Justin Jesty is a precise and articulate writer, a master crafter of rare jargon-free academic English writing that is a pleasure to read.Footnote ¹ His virtuoso study Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan is representative of the kind of granular-level Japanese art/cultural historical scholarship that talented linguists and multidisciplinary social historians like Jesty are able to produce today. Jesty also demonstrates the convincing effectiveness of an authorial voice with apparently unlimited access, actual and intellectual, to primary documents augmented by the active and happy cooperation of curators and living artists, or their heirs.

Jesty's book, which focuses on several loosely connected spheres of socially and politically motivated artistic activity during the first decade and a half after the Pacific War, 1945–60, when Japan was struggling to remake itself as a nation of peace, not war, is written for specialists in the field of modern Japanese studies. The fact that Jesty assumes a high level of familiarity with the issues and concerns of mid-twentieth-century Japanese history and culture renders Art and Engagement all the more useful as an informative and challenging resource. More importantly, Jesty provides the long-missing prelude to the better-known history of Japanese avant-garde art in the 1960s and 1970s that has been thoroughly and eloquently told in several previously groundbreaking American museum exhibitions and publications.Footnote ²

Jesty defines the dual goals of Art and Engagement in the preface. One is historical: to “reframe” the period 1945–60, which he successfully reveals as a time of political uncertainty and widespread anxiety over the fate and future of Japan, with respect to its relevance to the barely disguised chaos of the present day.Footnote ³ The other is methodological: to examine a selection of independent avant-garde art movements, widely embracing (often amateur) performance productions, film, writing, and the visual arts, which he successfully demonstrates functioned as alternative “mode(s) of (political) intervention” (p. 5).

The book is organized into four parts, each consisting of several chapters that unfold like nested boxes to reinforce and deepen the original premise. In part one, “The Democratic Culture of the Early Postwar,” Jesty demonstrates the command of intricate historical documentation that anchors the discussions in every chapter. He sets the stage by emphasizing the extent to which fear of the recurrence of fascism (in combination with the powers of the Allied Occupation, 1945–52, at least until the beginning of the Korean War, 1950–53), instilled a hunger for freedom and democratic institutions among the populace along with active support for labor organizations and open toleration of leftist ideology. At some point, Jesty might have more directly credited influential postwar Japanese socialist/communist organizers, temporarily liberated from the oppression of the war years for popularizing the idea of the cadre, or small study group, which flourished during this period. That creativity-fostering groups were often linked to the workplace or the neighborhood, recalls equally the traditional organizational structures of the neighborhood, town, or village society that had characterized Japanese communities before and during the Pacific War.

In part two, “Avant-garde Documentary: Reportage Art of the 1950s,” Jesty explores a fascinating series of isolated incidents of artists as individuals and collaborative groups involved in critical research and reporting on political, economic, and social issues of the 1950s motivated by a collective sense of duty to report the truth and a distrust of the mainstream media stemming from its wartime denial of Japan's losing position. The opening chapter, “The Tales of The Tale of Akebono Village,” examines “a landmark of reportage painting”—an otherwise enigmatic work of Surrealism by Yamashita Kikuji (1919–86)—painted in 1953 at the behest of the Japanese Communist Party in response to a complicated political incident of interclass violence and death in a small village in Yamanashi Prefecture. This is a prime example of Jesty's approach to the visual arts: a deep contextualization in social history and perceptive visual analysis, here building on the contribution of Linda Hoaglund to this topic and on Bert Winther-Tamaki's theories of the male Japanese body in modern Japanese art.Footnote ⁴

Part three, “Opening Doors: Sōbi and Hani Susumu,” takes up art education in Japan through a close study of the Society for Creative Aesthetic Education (Sōzō Biiku Kyōkai, or Sōbi for short) founded in the early 1950s by Kubo Sadajirō (1909–96) and connected to the international art education movement promoted by Scottish educational theorist A. S. Neill (1883–1973) and the British art historian Herbert Read (1893–1968), who, to paraphrase Jesty, considered creative engagement with the world as the key to self-determination, self-actualization, and personal and social emancipation (p. 130). For early postwar Japanese educators, eager to raise children who would not be susceptible to fascist and authoritarian ideology, or to repeating the mistakes of the recent militarist past, the active ingredient in Sōbi theory was its promotion of free expression in the arts, a stance as Jesty points out was seen by its critics as a form of naive utopianism.

The last chapter in part three is a close study and nuanced critical analysis of the morally didactic, documentary and feature films such as Bad Boys (1961), directed by the award-winning Japanese New Wave filmmaker Hani Susumu (b. 1928), whose connection to Sōbi began in his own progressive childhood education, which prepared him to be sympathetic to Sōbi pedagogy. In 1955, before his acclaimed work in the New Wave movement, Hani shot the short documentary film Children Who Draw: Understanding Free-Drawing, featuring elementary school students in an art class taught by a young Sōbi teacher.Footnote ⁵ What Jesty has accomplished through a clear and concise focus is to cross the tenuous bridge from Sōbi to Hani, a transition that demonstrates the complex interrelationship and cross-fertilizations that occurred across postwar Japanese intellectual and cultural forces united in their optimistic support of individualism, creative freedom, and democracy.

Part four, provocatively titled “Kyushu-ha Tartare: Anti-Art between Raw and Haute,” is a minutely detailed case study of a short-lived regional group of resourceful avant-garde artists from Fukuoka, known as the Kyushu-ha—a conglomeration of untrained (raw) artists living and working with extreme limitations far removed from Tokyo—the de facto (haute) artistic and cultural center of Japan—essentially in the boondocks on the southernmost island of Kyushu. On its own, part four makes a singular contribution to a fuller understanding of the motivations, challenges, successes, and successes unrealized/uncooked (tartare) of regional artists of the immediate Japanese postwar era, and could have been a separate monograph all by itself. What stands out is the way that their collaborative processes, new media, and the ephemerality of their disruptive and interventionist endeavors against the mainstream art world of the center, prefigures the international avant-garde art of the 1960s, and resonates with a twenty-first-century total breakdown of the crumbling wall between fine, graphic, and commercial and industrial art, and the recognition of process as the equal of product.

Jesty's accomplishments in Art and Engagement are many and idiosyncratic, and no book is perfect. One could question editorial decisions about organization and transitions without diminishing its strength or wish for more or less discussion of a variety of specific issues. It would have been useful to have a separate list of illustrations and an expanded discussion of the mainstream against which the avant-garde struggled, but in sum, the richness and significance of Jesty's book are difficult to exaggerate. Everywhere the ghost of fascism overshadows the era. What the field needs now is a transdisciplinary conference on the raw and the haute arts and culture of this haunted early postwar period.