Keywords

Introduction

“I want the democracy of the arts established,” declared William Morris in his lecture on the decorative arts at Oxford in 1883. He continued, making an apparent leap from aesthetic to moral judgment: “I want everyone to think for himself about them, and not to take things for granted from hearsay; every man to do what he thinks right, not in anarchical fashion, but feeling that he is responsible to his fellows for what he feels, thinks, and has determined” (Morris 1902, p. 46). Morris’ approximation of the aesthetic and the ethical is, however, not historically deviant. Paul Guyer traced the ethico-aesthetic discussion by focusing on such key figures as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Immanuel Kant in eighteenth-century Europe, the latter of whom was identified by Noël Carroll as the catalyst for the break between the two philosophical concepts (Guyer 2011, p. 3). Guyer, however, demonstrates that the bond between the aesthetic and the ethical was in the mainstream from antiquity until the late nineteenth century (ibid., pp. 3–28). Importantly, the ethico-aesthetic discussion has always had political undertones. Linda Dowling , detailing the genealogy of “aesthetic democracy” from Shaftesbury through the German philosophers to such Victorians as Matthew Arnold and Morris, explicates the political adaptation of the moral-aesthetic sense for the purpose of legitimising liberal democracy (1996, p. 16). Dowling points to Morris as its “supreme champion” (ibid., p. 50).

Underpinning its legitimacy is the long-standing belief in the universality of aesthetic sensibility, which consequentially makes it vulnerable to class criticism by Bernard Mandeville (Shaftesbury’s contemporary) and modern Marxist critics (ibid., p. 16). Thus, Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey condemn “the aesthetic effect” as “inevitably an effect of domination: the subjection of individuals to the dominant ideology, the dominance of the ideology of the ruling class” (Balibar and Macherey 1996, p. 292). On the other hand, Terry Eagleton , while recognizing the function of aesthetic discourse as an ideological apparatus of the dominant class, simultaneously argues for its subversive possibility: “the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon” (Eagleton 1990, p. 3). It is in this latter sense that Caroline Levine and Thomas Docherty discuss democracy and inclusiveness, specifically in relation to art in such critical terms as “the logic of the avant-garde” and “aesthetic democracy” with self-transformative “potentiality”, respectively (Levine 2007, p. 8; Docherty 2006, pp. xvii–xviii).

This short overview of the scholarly debate on the triad of aesthetics, politics, and ethics is sufficient to establish the relevance of re-evaluating the artwork by Elizabeth Keith (1887–1956) and her writings in the ethico-political light, especially given the highly political backdrop to her artistic career. The Scottish artist, now consigned to general oblivion, once enjoyed global fame for her Japanese-style woodblock prints, which depicted subjects taken from her travels in East Asia. She first came to Japan in 1915 with the intention of being in the country for only two months to visit her sister, Elspet Keith Robertson Scott (1875–1956), and her husband, John William Robertson Scott (1866–1962), an English journalist who had founded a small private press in Tokyo that published a monthly bilingual (English and Japanese) propagandist magazine, The New East, during World War I. 1

During what eventually turned out to be her nine-year stay in Japan, Keith travelled widely not only within Japan but also to Korea, China, and the Philippines, drawing and painting on the move. Her journeys coincided with political turmoil in the region, such as the March 1st Independence Movement in Korea and the recapture of Canton (today’s Guangzhou) in China by Sun Yat-sen in 1923, events that were a response to Japan’s expansionist movement and created discordance between Japan and other nations, including the United States and Great Britain.

It was the success in 1920 of an exhibition of her watercolour sketches on colonial Korea that brought Keith into contact with Watanabe Shōzaburō , a leading figure in an art movement in Japan called shin hanga (new woodblock prints), and boosted her artistic career. Eastern Windows : An Artist’s Notes of Travel in Japan, Hokkaido, Korea, China and the Philippines, a travelogue published in London in 1928, provides us with textual accounts of Keith’s intrepid journeys. It consists of the letters she sent Elspet during her sketching trips and features nine colour woodblock prints, one colour etching, and two watercolours translated from her sketches; Elspet served as the volume’s editor. Keith returned to the Far East at least four times, between 1929 and 1936, and observed the volatile political circumstances that led to the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. She co-authored another travelogue with Elspet in 1946, a year after the end of World War II. Old Korea : The Land of Morning Calm is based on the sisters’ three-month joint trip to Korea from March to May 1919, when they witnessed the aftermath of the March 1st Movement, a historic independence movement against Japanese rule. 2

Despite this background of political upheaval, Keith and her artwork have been little discussed with respect to her political engagement. The dissociation between art and politics in the studies on Keith seems to originate from the following passage from the “Editor’s Note” in Eastern Windows written by Elspet:

Stirring national events touched the author as a traveller and nerved her as an artist, but her chief concern was to paint—always against time—types and scenes in a life that seemed to be changing even while she worked. All dates have been ignored therefore and politics cut out. (Scott 1928, p. 15)

Elspet cautiously depoliticizes her sister’s artistic activities from the outset. Yanagita Kunio (1929), one of the contemporary reviewers of the book and a leading Japanese intellectual, views this evasion as an illustration of “feminine scruples” at work. Accordingly, the limited number of studies on the artist have been confined to the field of art history, mostly revolving around her artwork and her position in the art world. This scholarly tendency to focus on her artwork has inevitably pushed Keith’s travelogues to the margins. Art critics such as Malcolm C. Salaman , Richard Miles , and Kendall H. Brown use the travelogues solely for annotative purposes in their discussions of Keith and the Western reception and adaptation of Japanese printing styles and techniques. Tessa Morris-Suzuki presents a singular exception with her analysis of the travelogues to uncover the politics underlying the texts.

Yet, the separation of art and politics in Keith’s artwork still remains, and Morris-Suzuki reinforces the association of the artist with political abstinence rather than engagement by arguing that art afforded Keith “a space to express an aesthetic of the ‘Far East’ in which politics was invisible” (2012, p. 90). Assigned a supplementary role to the artwork, the two travelogues have escaped scholarly attention altogether despite a growing interest in women’s travel writing among literary scholars in the past few decades. Although both were received favourably when first published an obituary for Keith in The Times on 13 April 1956 appraised her travel writing as being “of permanent value” (“Miss Elizabeth Keith” 1956), neither of Keith’s travelogues has been reprinted since their initial appearance; the sole exception is a Korean translation of Old Korea in 2006.

Her careful editorial practice notwithstanding, Elspet retains the following assertion, with its Morrisian echoes, in Keith’s letters, which reveals the impossibility of divorcing art from politics: “In my journeyings in many lands I have come to think that the only true democracy is the democracy of art” (Keith 1928b, p. 84). In “Artist’s Introduction” in Old Korea , Keith articulates her “desire […] to bring the sympathetic eyes of a world already sated with tales of horror, to this little known land [Korea], and I had to use the material at hand,” thereby imparting her recourse to art for political purposes (Keith 1946, p. 7).

This chapter examines Keith’s artwork alongside a careful reading of her two travelogues and her social network in an attempt to shed new light on her career and activities as an artist. Keith was well connected to political and literary circles in Japan thanks to the journalistic activities of her brother-in-law, Scott. I argue for her political engagement through art contrary to other scholarly interpretations of Keith’s artwork that position her work as apolitical. I will attempt to shift the existing critical emphasis by reading the textual and the visual works of Keith juxtaposed with each other to show how they supplement each other in the way that they translate what might have been thought of as being too controversial in one symbolic system into the other, making it more effable in the process. I will situate Keith in the cultural and political contexts of Japan in the Interwar years of the 1910s to the 1930s and seek to demonstrate the ideological exchanges between her and Japanese intellectuals during the Taishō period (1912–1926), which embraced the liberal movement called Taishō democracy, and during the ensuing Shōwa period (1926–1989), which experienced a fascist military government. I will present Keith not as a mute bystander but as a political agent of her time.

Two Travelogues

Apart from the obvious differences in their subject matter, the key difference between Eastern Windows and Old Korea lies in their handling of Japanese imperialism . The two works present quite dissimilar narratives about the political relationship between Japan and Korea despite the fact that Keith, together with Elspet, witnessed the immediate aftermath of the March 1st Movement in Seoul in 1919, which was the first major uprising for Korean independence and the main focus of the latter book. The conspicuous absence of reports on the injustices of colonialism in Eastern Windows cannot be attributed solely to its epistolary provenance, in the sense that the lack of materials on Korea’s political resistance against Japanese Occupation could have been due to the sisters’ joint trip to Korea in 1919, explaining why Keith wrote very little on this subject to Elspet. Keith stayed on in the country to continue her sketching journey alone after Elspet left. In her “Editor’s Note”, as already mentioned, Elspet justifies the omission of political matters on the grounds that they were secondary to painting for the artist (Scott 1928, p. 15). The letters are categorised by country and not chronological order, and consequently lack a sense of history. Only scant allusions to the political may be found in statements like “[t]he Japanese have demolished the fine old gates and walls of this ancient city, apparently for no reason” (Keith 1928b, p. 29).

This deliberate avoidance of the political is more probably due to Keith’s close links with Japanese public figures and the dependence of her career on those connections. The Japan Times reports on several exhibitions of her artwork at the Peers Club, which took place with the help of Japanese nobility whose acquaintance she had gained through Scott. Her association with the Japanese authorities was developed during her work for Grin and Bear It (1917), a collection of sixty-two colour lithographs, caricatures of social luminaries in Tokyo, both expatriates and Japanese, that was exhibited and published for a charitable purpose (for the victims of World War I). 3

The relative freedom of movement Keith enjoyed during her numerous sketching journeys was secured by her connections to Japanese colonial authorities and infrastructure. An incident she describes of her official interrogation in Nagasaki on her return from Korea attests to this:

‘I never carry a passport to Korea,’ I said, ‘Korea is part of the Japanese Empire.’ Then I remembered that I had always taken letters or cards of introduction from high officials, and it was a glance at these that had saved me from trouble on my previous journeys. This time I had not bothered to take any with me. (Keith 1928b, p. 122)

Keith’s close association with the Japanese upper class and officialdom prevented Elspet from including passages which might have been construed to be critical of Japanese foreign policy.

Old Korea , on the other hand, focuses on the Korean independence movement and Japanese colonial iniquities. While Elspet took charge of the verbal text, Keith adorned it visually with her prints and watercolours. Elspet clearly condemns the Japanese Occupation and the colonial violence inflicted on the Korean people. To a limited extent, Keith herself is vocal in her criticism of colonial cruelties in “Artist’s Introduction” in contrast to her reticence on the subject in Eastern Windows . The work is dedicated to commanding officers of the Allied powers including Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers during the occupation of Japan, who is remembered for his iconic post-war photograph with Emperor Hirohito. This effectively gestures at the book, and the sisters’, dissociation from Japanese militarism . After the first four chapters, which introduce scenes from Korean life, its people, and the peculiarities of their culture in the typical manner of the travelogue, the six chapters that follow focus on the description of the March 1st Movement and the various parties that were committed to the Korean cause. The book highlights the international joint efforts orchestrated for Korean independence: not only Koreans in Korea but also Korean expatriates in Japan and Hawaii, and Christian missionaries from the U.S., the U.K., and Canada are featured—both women and men. Importantly, the list also includes Japanese anti-militarist intellectuals.

“The Idea of a Gap”

Chapter Seven of Old Korea , which Elspet entitled “Two Wise Young Men”, gives accounts of two revolutionaries involved in the Korean Independence movement. One is an unnamed young Korean whom the sisters befriended in Seoul; the other is Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961), a.k.a. Yanagi Sōetsu , a Japanese philosopher of religion and aesthetics , who is now mostly remembered for founding the mingei (folk craft) movement in Japan. Elspet introduces him as a person of “moral courage”—“rare” among the Japanese (Keith and Scott 1946, p. 45). His name is also acknowledged on the title page as a contributor to the book along with Christian missionaries who worked for Korean liberation. Elspet quotes excerpts from “Chōsen-jin o omou (Thoughts for Korean People)”, a series of newspaper articles Yanagi published in Yomiuri shimbun (the Yomiuri Newspaper) from 20 May to 24 May 1919, which condemns the injustice of Japanese colonial rule in Korea and calls for love and sympathy for the Korean people: “If we desire to secure lasting peace with our neighbour there is no other way but to fill our hearts with love and warm up with sympathy ” (ibid., p. 46). Although not cited in Old Korea , in the original abridged translation of his (1919) article, Yanagi asserts his belief that “[i]n my opinion the road to understanding of another country is not through scientific or political knowledge, but through the understanding of the inner life as shown in religion and art”. 4

He also writes: “Art enables one to understand the nature of things by sharp and direct observation, whereas science and politics will lead one to clouded understanding because of dogmatic and selfish judgements.” “To reach another’s heart,” he continues, “emotion is a far better way than knowledge.” He emphasises the importance of emotional communication and understanding and singles art out as its means. This basic tenet of his philosophy is repeated in “Chōsen no tomo ni okuru sho (A Letter to Korean Friends)”, which Yanagi contributed to the socialist magazine Kaizō (Reformation) in 1920, and “‘Chōsen minzoku bijutsukan’ no setsuritsu ni tsuite (Of the Establishment of the Korean Folk Art Gallery)”, which he contributed to Shirakaba (White Birch) in January 1921. 5

Both were translated into English and published in The Japan Advertiser; the frequent appearances of his articles in the English newspaper in Japan indicates the interest the expatriate community of Japan took in his opinions and activities concerning the Japan-Korean problem. 6

The English translation of the latter article, which appeared under the title, ‘“If Japan Understood Korean Art’: An Appeal for the Establishment of an Art Gallery,” underlines his love for Korea and affirms that “[i]f Japan had a proper understanding of this art [of Korea] she would remain ever a devoted friend of Korea. Art transcends frontiers and the differences of men’s minds” (Yanagi 1921).

It seems highly likely that Yanagi’s view of art was fairly familiar to Keith. Yanagi was in Scott’s circle of friends in Japan. In The Foundation of Japan : Notes Made during Journeys of 6,000 Miles in the Rural Districts as a Basis for a Sounder Knowledge of the Japanese People (1922), an extensive study of the agricultural system and life in rural Japan, Scott dedicates a short chapter to the introduction of Yanagi’s ideas. He begins the chapter, which he titles “The Idea of a Gap”, by offering anecdotes of the thinker publishing an anti-militarist article in a school magazine and challenging a principal who was a famous army general in the Russo-Japanese War. 7

Yanagi, who is characterised by Scott as a mystical “prophet” (Scott 1922, p. 98), elaborates on his idea:

It is deplorable that the world should think that there is such a complete difference between East and West . It is usually said that self-denial, asceticism, sacrifice, negation are opposed to self-affirmation, individualism, self-realisation; but I do not believe in such a gap . I wish to destroy the idea of a gap . It is an idea which was obtained analytically. The meeting of East and West will not be upon a bridge over a gap , but upon the destruction of the idea of a gap . (ibid., pp. 100–101)

Yanagi does not go into the details here, but in another passage, he tells Scott about the political and social contributions made by the Shirakabaha (the White Birch Society)—one of the representative literary groups during the Taishō period of which Yanagi was a leading member—and reasons that “European art broke down barriers in the Japanese mind”, especially among the youth (ibid., p. 105). The group of young artists was deeply influenced by modern Western art; Yanagi explains, for instance, how Post-Impressionism helped the youth generation to oppose widespread militarism (ibid., pp. 104–105). Thus, Yanagi endows art with the qualities that facilitate the demolition of preconceived differences and communication between East and West . This point is further supported by Scott’s reference to Yanagi’s intention to establish the Korean Folk Art Gallery. Scott quotes Yanagi as writing the following to him:

I approach the solution of the Korean question by the way of Art. Politics can never solve the question. I want to use the gallery as a meeting-place of Koreans and Japanese. People cannot quarrel in beauty. This is my simple yet definite belief. (ibid., p. 104)

As this gallery is also noted in Old Korea , it is presumed that Keith also knew of Yanagi’s project and intentions (Keith and Scott 1946, p. 45). It is important to distinguish Yanagi’s concept of the destruction of the idea of a gap, however, from unity through assimilation, which could lead to totalization. Yanagi was a supporter of individualism and an admirer of Korean art on its own terms. Writing in defence of Korean singularity, he observes that “the true accord originates not from assimilation but only from a mutual respect for individualities” (Yanagi 1981, p. 49; my translation). Yanagi believed in free and direct communication across differences through art.

“The Democracy of Art”

Keith, though reticent in Eastern Windows about the ruthlessness of colonial rule, played her part in trying to improve the situation in the Far East through her art. It was Yanagi’s spirit that Keith reflected in her artwork. As we saw above, Elspet keeps the following incongruous statement by Keith in Eastern Windows despite the earlier suggestion of a general evasion of politics:

In my journeyings in many lands I have come to think that the only true democracy is the democracy of art. Everybody is the artist’s friend, especially the sitter. No social allurements of my own world ever weigh with me or make me deviate for an hour if there is the faintest chance of getting a primitive subject—even if it be a man with only one eye—to sit for me. And when I say one eye, I may add that that other kind of single eye is more often a mental quality of primitive man than it is of his so-called superior, whether male or female. (Keith 1928b, p. 84)

Keith lightens the tone soon afterwards by swiftly changing the topic, thus presenting her idea of “true democracy” as a mere fancy and “preamble” to the episode that follows. Her uncritical use of terms such as “primitive” suggests vestiges of Victorian imperialism as well as Keith’s naivety; yet, her positive comparison of locals against her Western, “so-called superior”, compatriots in a moral respect (“that other kind of single eye”) suggests her scepticism toward the notion of Western supremacy.

This furtive allusion to the idea of democracy reveals its significance when examined alongside Yanagi’s ideology and the long tradition of ethico-aesthetic philosophy. The Keith sisters were keenly aware of the powerful impact art could exert on Japanese people. During their Korean sojourn, Elspet was summoned by the Military Governor, and to this meeting, she decided to take Elizabeth’s sketches of Korea and the Korean people in the belief that “no Japanese can resist a picture” (Keith and Scott 1946, p. 56). Her strategy turns out to be effective. She reports:

I quickly undid the portfolio and put some of my sister’s sketches on the table. The change was magical. Both men forgot their roles and turned over the sketches one by one while I told them various stories about the different subjects. Even the spy seemed to lose some of his ugliness. (ibid., p. 57)

Morris-Suzuki discusses this episode as an illustration of art’s power to “defuse” politics (2012, p. 91). However, this passage can also be read as a demonstration of art’s political efficacy to arouse interest and sympathy , and a sense of shared humanity, in both sitters and viewers.

Keith discovered the possibility of true democracy in art, and this idea manifested itself in her artwork. Art critics are unanimous in attributing Keith’s artistic strength to her sympathetic depiction of ordinary lives. “Her attitude towards her subjects,” Salaman states, “was one of affectionate interest, with no taint of the foreigner’s aloofness, but an indescribable warrant of real and intimate friendship” (1933, p. 1). Brown notes her “objective yet sympathetic approach” and an “almost anthropological interest” that distinguishes her from her Japanese contemporaries whose works tend to be infused with nostalgia and romance (2006, p. 22). Miles calls attention to Keith’s unique skill in being able to capture the individual appearances of people even in a crowd (1991, p. 22). Takeuchi Seihō , a prominent Japanese artist and a contemporary of Keith, praised her Soochow prints for “the crowds and the humanity and life” (Keith 1928b, p. 116).

By positioning her work within the field of shin hanga , we may even begin to realise that Keith’s oeuvre constitutes a new genre. Following in the tradition of their renowned Edo predecessors, such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Sharaku, most Japanese shin hanga artists produced prints along four categories: landscape, beautiful women, actors (mostly those of Kabuki theatre), and birds and flowers (Till 2007, pp. 15–27). Deviating from these established themes, Keith created numerous portraits of people from the working class, such as flower sellers and dressmakers. Keith’s landscape prints are also unconventional in the sense that the most of the scenes are occupied by a lively crowd, offering a stark contrast to those by Kawase Hasui , one of the most important shin hanga landscape artists, who travelled around Japan and depicted its rural regions in his artwork. His works tend to feature a solitary figure in the vast expanse of a quiet, all-encompassing nature. For the retiring artist, human figures were merely additions to the scenery to exemplify “local-color, manners and customs” (Koyama 2014, p. 43). On the contrary, Keith focuses on people and their activities. She walks into the hustle and bustle of markets, festival processions, streets, and squares and sets herself up among the locals. In Soochow, sketching its dynamic street scenes, she was surrounded by spectators: “When I sketch in the streets with one ineffectual guard-interpreter by me, the crowds surge around us” (Keith 1928b, p. 54). She reports on her interactions with people: “the crowd is always ready to share my mirth” (ibid., p. 54). Keith is by no means an isolated observer. She becomes a participant in the scene. 8

Keith captured the socially marginalized in her sketches, bringing out their subtle natural beauty. In Peking, she frequented the Lama temple. In the Philippines, she stayed with the Moros. The Koreans she loved were subjugated people who lived under Japanese colonial rule. She visited the northern island of Hokkaidō, Japan, and sketched indigenous Ainus living in penury. The watercolour of “Ainu Man”, which is the frontispiece of Eastern Windows , gazes straight back at the viewer with piercing eyes held in stern dignity and sagacity as if it were him, not the reader, who had the right to judge. In a letter to Gertrude Bass Warner on 13 March 1938 (Warner Papers, box 5 folder 4), Keith writes as regards her Ainu print that: “I know it is the only picture of an Ainu, that type at least—in existence. […] I know of no artist who made studies of the Ainu.” There existed some antecedent sketches of Ainu people by Western travellers such as Isabella Bird, but these were solely out of ethnographic interest and ended up objectifying the indigenous people. “Ainu Man” in Eastern Windows , on the other hand, exudes an aura of authority, dignity, and artistic composure with his slouching shoulders in a sitting position and hands, held together, arousing both our admiration and our sympathy . Keith’s Korean works represent very early examples of visual representations of Korean subjects by a Western artist. “Korean Scholar”, reproduced in Eastern Windows , depicts an authoritative sage with probing eyes as if he were examining the artist in return. Thus, Keith’s artwork makes viewers realise the beauty of ordinary lives and humanises the discriminated by giving them dignity and investing them with artistic presence. These artworks induce mutual understanding and respect between the artist, the subject, and the viewer. They invoke the possibility of a transnational democracy of art.

It is possible, however, to criticise Keith and her artwork for complicity in both Japanese and British imperialisms. Her work may be regarded as feeding Japanese imperial aspiration and colonial fantasy by transforming the scenes she saw into the quintessentially Japanese art form of woodblock prints, thus “Japanising” them, as it were. Keith’s travels in East Asia, which contributed to the uniqueness of the body of her work, were also the product of British imperialism . She travelled through the politically volatile region of Canton, in China, in the 1920s under the British aegis: “It was a comfort to see Englishmen nearby, and to know that they were armed” (Keith 1928b, p. 61). At the same time, the places she presents in her prints are densely populated, and their inhabitants display dignity and beauty as if to defy colonial covetousness. The artist on her part had no intention to claim authority over the scene. In a letter from Peking, Keith explains her artistic method as follows:

I have to drink it all in first. ‘Drink it in’ is not the phrase I want. I bathe in it. I feel as if I melted into the scene and became dissolved. Then follows the agonising process of resurrecting and getting it all on paper. (ibid., p. 45)

The sketching of the surface does not satisfy Keith. Neither does the objectification of the subject matter, as implied by “drink in”. Rather, she dissolves herself into the scene, thus bringing her subjectivity to a halt, to fully understand the subject from inside, undeterred by the “agony” that this exercise entails. In a letter to Scott dated 12 February 1916, Yanagi criticises the general attitude of many Western travellers to Japan including Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Loti: “In order to understand adequately the true inner side of [the] other nationality, we must taste it from within, not look [at] it & from without. Not observation, not criticism, but love is the only key for understanding” (1989, p. 42). He emphasises the importance of empathy and affective understanding in cross-cultural encounters and downgrades supercilious objectivity, lamenting that “[v]ery unfortunately, almost all of the foreigners come to Japan with a spirit of preacher […] and scarcely live in the inside of our minds with love” (ibid., p. 42). Keith’s artistic philosophy resonates with Yanagi’s idea of the ethical understanding of otherness.

We still need to consider why Keith did not depict Japanese colonial violence in her prints. It strikes readers and viewers as odd to find the discordance between Elspet’s explicitly political narrative and Keith’s seemingly serene illustrations of Korean daily life in Old Korea . This stands in stark contrast with Scott’s World War I propagandist text, The Ignoble Warrior (1916), which uses the sensational cartoons of Louis Raemakers to demonise Germany. The need to avoid censorship may be one practical answer. It would have been impossible for Keith to produce and sell her works in Japan if they had been considered propaganda against Japan. Her association with the Japanese upper class and the dependence of her career on their favour, as already mentioned, may also have been a factor. Added to this is her attachment to her Japanese friends. She did not wish to incriminate Japanese people as a whole. In her unpublished private correspondence with Warner, she repeatedly defends her Japanese friends, differentiating them from militarists. For example, Keith’s letter on 8 September 1937 states: “I maintain, however, that the Japanese people are not in any way responsible. It is only the military group that so dishonestly hid the truth from their own people and are led away by the lust of power” (Warner Papers, box 5 folder 4).

The Japan section in Eastern Windows may be the most penetrating because it so clearly draws from Keith’s long residence and her circle of friends in the country. The chapter, “Youngest Japan”, revolves around two main topics: Keith’s friendship with Japanese children and the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. The former foregrounds the innocence and hope of the country despite its imperialist advance abroad while the latter emphasises the perseverance and resilience of ordinary Japanese people. Keith demonstrates Japanese integrity and hope through these narratives, thereby countering militarist supremacy and essentialist discourses.

This subtle textual resistance was to develop into real political activities in art. The Japan Times on 16 December 1934 reports on Keith’s attendance at a Pan-Pacific Club meeting to exhibit her latest colour prints, where Yanagisawa Takeshi , a poet and a senior official at the Department of Foreign Affairs, delivered a speech on their new project, the International Cultural Work, which was launched “by the aspiration of our government, to assist the people of all nations of the world to understand our culture” (“Tourists” 1934). Yanagisawa also worked for the establishment of the Japan P.E.N. club, a Japanese branch of PEN International, the following year to build a platform for liberal, anti-militarist intellectuals and foster the international solidarity of writers (Kiyohara 2010). Keith was involved in Japan’s cultural diplomacy and participated in civilian resistance against militarists, which assumed some measure of critical importance for a country rapidly isolating itself from the international community after its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 for the dispute over China. Before leaving Japan for the last time on 17 December 1936, Keith produced at least four woodblock prints on the subject of Japanese Noh theatre (“Miss Elizabeth Keith ” 1936). Thus, although with some reservations about the problematic relationship that woodblock prints and the Noh theatre had with the nationalist conception of an intrinsic “Japanese-ness”, we can still acknowledge her effort to contribute to civilian efforts against militarism (Brown 2006, p. 14; Gordon 2014, p. 107). 9

Keith probably realized that the possibility of success for her counter militarism was slim. The year 1936 saw a wave of political assassinations by extremist army officers and the end of party politics in Japan. It was in the same year that Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany. The country she first encountered—a country vibrant with democratic aspiration—was rapidly assuming a fascist face.

Conclusion

This chapter has re-evaluated the works of Elizabeth Keith as political efforts against Japanese colonial violence in Korea and the advance of militarism in Japan in the context of the intellectual movement during the Taishō period and its vestiges during the Shōwa period. The research was conducted in the hope of saving the artist from oblivion and to pave the way for the discovery of the forgotten representation and imagery of East Asia by this early twentieth-century British woman traveller. It has argued that Keith’s work challenges the unidirectional model of cultural and intellectual influence between the East and the West, embodying the impact of the former on the latter, and is illustrative of the idea of a transnational anti-militarist community. It also sheds fresh light on the political possibility of art through the idea of transnational solidarity at the zenith of imperialism .

The main difficulty I faced was the paucity of historical materials to reconstruct the history of friendships between the sexes. The interaction between Keith and Yanagi had to be deduced from the published and archival records of the friendships between Scott and male Japanese writers. The trope that this homosocial history erases and mutes is that of female friendships. For example, Eastern Windows is dedicated to the children of the Matsukatas, one of the most famous political families in modern Japan, and here Keith provides some accounts of her friendship with their mother, Matsukata Miyo; however, it is well-nigh impossible to trace their relationship further due to the lack of historical evidence. This invisibility has to be addressed by future research. I also emphasise the necessity of transnational and translinguistic research in order to evaluate the international anti-colonial activities involved in Korean independence. Yanagi’s work, for example, brought him not only acclaim but also criticism by Korean scholars for his misinterpretation of Korean art and for the hint of condescension in his discourse. 10

The lack of Korean references poses major limitations in this chapter for a fairer evaluation of Keith’s work.

Yanagita Kunio, a famous Japanese folklorist, concludes his above-mentioned review of Eastern Windows with the following observation:

In the past, when the author occasionally contributed her sketches to The New East, I used to tease her, telling her that I did not approve of her sketches of Japanese people because they had eyes too slanted and that I would never praise her works. Then, she always made the same excuse that they appear to her in no other ways. But in Eastern Windows , I find few Orientals with such eyes. I reckon she probably started seeing in the same way as we do during her long stay. Generally speaking, Western people always try to see us by opening the eastern windows of their house; but in this book, in fact, the author looks at us, with a smile, through the western windows of our house. (1929, my translation)

It is interesting to find here that a change in Keith’s perception of other peoples and cultures parallels her changing representation of their eyes. The eyes are believed to be a vital part of paintings in the East Asian tradition, as expressed in this famous Chinese proverb in Japanese, “ga ryō ten sei”, which can be translated as “to add the finishing touches”. Drawing the eyes of painted dragons provides the finishing touch, which enables the dragons to come alive. Yanagita’s review underlines his belief that Keith acquired the alternative viewpoint to see the essence—singularities, not grotesque differences—of the other through her immersion in a non-Western culture, which was aided by the acceptance of her in their midst by the locals. Keith might not have demolished the gap between the East and the West in conformity with Yanagi’s dream, but she did succeed in presenting the East, not as the non-Western Other over a bridge across the water, but as a neighbour with a window open to the West. She allowed the coming together of both East and West in her compelling representations of the life and beauty of the ordinary.

Notes

  1. 1.

    For more information on The New East, see Nish (1972, pp. 229–232, 250–253), and Nakami (1997, pp. 170–172).

  2. 2.

    For more biographical information on Keith, see Miles (1991), Salaman (1933), Keith (1928), and Keith and Scott (1946).

  3. 3.

    For example, see “Briefs” (1924), “Personals and Local Items” (1929). They report Keith’s acquaintance with Viscount Okabe and Prince Tokugawa.

  4. 4.

    The English translation of the article appeared in The Japan Advertiser on 13 August 1919 under the title of “An Artist’s Message to Koreans: Japan’s Mistaken Policy and Korea’s Sad Fate.” Its Korean translation also appeared in Dong-A Ilbo (East Asia Newspaper) in 1920 (Yanagi 1981, p. 32). Yanagi’s criticism of the Japanese colonial iniquity in Korea received international coverage.

  5. 5.

    The former was heavily censored, and those passages are cut out in which Yanagi condemns Japanese colonial rule and violence or suggests the presence of Japanese sympathisers for the Korean cause. For the complete version, see Yanagi (1981, pp. 33–51).

  6. 6.

    The abridged translation of the former by Honda Masujirō appeared as “Young Japan to Young Korea: A ‘Heart to Heart’ Cry” on 16 June 1920. The latter was translated by Arthur Lindsay Sadler and published on 23 January 1921 (Yanagi 1981, p. 83).

  7. 7.

    This episode is repeated in Old Korea as a perfect illustration of his anti-militarist attitude though Elspet confuses Nogi Maresuke with Tōgō Heihachirō (Keith and Scott 1946, pp. 45–46).

  8. 8.

    Keith was doubly marginalised in the coterie of shin hanga artists due to her nationality and gender. In the critical context of world art history, art historians examine the appropriation of non-Western art by modernist artists in the European metropolis, thereby exposing the aesthetic exploitation of colonial peripheries (Carter 2017, p. 250 ). The application of ukiyo-e prints by late-nineteenth-century impressionists and post-impressionists, which created the Japonisme movement, was its precursor (Till 2007, p. 6). Unlike these predecessors, Keith attempted to genuinely engage with the tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. The creation of her own genre afforded her a space in the androcentric sphere.

  9. 9.

    See Tansman (2009) for the unfortunate complicity between art and Japanese Fascism in the 1930s.

  10. 10.

    For example, see Tanikawa (1981), Lee (1981), and Kubo (1981).