Kosei Kyoiku — Bauhaus pedagogy in Japan
Only four Japanese ever studied at the Bauhaus. Mizutani Takehiko entered at Dessau in 1927 and came home in 1930. The married couple Yamawaki Iwao and Yamawaki Michiko were there from 1930 to 1932. The last of them, Ono Tamae, arrived in 1933, and the school closed four or five months later. Someone translated what those four brought back into the language of the Japanese classroom: Kawakita Renshichiro. In 1932 he opened the New Architecture and Craft Institute in Ginza, the school people called Japan's Bauhaus. In 1934, with Takei Katsuo, he wrote Kosei Kyoiku Taikei, a book that put the foundation course — start from line, plane and material — into Japanese. Among the teenagers who enrolled there in 1933 was Kuwasawa Yoko. In April 1954 she founded Japan's first design school modelled on the Bauhaus, the Kuwasawa Design School. Two months after it opened, Gropius himself came to visit. Tokyo Zokei University followed in 1966. Water came in by a second door as well. Mukai Shutaro, born in 1932, went to the Ulm School of Design from 1963 on a JETRO design fellowship — and the people who taught him there were Max Bill and Otl Aicher. He came home in 1965 and in April 1967, with Abe Kimimasa, founded the Department of Science of Design at Musashino Art University: a second wave that arrived not straight from the Bauhaus but by way of postwar Ulm. (Mukai died in 2024.) Within the same decade, then, Japan received two answers: handwork by way of England in 1926 (Mingei), and the machine and geometry by way of Germany in 1932. It is not that one of them was right — I think both are needed. The composition exercises Japanese children still do in elementary school art class are downstream of this channel. One more thing. The single most famous image of the end of the Bauhaus was made by one of those four. Yamawaki Iwao's photomontage The Attack on the Bauhaus (1932): jackboots marching across the Dessau building. It was published in the Tokyo magazine Kokusai-Kenchiku and is now held at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. They did not only receive — they sent something back. A small instance of the shape this map likes best.