Kim Brandt's study focuses primarily on Yanagi Muneyoshi (Sōetsu) and the Japanese mingei—a neologism coined by Yanagi that has migrated into the English language—movement from the 1920s through the Asia-Pacific War, with some reference to developments as late as the 1960s. In the introduction, Brandt situates Japan's folk art movement of the interwar and wartime periods in the context of Japanese “imperialism and colonialism,” “new strains of nationalist thought and feeling,” and “the structures and processes of industrial capitalism” (p. 2). Fittingly, she begins her book with Yanagi's encounter with the Korean “blue” ceramics of the Chosǒn period, which he believed to have been produced by anonymous craftsmen. They were already becoming collectors' items when Yanagi encountered them, even though Korean elites traditionally esteemed the white ceramics. Yanagi did not highly regard white ceramics because, in his view, they lacked the naturalness and pureness derived from the nature of the Korean folk. What he sought after and praised was the beauty of the arts of the common people. After thus setting the stage for the development of mingei in a colonial encounter, Brandt follows Yanagi and his associates as they seek to discover the beauty of the Japanese folk in their “arts.”

The discovery of “folk arts” and “folk culture” as the products of nameless craftsmen in Japan was made in such remote localities as Tohoku and San'in, and even as far away as Hokkaido and Okinawa. The last two areas were newly “nationalized” in the Meiji era. Brandt refers to this nationalizing process, but she does not make it clear that Yanagi, as well as Yanagita Kunio, the originator and “emperor” of Japan folklore studies, was inclined to overlook the “foreignness” of these areas. If these regions were not culturally foreign to Japan, I wonder how much greater was the gap in the case of the Korean peninsula. I suppose Yanagi was intent to discover the “kingdom of beauty” in the most remote places of Japan.

With Bernard Leach, Kawai Kanjiro, and other artists, Yanagi rediscovered folk arts such as pottery, textiles, dolls, and furniture, which, following their “discovery,” became famous in Tokyo and in other major cities and were sold in high-end department stores, the sites of consumerism of modern Japan. Without consumerism, as Brandt shows, the folk art movement would not have achieved its popularity. But what is not described well is who the major supporters of the consumption of mingei were. Indeed, as Brandt asserts, they were the newly rising middle classes. But why they showed such a strong interest in folk arts and how their investment in mingei as cultural capital spread to other classes should be explored. Who exactly were they, and why did they flock to the great department stores? Was it nostalgia for the loss of native place?

The romantic side of this movement derived not only from a longing for the countryside they had left, but also from a new taste of the country lifestyle that European folklore had previously discovered. European folklore studies influenced Japanese folklore as developed by Yanagita Kunio, who romanticized the underdeveloped rural areas as sites of the old and true Japanese: residing deep in the mountains and far out on the ocean, as in the case of Okinawa. Brandt shows the relation of Yanagi to the military state, but she does not analyze the antimodern aspect of the movement as one among several romantic movements that were no less prominent in Europe and the United States. Developing this point would have led to an analysis of a more complicated relationship of the folk art movement with Japanese military colonization. Such an analysis would illustrate how the notion of an “originary” Japanese came to occupy the minds of elites and middle-class intellectuals.

After World War II, Yanagi's fame as the keeper of Japanese culture persisted. He survived as one of the leaders of the “peace culture of Japan.” As Brandt points out, although Yanagi cooperated with the Japanese military in its cultural policy in East Asia, he was still welcomed as the inventor of folk arts in the aftermath of the war, when Japan appeared to face total cultural collapse. His taste in folk wares, folk furniture, and folk toys grained wide currency to describe everything that was rural, traditional, and even vulgar in Japan. Brandt sees this vulgarity in the mass restaurants and cheap souvenirs that proliferated after the war. Again, I would like to know, who were the consumers of this vulgarity, and how did the folk arts lose the cachet of “high culture” bestowed by Yanagi? If, as Brandt analyzes, in the rapid economic growth of the late 1960s folk arts fell into the slough of high consumption, then the culture that Yanagi fostered lost out in Japan's postwar economy of high economic growth after the loss to Japanese militarism. Culture was twice defeated. If what Brandt means by “Kingdom of Beauty” is cultural power, it was first subordinated to the military and then to mass consumer capitalism. Culture was not only weaker but had lost its way.