ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is the relation between state policies and institutions from late Meiji to 1945, and the representation of China as a subject in Japanese painting. Most of the original paper, on which this chapter is based, was originally written in Japanese,1 yet its subject matter in the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat in the Second World War had still to find systematic discussion by Japanese art historians. This indicates a zone of social taboo as much as methodological aversion with which the subject matter must be associated. For artists as varied as Yokoyama Taikan (plate 1*) or Kanayama Heizo (plate 25*), China appears to be frequently imagined through the forms of art discourse in both ‘Western-style’ and ‘Japanese-style’ painting since the late Meiji period. What does not appear very often in this painting is what Japan as a state and Japanese citizens as its military or civilian agents were doing with China in the contemporary world. For them ‘China’ was another place. This gap calls up many fundamental questions about the relation between Japanese painting and historical experience,2 and about the role of paintings in mediating the state’s desired image of that history.
