KITAGAWA TAMIJI’S ART AND ART EDUCATION: TRANSLATING CULTURE IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO AND MODERN JAPAN

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the life and career of the Japanese painter, printmaker, and art educator, Kitagawa Tamiji (1894-1989), and his conception of Mexico as cultural Other. Today, Kitagawa is widely recognized in Japan as an artist and educator, whose thought and practices were deeply inspired by his long-term residence in postrevolutionary Mexico (1921-1936). Kitagawa left Japan at the age of twenty to study art in the United States. After engaging in several temporary jobs and briefly being trained at the Art Students League of New York, he went to Mexico in 1921, to eventually spend the next decade and a half working as an artist and art educator. Kitagawa’s conception and narrative of Mexican culture—especially that of the Mexican indigenous population—are noteworthy for an early twentieth-century artist/intellectual. Rather than seeing Mexico in terms of its widespread stereotype as a distant tropical country, he regarded the country as a key locus of the emerging anti-colonial notion of culture. Based on his experience in the utopian political/social milieu immediately after the Mexican Revolution (c.1910-1920), after his return to Japan, Kitagawa took Mexico as a crucial reference point in conceiving the future trajectory of post-1945 Japanese modernity. In this dissertation, Kitagawa’s career as an artist and educator will be investigated alongside the notion of “ethnography” as addressed by James Clifford in the late 1980s. Beyond the common understanding of the term within academic anthropology as a professional practice of participant observation and writing, Clifford defines ethnography as an omnipresent experience of displacement and cultural encounter in the contemporary global world shared by a variety of subjects such as immigrants, tourists, and “native” informants. Clifford emphasizes the experience of travel in ethnography, or a process of moving away from “home” in modern Euro-America, which often leads one to critical meditations on the normative cultural/political values in the West, including those represented by the discourse of nationalism, socio-economic progress and colonial domination over non-Western Other. According to Clifford and others, ethnography is a practice that prompts an alternative understanding of the modern/contemporary global world, in which the conventional boundary between “civilized” Self and “backward” Other has increasingly been blurred. Keeping Clifford’s notion of “ethnography” in mind, this dissertation argues that Kitagawa’s experience of travel over the Americas and his long-term residence in Mexico equipped him with an ethnographic perspective of modernity. After his return to Japan, expressing such critical standing on modernity, Kitagawa embarked on a difficult task of cultural translation in order to exercise his Mexican-inspired art and pedagogy within a post-1945 Japanese social context. His activities revolved around knowledge of the cultural Other that emphasized an alternative mode of modernity. In negotiating the dominant West-centered narrative of culture, Kitagawa’s art and pedagogy dealt with social ethics and worldviews that were inherently incompatible with the dominant ideologies of Western modernity.