carved shop signs mixed in with the bamboo furniture and cubist brass pipes designed by Kawai together with a selection of his radical calligraphy and curious faceted pots. The house is in the potters' quarter of Kyoto, and as with Hamada we get the sense of an intellectually minded artist turning away from his privileged background to lead the simple life.
Finally, the fine Ohara Museum of Art in the pretty town of Kurashiki (about an hour by train from Kyoto) devotes one or two rooms each to Leach, Hamada, Kawai and to the potter Tomimoto Kenchichi (who subsequently repudiated mingei), the faux-naive printmaker Shiko Munakata, and to the textile designer Keisuke Serisawa. Ohara Magosaburo was an idealistic textile magnate who also paid for the construction of Yanagi's Mingeikan in Tokyo. Although there are plenty of other mingei collections to see in Japan, the wheel comes neatly full circle in Kurashiki.
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