Mingei
In the late months of 1925, on a trip to see statues carved by the itinerant monk Mokujiki, three men — Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjirō, and Hamada Shōji — shortened minshūteki kōgei, crafts of the common people, into a new word: mingei. The following year, 1926, a prospectus for a Japan Folk Crafts Museum went out under four names, with Tomimoto Kenkichi added — exactly a hundred years ago now. The idea at its core was a paradox: a vessel made simply to be used turns out more beautiful than one made trying to be beautiful. And Yanagi explained why in Buddhist terms. When a nameless craftsman works without asserting the self, making only from necessity, that is where the beauty of other-power comes to rest — he laid Shinran's teaching that even an ordinary, flawed person can attain Buddhahood over the vessel itself. If this map's dedication points toward nameless hands, that is probably these three men's influence, still working on me. The relationship across the sea is one of the things worth watching in this band, too. Yanagi's concerns overlapped with William Morris's in England, but the two men answered differently. Morris remained, to the end, the designing individual; Yanagi placed the nameless craftsman above the individual artist. Yanagi himself denied any influence from Morris, saying he had begun before he ever knew of him — that is his own account, and scholars are divided on it. Then the current reversed. The English potter Bernard Leach studied in Japan, and in 1920 he and Hamada Shōji crossed together to St Ives in England and built a kiln. Modern English studio pottery starts from there. Japan received something, reshaped it, and sent it back — one of the most beautiful round trips on this whole map. One more thing, and I want to be honest about it. In 1922, when Korea's Gwanghwamun gate was about to be torn down, Yanagi wrote a five-part newspaper series against it, and the gate was preserved. At the same time, the way he saw beauty in Korean art — what he called the beauty of sorrow — has been criticized by Korean scholars as a colonizer's gaze, and that argument continues today. A man who saved a gate, and a man who is also criticized. Writing both seems like the honest thing to do.