Introduction. By contrast with theater and film, Japanese women’s accomplishments in modern and avant-garde painting, sculpture, and calligraphy have until recently been overlooked or regarded as secondary or marginal. In the period leading up to 1945, art by women was not considered to be equal to art by men. In the 1980s, art historians, in particular Patricia Fister, uncovered the history of accomplished women artists in the Edo period, 17th to 19th centuries. It seemed reasonable to assume that the story continued into the 20th century, and indeed that is so. We are just beginning to learn more modern Japanese women’s art based on new research by such art historians as Yoshimoto Midori, Alexandra Monroe, and Alicia Volk. In 2001, the Tochigi Prefectural Fine Arts Museum in Japan staged an important exhibition, “Japanese Women Artists, 1930 to 1960,” filling many gaps in Japanese women’s art history, including photography. However, to single out women as a separate category has been questioned for artists as it has for women writers. Is there a “feminine/feminist” artistic style or perceived style? Should women stick to particular kinds of painting and themes? The basic question remains: to what extent had there been a failure to nurture or recognize the talent of women or to take them seriously in a culture which gave primacy to men? And if women were accepted in the art world, they were heavily encouraged to stick to Nihonga, Japanese style ink painting on paper or silk, and not to take up Yōga,Western style oil painting. That was for men. Moreover, it was not seemly for women to paint nudes.

Senior Women Artists. In September 1954, shortly after the Occupation had ended, Arima Satoe (1893-1978), a sixty-one year old oil painter of modest reputation, told the women’s editor of the English language Nippon Times that she had left her home in Kagoshima at the age of sixteen to study with a famous oil painter. She had to promise him that she would devote her life to painting and not marry. “I am sure that I could not have served two masters—a husband and art. Had I been married I should have given up my career.” Although she was the only woman selected to display work at the official Ministry of Education Art Exhibition in 1914, she barely managed to survive over the years by teaching art to children. Nine years after World Two (and two years after the Occupation), Arima finally had received distinction as one of two female judges appointed to the prestigious Nitten Art Exhibition in Tokyo. The four examples of her oil paintings displayed in the 2001 Tochigi exhibition catalogue reveal considerable charm but also indicate that she painted subjects considered appropriate for a woman. Entry into the art world remained a struggle, especially for women with unconventional styles and views. Many years later, in 1988, male art critic Tōno Yoshiaki attempted to explain the then relative lack of critical standing in Japan of women painters, specifically Kusama Yayoi, by saying: “She’s a Japanese, she’s a woman, she’s an artist, and she’s avant garde, These are the worst conditions.” (quoted by Alexandra Munroe).

With such comments in mind, the main issue of this theme, the visual arts, is the extent to which the creative talents and personal lives of women in popular and high arts and in crafts were promoted or further liberated in the aftermath of war and defeat. Senior women artists from the prewar and wartime periods continued to paint, and younger artists emerged. This raises many questions. How were women trained in the arts after 1945? What did they do with their skills? What themes did they depict? What materials did they use? What schools of Japanese and Western painting did they follow? Did they feel the need to study overseas or pursue their careers outside of Japan? In fact, several Japanese women artists who were high school or university students during the Occupation, 1945-1952, and who would later achieve considerable fame felt the necessity of going overseas, to New York City or to Europe, in the 1950s and 1960s in order to hone their talents, achieve their ambitions, or simply to visit museums and meet Western artists.

Amateur Art. Although the focus here is on trained women artists who painted as professionals, it is important to note that folk art, crafts, and amateur painting have an important place in Japanese cultural history. For centuries prior to the modern era, calligraphy, along with poetry and music, had been regarded as necessary accomplishments of aristocratic or middle upper class women. In the modern era, since drawing and calligraphy were taught in the pre-collegiate curriculum, ordinary Japanese were frequently adept in the arts and an eager audience for shows and exhibitions. Girls and women of the upper middle classes often took private lessons in painting as well as in music, flower arrangement, or the tea ceremony. In Japan’s major cities, apartment stores in addition to museums or academies were among the important venues for art displays. Illustrated art magazines and books were primary sources for those who could not go abroad and view originals in museums and exhibits. By the 1950s, art had also come to be utilized in Japan as a form of therapy for mental or psychological disorders.

Senior Women Artists. As indicated above by the comments of Arima Satoe, it had not been easy for Japanese women to gain formal technical training in the male-dominated world of fine arts prior to 1945, let alone respect, fame, or income. Women enrolled in art schools, usually separate women’s schools, took private lessons with sometime reluctant male teachers, joined art movements, and entered official and private art exhibitions, but they rarely pursued careers, especially if they married. Although some women became professionals, their names have been mostly unknown in histories of modern Japanese art. Until recently, the few women painters who came readily to mind from the prewar period included Takamura Chieko (1886-1938), an oil painter, and Uehara Shōen (1878-1949), an ink painter. Takamura became mentally imbalanced, and is best known through the love poetry dedicated to her by her famous sculptor husband. Uemura, who mainly portrayed Japanese woman in the safely conservative Nihonga style, enjoyed considerable respect. In 1948, she was the first woman to receive the emperor’s Order of Culture. However, no women woman ink painter came close in fame to such male stars as Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who was still on the scene during the Occupation years but tarnished by charges of war complicity. And no woman oil painter measured up in reputation to Fujita Tsuguji (1886-1968), who spent his early career in Paris during and after World War I, returning to Japan in the 1930s and lending his talents to heroic war art. After helping the Occupiers, at their orders, to confiscate Japanese war paintings, including his own, Fujita left Japan for good in 1949, settled in Paris, and converted to the Catholic faith.

We must now add the name of Oguri Yuki (1895-2000) to the list of distinguished Nihonga painters. Born in Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, she lived briefly as a child in Manchuria. Though she and her mother soon returned to Japan, her father was absent in Manchuria until his forced repatriation in 1947, a period of forty-two years. Oguri graduated from the Nara Women’s Normal College in 1917 and initially made her living as a language teacher while beginning formal lessons under a well-known artist in 1920. After gaining recognition on her second try for Girls Bathing (painted in 1925), she decided in her late thirties to pursue a professional art career. In 1932, she became the first women member of the Japan Art Institute. Though her work was regularly accepted, such as Women Bathing, 1938, she was a token presence. She also incurred temporary displeasure when at the age forty-three she married a much older man, a seventy-three year old Zen Buddhist monk. She apparently was not bothered by gender issues and pursued her painting, believing, according to art historian Yamada Nanako, “that marriage contributed a great deal to the formation of her character.” Oguri temporarily stopped painting in 1944, following her husband’s death. It is unclear whether or not she was inspired by new legal rights for women in the first stages of the Occupation. But she took up her brush again in 1947 and participated in the first postwar exhibit of the Japan Art Institute. She would soon also adopt a son and remain close to him and his future wife and children, often depicting them in her ink paintings. Though Oguri continued to paint figures in the Japanese style, she experimented with space, form, and color. Her brush work became increasingly detailed. Her women were more bold than demure. An example is Young Women, dating from 1951; the figure is dressed in a kimono, sports a permanent wave, and sits on a chair with crossed legs. Her painting, Portrait of Mrs. O, earned her a prestigious award in 1953. She enjoyed attending exhibits of European paintings in postwar Japan, and art historians have noted a blend of East and West in her output. Decades later, in 1980, Oguri was one of the recipients of the Order of Culture. In 2000, the years of her death at age 105, she honored with a retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art.

Despite barriers and hostility from the family and public, Japanese women began taking up Yōga or oil painting in the early 20th century. Two such venturesome women were Migishi Setsu (b. 1905-1999) and Katsura Yuki (1913-1991). Both refused to be categorized as amateur lady painters. Migishi painted figures and still life. She also married, in her case a supportive husband, and raised three children. More is known about Katsura. She came from former samurai stock and grew up in Tokyo, where her father was a professor of engineering. Home life was strict but filled with examples of Western art and music. As early as age fourteen, Katsura was ready to drop lessons in ink painting and shift to oils in defiance of her parents. When they finally permitted her to take lessons in the studios of famous Western style artists, she objected to restrictions to safely female subjects, such as flowers, fruit, or feminine women. For a while, she studied with the famous Fujita upon his return from France to Japan in the early 1930s; she even drew a male nude, a banned subject for women. Her early works in the mid-to-late 1930s were influenced by avant-garde currents but also by a desire to be original. She used pieces of newspaper and cloth, for example, in constructing collages, in short she preferred to take up non-figurative work. Art historian Alicia Volk has characterized her as a fiercely independent modernist. Migishi and Katsura exhibited with some success in the 1930s, and Katsura helped to found an avant-garde group called the Ninth Room Society in 1938. Nevertheless, women artists in general were on the fringe and suffered from discrimination, essentially from doing things that were not quite seemly or womanly. Women were second-class in ability; only men were geniuses. Katsura reflected on the question of women’s talent in a 1939 essay, “A Woman’s Insight.” Together, Migishi and Katsura would attempt to do something after 1945 about the marginalization of women artists. They would also experiment more freely in their own work during the Occupation years and after.

Occupation Years. Even though women artists had exhibited works or entered private and state-sponsored competitions on a limited basis before 1945, sometimes even winning prizes, it is a painstaking endeavor to identify new paintings, prints, or posters by women during the Occupation years. Until recently, illustrations of their work have simply been overlooked or neglected. Although the Tochigi exhibit provides valuable new evidence, even more examples would be welcome, including the work of women commercial artists. After 1945, Katsura worked to support herself in bombed out Tokyo and participated in new group shows. In November of 1946, she and Migishi also founded the Association of Women’s Painters (sometime called the Women’s Art Association), Jōryū Gaka Kyōkai. Though the group was little noted in the press, it grew rapidly from its small original membership to over sixty-five the following year. In April 1949, the association sponsored an exhibit of paintings by members at the Metropolitan Art Museum, Ueno Park, Tokyo, but critical reviews and a catalogue are either lacking or languishing in an archive. Volk credits the Occupation with helping Katsura to overcome feelings of self-doubt and to challenge authority, including social injustice. Her 1952 painting, Resistance, expressed her new confidence and signified her acceptance as an artist. In the late 1950s, Katsura, who remained unmarried, spent four years abroad, two years in Paris and two in New York. Back in Japan, 1961, her work became increasingly respected and sold well. Megishi won a prize from the Ministry of Education in 1951 for a work called Gardenias. She, too, went overseas, making a post-Occupation visit to France. In the 1970s, after her husband’s death and in her sixties, she left Japan again and spent twenty years living and painting in the south of France. In 1994, she was named a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government.

Atomic Bomb Art. A senior woman oil painter who would become internationally famous after 1950 but who struggled, together with her artist husband, to make a living during and after the war was Akamatsu Toshiko (Maruki Toshi, 1912-2000), born in Hokkaido, the daughter of a Buddhist priest. In 1940, she apparently took an assignment to tour Southeast Asia and paint scenes of Japan’s mandates under the League of Nations, one of which was done on the island of Yap. She had also been in Moscow in 1937. One of her wartime paintings, “Hunger,” 1944, suggests a subsequent decision not to paint war art. By 1948, she would become an atomic bomb muralist, together with her ink painter husband, Maruki Iri, and an illustrator in her own right of children’s books (see her on people for this site). She was agonizingly conscious of the importance of depicting female victims of the bomb. The two exhibited in Japan and in Europe, beginning in the 1950s, and came to the United States in 1970, but her separate output was overlooked. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, the English language periodical, Japan Quarterly (published by the Asahi Newspaper) provided a few illustrations of her husband’s non-nuclear paintings but none of hers when featuring currents in Japanese art. She became increasingly well-known through the jointly produced A-bomb murals and translations of her illustrated children’s books, such as Pika-don (The Atomic Blast).

Although there is no counterpart in Japan to the professional atomic bomb art of the Marukis, numerous drawings by children and adults who survived the blast also bear witness to their experience. A large number of these images became public in the 1970s when NHK, Japan’s main television network, sponsored an exhibition and television documentary. Many photographic examples exist, incidentally, of devastation in Japan’s major cities from B-29 fire bombs, but no great fire bomb art seems to have emerged in the immediate postwar years.

Women as Subjects. As indicated, until recently, there few illustrations in art books or catalogues of paintings by women artists during the Occupation period. However, women made frequent appearances in art by men. Indeed, for centuries, Japanese women, mostly those considered to be beauties (or male Kabuki actors impersonating women), had been a favorite subject, or object, of male artists. The female nude had been introduced by 1900 in Japanese modern art; rarely is there a painting of a male nude. During the Occupation, images of women figured prominently not only in paintings and prints but also in Japanese poster art or in ads for goods and entertainment--and occasionally for causes, such as labor demonstrations.

Since early postwar representational art by male artists dominated Japan’s art scene, whether reflecting on daily life or the recent war, it requires attention. Among images of women in a modified Nihonga style, there is “Mary of Akita,” painted in 1948 by Fukuda Toyoshirō. His “Mary” is a farm woman who is breast-feeding a baby boy in a barn-like setting in northern Japan. Critics have noted its resemblance in color and form to the work of French painter Paul Gaughin. It reminds one of a 1947 stamp issued in commemoration of the new constitution—a mother holding a baby boy. New rights but old roles, seems to be the message. Woodblock print artists in postwar Japan also returned to images of women as well as to landscapes and cityscapes. By the 1950s, perhaps the most famous, certainly to foreigners, was Munakata Shiko, who also created many arresting images of women. In addition, male artists had begun to experiment in new forms of non-representational modern art and would become even bolder after 1952. One of the most striking oil paintings from the Occupation period is Tsuraoka Masao’s Heavy Hands, 1949. It is an abstract, avant-garde rendering of a figure with ponderous hands. Another famous piece is Quo Vadis, or Where Are We Going?”. Painted in 1950 by Kitawaki Noboru, it illustrates a man, perhaps a war veteran, in a drab and baggy suit, standing with his back to the viewer. Ahead of him is an obscure path across a vast plain with an indistinct line of people. Storm clouds hover on the right corner horizon.

Of great interest to the story of war and women are images produced by oil painter Furusawa Iwami (1912-2000), an army war veteran who returned to the Japanese art scene in 1947. As in the case of writer Tamura Taijirō, he was already in his thirties when recruited by the Japanese army; served several years on the China front, and was repatriated in 1946. One of his themes upon return was female nudes, such as Comfort and Agony, 1949, and Nude, 1951. His art of the flesh or of the body seemed to parallel Tamura’s literature of the flesh. Elise Grilli, art critic for the English language Nippon Times, called his nudes “exquisite” in a review of an October 1954 exhibit. “His drawings,” she said, “reveal him to be an excellent draftsman with a fine and sensitive line quality, and with an amiable and decorative handling of the human nude, female.” Yet he also engaged in allegory by adding “a fillip of the bizarre by juxtaposing something slimy or sensational next to these sinuous curves and pale, velvety flesh. The result produces the desired shock,” for example Venus wearing the head of a fox or Medusa with a crown of snakes. Many years later, Furusawa, for reasons not fully explained in art history books, would render a series of searing lithographs of Japanese war atrocities in Asia, including rape and military sexual service. His women were pitiful victims, not prurient objects.

New Women Artists. On exhibit at the same time as Furusawa in October 1954, but in a different gallery in Tokyo, were drawings by a young woman artist, Urushibara Hideko, born in London in 1928 but back in Japan as of 1941. Grilli described them as fantastic, macabre, and “somber in color” but also “powerful and disturbing,” especially in attention to the body. “The starting point” of Urushibara’s drawings, she said, “lies often in anatomical details and cross-sections of a spinal column, the uterus, or viscera, such as are found in medical illustrations; these may appear repulsive and even obscene to the layman, while they hold an immense fascination for those who can see patterns of beauty in the microscopic structure of organic cells” (a search is underway for illustrations of Urushibara’s art). Grilli, on her subsequent various rounds of art shows and exhibitions in Japan, occasionally noted the work of other promising young women artists. Earlier, she had remarked in a column on abstract art in July 1954 that women were “crowding the men in a realm where decorativeness and poetic play are of the essence.” At this point, both male and female artists in Japan were breaking out of representational art and experimenting with new fashions in postwar avant-garde art, such as post-surrealism and Gutai or group art. Few of the young Japanese women of this era who later attained great fame whether at home or overseas, were conventional artists in technique, style, aesthetics, or themes.

Postwar Avant Garde. Younger Japanese women artists began to come into their own in the 1950s, especially in the first years after the Occupation. Several of the most famous left Japan in the mid and late 1950s and found outlets for their talents in New York City. Since they were born in the late 1920s or early 1930s and were schooled in wartime and Occupied Japan, they are of special interest to the overall question of postwar liberation, creativity, and artistic vision. Among them are Kusama Yayoi and Ono Yōko (internationally known by the Western name order, Yoko Ono). Equally interesting is a third avant garde woman artist, one who did not leave Japan, Tanaka Atsuko. Kusama, in particular, draws attention because of the huge stature she ultimately attained. A final example is Tomiyama Toshiko, who is identified with feminist and anti war art.

Kusama Yayoi. Kusama was born in Matsumoto City (Nagano Prefecture), Japan, in 1929, to a small business family which would suffer loss in the Great Depression. She is the oldest of the postwar women artists selected for this site and in time would become the most famous Asian and Japanese artist in her home country and overseas. Like Arima, Katusura and many others, she would never marry. The major themes in her work, according to art historian Alexandra Monroe, who interviewed her in 1997-1998, are “accumulation, repetition, and obsession.” Based on Katsura’s own testimony as well as interviews, it is somewhat possible to link her early development as an artist to the wartime and Occupation periods. Her father was frequently absent from home when she was young, and her mother, a strict upholder of traditional notions of femininity, did not encourage her daughter’s talent. The earliest examples of her drawings as a ten year old reveal a fascination with dots, a recurring image in adulthood, perhaps a reflection of hallucinations. Kusama graduated from elementary school in 1941 and entered a girl’s high school in Nagoya. Her class was recruited in 1944 to make parachutes for the war effort, delaying graduation. From 1949-51, she enrolled in an art school in Kyoto

Kusama first displayed works in Tokyo, 1950-52, at a time of rapidly changing art fashions in Japan. She soon shifted from painting in the Nihonga style to experiments with oil and surrealism. One of her earliest works, a 1950 oil painting called Accumulation of Corpses, or Prisoner Surrounded by Curtain of Depersonalization, is, according to her own explanation, a manifestation of illness or mental instability; it was not about the recent war. In essence, she felt separated from others. In 1952, a Japanese psychiatrist who specialized in using art for therapy asked for an introducing after viewing some of her early images. Otherwise, Kusama displayed individualistic and iconoclastic tendencies in this period which did not fit well into the Japanese art scene or important group shows. Increasingly unhappy in Japan, she moved to the United States, first to Seattle in 1957 and to New York City in 1958. She was not alone in this. Japanese avant-garde artists, both male and female, saw New York as the new capital of the international art world and became either temporary or permanent exiles. Kusama had other reasons to leave Japan. As she said in an interview in 1955 with a major Japanese art journal: Japanese critics were too narrow. In a much later interview, 1988, she said that she did not feel appreciated in Japan, perhaps because of talk about her mental instability.

In New York, 1957-1968, Kusama was soon identified with what was called the Fluxus movement (officially launched in 1961 but in existence earlier in New York and also in Tokyo) and with performance art. Fluxus artists had formed a collective and made daily reality the subject of their art; the artist was part of the creation. They used new techniques and new materials and termed their work “interactive.” Kusama’s art changed radically at this point. She left watercolors behind, turned to minimalist paintings, and made collages. These include No F (1959), oil on canvas; and Accumulation of Stamps, 63 (1962), ink on paper. Her breakthrough to public and critical attention, not always favorable, came in the early 1960s from installation art. From pieces of cloth, she fashioned three-dimensional domestic or “soft” sculptures of furniture, boats, women’s clothes and shoes, covering the surfaces with dots (one of her obsessions) or topping them with myriads of stuffed cloth penises. Her shows had such ingenious names as Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1964); and Infinity Mirror Room (1965). Another installation, Narcissus Garden, 1966, was an uninvited show in Italy, consisting of a display of 1500 plastic mirrored balls. Repetition of images, such as dots, nets, or penises, was a trademark. Was it a case of free love, sexuality, or fetishism? In the 1960s, Kusama also became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement in New York, organizing nude protestors in scores of street and park happenings. In addition, she tried her hand at film.

Kusama returned permanently to Japan in 1972 and to another phase in her long career. In 1977, she entered a private mental hospital, where she built her studio and continued for over twenty years to create works of art, including reflections on Nazi atrocities, and to compose poetry and fiction. After a brief period of obscurity, she became increasingly famous in Japan, to the point of receiving credit from some critics for introducing post-minimalist and feminist art. In 1998, she was re-introduced to the outside world with the show, “Forever Love,” focusing on the New York years, 1958-68. At the age of seventy-five in 2004, Kusama was represented at the Mori Art Museum, a gallery on the top floor of a new giant building in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo. She also was honored that year with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, called “Eternity-Modernity.”

Yōko Ono. The international fame of Yōko Ono is such that the Western style name order by which she is known (personal name first and family name last) has been retained for this site. It is the only exception. She was born in Tokyo in 1933, the privileged daughter of an affluent family related to the giant Yasuda combine on her mother’s side and the Ono bankers on her father’s side. Twice before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 1941, she was taken to the United States with her parents. Her economist-banker father was at heart a pianist; her mother, described by Ono as distant and preoccupied with social events, an amateur painter. They enrolled Ono in a Christian Academy in Japan and at the Jiyūgakuen (Freedom School), founded by a pioneer woman journalist and educator Hani Matoko in the 1920s. In addition, she was given private music and vocal lessons. Throughout the Pacific War, Ono’s father was absent in Hanoi, serving as a high official with the Yokohama Specie Bank (later declared to be a war criminal institution). In 1944, her mother took the three children to a retreat in the countryside to escape the bomb raids. In Ono’s subsequent pursuit of a career overseas, beginning in the 1950s in New York and in London, no one could have been more unconventional. But first, she grew up in Japan during the Pacific War and Allied Occupation, though these years are inadequately noted in biographies and interviews. Either pertinent questions have not been asked, or brief answers not pursued. One wonders to what extent her experiences and schooling in this period, together with childhood memories of the United States, influenced her intellectual life and development as a creative artist. We do know that in 1946, Ono became a classmate of Crown Prince Akihito (also born in 1933) at the Gakushuin School for children of elite families, and so was there when American Quaker Elizabeth Gray Vining came to Japan as his tutor. In 1950, she became the first women student to be admitted to the philosophy department at Gakushuin College. Her choice of a major gives some indication of her reading and interest in thought and religion.

Everything changed in 1952 when Ono, age eighteen, 1952, left Gakushuin and joined her family in their new suburban home in Scarsdale, New York. Her father had been posted to New York City as head of the American branch of the Bank of Tokyo. Briefly, she was a student at Sarah Lawrence College, 1953-1955. It was one of the Seven Sisters of the women’s Ivy League and famous for its experimental curriculum. She dropped out to marry, over parental objections, her Japanese boyfriend, fellow avant-garde artist and musician Ichiyanagi Toshi (born in Osaka, 1933), and moved to Greenwich Village. Her early reputation, some would say notoriety or even ridicule, in the New York art world of the late 1950s and early 1960s was as an avant-garde conceptual artist in the newly launched Fluxus movement. She would also experiment with short films and vocal recordings. At this time, Ono, who had been educated in Western classical music, and her husband became friendly with experimental composer-musician John Cage. The two briefly studied with him, and Ono joined Cage on stage in a few musical events. In 1962-64, she followed her husband back to Tokyo, where both were active in avant-garde shows and exhibits. When their uneasy marriage broke up, she returned to New York and married American Anthony Cox, an art and music promoter, and gave birth to a daughter, Kyoko, in 1963. Though Ono was awarded custody in subsequent divorce proceedings, Cox abducted Kyoko. Reunion became possible only when Kyoko was grown up, married, and a mother.

Resuming her artistic career in New York and London, Ono wrote out intriguing instructions for painting objects in Grapefruit, 1964 (reissued years later with revisions). One of her famous interactive conceptual art shows from the early 1960s was called, “Cut Piece.” Apparently, it was first staged in Tokyo but is better known from a London performance in 1964. She asked members of the audience to come up and cut pieces from her clothing until she was naked. Was it, as has been suggested, a protest against materialism? Or was it an instance of self-obliteration? Her film, “Bottoms,” 1968, showed only the rear ends of over 350 people, many of them friends. Though the next stage of her creative life is beyond the scope of this site, Ono and her third husband, John Lennon of Beatles fame (they married in 1969), engaged in anti-Vietnam War activities and together wrote the song, “Give Peace a Chance.” After his murder outside their residence in New York City, 1980, she continued to develop on her own as a conceptual and collaborative artist while raising their son and preserving his memory and music. A momumental retrospective display of her intriguing artistic life, Yes, Yoko Ono, was held at the Gallery of the Japan Society of New York in 2000-2001. The creator and editor of this electronic site is among the many fascinated viewers.

Tanaka Atsuko. Born in 1932, Tanaka Atsuko experienced the war years and Occupation in her home city, Osaka, second only to Tokyo in population and one also heavily bombed by B-29s. As yet, little is know about her younger years. She was initially trained during the Occupation period in figurative art, but abandoned it in 1953. There are references, without explanation, to an extended hospital stay in 1953. Tanaka soon became part of one of Japan’s most important postwar avant-garde groups, the Gutai, which included decadence as a significant theme in representing reality. She met and married a fellow Gutai artist, Kanayama Akira, and became more and more fascinated by using technology to create art. An early example is Work, Bell, 1955, which says art historian Yoshimoto Midori, “caused a sensation.” It was innovative to say the least. The piece consisted “of twenty round bells connected in an approximately 120 foot circuit” and “created a series of ear-piercing sounds that traveled through the gallery space and returned to a switch that was activated by the viewer.” Her best known creation dates from 1956 and is called, Electric Dress. She, in essence, became a part of the art in wearing the electric dress in public performance and was the first woman artist to use her body on stage. Her dress or costume was made from numerous light bulbs, almost 200, of various colors and connected by electric cords. She had also performed earlier on stage by stripping off layers of cloth down to a leotard covered with light bulbs which blinked when the lights were turned off. Her numerous paintings feature repetitive circles and lines. All of her art work was done in Japan.

Tomiyama Taeko. Tomiyama would become one of Japan’s most politically and socially conscious artists but little recognized at home. She was born in Kobe in 1921 but taken to Harbin when young and grew up in Manchukuo as a school girl. She also traveled to colonial Korea as a young art student, and much of her subsequent art was devoted to Korean themes. Since she preferred Western style painting to Nihonga, she was typed when young as unfeminine. She was, however, not old enough to qualify as a senior artist during and after the Asia-Pacific War. Details and dates are lacking in tracing her post 1945 education and career, but she her consciousness was obviously further shaped by the eruption of the Korean War and instances of American misbehavior in Japan. Asia became her passion, but Japanese galleries were not much interested. She left Tokyo at some point to take up drawing in a mining area in Kyushu where Koreans had worked as forced laborers and where she came to the conclusion that artists should do more than just observe. They should make statements and engage in public art. In common with other Japanese artists, she also traveled out side of Japan in the 1960s, in her case to South America and Africa. Back in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, she created her own workshop and developed collaborative, multi-media art by showing slides of her prints to the accompaniment of poems and music by others. She completed Memory of the Sea in 1986. She was one of the earliest to learn about the Japanese Army’s abuse of Korean comfort women and began working on a multimedia presentation, including film, A Requiem: Military Comfort Women.

Many of Tomiyama’s best known activist works date from the 1990s, such as Sending Off a Soldier, 1995. In 1991, she founded the Asian Women and Art collective and joined forces with Shimada Yoshiko, a younger Japanese artist and printmaker born in 1959. Her father’s job at the American airbase in Tachikawa, located near Tokyo, made her aware of the Cold War presence of the US military in Japan but also of American popular culture. She came to California and earned am art degree from Scripps College in 1982. In Shimada’s view, Japan was an aggressor in World War II. She believed that Japan’s social structure had not changed greatly and that women had not been fully liberated. Back in Japan in the 1990s, she took up the cause of the Korean comfort women and Korean forced laborers as well as feminism. She and Tomiyama would work closely in using use art works and exhibitions to remember Japan’s atrocities during the Asia-Pacific War and to question existing attitudes in Japan about race, gender, and sexuality.

Sculpture. Sculpture and architecture remain among the most difficult fields to document for women. The Nippon Times offered a hint or two in an article, August 25, 1948, about two talented sisters. They were daughters of a noted sculptor, Asakura Fumio, and were termed “artists in their own right.” The older sister, Asakura Setsu, was a painter in the Nihonga style and had displayed work at the Japan Art Academy Exhibition. She turns up in the Tochigi Exhibition of 2001. The younger sister, Hyoko, then twenty-two, was following her father as a sculptor. Her piece, “A Woman in the Nude,” had just been accepted for exhibit with special honors. But here the trail ends, one hopes temporarily, for Japanese women sculptors. An exception is Miyawaki Taiko, a painter and sculptor who was born in Tokyo, 1929, and lived in Milan, Paris, and New York, 1956-1961. She married a famous New Wave architect, Isozaki Arata. Years later, in 1992, she created sculpture for his Barcelona Olympic Pavilion. Also obscure are women architects in this period. Ogawa Noriko is one of the few who has been recently been identified for the postwar period, but little is known in Western sources about her work. By way of explanation, women were not admitted to Japanese architecture schools until the educational reforms of the Occupation period. Ogata got her start after 1045 under the wing of a husband and wife team who had journeyed in the 1920s to the retreat of American Frank Lloyd Wright for training and later founded a successful firm.

Calligraphy. Another outlet for talented women was calligraphy, a very old and highly regarded art in the 20th century. Calligraphy, along with poetry and music, had long-standing in Japan as one of the aristocratic arts. Ink and brush were used to transform words into beautiful forms as well as to write poetry and fiction. Japanese calligraphers used both Chinese characters and their own phonetic symbols and wrote in block and cursive styles. For centuries, elite Japanese women, too, were trained in this art, and men and women were often judged by their handwriting. Shinoda Toko is an excellent example of a woman who gained fame as a master calligraphy in the 20th century and who frequently displayed in public and sold well. Born in 1913 in Dairen, Manchuria, where her father managed a tobacco company, she was taken back to Japan two years later. She was given calligraphy lessons when very young, and later would have no hesitation in seeing marriage as restrictive and remaining single. She first gained attention in her late twenties when participating in an exhibit in 1940 but, for unexplained reasons, did not show her work again until 1952. Francis Haar, a professional photographer living in Japan at the time, was among those who saw her work and produced a beautiful photo portrait of her in 1955, when she was thirty-nine. Shinoda was also one of the many Japanese artists who came to New York City in the 1950s, but primarily for a visit and not to stay. Examples of her calligraphy were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1954, the first of many exhibitions of her work in the United States. She also toured other parts of the United States, 1956-1958. Subsequently, she was hailed in Japan, the United States, and Europe both for her calligraphy, which is highly abstract, and her lithographs and paintings. In 1983, when Shinoda was in her seventies, her life and work were featured in a Time magazine article.

Cartoons. Another area in which women began to gain popularity and also income was in creating cartoon characters. None was more famous than Hasegawa Machiko (see people on this site). She was the beneficiary of training by a famous wartime male cartoonist and launched her widely successful career with a delightful young female character called Sazae-san. Sazae, in time safely married, would also become a popular character on television and in film. The most famous manga artist from the period, however, is Osama Tezuka (b. 1928), creator of a graphic novel in 1949 called Metropolis and of a cartoon character who would soon become Astro Boy in 1951. Not surprisingly, at first Japanese men would dominate the creation of manga and anime films, including comics for teenage girls, but by the 1970s a few young women would gain success as illustrators. By the 1990s, women would be well represented in the field and also occasionally direct an anime film. The supreme filmmaker in this genre, however, remains Miyazaki Hayao, the genius behind Spirited Away (winner of the Academy Award for best animated film in 2004) and Howls’ Moving Castle.

Crafts. Crafts in Japan had long been a high art. A law passed in 1950, with support from the Arts and Monuments Division of Occupation headquarters, created the new category of intangible cultural properties, mainly to give recognition to achievements in the visual and performing arts, such as music, dance, and theater, but also venerating potters, weavers and dyers, and makers of dolls, paper, swords, and bells. Women had long been active in the crafts in their own right or to assist their husbands at an expert level. In the first years, very few women were named to this category, which came to be called “Living National Treasures,” but in time would also be named as holders of intangible cultural properties. This designation generally came when the person was at an advanced stage of life and career, and no more than 70 or 80 held the title at any one time. One of the most beloved in recent years was a ninety-year old woman dyer, Chiba Ayano, featured in the 1988 National Geographic Film, "Living Treasures of Japan." The experiences of these women and men and their war and occupation memories have scarcely been studied.