creative print had come, and Hakutei Ishii was one of the first to recognize it.
By the time Yamamoto graduated from Ueno, he was deeply excited about creative woodprints and was the driving force behind the whole movement. It was he who gave the early prints their distinctive look when he pioneered the use of the curved-blade chisel, which was the mark of creative hanga for many years. To ukiyoe artisans this chisel, with a blade shaped something like a flour scoop, was only a tool to clean up the block, but in Yamamoto's hands it became a major instrument of virtuosity, as demonstrated by On the Deck (print 1). There is a striking development from Fisherman (print 3) to On the Deck. Fisherman was carved as a wood engraver would carve, in the Western style, cutting out white lines against the black background. In On the Deck he pushed this concept much further, carving out the white to create not lines, but planes, shadows, and mass.
In 1907, Yamamoto, Hakutei Ishii, and a few others started the magazine Hosun, and for the four years of its life they filled its pages with their own creative hanga and comment. This slim magazine, whose title meant "a little thing," is the first great landmark of the creative-print movement, and with the group Pan, of which it was the unofficial voice, forms a fascinating chapter in the history of Japanese art in the early years of the century.
Pan achieved notoriety as a boisterous, uninhibited, sake-loving crowd of artists, but behind the rowdyism it was to the artists a serious effort to assimilate the new modernism of the West without sacrificing their Japanese nature. Devoted to ukiyoe and to the spirit which produced it, they chose a meeting place in what had been the heart of old Edo (the former name for Tokyo), close by the Sumida River, and here they came to grips with the issue which still plagues Japanese art. If they failed to gain a final solution to their problem, they at least recognized it, faced up to it, and more often than not gained temporary victory by drinking it under the table.
It probably goes without saying that they invited the attention of the police, who were only too inclined to see a socialist under every beret. The irreverence of their caricatures in Hosun (Yamamoto, who admired Hokusai, was not backward in this department) was a constant incitement to the official mind, but their greatest fame was achieved when, in the course of a party called to condole a couple of members on their imminent induction into the army, they draped the pictures of the new privates with black to signify their demise, a piece of blasphemy which was promptly splashed on the front pages by an offended newspaperman. The police and the military were furious, but the public thought it very funny.
In the years after his graduation, Yamamoto devoted himself almost entirely to creative hanga, and then in 1912, amid speculation that he was running away to heal a broken heart, he went to Paris. He stayed in Europe until late 1916 and artistically these years were among the most productive of his life. He sent back prints to repay those who had helped finance his journey and he supported himself by his prints and oils and his old skill at illustration by wood engraving. Many of his finest prints were made in Paris from 1912 to 1914, among them On the Deck (print 1), A Small Bay in Brittany (print 2), and Yanchin, a picture of three Chinese courtesans. He had another burst of activity just after he returned to Japan, including Woman of Brittany (print 5) and the Moscow prints (prints 6 and 7), the latter inspired by his homeward journey through Russia. That was a fateful journey for Yamamoto because he saw in Russia some schools for peasants which excited him about the possibilities of adult education for farmers. He lingered there, fascinated by those schools.
Back in Japan, he plunged again into the growing creative-print movement. He was the central figure in organizing the hanga artists into the association which still exists, and in preparing the association's first show, held during January 1919 at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi. It was a good beginning, a big and successful exhibit of the work of twenty-five artists, including two Englishmen then resident in Japan, Bernard Leach and W. Westley Manning.
And then in 1919 Yamamoto embarked on another crusade. He could not get over his dream of a school for farm people. He went to Shinshu, to the village of Oya where his father had practiced medicine. In that country, high in the central mountains, the long cold winters brought dullness and apathy, with little to do but sit in the kotatsu, the pit in the floor where the charcoal fire underneath the blankets kept at least the lower body warm. To Yamamoto this waste of life was an irresistible challenge. His solution was a school where the people could learn the kind of art and handicrafts which would both enrich their lives and make it possible for them to augment their meager incomes during the slack winter.
He gathered a staff of instructors and started an ambitious program of woodcarving, textile weaving and dyeing, and some painting and print-making. Yamamoto was not a man of small ideas, and he did not envision his school on a small scale. He solicited help from both government and private agencies, and among his largest grants were four thousand yen each from the Education Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry, and the Mitsubishi interests. These were annual pledges, and not inconsiderable money for those days when the yen was worth about half a dollar and the dollar rather more than it is today. But Yamamoto found it harder to maintain interest than to excite it in the first place. His big subsidies dwindled to half the original figure and, after five years, stopped. And in Oya the mayor of the village, who had been an enthusiastic supporter, went bankrupt. The school charged no fees, support was increasingly scarce, and finances became an overriding worry. Always there was the nagging necessity to hunt for patrons.
That was not his only trouble. Because he had gotten his idea in Russia, the police always suspected that he was teaching communism and continually harassed him on that score. Un'ichi Hiratsuka, who for a while taught frame-making at the school, recalls that when he was preparing for his first trip to Shinshu he received a letter from Yamamoto. Yamamoto described his difficulties with the police and diffidently asked Hiratsuka, who is deeply conservative but who likes to work in a Russian-style jacket, if he would forego that costume at Shinshu. And, he added, the police seemed to mistrust long hair and would Hiratsuka mind too much getting a haircut.
"Yamamoto was a fine artist but a terrible businessman," says Tsuruzo Ishii. "When he started the school I told him that he should restrict his activity to teaching art and crafts, but he thought he would fail if he couldn't prove to the farmers that they could make money out of what they were learning. So he was continually involved in trying to sell their products, and all these efforts lost money.
"It was the same with his other crusade. He threw himself into a campaign to change the methods of teaching art in the public schools. He called it free art, the idea being that students were to sketch from nature instead of copying the pictures in textbooks. Of course he stirred up a battle with the textbook people and old-line art teachers, but his campaign was finally scuttled by an unfortunate business deal: his only interest was to make a better quality of art supplies available to students, but the whole thing ended in bankruptcy. Both the Shinshu school and the free-art movement were good ideas doomed by bad management.
"I was always trying to get him to give up these crusades of his and do some painting. He was a stubborn and a dedicated man, but after fifteen years of struggling and with both ventures failing, he was tired out, and in 1935 he did settle down in Tokyo. For the first time since Paris he seriously worked at his own art. In the next five or six years he did some fine work, oils and water colors, and he climaxed this activity with a one-man show at Mitsukoshi in January 1940."
The show opened in an aura of good feeling. The antagonisms and bitterness of the past were forgotten, and both long-time friends and former enemies rallied around to celebrate his return to art with an impressive testimonial dinner. Yamamoto was in a happy and expansive mood when he rose to say: "I shall live until I'm eighty-five. I shall live until May of my eighty-fifth year. Therefore, I am going to sit back now, and drink sake, and paint to my heart's content."
He was a poor prophet. Two years later he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage,
