Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. xvii, 314 pp. (Illustrations.) US$72.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7828-3.
Charlotte Eubanks delves into the life of Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2002), artist and traveler famous for the Nuclear Panels (Genbaku no zu) produced in the aftermath of the atomic bombings. The book combines a visual analysis of artworks and sketches with a textual analysis of travel diaries and essays in an attempt to examine the relations between art and politics between the 1930s and 1950s. It also seeks to explain the inaction of Akamatsu when facing the Empire of Japan’s colonial enterprise and expansionism.
In the Introduction, Eubanks explains her particular theoretical framework through the use of the concepts of “microhistory” and “persistence.” Microhistory is described as the reconstruction of history at the micro-level in order to erode established structures. Though this viewpoint sometimes mixes with a biographical approach, it does pay detailed attention to other cultural actors. Persistence is defined as a concept fundamentally different from others such as agency, complicity, resistance, and resilience. It is defined as a grey area in which subjects act within a contradiction between a compromised political position and a privileged socio-economic one.
Chapter 1 traces Akamatsu’s early years in Hokkaido as a member of a settler colonial family. Eubanks highlights that Akamatsu’s earliest surviving pieces reveal that the artist was looking with “imperial eyes,” as she was influenced by the influx of Western forms associated with the Empire of Japan’s cultural projects and her own state-sponsored education. This chapter covers Akamatsu’s writings while traveling through Micronesia in 1940, where she spent five months. By performing a simultaneous textual analysis of her published and private writings, as well as a visual analysis of the sketches that accompanied them, Eubanks shows Akamatsu’s “neo-anthropological tendency to exoticize and romanticize” in her published writings, as well as her desire “to engage with native peoples and customs in a direct, interpersonal, authentic manner” (48) in her private writings.
Chapter 2 delves into the period between 1940 and 1945, in which Akamatsu worked illustrating children’s books with an imperialistic undertone. By describing the nationalized infant culture of the Empire as a counterpart to the policies of development performed in the colonies (ulteriorly, both being mechanisms to recruit servants to the Empire), Eubanks states that Akamatsu was reproducing an imperial way of producing culture. Yet, she also uncovers three strategies of resistance by the artist: i) a minimal level of engagement with militaristic material in her compositions, ii) an artistic gaze that accords full humanity to others, and iii) the use of artistic techniques learned from interwar proletarian arts (79–80).
Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the influence that interwar proletarian arts had on Akamatsu’s work. Akamatsu traveled to Moscow between 1937 and 1938 when she served as a governess and nanny; she traveled there again in 1941 when she served as an artistic mentor. Both households where she served were those of elite families of Japanese diplomats, yet Eubanks notices a variation in the way that Akamatsu portrayed Moscow in the sketches she produced in each case: while the 1937–1938 sketches portrayed street scenes and working people, most sketches from 1941 depicted the cultural events of higher classes. Eubanks attributes the difference to the increased income that Akamatsu received during the second stay. She then studies the influence that interwar proletarian arts had in Akamatsu’s postwar artworks. Akamatsu joined the Communist Party in September 1945 when she wrote for the party’s paper, The Red Flag (Akahata), and produced Russian-themed pieces for several presses. Eubanks agrees that many of Akamatsu’s works were propagandistic, yet she finds a tendency to prioritize a critique of gender relations: first, in her attempt to confront being reduced to the status of “wife of” Maruki Iri (whom she had married in 1941), and second, in the way in which she depicted women. Eubanks also looks at Akamatsu’s 1949 manifesto Anybody Can Make Art (E wa dare demo kakeru), in which the artist strips herself from the layers of education the Empire had imposed on her, advocating instead for a “bare naked aesthetics” (154) that comprised critical self-reflection.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Akamatsu’s works of the postwar period and turn to the question of the wartime responsibility of artists. Eubanks studies Akamatsu’s five-step plan to accomplish artistic and political recommitment in artists, those being: making a public confession, looking critically at Japanese art history, liberating and cultivating young artists, promoting art produced by labourers and farmers, and creating culture in view of changing the future. In chapter 6, Eubanks shifts from Akamatsu’s early interpretation of “art as crime” during the wartime to an interpretation of “art as direct action” during the later postwar period. The main object of study is the Nuclear Panels series that Akamatsu created with her husband between 1950 to 1952. Eubanks concludes that through the Panels Akamatsu gave closure to her contradictions regarding the wartime responsibility of artists, effectively transforming the “art as direct action” standpoint into a self-realization of the artist.
The Art of Persistence is a thoroughly researched account with a specific theoretical framework grounded on the notions of microhistory and persistence. It successfully brings light into the complexities of Akamatsu Toshiko’s life and interactions with the state and other agents of power, while defining and putting into practice a perspective that will prove useful for many art historians and Japanese studies scholars. Readers would benefit, however, from information about the last decades of Akamatsu’s life, a period only mentioned briefly throughout the book. Likewise, Akamatsu’s critique of gender relations in her postwar left-wing publications could derive benefit from the application of theoretical categories from the fields of gender studies in order to explain in detail the interactions of art, politics, and gender during postwar Japan. In general terms, this book is a most valuable contribution to academic debate which invites readers to think over the role of artists during war periods without making simplistic and oversimplified interpretations.
Matías Chiappe Ippolito
Waseda University, Tokyo