"Deco Japan' in New York

Modern Japan is unique: a complex, hierarchical and profoundly isolated culture that remade itself virtually on a dime in response to the challenge of Western imperialism and emerged as a power determined to beat the West at its own game in the early 20th Century. I know of no other society that was able to remake itself so thoroughly in so short a time, and to adapt alien customs, institutions and values to its own.

Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) was as thoroughly cut off from the outside world as it is possible for a society in proximity to other cultures to be. Foreigners had been expelled in the 17th Century, and trade contact was limited (at least nominally) to a single day a year when outside shipping was permitted to berth in Nagasaki harbor.

Of course, the fascination of the forbidden meant that both Western and Eastern influences made their way by osmosis into Japanese culture, despite official prohibition. But until Commodore Perry trained his guns on Tokyo in 1853, Japan's ruling elite was able to preserve not only the façade but in large part the reality of a feudal culture that answered to no code but its own.

From Samurai to Pearl Harbor

Such a society, where even firearms had been banned to protect the monopoly of the sword-wielding Samurai warrior class, would have seemed an easy target for Western predation. But the native leaders, recognizing their peril and rapidly calculating that their power could be preserved only by adopting Western political and economic forms and military tactics and technology, transformed Japan within 40 years into a ranking world power, and within 60 into the dominant presence in the Far East.

The culmination of this process— an inevitable one, in the eyes of Japanese leaders— was a confrontation with the greatest world power of all, the U.S.

The amount of cultural contradiction and what sociologists like to call cognitive dissonance that Japan was called upon to absorb in these decades, from the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1868 (in reality a modernizing coup d'état carried out in the name of the emperor) and the outbreak of war with China and the U.S. in 1931-1941, is staggering. Yet it was an aspect of Japan's drastic reinvention of itself to have persistently interpreted radically new social forms in terms of traditional values and conventions.

Only in this way was the country able to assimilate a change that affected virtually every aspect of life without losing its abiding cultural identity. Without that remarkable dynamic, the great experiment in forced-draft modernization would certainly have come a cropper, and Japan would have faced the revolutionary crises that swamped Russia and China.

Bertolucci's Emperor

Still, the tensions and confusions inherent in such a process were painful and occasionally absurd. Japanese cultural modernism is a very curious thing.

After 1945, with the imposition of the MacArthur regime on the defeated Japanese empire, change was, at least for a while, dictated by the American occupation. But the adoption of Western influences before World War II, especially after the formal recognition of Japan's Great Power status at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922, was a matter of choice by the Japanese themselves.

Virtually none of this fascinating period has been noticed in the West, except of course by scholars. The only portrayal I can think of in Western popular culture is in the brief section of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film, The Last Emperor, that deals with Japan's creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. That film's chief interest is China, but suddenly highly Westernized Japanese types appear to direct the court of the "restored" Chinese emperor, much to the fascination of the young emperor, who had himself grown up in the total seclusion of Beijing's Forbidden City.

Ahead of the curve

The Japan Society's present show of Japanese art and artifacts from between 1920 and 1945 thus breaks new ground, and must be accounted one of the most important exhibitions of the current season— in larger terms, a significant cultural event, and a milestone in Japanese-American cultural relations. It has been made possible by two extraordinary collectors, Robert and Mary Levenson, who have amassed the works on display over more than two decades.

Even in Japan, the influence of Western art deco on the art of interwar Japan has been belated: Only in the past ten years has serious attention begun to be paid to it. The Levensons were ahead of the curve, and we are in their debt.

The objects on display range from the most casual items of popular consumption— matchboxes, postcards, sheet music, advertising posters— to works of high fashion and fine art. Two things about them strike one immediately: their natural stylishness and level of craftsmanship; and their fascination with any and all things Western.

One might think the former might reflect the Levensons' own good taste, and no doubt it does. But design excellence in the humblest commercial artifacts suggests a broadly diffused level of aesthetic invention and sophistication.

Cigarettes and cocktails

Art deco, of course, was a movement designed precisely to extend such values to articles of commerce, but it dovetailed with traditional Japanese expression. The resulting dialogue between Western motifs and Japanese forms is the core of the exhibit.

Such cultural encounters are not always happy, but Japanese deco, at its best, achieves an extraordinary stylistic synthesis, and it's certainly a distinctive branch of the worldwide deco movement.

Japanese art had already exerted its own influence on Western fine art in the late 19th Century work of Van Gogh and others, but it had never penetrated to a popular level. To see vampish Japanese girls in low-cut Western dress with cigarettes and cocktails, or bent into Isadora Duncan dance poses, is certainly striking; but even women of the elite classes in traditional costume reflect the Western aura.

Kobayakawa Kiyoshi's Staircase (Kaidan) is a good example: Its young lady wears a kimono with a fox fur wrap, and almost certainly reflects— directly or indirectly, consciously or not— Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

Nudity appears, too, as in the sheet music for Song of Miss Nippon, whose Western-bobbed and black-slippered figure reclines— none too comfortably, it would appear— in a figure-length, corkscrew-shaped hoop.

Imperial stallion

Male figures, in contrast, are almost entirely absent from this art, a reflection perhaps on patriarchal dignity or the greater plasticity of perceived female identity. The male does appear prominently, however, in animal figures.

Hiramatsu Koshun's highly stylized bronze Bull is a superior example, with its striking (but not derivative) evocation of Picasso. On a rather different level is Hayashi Bunshu's Stationery Box with Pegasus Going to the Sky. The winged stallion surmounts the globe, clearly an appropriation of the classic Western image for the imperial purposes of the Land of the Rising Sun.

More and more overtly political themes emerge as Japan's Asian wars begin in the 1930s, and persist— still in Western dress— into the 1940s. Japan had taken the Prussian constitution for its own model, and industrial cartels characterized both Germany and Japan prior to the advent of fascism. Eroticism, militarism and expansionism are all increasingly interwoven as the period proceeds; objects are more sharp-edged; animal totems are more beaked and predatory.

Elegance is rarely lost, however. European fascism, military tailoring aside, was more or less a stylistic disaster; the Japanese variant held up a good deal better.

Hiroshima's legacy

Japan's imperial era came to an end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with it the deco style. Few artistic movements have ever tried to reconcile such complex and conflicting imperatives, and few in consequence have been as distinctive.

At its best and most sophisticated, Japanese deco was a genuine fusion of old and new, East and West. But few of its products lack interest as cultural expression.

"Deco Japan" is finely curated, beautifully displayed and revelatory on many levels. Connoisseurs of fine art and popular culture alike will be well rewarded. The show's real subject, though, is the enigma of modern Japan itself.