宗悦は文化に何を為したか：民藝運動の挫折What Did Soetsu Do for Culture? The Setback of the Mingei Movement

Recently, I visited the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan) in Tokyo. Although it was a weekday and the museum is far from the nearest station, I was surprised by the constant stream of visitors. It seemed to me that people today are searching for a “lost heat.”

The concept of mingei (民藝) was proposed in 1926 by Soetsu Yanagi (1889–1961). It was born as a reaction against the expanding market for industrial goods.

In Soetsu’s definition, mingei means the crafts that ordinary people use every day, practical things deeply bound up with human life. These were formerly called zakki (雑器), everyday wares.

But go to the museum Soetsu left behind, nearly a hundred years later, and you can see that the mingei movement largely failed. Where did his theory of mingei go wrong? I see it as a confusion of bunka and culture.

Soetsu, who learned from D. T. Suzuki, applied Zen thought to his theory of mingei and spoke often of the importance of mingei born of mushin (無心), no-mind, and muso (無想), no-thought. The problem was that he asked for expert evaluations of beauty to be applied to mingei.

Mingei is born from the environment of place in which people actually live. It is generated thoroughly in a “limited place,” and it is the bunka of a place that cannot be reduced to a unified space called “Japan.”

As the word muso says, there is no firm will of a subject there. Mingei was created in the predicate-based world of Japanese, which has no subject. This is the essence of bunka, which is not culture.

Bunka has no completion. It is always in an eternal moment.

The concept of time and space as past, present, and future, which belongs to a world of the subject, does not exist there, and in it people lived their lives. What is lost in the process is lost. There lies the heart of wabi-sabi.

Because mingei is bunka, there is no point in an expert’s evaluation of its beauty, or in claiming its superiority over the established concept of “crafts.”

Yet Soetsu set up the types of crafts as follows. The former and the latter are placed in opposition, which shows that he brought the modern into the concept of bunka.

●Aristocratic Crafts: Aristocratic – Individual – Exceptional – Conceptual – Discerning

●Mingei: Folk – Communal – Ordinary – Non-conceptual – Unpretentious

Behind his search, through mingei, for an equal relationship between officials and the people lies the influence of Taisho Democracy (大正デモクラシー), a great current in Japan at the time. The Taisho era ran from 1912 to 1926, and since Soetsu’s mingei movement began in 1926, he was deeply influenced by it.

When the heat of the Taisho era cooled, Japan pressed on toward statism and war. Soetsu, fixing mingei as a defined thing while trying to reduce it to a single space of unified control, came at last to declare that mingei is “the craft among crafts.” By that act he did not notice that he was erasing what makes mingei mingei, its place. There the source of bunka’s ending was prepared.

This was not true of Soetsu alone. The view of Japan taken through a half-adopted Western frame in those years always carries this entanglement. They look like traditionalists, but the fact is the opposite. The very concept of “tradition” in Japan is a new word that became common in the 1920s, and it has nothing to do with bunka.

Soetsu is told to this day as the one who deserves credit for mingei, but the way his theory was built opened the way for mingei, and bunka with it, to be stopped at its last breath. The people who lived in their places went out of sight, and people were drawn into the circuit of becoming a nation.

Why, against Soetsu’s own wish, did the best produce the worst? Because he brought the concept of culture straight into bunka, set mingei in the same category as the crafts of the aristocracy in the context of culture, and discussed bunka from there.

Regrettably this became the base of mingei theory, and mingei was swiftly taken into the commodity market. As a result, against Soetsu’s own theory, mingei objects were shown in museums, cut off from contact with people by a showcase, and became mere exhibits that had lost their use in actual life. Only being “nameless” came to mark mingei.

With the outcome of the mingei movement looking like this after a hundred years, it is plain that it had no effect at all. In achieving a place in museums on a par with the crafts of the aristocracy, or as a variant of them, the theory of mingei, ironically, never looked at mingei itself. That is Soetsu’s limit, and the one who broke through it was the dyeing artist Keisuke Serizawa (1895–1984), a close friend of Soetsu.

Soetsu’s theory does not stand on the side of bunka, and it sees neither place nor the people who live in it. What it sees is a Japan on the way to being unified, and mingei is placed in that.

What presence does mingei have without the grime of hands and the feel of skin?

What life does mingei have once it is cut off from people’s actual lives?

Mingei in our time should have held the possibility of an actual experience that restores people, who in the modern age have become social agents to a high degree, from alienation. Sadly, that chance is now lost, and people have been forced to drift in search of the “lost heat.”

Soetsu Yanagi for mingei, Kunio Yanagita for folklore studies, and D. T. Suzuki for Zen are valued around the world. Yet while speaking of the bunka of people who live their lives, their theories ran together with the current in which that bunka became invisible, and with the circuit of the coming statism.