ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the issue of taste in the gallery, in the street and the home in early twentieth-century Japan. The example chosen is the so-called ‘Knickers Incident’ (Koshimaki jiken) of 1901, when the artist Seiki Kuroda exhibited A Female Nude Figure (Ratai Fujinzô) at the sixth Hakubakai exhibition in Tokyo, and the police ordered the lower half of the painting to be covered by a cloth. Kuroda studied painting in Paris for ten years and brought back to Japan the notion that nude painting is the epitome of Western civilisation, whereas the Japanese police, who also imported the notion of urban policing from Paris, regarded the painting as lacking respectability. This was not a clash of Japanese tradition and Western modernity, but a clash of differing interpretations of modernity. The key component of this censorship was not whether the painting was regarded as intrinsically obscene in itself, but whether it was open to public gaze. By this term ‘public’ was meant lower-class men, women and children, which probably Bourdieu would recognise. The judgement of taste here is indeed related to social position. However, the censored artist was probably the most respected Western-style painter of the time and of high social ranking. The relationship of taste and obscenity in Modern Japan is highly layered, complicated and fluid and could be seen as taste after Bourdieu avant la lettre. The chapter will conclude with some later examples, which should provide food for thought.
