canon history
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wordcarvingsKoutarou was born in 1883, in the Shitaya neighborhood, Asakura district, Tokyo, Japan. His real name was Mitsutarou, Koutarou was the penname he chose and is the alternate reading of Mitsutarou.
He was the first son of a famous wood sculptor employed by the Meiji court specializing in Buddhist objects called Takamura Koun, and his wife Waka (later Toyo); they also had at least one more son called Toyochika. Toyochika would, together with Senroku Kitahara, founded the avant-garde craftsmen's group called Mukei (Formless). His father sent him to Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1897, when the boy was 14, to study oil painting and sculpture with the intentions of his son following in his footsteps. At the age of 5, Koutarou had been given a set of chisels by his father for this reason. Before starting school, his father had taught him in his studio. Already during that time, Koutarou had become interested in literature and had started writing and publishing haiku and tanka poems. His father was a professor at the school while Koutarou attended it. During his time at the school he joined a literary circle called Meisei, organized by Yosano Tekkan, to which he contributed poems, mainly in tanka form.
He graduated with a degree in sculpture in 1902, and did post-graduation work focused on Auguste Rodin's work. After he completed it, he re-entered the school in 1905, this time in the Western Painting department. He also studied anatomy under Mori Ougai, who would become a literary colleague in a literary gathering later on, at one point during his academy years.
Thanks to the professor of Western art history and aesthetics, Iwamura Tooru, Koutarou's father allowed Koutarou to go study abroad. In 1906, he left Yokohama for New York, arriving at Grand Central Station about a month later, but the two New York sculptors to whom Iwamura had written letters of introduction to did not accept him as an assistant. He was instead hired by Gutzon Borglum (who would become famous for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial). In the meantime Koutarou attended the Art Students League of New York City, where he won second prize in an annual competition, which freed him from having to pay tuition for the following year. During his time at the League, he quarreled with his instructor almost every day, and he "disliked extremely the vulgar, what you might call the American, taste." He also often picked fights with Americans who called him "Jap" and got the best of them. He felt greatly alienated in the West, as a Japanese living abroad, but was still a dedicated student.
He did not stay in New York for that second year, and with the special prize money that Borglum, an instructor at the school, gave him, he moved to London in June 1907. He had intended to work and earn some money in New York before going to Paris to study seriously, but he was not overly impressed with New York or London. He was, despite that, an inexhaustible student of art and language. In London, he developed relationships with Bernard Leach and Ogiwara Morie. At some point, he also lived in Italy.
Paris, where he lived from June 1908 to May 1909, was different. Paris, he found to be a profound experience, and would later say that it was "the place I became an adult." It was a spellbinding city to him and it profoundly changed his outlook on life and art. He was never, however, high-handed about Paris. He was exhilarated by everything he saw and experienced, while in a perpetual state of doubt and despair. He wrote in an unmailed letter that he published after his return to Japan, that he constantly had to remind himself that he was in Paris; so engrossed was he chasing strange and beautiful things, he said, that at times he forgot it would hurt if he pinched himself. In Paris he saw an exhibition of several hundred drawings, all of nude women, by Rodin. Koutarou was moved beyond "simple words" although he was aggreived to feel that he did not possess the kind of "animal electricity" that the master had.
While in Europe, Takamura read Baudelaire, G. Apollinaire, and other poets and translated a number of their works into Japanese. He was in Paris during the same time as Arishima Takeo.
The reason for his exhiliration with Paris was the art, and his despair was a racial inferiority complex. It was this inferiority complex that made him cut his stay in Paris short, to less than a year, even though he had planned on staying there for several years or more. He returned to Japan in June 1909, a land he had longed for and dreaded to return to at the same time.
Rodin's influence on Koutarou was decisive. He became inspired by the works of art he saw in the West, particularly the impressionists, and his works was inspired by both Western and Japanese works. He always tried to move beyond his father's vision, even as he respected his father's skill as a craftsman and was partially inspired by him. But they had their disagreements regarding art and their relationship was strained.
He frequented Yoshiwara brothels, and one time he fought with a friend over a prostitute whom he called Mona Lisa. He became a pest to the art world. His article "A Last Glance at the Third Ministry of Education Art Exhibition," published in January 1910 and regarded as the first full review of its kind in Japan, is also a model of sarcasm, must have been infuriating, painful and even destructive to the artists whose works became Koutarou's targets. He was also close to the Shirakaba (White Birch) Society, which had members such as Shiga Naoya, Mushanokouji Saneatsu, Yanagi Souetsu, Satomi Ton, Arishima Takeo, Nagano Yoshirou, And Barnard Leach, who was the only Western member of the Shirakabaha. Koutarou contributed art to the magazine that the Shirakabaha ran, though puplication ended after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1823. He wrote a piece for their Rodin's Birthday Issue in 1910.
He became a member of the Kinoshita Mokutaru's Society of Pan, a group of self-styled "decadent" writers and artists created to promote aestheticism and art for art's sake, who met in a tavern kept by a fellow aesthete. While many of the members enjoyed the time drinking, resulting in a lot of fights and the police watching them (according to rumors), Koutarou was one of those who didn't drink much and tried to keep the rowdy members in line so they wouldn't bother other people. Their magazine was edited by Nagai Kafuu and Sawaki Kozue, and was called Mita Bungaku (published at Keio University) through Shinshisha, which was considered the rical of Waseda Bungaku. Other contributors were Tanizaki Junichirou, Nagata Mikihiko, Suzuki Miekichi, Morita Shohei, Chikamatsu Shuko, Satou Haruo, Kubota Mantarou, Osanai Kaoru, Izumi Kyouka, Minakami Takitarou, and Tamura Toshiko, Watsuji Tetsurou, Kitahara Hakushuu, Nagata Hideo, Ishikawa Takuboku, and Yoshii Isamu. The group was devoted to the pursuit and enjoyment of sensual beauty. The city rather than the country, and foreign countries instead of Japan, drew their interest; they found solace in Bohemian cafes and bars. Imaginary worlds were deliberately created in order to seek liberation from the pains of reality. Social concerns were rejected. The sensitive perception of formal beauty became allimportant. The writings were chic and flashy. Too frequently without substance, the writers were attacked by critics like Abe Jiro and Akagi Kouhei; Ishikawa, Kitahara, and Kinoshita soon fled the group. Koutarou did as well, once he met his future wife. During his time of decadence, Kitahara was one of his companions in revelry.
It is thought that Koutarou, alongside Ogiwara Morie, laid the foundations of modern sculpture in Japan. Beyond sculpting and poetry writing, Koutarou sometimes was an art critic, as well as one of several who translated and published Western works in Japanese. He wasn't very good at writing prose, the writing tending toward the awkward. He had written traditional poetic forms before, but after his return to Japan he started to write in free verse instead, which he is said to have been one of the first Japanese poets to do. He wrote a lot of non-traditional, provocative works. His first poem of note, The Lost Mona Lisa, published in 1911, was about the disappearance of a prostitute.
He met a woman called Naganuma Chieko, an oil painter and member of the early feminist movement Seitosha born in the town of Adachi (now the city of Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture), the eldest of six daughters and two sons. She had the reputation of being a rebellious artist, and she, for example, drew the back cover of Seitosha's magazine's first issue. In 1912 he became one of the co-founders of the Fusain-kai group of artists alongside Kishida Ryuusei among others. In February 1914, he married Chieko and they lived a happy life in poverty. To him, Chieko was a saviour from the decadence that he had become wrapped up in, and from himself. Their marriage was founded on the principle of sexual equality with both partners pursuing their own artistic careers; they shared the chores and the atelier Koun had built for Koutarou. How successfully they were able to keep to this principle has been subject to debate, but there is no doubt that their type of relationship was unconventional and advanced for their time. Because they had little income, he sculpted during the day and wrote articles during the night. From time to time he was forced to borrow a fair amount of money from his father to keep them afloat. As Chieko's name was not added in the family register at marriage she was not, as far as Japanese law was concerned, Koutarou's wife, which gave her more freedom as an artist and as an idividual. The same year, he published his first collection of poems, called The Road Ahead (alternatively called The Distance of the Road, was influenced by the French symbolists and challenged conceptions of poetry by using subjects and diction that were not traditionally considered appropriate. This work became one of the two landmarks in modern Japanese poetry, showing a mastery of colloquial language for the first time. The other is Howling at the moon by Hagiwara Sakutarou, which came out in 1917. At a point, Koutarou bound/edited Nakahara Chuuya's poem collection.
He went on a few trips together with Chieko, once to Pompeii where they went on a tour on Vesuvius' crater, and once in 1933, to Kusatsu, where they visited the onsen, which Koutarou visited once before, in 1927.
In the 1920’s he published the collection Wild Beasts, many of whose poems expressed social motifs. Koutarou felt, along with many others then and later, that the modernisation was occurring not by organic evolution but almost by imposition and something valuable and quintessentially Japanese was being lost in the process. Nevertheless one introduction from the West that Takamura embraced was the concept of personal freedom. It cannot be overestimated how this put him at odds with the rest of a still rule-bound society. Koutarou was aware that he had persuaded Chieko away from a typical social marriage, into a more free-wheeling artistic life, and that she would be subject to dismay, bewilderment and outright opposition from those who felt that she was behaving strangely and felt threatened by it. Koutarou saw social conventions as unnatural "like standing rigidly to attention" , he wanted to be true to himself and believed in "living naturally and freely/Like the blowing of the winds, like the flying of the clouds". Nature was seen as a moral positive - even though it could mean exposing oneself to loneliness cut off from the rest of society.
Koutarou was part of a literary faction called Myoujou, or the Morning Star, and he contributed to the magazine, which was the organ of a circle called Shinshisha (New Poetry Circle). The magazine's style was inclined towards a sensual style in the romantic movement. It was founded by Yosano Tekkan, and other contributors included Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa Takuboku, Hakiwara Sakutarou, Iwano Homei, Kitahara Hakushuu, Noguchi Yonejiro, Kinoshita Rigen, and Satou Haruo. The magazine was advised by Mori Ougai, Ueda Bin and Baba Kocho, with Yosano Tekkan remaining as editor-in-chief of the publication. Myoujou was short lived, as internal dissension dissolved the Shinshisha literary circle. Many of its original members helped create a successor literary journal, Subaru (The Pleiades). Among the most notable founders are Tekkan, Mori, and Akiko. Koutarou was one of the contributors to Subaru as well as Ishikawa, Hakushuu, Kinoshita Mokutaro, and Yoshii Isamu. His piece A Green Sun was published in Subaru.
In 1929, Chieko was diagnosed with symptoms of schizophrenia and Koutarou did his best to care for her in any way possible for three years as she descended into madness. Her mental illness was agonising. Koutarou was losing the Chieko he knew while she was still there. During this time she attempted to commit suicide by poison; beside her easel stood a basket of fruits as if prepared for a still life painting. Her increased violence toward him - her violent, swearing, suffering from hallucinations and deep despair - became, in the end, too physically dangerous and he was forced to put her in a hospital in 1935. In 1938 he was briefly institutionalized for the same disease. Chieko died of tuberculosis the same year, briefly returning to her old self while se gave her a lemon she had wanted. Although the cause for schizophrenia was not well understood at that time, but Koutarou later would surpect that their pursuit of Western ideals had strained Chieko's none too strong nerves.
In 1941, Koutarou published a book of poems about Chieko, called Selections of Chieko, which was filled with poems about her and his love for her that he had written during and after their marriage. This book has, ever since it's publication, been a best-seller and is the longest-running best-seller in modern Japanese poetry. He was one of the Japanese writers who could really think in poetry.
About the time Chieko showed the first schizophrenic symptoms, Koutarou's views on art began to take on nationalistic overtones and, as Japan's expansion of its war against China in the thirties became the frequent target of worldwide criticism, he became more nationalistic in his writings. Koutarou became one of the strongest advocates in the literary and artistic world for Japan's militaristic policies. As though his earlier racial inferiority complex had been stood on its head, the admirer and promoter of Western ideals turned himself into a facile user of trite, tawdry, and dangerous military slogans. During the Second World War, Koutarou acted as the head of the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association. During the war, his studio in Tokyo was burned down. While Chieko's fall into madness was a private ordeal, Koutarou's turn to jingoism had social consequences which, to some, were extremely grave.
A few months after Japan's defeat in the war, the literary critic Odagiti Hideo frontally attacked Koutarou's "unprecedented," "despicable" change in stance, his "degradation." He charged him with "war responsibility" of the "first order." He was not the only critic who wanted Koutarou to be prosecuted as a "cultural war cirimnal" for his writings.
Partly in response to the accusation, and because he took the defeat of Japan hard, Koutarou secluded himself for seven years in a ramshackle hut in a remote village in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, northern Japan, to come to terms with the guilt he felt over having encouraged young soldiers to battle and thus leading them to their deaths. He fled Tokyo through a connection with Miyazawa Kenji. He returned to Tokyo in 1952, seven years later, to work on a large bronze nude of Chieko that is still standing at Lake Towada, northern Honshuu, today. He finished the piece in 1954. At the beginning of his self-imposed exile he wrote an apology of sorts, a sequence of twenty autobiographical poems called A brief history of imbecility.
Koutarou died in 1956, at age 73, from pulmonary tuberculosis. Koutarou always considered himself first and foremost a sculptor, but he is more highly regarded as a poet who helped redefine the landscape of modern poetry. His most significant poetry is in free verse. In particular, his love poems to his wife garner the greatest praise for their moving emotional content and for their clear expression. His poetry were rooted in genuine everyday speech, and he also had great attention to sound, though not as much as Hagiwara Sakutaro did. The Takamura Museum is about 150m from the hut, which is not walled the Takamura Sanso.
A long time after his death, beings known as Taints are erasing well-known pieces of literature from the world, and from people's memories. A person simply called The Librarian (or Miss Librarian by some) uses alchemy to transmigrate/summon authors from their works to defeat the Taints and save the literature, and Koutarou is among one of these authors. He gained a youthful appearance as he was summoned, and also gained skills with a gun - though he was already proficient in martial arts. Now he lives in the Imperial Library with the other transmigrated authors, and when he doesn't delve into books to fight Taints, he crafts artworks mainly out of wood but also out of bronze, and he also paints. His room is overflowing with art and he often gives away pieces to other authors. He also writes more poems, and plays with the other authors. He is particularly fond of playing in the snow.
He was the first son of a famous wood sculptor employed by the Meiji court specializing in Buddhist objects called Takamura Koun, and his wife Waka (later Toyo); they also had at least one more son called Toyochika. Toyochika would, together with Senroku Kitahara, founded the avant-garde craftsmen's group called Mukei (Formless). His father sent him to Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1897, when the boy was 14, to study oil painting and sculpture with the intentions of his son following in his footsteps. At the age of 5, Koutarou had been given a set of chisels by his father for this reason. Before starting school, his father had taught him in his studio. Already during that time, Koutarou had become interested in literature and had started writing and publishing haiku and tanka poems. His father was a professor at the school while Koutarou attended it. During his time at the school he joined a literary circle called Meisei, organized by Yosano Tekkan, to which he contributed poems, mainly in tanka form.
He graduated with a degree in sculpture in 1902, and did post-graduation work focused on Auguste Rodin's work. After he completed it, he re-entered the school in 1905, this time in the Western Painting department. He also studied anatomy under Mori Ougai, who would become a literary colleague in a literary gathering later on, at one point during his academy years.
Thanks to the professor of Western art history and aesthetics, Iwamura Tooru, Koutarou's father allowed Koutarou to go study abroad. In 1906, he left Yokohama for New York, arriving at Grand Central Station about a month later, but the two New York sculptors to whom Iwamura had written letters of introduction to did not accept him as an assistant. He was instead hired by Gutzon Borglum (who would become famous for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial). In the meantime Koutarou attended the Art Students League of New York City, where he won second prize in an annual competition, which freed him from having to pay tuition for the following year. During his time at the League, he quarreled with his instructor almost every day, and he "disliked extremely the vulgar, what you might call the American, taste." He also often picked fights with Americans who called him "Jap" and got the best of them. He felt greatly alienated in the West, as a Japanese living abroad, but was still a dedicated student.
He did not stay in New York for that second year, and with the special prize money that Borglum, an instructor at the school, gave him, he moved to London in June 1907. He had intended to work and earn some money in New York before going to Paris to study seriously, but he was not overly impressed with New York or London. He was, despite that, an inexhaustible student of art and language. In London, he developed relationships with Bernard Leach and Ogiwara Morie. At some point, he also lived in Italy.
Paris, where he lived from June 1908 to May 1909, was different. Paris, he found to be a profound experience, and would later say that it was "the place I became an adult." It was a spellbinding city to him and it profoundly changed his outlook on life and art. He was never, however, high-handed about Paris. He was exhilarated by everything he saw and experienced, while in a perpetual state of doubt and despair. He wrote in an unmailed letter that he published after his return to Japan, that he constantly had to remind himself that he was in Paris; so engrossed was he chasing strange and beautiful things, he said, that at times he forgot it would hurt if he pinched himself. In Paris he saw an exhibition of several hundred drawings, all of nude women, by Rodin. Koutarou was moved beyond "simple words" although he was aggreived to feel that he did not possess the kind of "animal electricity" that the master had.
While in Europe, Takamura read Baudelaire, G. Apollinaire, and other poets and translated a number of their works into Japanese. He was in Paris during the same time as Arishima Takeo.
The reason for his exhiliration with Paris was the art, and his despair was a racial inferiority complex. It was this inferiority complex that made him cut his stay in Paris short, to less than a year, even though he had planned on staying there for several years or more. He returned to Japan in June 1909, a land he had longed for and dreaded to return to at the same time.
Rodin's influence on Koutarou was decisive. He became inspired by the works of art he saw in the West, particularly the impressionists, and his works was inspired by both Western and Japanese works. He always tried to move beyond his father's vision, even as he respected his father's skill as a craftsman and was partially inspired by him. But they had their disagreements regarding art and their relationship was strained.
He frequented Yoshiwara brothels, and one time he fought with a friend over a prostitute whom he called Mona Lisa. He became a pest to the art world. His article "A Last Glance at the Third Ministry of Education Art Exhibition," published in January 1910 and regarded as the first full review of its kind in Japan, is also a model of sarcasm, must have been infuriating, painful and even destructive to the artists whose works became Koutarou's targets. He was also close to the Shirakaba (White Birch) Society, which had members such as Shiga Naoya, Mushanokouji Saneatsu, Yanagi Souetsu, Satomi Ton, Arishima Takeo, Nagano Yoshirou, And Barnard Leach, who was the only Western member of the Shirakabaha. Koutarou contributed art to the magazine that the Shirakabaha ran, though puplication ended after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1823. He wrote a piece for their Rodin's Birthday Issue in 1910.
He became a member of the Kinoshita Mokutaru's Society of Pan, a group of self-styled "decadent" writers and artists created to promote aestheticism and art for art's sake, who met in a tavern kept by a fellow aesthete. While many of the members enjoyed the time drinking, resulting in a lot of fights and the police watching them (according to rumors), Koutarou was one of those who didn't drink much and tried to keep the rowdy members in line so they wouldn't bother other people. Their magazine was edited by Nagai Kafuu and Sawaki Kozue, and was called Mita Bungaku (published at Keio University) through Shinshisha, which was considered the rical of Waseda Bungaku. Other contributors were Tanizaki Junichirou, Nagata Mikihiko, Suzuki Miekichi, Morita Shohei, Chikamatsu Shuko, Satou Haruo, Kubota Mantarou, Osanai Kaoru, Izumi Kyouka, Minakami Takitarou, and Tamura Toshiko, Watsuji Tetsurou, Kitahara Hakushuu, Nagata Hideo, Ishikawa Takuboku, and Yoshii Isamu. The group was devoted to the pursuit and enjoyment of sensual beauty. The city rather than the country, and foreign countries instead of Japan, drew their interest; they found solace in Bohemian cafes and bars. Imaginary worlds were deliberately created in order to seek liberation from the pains of reality. Social concerns were rejected. The sensitive perception of formal beauty became allimportant. The writings were chic and flashy. Too frequently without substance, the writers were attacked by critics like Abe Jiro and Akagi Kouhei; Ishikawa, Kitahara, and Kinoshita soon fled the group. Koutarou did as well, once he met his future wife. During his time of decadence, Kitahara was one of his companions in revelry.
It is thought that Koutarou, alongside Ogiwara Morie, laid the foundations of modern sculpture in Japan. Beyond sculpting and poetry writing, Koutarou sometimes was an art critic, as well as one of several who translated and published Western works in Japanese. He wasn't very good at writing prose, the writing tending toward the awkward. He had written traditional poetic forms before, but after his return to Japan he started to write in free verse instead, which he is said to have been one of the first Japanese poets to do. He wrote a lot of non-traditional, provocative works. His first poem of note, The Lost Mona Lisa, published in 1911, was about the disappearance of a prostitute.
He met a woman called Naganuma Chieko, an oil painter and member of the early feminist movement Seitosha born in the town of Adachi (now the city of Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture), the eldest of six daughters and two sons. She had the reputation of being a rebellious artist, and she, for example, drew the back cover of Seitosha's magazine's first issue. In 1912 he became one of the co-founders of the Fusain-kai group of artists alongside Kishida Ryuusei among others. In February 1914, he married Chieko and they lived a happy life in poverty. To him, Chieko was a saviour from the decadence that he had become wrapped up in, and from himself. Their marriage was founded on the principle of sexual equality with both partners pursuing their own artistic careers; they shared the chores and the atelier Koun had built for Koutarou. How successfully they were able to keep to this principle has been subject to debate, but there is no doubt that their type of relationship was unconventional and advanced for their time. Because they had little income, he sculpted during the day and wrote articles during the night. From time to time he was forced to borrow a fair amount of money from his father to keep them afloat. As Chieko's name was not added in the family register at marriage she was not, as far as Japanese law was concerned, Koutarou's wife, which gave her more freedom as an artist and as an idividual. The same year, he published his first collection of poems, called The Road Ahead (alternatively called The Distance of the Road, was influenced by the French symbolists and challenged conceptions of poetry by using subjects and diction that were not traditionally considered appropriate. This work became one of the two landmarks in modern Japanese poetry, showing a mastery of colloquial language for the first time. The other is Howling at the moon by Hagiwara Sakutarou, which came out in 1917. At a point, Koutarou bound/edited Nakahara Chuuya's poem collection.
He went on a few trips together with Chieko, once to Pompeii where they went on a tour on Vesuvius' crater, and once in 1933, to Kusatsu, where they visited the onsen, which Koutarou visited once before, in 1927.
In the 1920’s he published the collection Wild Beasts, many of whose poems expressed social motifs. Koutarou felt, along with many others then and later, that the modernisation was occurring not by organic evolution but almost by imposition and something valuable and quintessentially Japanese was being lost in the process. Nevertheless one introduction from the West that Takamura embraced was the concept of personal freedom. It cannot be overestimated how this put him at odds with the rest of a still rule-bound society. Koutarou was aware that he had persuaded Chieko away from a typical social marriage, into a more free-wheeling artistic life, and that she would be subject to dismay, bewilderment and outright opposition from those who felt that she was behaving strangely and felt threatened by it. Koutarou saw social conventions as unnatural "like standing rigidly to attention" , he wanted to be true to himself and believed in "living naturally and freely/Like the blowing of the winds, like the flying of the clouds". Nature was seen as a moral positive - even though it could mean exposing oneself to loneliness cut off from the rest of society.
Koutarou was part of a literary faction called Myoujou, or the Morning Star, and he contributed to the magazine, which was the organ of a circle called Shinshisha (New Poetry Circle). The magazine's style was inclined towards a sensual style in the romantic movement. It was founded by Yosano Tekkan, and other contributors included Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa Takuboku, Hakiwara Sakutarou, Iwano Homei, Kitahara Hakushuu, Noguchi Yonejiro, Kinoshita Rigen, and Satou Haruo. The magazine was advised by Mori Ougai, Ueda Bin and Baba Kocho, with Yosano Tekkan remaining as editor-in-chief of the publication. Myoujou was short lived, as internal dissension dissolved the Shinshisha literary circle. Many of its original members helped create a successor literary journal, Subaru (The Pleiades). Among the most notable founders are Tekkan, Mori, and Akiko. Koutarou was one of the contributors to Subaru as well as Ishikawa, Hakushuu, Kinoshita Mokutaro, and Yoshii Isamu. His piece A Green Sun was published in Subaru.
In 1929, Chieko was diagnosed with symptoms of schizophrenia and Koutarou did his best to care for her in any way possible for three years as she descended into madness. Her mental illness was agonising. Koutarou was losing the Chieko he knew while she was still there. During this time she attempted to commit suicide by poison; beside her easel stood a basket of fruits as if prepared for a still life painting. Her increased violence toward him - her violent, swearing, suffering from hallucinations and deep despair - became, in the end, too physically dangerous and he was forced to put her in a hospital in 1935. In 1938 he was briefly institutionalized for the same disease. Chieko died of tuberculosis the same year, briefly returning to her old self while se gave her a lemon she had wanted. Although the cause for schizophrenia was not well understood at that time, but Koutarou later would surpect that their pursuit of Western ideals had strained Chieko's none too strong nerves.
In 1941, Koutarou published a book of poems about Chieko, called Selections of Chieko, which was filled with poems about her and his love for her that he had written during and after their marriage. This book has, ever since it's publication, been a best-seller and is the longest-running best-seller in modern Japanese poetry. He was one of the Japanese writers who could really think in poetry.
About the time Chieko showed the first schizophrenic symptoms, Koutarou's views on art began to take on nationalistic overtones and, as Japan's expansion of its war against China in the thirties became the frequent target of worldwide criticism, he became more nationalistic in his writings. Koutarou became one of the strongest advocates in the literary and artistic world for Japan's militaristic policies. As though his earlier racial inferiority complex had been stood on its head, the admirer and promoter of Western ideals turned himself into a facile user of trite, tawdry, and dangerous military slogans. During the Second World War, Koutarou acted as the head of the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association. During the war, his studio in Tokyo was burned down. While Chieko's fall into madness was a private ordeal, Koutarou's turn to jingoism had social consequences which, to some, were extremely grave.
A few months after Japan's defeat in the war, the literary critic Odagiti Hideo frontally attacked Koutarou's "unprecedented," "despicable" change in stance, his "degradation." He charged him with "war responsibility" of the "first order." He was not the only critic who wanted Koutarou to be prosecuted as a "cultural war cirimnal" for his writings.
Partly in response to the accusation, and because he took the defeat of Japan hard, Koutarou secluded himself for seven years in a ramshackle hut in a remote village in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, northern Japan, to come to terms with the guilt he felt over having encouraged young soldiers to battle and thus leading them to their deaths. He fled Tokyo through a connection with Miyazawa Kenji. He returned to Tokyo in 1952, seven years later, to work on a large bronze nude of Chieko that is still standing at Lake Towada, northern Honshuu, today. He finished the piece in 1954. At the beginning of his self-imposed exile he wrote an apology of sorts, a sequence of twenty autobiographical poems called A brief history of imbecility.
Koutarou died in 1956, at age 73, from pulmonary tuberculosis. Koutarou always considered himself first and foremost a sculptor, but he is more highly regarded as a poet who helped redefine the landscape of modern poetry. His most significant poetry is in free verse. In particular, his love poems to his wife garner the greatest praise for their moving emotional content and for their clear expression. His poetry were rooted in genuine everyday speech, and he also had great attention to sound, though not as much as Hagiwara Sakutaro did. The Takamura Museum is about 150m from the hut, which is not walled the Takamura Sanso.
A long time after his death, beings known as Taints are erasing well-known pieces of literature from the world, and from people's memories. A person simply called The Librarian (or Miss Librarian by some) uses alchemy to transmigrate/summon authors from their works to defeat the Taints and save the literature, and Koutarou is among one of these authors. He gained a youthful appearance as he was summoned, and also gained skills with a gun - though he was already proficient in martial arts. Now he lives in the Imperial Library with the other transmigrated authors, and when he doesn't delve into books to fight Taints, he crafts artworks mainly out of wood but also out of bronze, and he also paints. His room is overflowing with art and he often gives away pieces to other authors. He also writes more poems, and plays with the other authors. He is particularly fond of playing in the snow.
Family
Date: 2017-06-05 08:51 pm (UTC)https://wiki.samurai-archives.com/index.php?title=Takamura_Koun
Takamura Kōun, original name Nakajima Kōzō (born March 19, 1852, Edo [now Tokyo], Japan—died Oct. 10, 1934, Tokyo; becvame 82 years old), Japanese sculptor who worked to preserve the art of wood carving.
Takamura studied Buddhist sculpture under Takamura Tōun, later succeeding to his master’s art and name. He had to endure poverty in order to continue making wood sculpture, since ivory was the favoured medium of the 1870s and 1880s. In 1887, when the Tokyo Fine Arts School was opened, he was invited by two art historians, Ernest F. Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin, to head its wood-carving department. Takamura worked to free wood carving from the Buddhist tradition by stressing a realistic approach to his models. On the whole, however, he remained within the limits of traditional wood sculpture. His representative works are Aged Monkey and the bronze statues Nankō dōzō and Saigō Takamori dōzō.
Kôun was born in the Shitaya neighborhood of Edo; his name was originally Nakajima Mitsuzô. He began studying under Takamura Tôun - the last great Buddhist sculptor of the Edo period style - in 1863, and was officially adopted by Tôun's older sister, taking the Takamura name.
He continued sculpting in wood through the Meiji Restoration, and began working for the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkô (Tokyo School of Fine Arts) when it opened in 1889. Kôun became an instructor at the school the following year. He was later named one of the Imperial Household Artists (teishitsu gigeiin), and was given honorary court rank of Upper Fourth Rank
Though initially trained in more traditional modes of wood sculpture, he began, particularly in the 1890s-1900s, to incorporate Western approaches and aesthetics of realism into his wooden sculptures. He also ventured into sculpting in bronze. While there had been a tradition of bronze sculpture in Japan going back over 1000 years, producing sculptures in the Western style and mode was rather cutting-edge in Japan at the time. Over the course of the next several decades, Kôun's works were shown at numerous international and domestic expositions, where he frequently earned high awards. From 1907 onwards, he regularly served as a judge in the official government-sponsored exhibitions.
Kôun's most famous works include "Aged Monkey," a wooden sculpture held at the Tokyo National Museum; a standing statue of Saigô Takamori in Ueno Park; and a mounted statue of Kusunoki Masashige in the outer gardens of the Tokyo Imperial Palace.
His many students included his son Takamura Kôtarô, Yamazaki Chôun, Yonahara Unkai, and Hirakushi Denchû.
Sculptor. Born in Tokyo. In 1863, he became a pupil of Toun Takamura, who was a sculptor of Buddhist images, and later was adopted into the Takamura family. In 1877, he was awarded the best prize in the Naikoku-Kangyo Exposition. In 1886, he founded the Tokyo Choko-kai. He taught at the Sculpture Department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from 1889. He adopted realistic styles in wood engraving and fostered a younger generation of artists including Choun Yamazaki and Denchu Hiragushi. In 1919, he became a member of the Teikoku Bijutsu-in. His representative works include "Roen" (The Aged Monkey), "the statue of Masashige Kusunoki", and "the statue of Takamori Saigo". He is the father of poet and sculptor Kotaro Takamura and caster Toyochika Takamura.
Skilled manual trades of this sort have been dying out for a very long time, and people have been lamenting their death for just as long. In the Meiji era (1868–1912), the renowned sculptor Takamura Koun commented to his son, the poet Takamura Kotaro, on the disappearance of handwork since the end of the Edo period (1603–1867). He was looking back over a career in which he had reached the summit of success only after years of grueling training under the apprenticeship system that was common to all Japan’s traditional arts, crafts, and manual trades.
Takamura Toyochika = Younger Brother.
1890 – 1972. Younger brother. A son of the famous sculptor Takamura Koun, Takamura Toyochika was a specialist in metal casting using the cire-perdue or lost-wax method. In 1908 he became a pupil of Tsuda Shinobu, graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1915. He took a tokusen or gold prize at the 8th Teiten exhibition in 1927, a prize his work also won in the following two years. Toyochika exhibited at the Shin-Bunten and after the War at the Nitten. Especially noted for his flower vases, he was honored as a Ningen Kokuho or National Living Treasure in 1964.
With the tomobako or original box, inscribed on the exterior of the lid: Ho-gata Kaki or Angle Form Vase; and on the reverse of the lid signed by the artist: (Teikoku) Geijutsuin Kai-in, Takamura Toyochika or (Imperial) Fine Arts Academy Honorary Member, Takamura Toyochika, and sealed: Toyochika.
Mukei no. 1, January 1927, published a declaration, said to be written by [Yamazaki] Kakutaro’s lifelong friend Takamura Toyochika (1890-1972), which provides - in the high-flown language of the time - some hints about what the group aimed for and what it despised: Mukei means ‘no form’…[…] We must have a blazing passion, a serious enthusiasm, unfailing patience and a beautiful yearning for the future. Yearning for the old days, retrogression, withering, rest, extinction, emptiness, silence, the maintenance of the status quo and prudence – these are what Mukei has to expel most.
Freshness, vividness, liveliness, driving ahead, lively motion, fullness, destruction of the status quo, the future and a shout of joy – Mukei raises the flag toward the distance where there is always light. […] Those who yearn for the era when court nobles used to walk holding cherry blossoms over their heads should die first.
During the subsequent years he continued to exhibit his work, acted as a juror, went on a lecture tour for Mukei together with his friend Takamura Toyochika, and was involved in the decoration of the Imperial Waiting Room of the National Diet Building.
THE CULT OF RODIN
Date: 2017-06-05 10:39 pm (UTC)COLONIAL HISTORY IN THE SPREAD OF AUGUSTE RODIN’S
REPUTATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA
Although small in number, traditional carvers in Japan, Takamura Koun and his colleagues in the wood-carving department of Tokyo Art School in particular, received commissions for important monuments. Referring to monumental tradition of the West, traditional sculptors of the country carved wood models for statues to be cast in bronze and placed on high pedestals in parks and plazas. Due to a large amount of work involved in carving monumental statues in wood, Japanese carvers often worked together for a project, each carving the part that he was good at. The equestrian Statue of Kusunoki Masashige (fig. 3), installed at the Imperial Plaza in Tokyo in 1900, for
instance, was carved by three different sculptors. Takamura Koun carved the head, Yamada Kisai the body, and Kotou Sadayuki the horse. Compared to statues created by Western-style sculptors, which were cast from clay models like The Statue of Omura Masjiro (fig. 4), those created by traditional carvers retain sharper and more angular edges with detailed descriptions of smaller parts such
as eyes, mouth, and fingers, as in The Statue of Saigo Takamori at Ueno Park (fig.5).34
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Rather than imposing their own values or tastes on public sculptures, Northeast Asian sculptors were more receptive to public responses. Japanese sculptor Takamura Koun, for instance, re-carved the model for the statue of Saigo Takamori, a military leader who contributed to overthrow shogunate and to help Meiji restoration, when his first finished model caused public disagreement in 1893. Responding to public claims that Saigo was not qualified to wear military uniform since he dishonored the spirit of a soldier by rebelling against the military order, Koun carved Saigo in ordinary outfit hunting out with his dog, which was carved by Kotou Sadayuki.
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In the same vein, Ogiwara claims that The Statue of Saigo Takamori (fig. 5) cast from Takamura Koun’s wood model was successful in capturing the essence of the subject, although he thought Saigo and his dog did not go well together and thus, it would have been better if the dog had been removed from its master.
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Another contributor to the Rodin issue of Shirakaba, Takamura Kotaro, a poet, critic, and sculptor, who wrote and translated most intensively on Rodin in Japan in the first decades of the 20th century, also took Rodin in the manner of Rilke and Mushanokoji. In his introduction to Rodin’s Words, a collection of writings on the sculptor published in Europe and America that Takamura edited
and translated into Japanese in 1916, he wrote, “How much I owe to Rodin for my life! … I was saved and encouraged by Rodin,” even though he never met the master.
Takamura was born the son of a poor Buddhist carver. However, he was able to receive an education of which any artist could dream at the time, as his father Takamura Koun’s status changed from a lowly artisan to a respected
master by being appointed as a professor of Tokyo Art School during the traditional revival movement and began receiving prominent commissions.
After studying sculpture and painting at Tokyo Art School, Takamura traveled to New York, London, and Paris, studying sculpture at National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, and the Academie Julian between 1906 and 1909.
During his stay in New York, Takamura saw Bust of St. John the Baptist, in which a fleeting moment of facial expression was well captured with careful rendering of details and refined sculptural surface, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although it was the first Rodin sculpture that he saw, the eloquent writer did not leave a detailed account of his encounter with his hero’s sculpture.
Instead, Takamura left a vivid account on his experience of Diomedes’ Mare by Gutzon Borglum also at the museum:
Takamura was so impressed by Borglum’s sculpture that he asked Daniel Chester French to write a letter of recommendation for his assistantship under Borglum.18 While working as the American sculptor’s assistant for about four months, Takamura made Bust of Ruskin after his master’s. Given that Borglum was one of the first American sculptors who had close contact with Rodin, wrote an article on the French sculptor as early as 1902, and his early works presented so much Rodinian flavor that Paul Manship went so far as to think Rodin imitated Borglum’s style, it was natural for the Japanese Rodin enthusiast to be impressed by Borglum’s sculptures.
Although Takamura was a talented sculptor, his achievements in the early 20th century were more prominent in poetry and art criticism than in sculpture. Loosely affiliated with Shirakaba group, Takamura rigorously
promoted Rodin after his return to Japan in 1909. Although overtly pedantic, his writings from the 1910s, which often included German and French words without Japanese translations, were most influential among young Japanese
artists and writers. His article “Green Sun,” published in 1910, has been regarded as one of the most influential art-critical texts in the country, being quoted in various writings on art since then. In this article, Takamura urged Japanese artists to forget the burden of being Japanese and having local colors and to be truthful to their personalities:
For Takamura, Rodin was not only a criterion for his judgment on art, but also a standard toward which all sculptors should aim. In almost every review on Japanese sculpture that he wrote, Takamura brought up Rodin, as in the following review of the third Bunten:
Takamura’s accounts of Rodin seldom included discussions of specific sculptures by the master, but were often charged with extravagant praise, which makes his writings more rambling, as in his entry for the Rodin issue of Shirakaba magazine, titled in French “Meditations sur le Maitre”:
In contrast to the accounts written by Takamura and Mushanokoji, accounts by Japanese sculptors included in the Rodin issue of Shirakaba were more down to earth. In his account of experiencing Rodin’s works through
“imperfect photographic reproductions,” Asakura Fumio, then a professor at the sculpture department of Tokyo Art School, confessed that although he could see some merits in Rodin’s works, he could not feel what people called ‘the life’ in the master’s sculptures, which seemed “overly nervous, gloomy, and irksome” and had something that made his “shoulders stiff.”
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Rodin’s influence culminated in works by Takamura Kotaro,
Ogiwara Morie, and young sculptors associated with the two Japanese apostles of Rodin, including Nakahara Teiichiro, Tobari Kogan, and Fujikawa Yuzo.
The new generation of sculptors in Japan became interested in more naturalized and expressive rendering of human figures. Muscular male nudes in contemplative poses became popular sculptural subjects, while female nudes became more sensual, even though less overtly sexual than Rodin’s, as in Ogiwara’s Despair (fig. 10), a direct quote of Rodin’s Danaid, and Tobari’s Foot Trick which depicts a naked female acrobat lying on her back with her legs up
balancing a barrel on her foot.
Also evident in works by these sculptors was their interest in Rodin’s bold experimentation with human figures that he so often distorted, exaggerated,
and mutilated, according to Albert Elsen, to free his sculptures from traditional narratives.26 While Ogiwara, Tobari, and Hori Shinji made a number of torsos,
Takamura executed a series of hands and feet between 1917 and 1923. In his Paris years, Ogiwara created a male nude in which the head and arms were brutally mutilated as in Rodin’s Walking Man (fig. 11).
On the other hand, retaining the traces of a sculptor’s hands, sculptural surfaces became more varied and roughened, while Japanese sculptors adopted accidental or quasi-accidental effects that Rodin used in such pieces as The Head of Baudelaire, Meditation, and Walking Man in which a big dent was left on the back (fig. 12). Takamura scarred the Head of Okura Kihachiro (fig. 13) by cutting
chunks of clay from the proper left side of the face, while Tobari erased the face of a seated female figure, Glittering Jealousy, and cut off her breasts (fig. 14).
However, the most striking example is found in Ogiwara’s Woman (fig. 15) on which the sculptor left a scraped scar by gouging out a handful of clay from the back of the female nude with refined front (fig. 16).
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While publishing his second translation of Rodin’s Words in 1920 and a monograph on the sculptor in 1927, Takamura
Kotaro continued to practice Rodinian sculptural principles into the 1930s, although this aspect of his output was not as prolific as his literary activities.
Moreover, Takamura became more nationalistic in his writings from the 1930s and turned into an advocate for militaristic efforts of the Japanese government
during World War II. Being a frequent target for criticism after the war, he had a rather isolated life, working more on wood carving than modeling.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-05 10:39 pm (UTC)recommended in the Valuable Book Section of Chosun Ilbo in 1939, the sculptor was described as “almost a saint in art,” while the book would provide “knowledge on the mystery between art and human being.”
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another noted artist, Kim Sejoong, decided to be a sculptor in the mid-1940s after reading Takamura Kotaro’s Rodin’s Words.
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Writers of Northeast Asian accounts of Rodin were familiar with contemporary accounts of the sculptor published in Europe and America. In Japan, Takamura Kotaro saw the image of Rodin’s Thinker in The Studio, an art magazine based in London, in 1904 and purchased Camille Mauclair’s book on Rodin published in New York in the following year, when he was a student at Tokyo Art School. Mushanokoji Saneatsu was subscribing to a German art magazine, which published articles on Rodin in the early 20th century.
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Books and articles on the sculptor from Europe and America began to be translated into Northeast Asian languages, when the Rodin myth was more or less firmly established in the region. The first Japanese translation of the
Western books on Rodin, Auguste Rodin: L’Art entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell (L’Art) was published in the country as early as 1914, while Takamura Kotaro’s Rodin’s Words, a Japanese translation of various writings on the sculptor and Rodin’s own writing, published in Europe and America before the mid-1910s, was published in 1916. However, it was not until 1960 that the first Korean translation of a Western book on the sculptor, Rilke’s essays on Rodin, was published in the country. A few books on Rodin written by European writers were translated into Chinese in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, literary critic Fu Lei, who studied literature and aesthetics in France, translated and printed 100 copies of Gsell’s L’Art for his class on Western art in a university in Shanghai, while Zeng Juezhi published his translations of Rilke’s Rodin and Gsell’s L’Art in 1930. Liang Zhongdai’s translation of Rilke’s Rodin was published in 1943.
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In fact, three of the most widely read books on Rodin in Northeast Asian countries were all translations of Western accounts on the sculptor; Rilke’s essays on Rodin, Gsell’s L’Art, and Takamura’s Rodin’s Words. Rilke’s Rodin was more frequently published in Japan than in any other country in the world, while the number of Gsell’s account published in Northeast Asia is more than those published in all the Western countries added together. In addition, accounts of Rodin included in Takamura’s translation were published no more than a few times in the West, but in Japan the book was published in a number of editions and reprints throughout the 20th century.
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L’Art was also published in Japan in 1916 as a part of Takamura Kotaro’s Rodin’s Words, in which three chapters from the books and excerpts of the rest of the chapters were included. Takamura translated two more chapters from L’Art for his second book with the same title published in 1920. The revised edition of Rodin’s Words, which includes all the five chapters and the excerpts of the other chapters was published by Iwanami Shoten in 1960.
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The last book that had a great contribution to the establishment of Rodin’s reputation in Northeast Asia was Takamura Kotaro’s Rodin’s Words. Since his return to Japan in 1909, Takamura translated accounts of Rodin published in the West for journals and magazines of the country, and published his translations into two books with same title in 1916 and in 1920. As suggested in the title, Takamura intended to present Rodin in his own words and selected writings known to have been Rodin’s own such as “Les Cathédrales de France” and “A la Venus de Milos,” in addition to accounts written by those who had close acquaintance with the sculptor and had deep admiration of his genius, such as Judith Cladel, Paul Gsell, Gustave Cocquiot, and Camille Mauclair.
Accounts by these writers seldom contain critical evaluations of Rodin’s art, but are full of quotations of what the sculptor said on art. Rodin’s Words was an instant success in Japan. The first book published in 1916 was reprinted in the following year, while the second book came out in 1920, with its second printing in 1921. According to Takamura Toyochika, the book appealed not only to young artists but also to a wide range of people:
Takamura’s translations were published in a number of editions and prints throughout the 20th century and are still in print. In 1960 Iwanami published a pocket-sized edition of the book, combining the two Rodin’s Words that Takamura translated. The 31st printing of the revised edition, which added a detailed chronology of Rodin’s career and more images of his works not included in the earlier editions, came out in November of 2004. In other words,
the Iwanami edition was reprinted an average of less than once every one and half years.
Rodin’s Words was not translated into Chinese, and its Korean translation was not published until the mid-1970s. However, writers of the earlier accounts of Rodin in both countries, mostly studied in Japan, were familiar with
Takamura’s book. In 1928 when Lu Xun recommended Takamura’s monograph on Rodin in his review of the Chinese translation of Arishima Takeo’s account of Rodin, he wrote that Takamura’s book on Rodin was easy to acquire in China.
While Kim Moonjib, who wrote the first intensive account of Rodin in Korea, referred to Takamura’s book, Chosun Ilbo recommended the Japanese book to its readers in 1939, as discussed in the previous section of this chapter. On the other hand, Kim Sejoong (1928-1986) recalled the impact of Rodin’s Words on his career as a sculptor as follows:
Translations of Western books on Rodin further flourished in Northeast Asia in the late 20th century.
However, no other books could beat the popularity of Rilke’s Rodin, Gsell’s L’Art, and Takamura’s Rodin’s Words. All written in Rodin’s lifetime by those who had personal rapport with the sculptor, these books are far from scholarly accounts grounded on facts. However, for those who had rare chances to see the sculptor’s actual works, Rodin’s voices delivered through Rodin’s Words and L’Art could be surrogates for his works, while Rilke’s poeticized Rodin could provide a room for imagination for those who experienced his works in photographs.
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A few leading figures in Japanese modern sculpture left accounts on the impact of their first encounters with
pictures of The Thinker. In 1904 Takamura Kotaro saw a small photograph of the sculpture that appeared in the February 1904 issue of The Studio magazine and wrote:
Takamura’s urge to “know more about the sculptor” ignited by the image of The Thinker was strong enough to lead him to purchase Camille Mauclair’s Auguste Rodin: The Man-His Idea-His Works soon after its English publication in
1905. The poet, critic, and sculptor is known to have read the book so many times that he memorized the whole book, and he wrote, edited, and translated a large number of accounts on Rodin in the 1910s and 20s, while he himself
practiced Rodinian sculptural principles.
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In 1960, Iwanami published its first printings of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Rodin and Takamura Kotaro’s Rodin’s Words in pocket-sized paperbacks, which have since been widely read in the country.