Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility by Laura Hein & Rebecca Jennison

Author:Laura Hein & Rebecca Jennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 15. The Spirit of Yamato extends Tomiyama’s signature theme, the abdication of responsibility for other humans, and ties it to Japanese society, the Japanese empire, and the postwar state by including cherry blossoms and the 16-petal chrysanthemum, the official symbol of the emperor.

SPIRIT-POSSESSION AND ILLUSION

The most popular association of the fox is probably its ability to deceive humans, particularly to ridicule humans by enchanting them into an illusory world.35 The story of a Buddhist monk in the Kitsune zōshi, cited above, is a good example of this kind of fox-possession. Philosopher Uchiyama Takashi introduces several patterns of fox-possession that he collected from villagers in Japan. In one tale, a villager encounters a traveler in the mountains who gives him a rice cake. As he devours the cake, enthralled by its delicious flavor, another villager happens to walk by and points out that the cake is actually horse droppings. In another version, a villager is told by a traveler of a place where hot water springs from the ground. Surprised, the villager finds it, but as he is enjoying bathing in the hot water, someone asks what he is doing in the cold river.36 In both stories the deceived person enjoys fulfilling his carnal desire but is publicly revealed to be acting out a delusion.37 In other words, perhaps the stronger one’s desire, the more susceptible one is to fox-possession.

This, then, is why being deluded is no excuse in Tomiyama’s mind—either when, as she put it, the “whole era [of the 1930s through 1945] . . . had been in the grip of fox-possession,”38 or immediately after the war when Japanese claimed to have been duped, or following the burst of the bubble economy. As Tomiyama relentlessly reveals, the Japanese people were not only rational but actually enjoyed themselves in the delusion based upon their own desires, and thus showed a willingness for deception. What Tomiyama’s foxes disclose in these paintings is that the rhetoric of being possessed is synonymous with an evasion of responsibility. Thus fox-possession is, in my reading of Tomiyama’s work, tantamount to self-deception. Similar self-deception is, for example, demonstrated over and over again in the global financial market, not just by Japanese. This, finally, is the heart of Tomiyama’s understanding of the foxes’ illusions: the fact that people are willing to be duped.

THE FOX, INARI, AND THE IMPERIAL FAMILY

Although Tomiyama places responsibility for the war on people too eager to be deceived, she does not overlook the framework that gave rise to such (self-)deception: the imperial system. Thus her paintings relate to a history that closely connects the emperors lineage to the fox39—a connection that Tomiyama uses to emphasize the deceptive and oppressive nature of the wartime imperial system.

In the imperial court and household, Buddhist and Shinto rituals, as well as those of On’myōdō, were never mutually exclusive. On the contrary, despite retaining Shinto rituals at court, it was common practice for retired emperors, empresses, and widowed princesses to become Buddhist monks and nuns, though the reasons for doing so were often political rather than purely religious.

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