Mingei

Amid the rapid changes brought on by Japan’s modernization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arose a discourse of the appreciation of folk culture. From the 1920s onward, writer, educator, and aesthete Yanagi Sōetsu (Muneyoshi, 柳宗悦, b. 1889–d. 1961) spearheaded the Mingei movement, centered on the recognition and preservation of Japanese folk craft objects and their creation. The term mingei, usually translated into English as “folk craft” or “folk art,” is a shortened form of minshūteki kōgei民衆的工芸, or “people’s craft.” Coined in the mid-1920s, the two characters of mingei combine “of the people” (民min) with “art” or “craft” (藝, 芸gei). Yanagi defined mingei as functional, ordinary, healthy objects of daily life for the common classes created by anonymous makers in quantity. Unlike folk studies specialists relying on ethnographic or empirical values, Yanagi and his followers determined what constitutes mingei according to aesthetic and moral precepts of goodness and truth, with Pure Land Buddhism a particular influence in post–World War II discourse. Through the activities of the Japan Mingei Association (Nihon Mingei Kyōkai 日本民藝協, 1931–), the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan 日本民藝館, 1936–) and several journals, the Mingei movement has aimed to advance the research, collecting, promotion, and sale of mingei objects. Mingei exhibitions and various forms of outreach have positioned Mingei aesthetic values as Japanese national cultural identity, and special attention has been given to the preservation of craft making in remote areas. By the end of World War II, mingei had become a household word in Japan, and in the 1950s the Japanese government used the term in official documents to categorize one genre of Japanese craft (kōgei). Today, there are dozens of museums throughout Japan with ties to the Japan Mingei Association as well as a Mingei museum in San Diego, California, founded in 1978 by Martha Longenecker. In some respects, the Mingei movement’s ethos parallels the utopianism of the late-19th-century British Arts and Crafts movement and its offshoot in Germany, the Deutscher Werkbund. But the Mingei movement did not focus heavily on economic issues or promote collaborations between artists and designers within industrial production and architecture like its forebears in Europe. Mingei precepts have greatly influenced modern craft ideology in the English-reading world, particularly for ceramists in the post–World War II era. Publications on Mingei mainly comprise primary sources by Yanagi and his followers, museum catalogues, and scholarly analyses from anthropological, art-historical, and postcolonialist historical points of view. Over the last few decades, critical studies of Mingei have probed the contradictions, complexities, and problems of Yanagi’s theories in light of their political and economic contexts. Several recent publications in Japanese explore Mingei’s relevance to contemporary society. This bibliography’s focus is English-language sources, with select Japanese-language primary sources and recent scholarship.