JAPAN-YOMIURI NEWS
Above, portraits of Edo artists are on display at the Tahara Municipal Museum.
JAPAN-YOMIURI NEWS
Watanabe Kazan painted many scenes of life in Japan in the mid-19th century.
TAHARA, Aichi >> Donald Keene, who brought the charms of Japanese literature to the world in his later years a book on Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841).
A painter of the past Edo era (1603-1867) and servant of the Tahara clan, which presided over Tahara, today Aichi Prefecture, Kazan tragically ended his life under the pressure of his Western concepts at the moment when the country was about to open up. its borders to the outside world after three hundred years of isolation.
What attracted Keene to Kazan?
The exhibition Donald Keene and Watanabe Kazan, held at the Tahara Municipal Museum, offers some answers.
The museum, on the ruins of Tahara Castle, opened in 1993 and the special exhibition celebrates the museum’s 30th anniversary. Keene served as the museum’s honorary director from 2017 until 2019, when he passed away.
Kazan showed his skill as a painter in search of realism. He painted many portraits that captured the individuality of other people in a realistic way, as well as works depicting everyday scenes of other people in the Edo period. His works remain highly regarded to this day. .
Kazan was also interested in Western knowledge, including practical skills, during Japan’s period of seclusion. He compared Western studies with China’s import, Confucianism, which at the time was the standard of learning for the samurai class. He believed that if one was obsessed with conceptual studies over the practical, one was a “frog in a well” and that national defense was at risk.
Such a thought was seen as a complaint from the Tokugawa shogunate, and Kazan was arrested in 1839 and placed under space arrest at his family’s estate in Tahara, far from his family’s apartment in Edo (present-day Tokyo) where he had been born and raised. . In 1841, Kazan committed suicide in Tahara.
Keene, who died at the age of 96, wrote a series of reviews about Kazan in magazines, followed by the publication of a book titled “Watanabe Kazan” in English in 2006 and in Japanese the following year. However, his encounter with Kazan goes back half a century earlier.
According to Keene’s e-book, his interest can be traced back to two illustrations from “The Western World and Japan,” published in 1949 by British diplomat and historian George Sansom. One of the illustrations, drawn across Kazan, showed Kazan with his hands tied behind his back as he was interrogated through two samurai. Keene wrote that the e-book showed how harshly Kazan had been treated after his arrest for his excessively pro-Western leanings.
The book’s descriptions are arranged alongside the works by Kazan and are notated with Keene’s opinions. For example, next to the “Isso-hyakutai Zu” drawings that depict the lives of Edo people, including a goldfish merchant, Keene praises the work, saying that he could think of no other pieces that so vividly and effectively illustrate the lives of the people in the capital in that era.
“I think Keene-san was very sympathetic toward Kazan,” said Yosuke Kimura, a curator. Kimura quotes Junichiro Tanizaki, an iconic writer from the late Meiji (1868-1912) into the Showa (1926-89) eras, who wrote that Keene studied and introduced Japanese literature with a firm foundation and knowledge of Western civilization.
“Kazan was an honor student who was educated in Confucianism and studied with some of the leading Confucian scholars of his time. With this as his base, he started studying Western knowledge,” Kimura said. “I think Keene-san saw himself in Kazan.”
For more information, taharamuseum. gr. jp.
Have comments? Learn more here.
Click here to see our full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak. Submit your coronavirus news tip.
Scroll Up