Meiji shōnen kaiko 明治少年懐古
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Commentary by Alicia Volk
Posted October 17, 2016

Of the more than one hundred books written, designed, and illustrated by Kawakami Sumio during his career, Meiji shōnen kaiko (Reminiscences of a Meiji youth) has reached the largest audience and is perhaps the most beloved. Published in a limited edition of two hundred in 1944 during the Pacific War and republished in greater numbers in 1967, 1975, and 2008, Meiji shōnen kaiko was in fact a reprinting with slight modifications of Kawakami’s earlier 1936 Shōshō mukashibanashi 少々昔噺 (Somewhat old tales). [1] The book’s ongoing popularity is a testament to Kawakami’s genius in representing in both written and visual form the poetic texture of Japan’s recent past, which was so visibly marked by modernization and Westernization. For several generations of Japanese readers in the rapidly changing twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Meiji shōnen kaiko has elicited nostalgia for the perceived innocence of a lost age.

Meiji shōnen kaiko features sixty-three short chapters. Each comprises a prose text by Kawakami on an aspect of life in the Tokyo metropolis in the late Meiji period (1868–1912), accompanied by a self-carved, monochromatic woodcut illustration. Five additional woodcuts hand-printed in four colors are interspersed throughout the volume. They portray such emblematic Meiji images as a woman in Japanese dress carrying a Western umbrella, a Western lamp and a Japanese hibachi, a schoolgirl sporting a large hair bow, and a soldier and a government official in their respective Western-style uniforms. On the color woodblock-printed cover is a young man holding a Western lamp, which was clearly a motif with some significance for the artist. He explains in the chapter titled “Lamps” (Yōtō 洋燈) that he found Western lighting trustworthy and agreeable as it chased away the darkness of night. This and other chapters focus on a variety of sites, customs, novelties, and delights drawn from Kawakami’s childhood memories, among them picture books, puppet shows, footwear, clocks, the sweet red bean soup (oshiruko) sold at Ginza’s Jūnikagetsu shop, Hibiya Park, and the Yasukuni Shrine festival.

Meiji shōnen kaiko conjures up a bygone era as seen through the eyes of a child. Kawakami was born in 1895 in Yokohama, the port city near Tokyo that was strongly inflected by modernization and Westernization. He was still a youth at the close of the Meiji period in 1912. In September 1923 he saw most of the material vestiges of that world reduced to rubble by the Great Kantō Earthquake. Meiji shōnen kaiko was conceived thirteen years later as an homage to all that had been lost. Other books by the artist that draw upon the Meiji-period program of bunmei kaika 文明開化 (civilization and enlightenment) and the opening of the country to Western influence include Bunmei kaika ōrai 文明開化往来 (Comings and goings of civilization and enlightenment; 1941), Yokohama kaiko 横浜懐古 (Yokohama reminiscences; 1942), and the series Egeresu iroha ゑげれすいろは (English ABCs; 1929–36).

Given the predominance of Euro-American motifs in Meiji shōnen kaiko and the artist’s oeuvre more generally, it might appear that all things Western entranced Kawakami. However, he was quick to clarify that the exoticism running through his works was “not toward the West itself. It is nostalgia toward the unique and reassuring poetics of the discrepancies within Meiji culture. It is toward Japan, with Japanese eyes.” [2]

Selected readings:

Kawakami Sumio, Kawakami Sumio zenshū 『川上澄生全集』, 14 vols. (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1978–79), vol. 3.

Setagaya Bijutsukan, ed., Kokon tōzai o asobu: Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan shozōhin ni yoru Kawakami Sumio mokuhanga no sekai『古今東西を遊ぶ：栃木県立美術館所蔵品による川上澄生木版画の世界』 (Tokyo: Setagaya Bijutsukan, 2010).

Oliver Statler, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956).

Copies in other collections:

British Museum, London
Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
Kyoto Prefectural University Library
Meiji University Library, Tokyo
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon Kindai Bungakukan)
Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties
National Diet Library (NDL), Tokyo
Osaka University Main Library
Tokyo Metropolitan Tama Library
University of California (UC) Berkeley Libraries
University of Maryland Libraries

[1] Shōshō mukashibanashi was originally published in 1936 by Hangasō (版画荘); it was republished 1944 as Meiji shōnen kaiko by the Meiji Bijutsu Kenkyūjo 明治美術研究所 (Meiji Art Research Institute). In 1967 Meiji shōnen kaiko appeared in a new edition by Tochigi Shinbunsha under the title Shinpen [New edition] Meiji shōnen kaiko (新編明治少年懐古). Meiji shōnen kaiko was republished by Tōji Shobō in 1975 and by Uejji in 2008.

[2] Author’s translation, from Kawakami Sumio, “Watashi” 「私」, in the journal Kōgei 『工藝』 (May 1939); cited in Setagaya Bijutsukan 2010, 92.