out a popularly priced edition, thus displaying to a far wider audience the techniques and craftsmanship of this group of distinguished artists, along with Mr. Michener's perceptive, informative commentary.
James Michener heartily endorses this version of what originated as a collector's item. We present this volume with renewed pride.
INTRODUCTION
I N the early summer of 1959, business required that I be in Tokyo during an exciting time in my life: word kept trickling through from New York telling of the unexpected good things that were happening to a novel I had recently completed, and it looked as if it might be a success. For five years I had worked on the novel, and to have it accepted was encouraging, but the degree of success promised by these first reports went well beyond my expectation. Thus early in the life of the book I was assured that the time I had invested in its writing would be repaid; whether or not the public would like the book would be determined later.
As a result of the good news, I found myself assured of financial independence for a few more years, and I began to reflect upon how unfairly modern society distributes the rewards of art. I knew literally hundreds of able writers who found it impossible to earn a living, while to a few all good things happened. Once I myself had labored at writing for eight years without being able to earn a nickel, and I had been as good a writer then as I was now. Those who try to be artists exist in a world of nothing or everything, and I wish it were not so.
It was in this mood that I was drifting down Tokyo's Ginza one sunny afternoon, idly watching the flow of life along that enchanting thoroughfare. With nothing better to do, I turned west and passed into the warren of little streets and alleys known as the Nishi Ginza. Soon I found myself standing before a window I had grown to know; it belonged to the print shop and art gallery called Yoseido, opened in 1954 by Abe Yuji, third-generation representative of a family of art-mounters which had formerly been appointed to mount scrolls, screens, and the like for the Imperial Household and had also become prosperous in Ginza real estate. Ever since Yoseido's opening, the artistically-minded young Abe had served as the principal salesman for a group of artists who had made something of a splash in the art world.
I entered Yoseido that afternoon and saw on its walls the latest prints by artists I had come to know well. Here was a brilliantly colored alpine scene by Azechi Umetaro, and I studied the manner in which this delightful mountaineer had progressed to new understandings of his art. On the other wall was a marvelous, somber abstraction by Yoshida Masaji, a brooding thing of gray and black and purple, and again I lost myself in contemplating the various plateaus of progress across which this young man had moved in the years I had known him.
Also prominent was a large print in stark black and white, an architectural scene carved in the most ancient tradition by the oldest of the artists, little Hiratsuka Un'ichi, who had been my close friend for many years and who was still one of the greatest of contemporary woodblock artists, regardless of what country one was considering.
Here before me was the work which fifty men had accomplished in the two years since I had last met with them: the scintillating color prints, the vibrant black-and-whites, those done in the old style, and those so modern that they clawed at the mind for recognition. It was a body of magnificent work, one group's summary of how men saw the world and its passions.
As I looked at the prints I could see behind each one the man who had carved those blocks and pressed that paper down into the splashed colors. They were as fine a group of men as I have ever known: schoolteachers, mechanics, intellectual hermits, wild, gusty men who loved to drink, mountaineers, factory workers, poets of the most exquisite sensibility, laughing men, sober men, tragic men. And as I saw their faces staring back at me I experienced a real sickness of the soul, and out of that sickness came this book.
For I, by pure accident, worked in a field (writing) in a society (America) that assured me a decent income, a good living, and some security for the future. But those men on the wall, most of them with a far greater talent than mine, were laboring in a field (print-making) in a country (Japan) that provided only the most meager living, if any. Of all the woodblock artists I have known in Japan only two have been able to make a living from their art, and they have worked like dogs to accomplish even this. All the others have had to devote their principal energies to irrelevant jobs.
It has always seemed to me most unfair that a world which, whether it acknowledges the fact or not, requires art just as much as it requires rice has never discovered a way in which to reward the artist sensibly. A young American, talented to be sure, writes a book about a man who wears gray-flannel suits and from it earns more than a million dollars. Another young American whose equal talents run to poetry cannot even begin to make a living. A third young American with more talent than either of his compatriots turns to sculpturing and literally starves.
Or, to take a specific example, I spend five years at a major project and before it is even published I am assured security for two or three years, while Yoshida Masaji, in Tokyo, works for the same length of time on his statement of a major theme and from it gains almost nothing. Tormented by these injustices, I decided that the least I could do would be to purchase still more of the work of my friends; so I quickly bought all of their recent prints and lugged them back to my hotel room. There, with the help of a maid and a box of thumbtacks, I hung the prints until they completely covered my walls; and then I sat solemnly in the middle of the room to review what had been happening in Japan's art world since my last visit.
I was overcome by the beauty that these hard-working men had created. There was a richness and a variety that stunned me with its opulence, a warmth of comment that was constantly delightful; and I returned to the comparisons that had stung me in Mr. Abe's shop: why should my work be paid for so well and theirs so poorly? I thought: "When I consider what these men have meant to me, I'm almost obligated to do something." For some hours I pondered what to do; one could not simply share one's good fortune with no reasonable explanation, and I had already bought all the prints I could reasonably take home with me. And then an idea flashed into my mind: "Why not make a book so beautiful as to do credit to these artists? Each picture in it will be an original hand-printed work by one of them. Every penny the book earns will go back to the artists. And they'll be paid before the book is printed."
This was the proposal I made that same day to my long-time friends at the publishing house that has done more than any other in the world to introduce the Orient to the West—to Charles Tuttle, the canny Vermonter who had the foresight to expand the family business from its rare-book New England background to include a very active Tokyo publishing operation, and to his discerning Texas-born editor-in-chief, Meredith Weatherby. They studied for less than a minute before agreeing, and the fact that the book was ultimately published is due to their appreciation of what it might accomplish.
This explains the genesis of this book. But it does not describe why the book was worth doing in the first place nor the full debt of gratitude I myself, and doubtless many others, owe these artists.
It is not my intention here to write even a brief history of the artists whose work makes up this book. This has been ably done by Oliver Statler in his Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn, which is a lively, informative essay crowded with good reproductions and was also published by Tuttle's. However, for maximum enjoyment of the prints that are to follow, it is necessary that the reader appreciate something of the historical derivation of the artists who did them and of the school that produced the artists.
Starting roughly in the middle of the seventeenth century, a group of Japanese woodblock carvers working in the two great cities of Kyoto and Edo (later Tokyo) branched out from their traditional task of carving illustrations for books and began issuing large single sheets which by themselves were works of art. Quickly the taste of the times required that these striking sheets be adorned by the addition of hand-applied colors. Rather later than one might have supposed, sometime in the early 1700'S,
