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Alicia Volk, "In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Dr. Alicia Volk
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Dr. Alicia Volk
taste Welcome to the New Books Network
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Nathan Hobson
hi, my name is Nathan Hobson and I'm a host for the New Books Network. Today I'll be talking with Dr. Alicia Volk about her book in the Shadow of Empire Art in Occupied Japan. The book, which is out from the University of Chicago Press in 2025, uncovers what has been a largely overlooked history of Japanese art during the years of occupation, in other words, 1945-1952. The diverse case studies which bulk presents in the book trace the intersections of politics and art in what was a very charged period. As it had accommodated, shaped and resisted empire, Japanese art now accommodated, shaped and resisted the push and pull of defeat, occupation and the dawning Cold War. The chapters in in the Shadow of Empire present a range of practitioners and practices and their struggles in the new geopolitical order taking shape around them. The book takes into account not just the domestic context of Japan's relationship with the American led occupation, but with Japan's erstwhile Asian empire, the socialist bloc and audiences in the West. Okay, Dr. Volk, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Thanks for having me.
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Nathan Hobson
So I wanted to ask you first how you got into the research that became the book in the Shadow of Empire.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Well, I came to the topic quite early on in my career, even before graduate school, as someone studying Japanese art in Japan and really fascinated by so many of its differences, structurally and otherwise, with what I had learned of Western art, of modern Western art, and with my interest in the modern and so kind of alongside my dissertation, which was on oil painting, something that is quite difficult to. For those who don't specialize in Japanese art to accept as a medium that's so central to the European condition and history and culture. I looked at something that was quite different, which was Japanese art, Japanese prints that were readily accepted by a Western audience. I was very interested why some media and not others can be appreciated and valued. And it was in the course of researching that particular medium and its reception in post World War II United States from 1945 to 1970, that I did a lot of primary research. And a big part of that research was occupation, period, news accounts and other media that showed a whole world that had never been visible to me before in terms of discussions of Japanese aesthetics and the importance of role in art in society, and in particular at that time, the idea of the democratization of art. So I became very curious about those particular issues. And although it's been a long, long time since I first discovered this topic and it took me way too long to write this book, these are things that I've been thinking about for a good. Yeah, easily 20, I guess 25 years at this point. So finally I pulled it together.
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Nathan Hobson
Well, that's so fascinating to think about how you know, this journey from some art being accepted, you know, as sort of gaining international recognition and some not. This is such an interesting theme for me, thinking about your current, you know, about this book project, because one of the big themes that I think you're exploring here is know art as a sort of in its role in forgetting in a period that tends to be forgotten. And you're also sort of, in a sense then sort of at this meta level, also talking about the art itself being forgotten as well as sort of the. Yeah, so this is really sort of. There's all these layers of remembrance and forgetting that I'd like to get into here as we begin to talk about the book. Because I think you're making an argument here that forgetting is sort of the origin of the post war. That's something that's been talked about, but also post war art. So if this sort of springs out of this void of memory, it's also coming out of very material ruins, political realities, the occupation, et cetera, paradoxes of Censorship and something that you call, and I'm going to quote you here, the larger and more nebulous forces of American empire that come with it. I think that really describes this multifaceted context in which you're sort of asking this question. What did it mean for Japanese artists that the government takes an interest in art as part of trying to fashion a new identity as a nation of culture? I mean, I think. So if you could tell us a little bit about what you're arguing in that context, that'd be a great way to start.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Right. Well, I think I'm very careful to try to explore the reasons for this forgetting. Of course, in Japanese studies, there's a lot of very valuable work on memory and forgetting of the war, Japan's role in the war. As an art historian writing about post war art, which is typically in at least English language, writing on post war Japanese art really centered on American art. As America becomes ascendant geopolitically in the world from the mid-1950s, then the kind of values that art is judged by are really coming out of what American art is doing, or at least the discourses surrounding American art. And so I've been really interested in thinking about not only how Japanese art has been forgotten both within and without Japan from this period, and how that relates to these geopolitical conditions. So as both Japan's complicated role in World War II has oftentimes been forgotten, so too has the origins of the relationship between the US and Japan. So as that relationship became quite naturalized, the conditions really, the open conditions, in some ways not yet decided conditions of that relationship during the occupation were kind of forgotten. And so the art that I look at in the book really explores this moment where it wasn't certain what Japan's place was going to be in the new world order, how Japan would, even despite the occupation being dominated by Americans, it still was not clear, at least to the practitioners that I look at in the mid-1940s, what direction Japanese society was going to be going in and how that would relate to Japan's former enemies as well as to the Allied nations. So I think a lot of the really interesting art from this period doesn't fit narratives that have been told since. Japanese art institutions, critics, artists, were really interested in re engaging with the so called international community. This is really the free world, America dominated community from the mid-1950s. And they were very proud to show their work overseas and very invested in Japan and being recognized through its art as a nation that should be respected. But they did that really from the mid-1950s on, in an arena that was, as I said, dominated by this free world set of values. Before that, there were multiple points of reference and audiences that Japanese artists were considering. And so I've really tried to explore that in the book, when artists were also looking at Soviet examples, their comrades in China, and thinking critically about the possibilities of expression for Japanese in a time of great transformation.
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Nathan Hobson
Yeah, thank you. I was listening to you talking about that and thinking very much about the sort of differences in medium, but also the differences in the sort of backgrounds of people who engaged in these different types of mediums. You know, there's a lot of historical work that is based on documents left by the type of people who leave behind documents. Right. And that. And that's not that. That's not a.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Not that.
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Nathan Hobson
That's not a diverse set, of course, but artists are a sort of a different. There's a Venn diagram there, certainly, but it's a different group. And it's just interesting to think about having both a different a medium and a different sort of set of people. And there are different feelings about engagement with Japan and with the world. And so. Yeah, so I think that's a really good way to set up the chapters that I really want to dive into, which are chapters three and four in the book. But before we get to those, I want to think a little bit about chapter one, because the contrast between the two chapter, the two chapters three and four, highlights some of the bigger arguments you're making about the nature and struggle of post war art. And in order to sort of set that up, let's talk about chapter one. You write that, quote, the infrastructure for art became a vital arena for democratic reform in the occupation years. And I wonder if you could unpack that in a way that sort of leads us on to chapters three and four afterwards.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Sure. Well, we need to remember, of course, that Japanese artists, like all members of society, were coming out of the trauma of the war and defeat in war and immense loss. In many artists, in addition to the impoverishment or the homelessness that came with the war, with the bombing of Tokyo and other cities, a lot of them also lost their, you know, their various artworks that they had produced, and they carried with them as well this, you know, the challenge or the burden of recognizing how their own actions may or may not have contributed to the great tragedy that befell the Japanese at this point in time and the collapse of the ambitions and ideals upon which the war was based or for which it was waged. And so the artist really recognized, and I'm speaking here, I should clarify some artists. So a good number of artists, many, many, probably hundreds of artists, but not the entire art world, recognized that things needed to change. There was a large portion of the artistic community, and the artistic community was, I think, larger than we could ever imagine. I don't know how one nation can produce so many practicing artists. And art was very vital as well during World War II. So artists, unlike, say, maybe American artists, who didn't really think that an artist played a strong and important and vital role in the waging of World War II in Japan, artists, I think, really felt that they were, in a way, on the front lines. Some of them were literally on the front lines, embedded with the troops, and they were producing material that was meant to bolster the population's fighting spirit or to justify or idealize Japanese actions in war, to glorify battles that had been won and the men who fought them and things of that sort. And so Japanese artists recognized that art is powerful, first of all. So I think that's really important, that the medium of art can move minds and hearts. And so many artists recognized that things needed to change within Japanese society, of course, but within their own particular world of production in visual art making, that such a tragedy should never happen again. And they needed to think what was it about the existing art world and its structures and its relationship to authority, to the state, to the military, to the public, to audiences for art that allowed it to be so easily, swiftly, thoroughly co opted by a fascist regime to propagate ideals that were in some cases espoused by artists, but in other cases not. And they wanted to protect the art world and also Japanese society from such a thing happening again in the future. And so there was a real drive among these artists who were primarily liberal or left leaning towards reflect upon those structures of the art world and those relationships of power that had proved to be problematic. And so they were able to identify a number of different hierarchies and appointments that were based upon power and not upon democratic relations which they had hoped to introduce to the art world. So the Japanese art world, and I've written about this in other publications, was very closely tied to the state and state appointed judges with the authority of the Emperor, really determining whether an artist was valued or respected by society as a whole. It was a very fractious art world, many different positions, many different styles, different modes of working. But it was very clear that to be a successful artist in society, then you would be successful within certain organizations. Institutions and groups. And the main forum for expression was the Salon, the Bunten and its various transformations or configurations before and during the war. And so after the war, Japanese artists wanted to think about how can we have an art world where artists do not are not appointed in a type of hierarchy, but instead operate according to a sense of fraternal, shared ideas, competition, but healthy competition, and without the authority of the state of the Emperor behind any one particular artist or group of artists. And so they formed an organization, a very loose organization of artists of varying backgrounds and relationships to war art, to different styles and different affiliations in terms of the groups that they worked with, in order to think about creating a new relationship among artists that would itself mirror or somehow be a manifestation of a new relationship in society amongst its various members. And so they envisioned an art exhibition different from the Salon, one that was a free exhibition that anyone could submit to, where works would not be judged by appointed judges, but would rather have a fair chance to be seen and to be valued on their own terms. And so that was one of the ways that they thought they could bring such a reality, a new set of power relationships into being in the art world. Another one was the abolishment of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy, which had long been closely tied to the imperial household and government appointed bureaucrats. And so those kinds of structures that continued into the post war were very alarming for these liberal or leftist artists who were very frightened that if the power structure for art remained in place, then the resulting ground within which artists would work would affect their project so much that they would truly not become democratized.
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Nathan Hobson
Yeah, so I admit I buried the lead here a little bit for our audience once I heard you describe how you got to this project. Because the chapters that I want to talk about, chapter three, is about prints. And once I heard that you had sort of originally started out with prints, I thought I should let that be a little bit of a surprise for the audience. But I do want to talk about the sort of vastly divergent trajectories that prints take in this period. And you contrast the modernist creative prints called Sousaku Hanga and the so called People's Princess with the visions of post war Japan that they represent. So can you tell us about the prints themselves, about the producers of each sort of genre, if you will, and what the two types of hanga of prints tell us about the early post war years of Japan and its art?
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Yeah, I have to say this was probably the most exciting, thrilling chapter for me to write. It was an ongoing series of discoveries when I was actually in the process of writing, not just researching. And this is because, you know, I mentioned earlier about how, you know, so much of Japanese art of this period has not been seen or recognized or introduced into scholarship, into museum collections or whatever. And so one half of the chapter was material that I was had only the vaguest knowledge of back in the early 2000s when I began researching this topic. The attention that Americans, other Westerners and Japanese themselves placed on the medium of the print in the post war period was almost entirely upon this group called creative prints or sosakuhanga, which had their origins in the early 20th century. By the time World War II, you know, began, they had made great inroads in having the print be accepted as a form of fine art, which it really wasn't. So that was really the struggle of these print artists was to elevate the status of the kind of humble print on paper to that was enjoyed by painting or sculpture, as reflected for example, in the salons which devoted sections to painting and sculpture, but not to prints in the post war. So these artists were very interested in the control of the print in their own hands and the print as a medium for expression. Very, very vast array of different styles and approaches and subjects that were treated under the print. So it's a whole world unto itself, these creative prints. But in the post war period, they were eagerly consumed by the occupiers. Some of them had been shown in overseas exhibitions in the 1930s and had also they were kind of, I guess, a sister type of art, being a print to Shinhanger, which were kind of new contemporary prints made for export. Americans and others in Japan at this time had been, you know, fans of Japanese prints of ukiyo E, so traditional pre modern prints for a long time. And so when they found these creative prints in the post war period available, they acquired some new patrons and aficionados and these very impoverished artists. It's really interesting, among all arts, it was the printmakers who were able to secure an income, however modest, from their patronage by foreigners. These prints eventually entered numerous collections outside of Japan. In Japan, many of the most tremendous works are in American collections today, museum collections or private collections. And so these were written about quite a bit, celebrated, been studied, been exhibited. And they really were seen as espousing a lot of the values of creative expression. Individualism that were enjoyed and appreciated in America dominated cultural sphere. The big discovery was their relationship to the people's prints or jinminhunga, which were practiced contemporaneously they also had a pre war history in the proletarian art movement. To some extent that movement was crushed in the early 30s by the Japanese state. And so it did not continue very strongly as a practice. But the post war defeat of Japan allowed for these prints to become a very vigorous platform for expression. What I found perhaps most interesting of all was that the interest in the people's prints was spurred by exposure to Chinese prints. Of course, China having been Japan's enemy and Japanese being the aggressors and the, the occupiers of China. But the very first and most significant body of overseas art to be introduced to the Japanese who were so thirsty. Japanese artists just really wanted to know what was happening in art overseas. They hadn't had contact at least with European centers for years. So when Chinese prints arrived in Japan and were shown widely and treated in The Press From 1947, 1948, they had a huge audience. They were immensely appreciated by artists, but surprising to me also by a large Japanese audience. And you might think why the Japanese have been fighting the Chinese. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Chinese prints, many of which were anti Japanese and were made for that very explicit purpose. The Japanese identified with the victims, the Chinese victims of Japanese imperial aggression and were beginning to see themselves too as victims of the Japanese military. So this is an early, I think manifestation of a type of victims consciousness that was perhaps facilitated by the conditions of the occupation itself. But so these prints were so different from Sosaku Hanga in that they were really not concerned with the individual artist making them or the creativity in terms of expression. Although they were very creative, obviously any form of expression would be. They were more interested in focusing on the subject matter. And to that end they restricted the kind of stylistic language that you might find in print. So the creative prints are full of color and all different types of mark making, whereas the people's prints are monochromatic. They tend to be very stark in their contrast of black ink upon white paper. They're small in scale. They are really seen as a means of both arousing sympathy and identification with the workers of Japan. So the factory workers or the farmers, those members of the lower class members of society that had been disenfranchised and who now had the possibility perhaps of shaping post war Japan in ways that had never been possible before. But they were also seen as a vehicle really for these very same workers, farmers and rural folk to. To practice their own kind of subjectivity, their own kind of form of expression. So the print, and especially these very plain, small, humble people's prints was very easy to make. Any amateur could, you know, anybody really could pick up a knife and a piece of wood, cheap materials, a little bit of ink used for writing anyway, you didn't have to go to the art store for that one and make a picture. And then that picture could be shared with other people. And it was a way of facilitating the creation of new communities and new shared identities across, you know, these workers communities, whether within one factory or from sharing from one factory to another. So there was a lot of emphasis placed on this worker's culture. Of course, you know, others have studied how poetry, for example, poetry circles were really important. And there are, you know, various different types of cultural expression. But in the arts, the print was, was a very vital part of this new workers culture that was supposed to come into being. And so the two types of print sit next to each other really strikingly, visually, very, very divergent. You can see on first. Doesn't take an art historian to know that they're doing really, really different things. But what I found, and I was really shocked, I have to say in my research, using very, very obscure materials that I had access to through the Gordon W. Prang collection, which is really the corpus of the printed material during the occupation that had to go through the eyes of the America led censors. And so all of these printed materials, some of which don't survive in Japan, are cataloged and in great overwhelming number on my campus. But I had access to some really wonderful publications that made me realize, you know, it was like, holy cow, these prints weren't just different, they were actually in dialogue with one another and in the process of trying to come together and resolve the kind of contradictions of Japanese society and the possibilities for where it would go ideologically, politically and in so many different ways. They were working this out in prints and trying to see how can we all come along and work together. And as they tried that, they realized that the differences were insurmountable. And they became more and more deeply entrenched in their respective arenas of expression and ideas about what art should be and its role in society. And these ideas then map really easily onto this Cold war dichotomy between the communist aligned countries and the America free world countries and their artistic production and ideas about art. And I don't think that I expect it to find such a satisfying story and dramatic story when I began working on this project, but there it is.
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Dr. Alicia Volk
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Dr. Alicia Volk
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Nathan Hobson
Yeah, I love that idea that these, you know, materials which are essentially ephemera and often, you know, lost to history, are a so well preserved, even if the context is, you know, censorship, but also that there's such an accessible medium for production, you know, as you said, I mean, you know, it's, it's a little bit like scrimshaw or whittling or, you know, something that, you know, you just, it's a little, little something to occupy your hands at some level in terms of the techniques and the availability. But I remember when my kids were in, you know, Japanese elementary school, you certainly had printmaking as part of, you know, elementary school art classes. Right. It's still something that's, well, that's a
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Dr. Alicia Volk
heritage of this moment. Direct heritage. I'm sorry to interrupt, but. Yes, right.
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Nathan Hobson
That's exactly what I was getting to. So, yeah, it's nice to hear the artist story and agree with me. So, yeah. So, and this is, it is also such a really interesting contrast to the art that you talk about in chapter four. So on the one hand you have these, as you put them, nimble print, small, lightweight and multiple prints. Which are an ideal object for sharing far and wide. And on the other hand, you have chapter four, which is all about sculptures and monuments. They're expensive, they're massive, they're heavy, they're stationary, they're unique. I mean, they're probably mostly in some sense, a sort of elite creation, if you will. But nevertheless, as you point out, they have an important role in the process of forgetting and remembering this period. So in thinking about this, I was really struck by this passage that I want to read out here, which is, quote, with defeat and occupation, however, those same artists who had participated in art production during the war were forced to rethink the social role of art and culture in their newly established democracy. And this is a point that you've been making. But I want to think about this in the context specifically of something that you say in this chapter, which is that idealism, whether in the service of Japan's imperial ambitions or toward the creation of a peaceful nation of art and culture, was endemic to Japanese thought both during and after the war and found consummate expression in culture, excuse me, in sculpture during both eras. And so what is it about sculpture that is sort of special in this way within this overall picture of art in the early post war?
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Dr. Alicia Volk
Yeah, I think sculpture, you know, as you mentioned, it can often be elitist. It requires materials and resources, money, typically, patronage. And patronage is oftentimes associated with money and power in society and also the authority to take a place. You know, if we're talking about public sculpture, for example, to secure a space within the public arena, to put a sculpture, that means something. And so sculpture, I think, of all the art forms was most engaged or can tell us the most about the processes of remembering and forgetting of the recent past in Japan. When I talk about idealism, it's interesting with sculpture, I think, and this is true not just in Japan, but maybe because of these relations that we've been talking about about patronage and about the place of sculpture in society. If it's a public sculpture that it often functions as a vehicle for communicating or reaffirming ideals, whether commonly held ideals or, you know, aspirational ideals. And during wartime, of course, you know, we don't see a lot of sculpture from that time because objects couldn't be cast into metal. The metal was being used to create weapons, so they were being made in plaster. This is an area that has barely been studied at all. You know, I had to do the most amazing amount of research into wartime sculpture in order to begin to understand, you know, anything in Post war sculpture. But the work hasn't been done yet. But. And a lot of that is because, like the prints we were talking about, these works don't really survive as works, as completed works. So oftentimes they were plaster studies. There might be sketches. A lot that survives is merely photographs in the exhibition records, the catalogs from the salons that were held and sponsored by the government or the military during the war. So there was a lot of sculpture that was produced during the war. Most of that sculpture doesn't survive, so it's hard to find traces of it. It's EAS to forget. It's also very embarrassing, you know, kind of sculpture from a post war perspective. I think from any point in time it's, you know, you gotta be a special person to really want to remember. It's not the kind of thing that's going to help create a narrative of Japanese art that is going to be sympathetic to, to Japan and, and Japan's role in World cup culture. And so when the Japanese are creating their own narratives of Japanese art, they're often doing it in a way that is a way to show what Japan is. So the art becomes a vehicle for national identity. And of course, certain narratives, they select certain narratives over others. So this has not featured prominently, but a lot of works were made during the war and they were viewed by millions of people because despite the fact that the nation was at war, they were also going to lots of art exhibitions. And this has been documented how many people showed up even with bombs flying overhead. In the spring of 1945, there was still an exhibition of art. And then objects were sent, paintings, to a lesser degree, prints, but also sculpture, were sent around the country and then even overseas. And they were seen by the military and by the colonized peoples. And so art was really circulating. Sculpture played an important role in this. And sculpture is, you know, it's so different from painting in the way it can kind of congeal an idea. And so I, you know, as I said, both in and out of Japan, it's oftentimes been a mode, a medium for expressing ideals. And so during the war, those ideals had to do with the greatness of the, the Japanese, how they were creating a new world culture as liberators of the Asian peoples who they occupied, and also as models for behavior and modes of thought for people on the home front as examples of the valiant, self sacrificing soldier. So there were many different ways that sculpture embodied ideals and the ideals of wartime Japan. And it did so as well in the so that function of sculpture didn't really change, although the types of ideals that the sculpture may have been meant to embody did. So the fascinating part is that there were sculptures that were made during the war that were exhibited in the years immediately following the war as contemporary works of art, but they had to be seen differently. So the artworks are exactly the same, but they're being shown in different kind of historical moments and different conditions by very different circumstances. So one that's really interesting is the mother and child motif. There's a famous sculpture of a mother and child that was shown in 1940 at the Big Exhibition meant to commemorate the 2,600 year of Japan's founding. And there's very emperor and imperial lineage centric exhibition. And a lot of art in support of the war, very visibly in support of the war, was seen there. And this one work that was shown was of a mother and child and the senning body, the 1000 stitch object that women would give to the men going off to the front. But in the post war period, it was shown with the title Mother and Child in the first or second exhibition within a year of defeat. And then there were images of men. There were so many images of strong men during the wartime, really muscular guys. They were oftentimes soldiers, but more often than not they were actually laboring men, men in the fields, men who held hammers or sickles or, you know, various implements that showed how strong and tough they were in the creation of something. And during the wartime, it was the creation of this new culture and this new world order that Japan was going to lead. In the post war period, those very same sculptures were retitled as reconstruction. So these are laboring men who are working to rebuild the new Japan. You know, so the city and the country is in ruins, there's rubble everywhere. And these are the guys who are building the new structures. And so it's a really interesting thing to see how these artworks become vessels for meaning. And there's such a mutability of meaning across time that function, though of this kind of idealistic manner of communication continued. And that's one of the reasons, I think, why the sculpture that I focus on in chapter four, the Wadatsumi no Koe, or Listen to the Voices of the Sea, ended up being so problematic, so easily accepted and embraced as a anti war symbol, as a way to honor and grieve, to mourn the deceased student soldiers who were sent off to war to fight a losing war. Really, in almost the final days of the war, just a real Kind of self sacrifice of Japan's best and brightest young men. But the figure itself is so idealized, so beautified as a way for the viewer to sympathize with the loss and the sacrifice of these young men. And that it was easy to see them as victims and not as the perpetrators that they were forced to be on the battlefields. And so this idealization fed into an evolving victim's consciousness about the role of the Japanese people in the fighting of the war and the support of the war. That although I think the original patrons of the sculpture and the maker of the sculpture did not wish for, but that perhaps it was inevitable that this beautification and idealization of the student soldier would result in such a paradox.
- [41:46]
Nathan Hobson
Yeah, this was one of the things that really struck me as a non art historian was, you know, it's such a wonderful example of how problematic the question, you know, what did. What did the author? What did the creator mean or want or whatever, because, you know, the moment it leaves their hand. Well, everybody's got an opinion. Studies show people have opinions. Yeah. And it just, you know, it takes all a life of its own. But then often you're not allowed to actually have a life of its own. And other people are sort of of making all those decisions for works of art, works of literature, whatever they be. So we did here talk about some specific art, but I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about individual pieces that were particularly interesting or moving for you. Can you pick maybe two from the book that epitomized for you these stories that you're trying to tell about occupation era Japanese arts to relaunch of Japan after 1945. Now obviously suboptimal medium for art history in general, for visual anything. But now that we sort of have a context to think about them, I wonder if you could sketch out for us just a few things that are really impactful for you?
- [43:01]
Dr. Alicia Volk
Yeah, well, it's tough. I think I have a lot of narratives going on and a lot of things I'm trying. A lot of stories I'm trying to tell. But if I were to choose one artwork that I think that would be most representative of this period, which is really a period of a push and pull of many different directions. And I try to capture that in the book. So really looking at art relationally in a type of a dialogic manner, as I mentioned earlier, with the prints and how they evolved in relation to one another in different directions, and that was true of a lot of the art world. But. But one artwork that I think really sits in a very strong and meaningful relationship to its present and also to the past and to all of these various conflicts, this push and pull in various directions, the tensions and in some cases the bitter battles that were being waged by artists in the post war period. I would say that Fukuzawa Ichiro's Monument to Defeat in War, or Haisen Gunza War Defeat Group, as it's often known today, would probably be the most emblematic artwork. It lives at the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma. It was one of the artworks that was just on display last fall. So the fall of 2025 at the groundbreaking exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Tokyo that attempted to show Japanese art from these difficult periods in a somewhat comprehensive manner. So that is Japan's imperial program in the early 19th century through World War II and then a bit beyond. So that work, I argue, is trying to look with open and very brutal eyes at the reality of post war Japan and of the war that preceded it, in a type of self examination of responsibility and of the various sets of ideas and forces that brought the Japanese people to war and then to defeat. And so it's a little hard to describe, but imagine a monumental canvas painted in oils of a landscape, very indeterminate landscape, no physical structures anywhere, a horizon, a blue sky, but set through, in the very center, taking up most of the composition, a pile of writhing bodies that form a type of triangular or pyramidal shape. You can't see any of the faces of the figures. What you can see are the muscles that are very fleshy and vigorous, and there are hands and limbs that go every which way. These figures appear to be in a continuous battle. The bodies and the limbs are interlocked. We don't know what they're fighting over. You can see gaps through the form to the landscape beyond. The form of the triangle or the pyramid is echoed in the distance by another similar form that is clearly a mountain, suggesting a type of mountain of these figures, but one that is the exact opposite of what a mountain should be. So the triangle, a mountain is the stablest of forms, right? So it's not supposed to move. This is a continuously moving, very unstable type of mountain. And I think in this painting, Fukuzawa was really trying to reveal how illusory these foundational ideas about who the Japanese people are, what the nation was, the Kokutai ideology of the body of the Japanese people, this very idealized, spiritualized, exalted idea of how they were a special nation of people. Sharing their identity with the emperor and the spiritual mission that they were entrusted with during the war. But he's showing us, I think, how illusory that was and how easily collapsible it was. Just something that everybody believed and it seems so solid and so certain. And then it ended up being so utterly meaningless in this, this new landscape. But I think he's also making a critique in a similar manner with the promise of democracy. Not necessarily with democracy itself, but with how it had begun to manifest in Japan. The art world, celebrities, the big guys who were everybody knew and their paintings were everywhere. Yokoyama Taikan is one painter. He painted many, many images of Mount Fuji. He sold these images for these big public relation coup to finance fighter jets that were named after him. And so artists like him. And then also the oil painter Fujita Tsuguharu, who painted some of the most monumental, glorifying, but also grisly scenes of battle from the war. Those were two leaders of the military or Japan's art institutions during the war and seem to have been the most responsible for making all other artists submit to the pressures of the state and of censorship during that time. But they were rehabilitated in the post war period and they lived unproblematically in Japanese society. It was feared that by Taikon and his buddies that he was going to be tried as a war criminal. The Americans, of course, didn't think artists could possibly be important enough, I think, to be a war criminal. There is a painter they paint Mount Fuji, make one for me. But I think Fukuzawa and many of his colleagues were alarmed by the resuscitation of the wartime status quo in the post war and saw that as a real failure of the promise of democracy. And so in a sense, the democracy that had, at least in 1948 when the painting was made, was more illusory than it was actual in Japanese society. So I think that would be the one picture I would say that might encapsulate a lot of the issues of the book. Although it is past looking, you know, and very much in the present, not so much future looking. I think the prints that we talked about earlier in conjunction with one another, Onchikoshiro's beautiful large scale abstractions that he made using print processes, but really with the mind of an artist who was a painter. So he was, you know, the greatest champion of the print. But he did not confine his ideas about what the print should be to multiples. So for the people's print artists, multiples were really important. You shouldn't have a singular object. You know, only the rich and wealthy have these things that are unique that they hang on their walls as decorations. So they loved multiples. The print was great for that reason. You can make as many as the block would allow, and everybody can have art, you know, so. But Olmshi was really interested in creating art, an object, a printed image, a beautiful image made with the printmaking materials. And he did that more and more through the language of abstraction during this time. And the contrast of these to ways of making prints and the aesthetics that are used within them, I think is another place where I think the ideas of the book are most readily seen and help us to understand, of course, Japanese occupation and the kind of aesthetic and political convictions of artistic practitioners of the age.
- [51:18]
Nathan Hobson
Yeah, great, thank you. And the choice of the high Seng Goodso as this, you know, 1948 oil on canvas painting. It's quite large. It's almost 2 by 2 and a half ish meters, if I remember right. And I just. I was looking it up here in the background, so. Because I don't obviously remember it as well as you do,
- [51:42]
Dr. Alicia Volk
my description may not have been that evocative, but it's.
- [51:46]
Nathan Hobson
It's absolutely spot on. And the thing is that, you know, the thing that really strikes me thinking about it is, you know, the sort of barren, devastated, very sort of un. Japanese deserty kind of landscape where everything has been totally lost. And yet you also have this very gross, writhing fleshiness that I'd actually maybe more associate with. And if you'll forgive the reference with something like the. The transformation of the protagonist in Akira, you know, where you have. Where the sort of later, which is also about, in some ways about this kind of era also, and the problem of defeat and nuclear so on and so forth. But like, it has that same sort of feel to it, which is such a stark, interesting contrast. And again, this whole theme that you're bringing out throughout the book of these very stark contrasts between different art mediums, different agendas. I think it's such a great a summation of all that. So thank you for sharing that. I'll see if we can stick a link to the museum's page for the artwork into our description. But you can definitely, for our listeners, if that's. If you don't see it in the description, you can look up group of figure, singular, Defeated in Battle, 1948. And it will come right up. Fukuzawa Ichiro Memorial Museum. So we had this great conversation about all this, but I also want to Hear exactly what it is that you are up to now. Now that the book has come out. As you said, it's been, you know, a real work of many, many years, obviously. And so for some people, they'd be relieved. It's like, oh, I'm never going to touch this work again. For other people it's like, wow, I finally get to get to that next stage of my research. Which is it for you and what are you up to these days?
- [53:28]
Dr. Alicia Volk
Yeah, I was kind of hoping for the first one. I'm actually really energized on my next project and, and really happy to tackle it. Coming off of this one, I think. Well, it's a book with a working title of the Nuclear sublime Japanese Art after Hiroshima. And it's a topic that kind of like the current book that I've been interested in and exploring for quite some time, really from the beginning of my scholarly leanings. And I'm beginning with two chapters at the moment. So I'm researching two chapters at the moment. One of them picks up from the current book with a series of pictures called the Atomic Bomb Pictures or Genbaku Nozu by Akamatsu Toshiko and Maruki Iri. I discuss these in chapter five of the current book, but I'm looking at them from a different angle in a different context as they travel overseas in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, various other locations as part of a World Peace Council sponsored peace propaganda tour. And so really interested in seeing in this book. I was very specific on what are the local meanings of these artworks? How can we recuperate these meanings that if we were to bring a Western kind of perspective or set of assumptions and values to, we would never be able to understand these artworks. So I really was going hyper specific and local in their original context. But for this I'm looking at how these artworks traveled and became meaningful to multiple different audiences during the, you know, the evolving Cold War years. So around 1955 to 1958, roughly around that time. And then my second chapter is on a. Very excited about this publication by the photographer Kawada Kikuji called Chizu or the map that has received a good deal of attention, especially in recent years, that was compiled in 1965 with photographs made in the handful of years prior to of combining pictures of Hiroshima. In particular images of the stained interior walls and ceiling of the dome, the Genbaku Dome, the atomic bomb dome in Hiroshima at a time when memorialization in the 1960s and the mid-1960s was a very big topic. And also the appropriation of the anti war, anti nuclear movement and the kind of political divide in that during these years. But his images superimpose. Well, his book superimposes images of the atomic bomb dome with images of Americans and signs of American culture within Japan in the mid-1960s, and also kind of war relics of Japan's wartime era, kind of architectural ruins and survivors in a very interesting manner for a new generation of people to think about the relationship between Hiroshima, Japan's wartime past and the current present under the US Nuclear umbrella. So, so those are the two things I'm thinking about now. I have other chapters that will lead up to the present on various different artworks. But anyway, thank you for asking.
- [57:19]
Nathan Hobson
Not at all. And I'm glad you're feeling energized about that. And hopefully when that book comes out, we'll have a chance to have you back again. But for now, thank you so much for your time taking the time to talk to us.
- [57:31]
Dr. Alicia Volk
Thank you so much. It's been an honor and a pleasure.
- [57:33]
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- [58:08]
Nathan Hobson
Sam.