‘Tōyō shumi’ of household products designed in Imperial Japan of Manchukuo and Taiwan

This paper was presented to an invited lecture at Tottori University in Japan as well as to the invited symposium held at Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts And Cultures, the University of East Anglia.

Since the 19th century, craft design has been modern Japan’s national obsession, not only supporting its trade and economy, but also establishing its national cultural identity while developing the notion of ‘Japaneseness’. This national consciousness and identity formation developed primarily through the encounter with the Euroamerican gaze on Japanese crafts through export trade. Japan’s discourse of ‘modernity’ in crafts was constructed on the binary identity formation of ‘Occident’ vs. ‘Orient’, and Japanese modernity was sought in the direction of western-style Oriental modern as demonstrated by foreign advisors such as Bruno Taut. (Fig. 2) However, this binary design discourse was complicated as Japan gradually acquired its empire in Asia. In the late 1930s until 1945, as the Japanese empire – which already included Taiwan since 1895 – expanded into North East China, the development of ‘daily life folk products for export’ for the market of Asia and the Japanese empire became an important intensive national agenda. Japanese designers were assigned to lead development of Japanese products that had universal and modern values as well as shared Orientalness, and they encountered multiple and different shades of Orients within the empire. During the course of this, the notion of ‘Japaneseness’ was contested by different Orients, and was complicated by its effort to redefine itself as part of ‘Orientalness’ and the location of its identity within the three way positioning of Occident-Japan-Orient. It is in this climate of uneasiness brought about by an identity crisis, that one can also identify a certain ‘creativity in hybridity’, which is the issue that I would like to focus on in my ongoing, ‘work-in-progress’ research presentation today, essentially the discourse of ‘Oriental style’ or this workshop’s theme ‘Oriental taste’ that has emerged in everyday crafts, and as object examples, I have identified some aspects of the crafts produced in Manchukuo (specifically, pottery and furniture) and Taiwan (hats).