Did anybody see the exhibition Berlin – Tokyo / Tokyo – Berlin at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo last year? I wasn’t neither able to see the exhibition in Tokyo nor at the second venue in Berlin afterwards. The reviews in the German press were very positive (except on the contemporary part of the show) while the main English review of the exhibition in a Japanese newspaper was quite crushing: “Berlin/Tokyo: Invitation to a car wreck”.

Some better examples

While I cannot say anything about the exhibition, I found the catalogue to the exhibition very weak compared to previous exhibition catalogues about the relationship between the West and Japan. Just take for example the early publication “Japan und Europa 1543-1929″ (Berlin, 1993) which contains many elaborate essays as well as detailed descriptions of/ explanations to every piece exhibited; or take the more recent exhibition catalogue “Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500 – 1800” (Victoria &Albert Museum, London 2004) which contains very insightful essays on the early encounters between the West and Japan. I have seen the show and I kept it in my mind as a very important contribution to our knowledge about the cultural exchange in the early stage of the contact between the Far East and Europe.

Below expectation

The exhibition catalogue “Berlin – Tokyo / Tokyo – Berlin” does not meet the standard of the above mentioned catalogues for a very simple reason: the essays are so short that they just are able to name the absolute basic facts on either the Japanese or the German art history and the exhibited art works lack any explanatory comments. The complex discourse of the two cultures, the innovations and (sometimes positive) misunderstandings of a cultural transfer, the multilayered historical relationship are just touched superficially in the publication. For example the essay by Kotaro Iizawa on “Japanese photography and Berlin” is way too short to discuss the extreme enthralling encounter between the German New Vision and the Japanese Avant-garde photography in Kantô and Kansai. Iizawa referred for example to the Japanese photographer and publisher Yônosuke Natori, but unfortunately the exhibition missed the chance to illustrate the importance of Natori as a vital link between Germany and Japan.

Moreover some of the essays are a kind of autistic in regard to the title of the exhibition: often they just talk about the developments either in Berlin or in Tokyo without looking for any relationship between the two capitals or even mentioning the other town. But the missing dialogue between Tokyo and Berlin is clearly not the fault of Japanese and German authors like Kotaro Iizawa or Jaqueline Berndt (she writes on Manga in Tokyo), since they are well known and prolific specialists in their areas of research and since they know the Western _and_ the Japanese side of the cultural exchange. Unfortunatley most of the Western researchers on Modern art have no idea what happened in Tokyo in regard to their area of interest – which, to their excuse, often has a very practical reason: only in the recent years detailed information about Japanese art of the 20th century became available in Western languages. Nevertheless, all Japanese researchers and museum curators I met in Japan over the years had a deep understanding of Western art (modern and contemporary). Actually, I too was one of the Western ignorants when I did my first trip to Japan in the 1990th, but fortunately over the years several Japanese curators were very generous in taking their time to introduce me to several aspects of Modern Japanese photography.

Asymmetry

Besides the very reduced account of the dialogues of the two metropolis I missed also any reference on the entirely asymmetric relationship between the German (Western) and the Japanese art scene for most of the 20th century. In the catalogue you will find some authors writing, albeit much too short, about the influence of the German Avant-garde on Japanese art (Dada, Bauhaus, New Vision, e.g.), but I did not see _any_ passage on how Japanese Avant-garde influenced the German art scene.

Actually as far as I know this reverse influence never took place until the end of the 20th century [please correct me if I am wrong, I would love to learn about contrary evidence!]. It would have been very interesting to discuss why the German Avant-garde artists and critics did not appreciate Modern Japanese culture and art at all. This discussion would have needed to include the discourse about the self-conception and self-definition of the Western Avant-garde, especially in regard to the question if and how the art movements in the ‘periphery’ of the Western perception fit into the terms ‘Avant-garde’ and ‘Modernism’. Obviously the Japanese Modernism didn’t fit at all in the eyes of the Western critics and artists of that time.

In regard to the German influence on Japan, it diminished almost completely after WW II, except for a short intermezzo of the German so called Subjective Photography. In the 1950s the USA took over as the leading source of contemporary culture. The “Berlin – Tokyo” catlogoue reflects the diminished artistic dialogue between and Japan – but maybe unintentionally -, since it show merely no visible interaction/ relationship between the contemporary Japanese and German art works.

Bruno Taut: “I love Japanese Culture” – Really?

Coming back to the West, it seems that the West and the Western artists were exclusively interested in premodern Japan, its feudal culture, the old temples and shrines, the Zen aesthetics, Hiroshige’s wood cuts, e.g.. This romantic vision and version of Japan, which excluded the development of the modern Japanese society and culture completely, shaped the view of even the most avantgardist artists.

Just take one of the most prominent representative of the German- Japanese cultural exchange: the architect Bruno Taut, who fled 1933 via Switzerland to Japan and who wrote the highly influential book “Nippon seen through European Eyes” (1934) which soon became part of the curriculum at Japanese schools. Three years later, 1937,  Taut published as second book “Houses and People of Japan”, and in 1939, after Taut’s death, a collection of his essays was published in Japanese under the title “The rediscovery of the Japanese beauty”. This posthumous anthology reached an edition of around 400.000 until today.

While Taut was in search for the “pure” (which means traditional) Japanese aesthetics and architecture he despised anything modern in Japan. He even preferred every anonymous wooden Japanese house above any modern Japanese architect.

Nevertheless the press release of the Mori Art Museum to the exhibition “Berlin – Tokyo / Tokyo – Berlin” quoted Bruno Taut’s famous calligraphy “I love Japanese Culture” as evidence for the love of the Germans for Japanese culture.”1 Maybe if the author of the press release would have read Bruno Taut’s book “Houses and People of Japan” more carefully he would have found the following sentence, which contradicts Taut’s famous statement (my translation from the German edition of the book): “Tokyo and its main shopping street, Ginza! What was before noise for the eyes became a blare. I, the sensible one, overcame a terrible depression; I did not talk anymore and I already deeply regretted my travel to Japan. For to see such ugliness I did this exhausting trip [...]?

Color movie of Tokyo 1935

But, why today this post on the exhibition “Berlin – Tokyo/ Tokyo – Berlin” after the exhibition has ended many months ago? Because I am a huge fan of Modern Japanese culture, I appreciate the photographs of Japanese Shinkô Shashin (New Vision), and I am fascinated by the energetic life in modern Tokyo like it is decribed in the novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata (1930), but first and foremost because I just found a color movie of Tokyo from 1935 which shows how modern Tokyo was during that time – a Tokyo completely unknown and completely neglected by the German (Western) Avant-garde for many decades.

The video shows the main shopping district, Ginza, as well as the main entertainment district, Asakusa, of that time. Other places are for example Marunouchi and the famous “Imperial Hotel” by Frank Lloyd Wright which was destroyed in 1968.

PS: The photographs except the one from Kôyô Kageyama are not from the “Berlin – Tokyo” exhibiton. The exhibition just had less than a dozend Modern photographs. (-_-)