Mingei

As such, it was a conscious attempt to distinguish ordinary crafts and functional utensils (pottery, lacquerware, textiles, and so on) from "higher" forms of art – at the time much admired by people during a period when Japan was going through rapid westernisation, industrialisation, and urban growth.

Realising that Yi Dynasty wares had been made by "nameless craftsmen", Yanagi felt that there had to be a similar sort of "art form" in Japan.

In the following year – after considerable discussion with two potter friends, Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō – the phrase that they coined to describe the craftsman's work was mingei (民藝).

In 1936, with financial assistance from a few wealthy Japanese businessmen, Yanagi was able to set up the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan, [日本民芸館]) and three years later, in 1939, launched a second magazine, Mingei (民藝).

Yanagi's theoretical and aesthetic proposition was that beauty was to be found in ordinary and utilitarian everyday objects made by nameless and unknown craftsmen – as opposed to higher forms of art created by named artists.

Sung period ceramics, or medieval Gothic architecture were products of the same spirit; "true" man was unchanging, unaffected by cultural or historical background.

[13] If chokkan was an "absolute foot rule",[14] it also defied logical explanation and was, therefore, very much part of his "spiritual" approach to aesthetics and the appreciation of folk craft beauty.

Just as an Amidha Buddhist believed he could be saved by reciting the nenbutsu prayer and denying his or her self, so the craftsman could attain a "pure land of beauty" by surrendering his self to nature.

The spread of Yanagi's ideas was helped by these developments so that, by about 1960, the concept of mingei had become known not just to a small group of people living in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, but — as a result of publicity by the media — to almost everyone in Japan.

Nevertheless, craftsmen who had been struggling to make ends meet before and just after the Pacific War, suddenly found themselves comparatively well-off; potters in particular benefited financially from the "boom".

[19] However, consumer demand for mingei objects led to increased mechanisation of production processes which, in themselves, relied far less on cooperative work and labour exchanges than they had in the past.

(2) Mechanisation also led to less reliance on, and use of, natural materials – something that Yanagi had insisted upon as essential to his concept of beauty – something which also deprived modern mingei of its specifically "local" qualities.

(3) Both media exposure and consumer demand encouraged the emergence of the artist-craftsman (geijutsuka, [芸術家]) intent on making money, and to the gradual disappearance of the less profit-motivated "unknown craftsman".

In this respect, he echoed similar theories put forward in other industrialising countries – notably those of William Morris and followers of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United Kingdom.

Both men argued there was a close connection between the incentive for profit and the quality of work produced under a capitalist system of wage labour relations.

One major difference is that Yanagi introduced Buddhist thinking into his philosophy (especially that of Daisetsu Suzuki and Kitarō Nishida)[26] – something completely lacking in the British Arts and Crafts movement.

[27] In addition, he applied his "criterion of beauty" to the crafts of the Okinawans and the Ainu in the Japanese peripheries, and to those of the colonies including Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria.