Japan

Although I spent some time in Japan as the guest of the Japan Foundation, my knowledge of the country is very limited. I am therefore most grateful to John Gehl for sending us this bio of the Japanese master painter and woodengraver Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): "He produced an astounding assortment of 300,000 works of art, including silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, travel drawings, paintings and sketches. He is most famous for his "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji", a series of prints, one of which, "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa," has become a timeless icon and a great inspiration for generations of painters. Hokusai's images mostly depicted the Japanese countryside, people and legends, and the influence of his prints can be found in the work of many European impressionists like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

Hokusai was born in the neighborhood of Tokyo, known then as Edo. His father was Nakajima Issai, a mirror-maker of some prominence. As a youth Hokusai worked as a clerk in a lending bookshop, and between the ages 15 to
18 he served an apprenticeship as a wood-block engraver. His master was Katsukawa Shunsho, famous for his prints in the ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") style. As an apprentice of Shunsho, Hokusai produced tens of thousands of prints, paintings and illustrations, including single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors, hand paintings, and surimono ("printed things"), such as greetings and announcements. Ultimately however, Hokusai fell out with Shunsho, and moved out to work on his own in what turned out to be a long and prolific career.

Hokusai was an energetic artist, rising early and working well into the night. He also had an extremely restive nature, manifested in the number of times he changed residences -- more than 90 in his lifetime -- and his penchant for publishing under different names (between 30 to 50 by some counts). The professional names he seemed to prefer included Shunro, Sori, Kako, Taito, Gakyojin, Iitsu, and Manji. But Hokusai is the name by which he
is best remembered. Though famed for his detailed prints and illustrations, Hokusai also produced huge paintings (as large as 2,000 square feet) for showing at festivals held in Tokyo and Nagoya. Once he was even summoned to demonstrate his artistic skills before the shogun himself.

Hokusai produced much of his most important work after the age of 60, and at the age of 80 he was still busy producing many fine prints. He often expressed his desire to live beyond the age of ninety, so that, in his own words, "I might become a true artist." But Hokusai was to die 1849 at age 89, after a phenomenal 70 years of continuous artistic creation. Today his work is honored and remembered in a Museum bearing his name that was opened in 1976 at Obuse, a town in central Japan.

See http://www.artelino.com/articles/hokusai.asp to get some illustrations of Hokusai's style; and you might also want to take a look at the Amazon page
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374332630/newsscancom/ref=nosim
for Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain.

Kawabata was born in Osaka. His parents died when he was three years old, and by age sixteen he found himself alone in the world -- his grandmother, grandfather, and sister all having died by then. This may explain his lifelong preoccupation with death, aging, guilt and isolation. Kawabata graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and two years later published his first successful book, the partly autobiographical novel The Izu Dancer. About the same time, together with the writer Yokomitsu Riichi, he founded the journal "The Artistic Age," which became the organ of the group of Neosensualist artists to which he belonged. The Neosensualists drew inspiration from the post-World War I Dadaists and Expressionists, finding elements in these modern movements that bore similarities with Japan's 17th century prose and its 15th century verse. Kawabata is probably best known for three novels: Snow Country (1948), Thousand Cranes (1949), and The Sound of the Mountain (1952). In these novels he tells the stories of a the relationship between a man of artistic sensibility and a beautiful geisha, and that between a young man and his father's former mistresses and one of their daughters.

Critics praise him for his evocative, haunting descriptions, his emphasis on setting as much as on character, and his open-ended plots. In their opinion, these are qualities that made him the most "Japanese" of modern writers because these were the same qualities that are found in many works of the classical canon. In 1970 Kawabata's protégé, the brilliant writer and political activist Mishima Yukio, committed ritual suicide in a spectacular protest against modern Japan's abandonment of Samurai ideals. Two years later Kawabata also took his own life by gas in the privacy of his workroom.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679761047/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Kawabata's Snow Country .

Ronald Hilton -

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