Roland Kelts's Blog, page 13

The traditional Japanese house in the middle of Philadelphia

There is a model 17th century Japanese house squatting in the middle of a park in Philadelphia. It has been there for 63 years, but not many knew why until the city's Japan America Society staged an exhibition called "Shofuso and Modernism: Mid-Century Collaboration Between Japan and Philadelphia." Meant to highlight the JapanPhilly2020 campaign -- an Olympics-related celebration of nearly 150 years of transcultural exchange between Japan and the city -- the exhibition ran from September through November 2020, and will reopen later this year.

The story of the Shofuso (Pine Breeze Villa) house and grounds brings together four artists from Europe, the U.S. and Japan: Antonin Raymond, an architect from Prague; his French wife Noemi, an interior decorator; famed prizewinning Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura, designer of International House of Japan in Tokyo and the Japan Society building in New York; and George Nakashima, a Japanese-American wood craftsman and furniture designer.

Raymond, who worked under Frank Lloyd Wright but had little respect for his boss's grasp of Japanese aesthetics, eventually became the go-to Western architect in Tokyo, where he founded his own company. The four met in Raymond's Tokyo office in the 1930s, working to design private homes and public buildings for the city's richest patrons. Their collaborations and friendship spanned half a century and survived a world war.

The history of the house itself is also a wonder, as recounted in an elegant documentary film, "A House in the Garden: Shofuso and Modernism," produced by the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia with Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, both fellows of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia.

The house was built at a workshop in Nagoya in 1953 using the traditional hand tools, materials and joineries of classic shoin-zukuri (residential architecture) of Japan's Edo period (1603-1868). A year later, it was dismantled and reconstructed in New York City, where it was opened to the public at the Museum of Modern Art as a gift from Japan to America symbolizing postwar friendship and peace.

Shofuso was built using traditional hand tools, materials and joineries of classic shoin-zukuri (residential architecture) of Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868). The interior, however, is an ode to modernism. (Top photo by Constance Mensh, both courtesy of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia)

Two years later it was moved again, this time only 160 km down the coast to Philadelphia, where it has stood since 1958.

The 1954 Shofuso exhibition at MoMA was a watershed in the West's nascent understanding of Japanese art, according to Harvard University architecture professor and historian Yukio Lippit.

"That was such an interesting event because it fixed and promoted this idea that traditional Japanese architecture was somehow modern at the same time," says Lippit. "Western observers had tended to view traditional wooden houses in Japan as inferior and even primitive. This image was inverted with the MoMA house and exhibition. It was a seminal moment. Nothing could be stranger than a museum of modern art showcasing a traditional architectural culture."

If that were not odd enough, a Japanese presence on Shofuso's current site in West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, actually dates back even further -- to the 19th century.[image error]

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Garden views at Shofuso.(Top photo by Constance Mensh, both courtesy of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia)

In 1876, two decades after Japan opened to trade with the West, Philadelphia welcomed the earliest wave of Japanese cultural emissaries when it hosted the Centennial International Exhibition, held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. A small Japanese bazaar selling native crafts occupied part of the main hall, surrounded by a few modest replicas of Japanese farmhouses, with their carpenters wearing traditional tobi (loosefitting) work clothes, which reportedly caused a sensation among the locals.

The architectural display also created a stir, especially among Philadelphia's wealthiest class, for whom the fetish for all things Japanese was blooming into what became known as "Japonisme." Thirty years later, in 1906, one of the city's upscale collectors bought a Japanese Buddhist temple gate from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (informally known as the World's Fair) in Saint Louis, Missouri, and erected it on the former Centennial International Exhibition grounds in West Fairmount Park, surrounded by a landscaped Japanese garden.

Thirty more years brought on World War II, prompting the Raymonds to decamp to the U.S., where they purchased a farmhouse outside Philadelphia in a town aptly called New Hope. Yoshimura joined them for a while, and they eventually succeeded in sponsoring Nakashima's release from a U.S. internment camp where the Americans had incarcerated him.

Front row: Noemi Raymond, left, and Junzo Yoshimura. Middle row: Antonin Raymond, third from left, and George Nakashima, fifth from left. (Courtesy of the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

In the early 1950s, the modernist American architect Philip Johnson sent a letter to John D. Rockefeller III, then-president of the Japan Society of New York. Johnson had been developing a series for MoMA called "House in the Garden." He understood the connection between traditional Japanese design and modernism and urged Rockefeller to hire Yoshimura for Shofuso.

"This site combines the history of architectural design, the war, and the personal histories of artists around the world," says Yuka Yokoyama, associate director of exhibitions and programs for the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia. Yokoyama co-curated the Shofuso exhibits with William Whitaker, collections manager of architectural archives at the University of Pennsylvania. For her, its opening has been 20 years in the making. She was attending art school in Tokyo in 1999 when she first learned about Shofuso through an offhand encounter with a chair designed by Nakashima. "I just said, 'This is really comfortable. Who made it?'"

She would later work for artist Sori Yanagi -- the son of renowned designer and founder of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, Soetsu Yanagi -- who taught her about the unlikely community of transcultural figures behind Shofuso and the camaraderie they shared.

A lamp, chair and desk by renowned wood craftsman and designer George Nakashima. (Courtesy of Nakashima Foundation for Peace)

While Yoshimura's historic house, with its gardens and waterfall designed by Tansai Sano, have existed in downtown Philadelphia since 1958, the new exhibition is the first to tie together three interconnected locations: Shofuso, the Raymond farmhouse and studio in New Hope, and Nakashima's house and workspaces, which he constructed within walking distance of the Raymond compound just after the war.

All three properties are linked by Japanese aesthetic concepts transplanted onto the vastness of American soil and sensibilities -- open sunlit spaces with views of broad landscapes, and interiors that blend minimalist tastes from Japan, modernist Western artistry and the craftsmanship of resident Quakers, members of a Christian denomination that settled in rural Pennsylvania in the 17th century and led efforts to help Japanese Americans in the region during and after World War II.

As eighth generation Kyoto gardener Tomoki Kato noted when he visited Shofuso to provide consultation in early 2020, the plants native to Philadelphia may be different from those found in Japan, but the core spiritual values can be cultivated anywhere, and in any era.

Like Shofuso, the interior of the Raymond farmhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, blends minimalist tastes from Japan, modernist Western artistry and the craftsmanship of resident Quakers. (Photo by Elizabeth Felicella, courtesy of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia)

The variety of juxtapositions in the Shofuso exhibition makes it uniquely timely, and not just for globalists. Visitors to the site during its brief window of accessibility in 2020 (it opened in early September but closed shortly after due to COVID-19 restrictions) celebrate the calming effect of the environs and their meticulously arranged objects, which include Nakashima's furniture, Noemi Raymond's interior designs, and photographs both archival and recent, curated by landscape and architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella. A soothing, contemplative experience of any kind can be healing in these times.

The convergence of cultures in the making of a single site is also particularly relevant to today's debates over whether appropriation, the borrowing and refashioning of nonnative cultural artifacts, can ever be appropriate. If these four artists from divergent backgrounds had resisted exchanging and applying ideas from one another's cultures (and most likely committing errors of disrespect along the way to excellence), would Shofuso even exist?

"It's a transcultural project and it's not an easy sort of adaptation," says Yokoyama, admitting that Shofuso's history could invite charges of Orientalism. "We were so aware of what's going on in the art world with institutional racism, and what we really want to do is start discussion, not cut it off."

The program will resume in 2021. Until then, virtual tours are available on the JapanPhilly website, the environs can be sampled via the documentary film, and there is a Shofosu Modernism and Curators Talk on YouTube.

Anime in 2020 & 2021: My look back and ahead

It would be hyperbolic to call 2020 a great year for anime. But in most respects, it ended better than it began.

Last April, the Japanese government’s first declaration of a state of emergency raised the specter of 2011, when the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown stopped anime studios cold, forcing many to consolidate for survival and some to close for good. The triple disasters of nine years ago disrupted the industry for at least a month and took three or more to overcome.

“We almost went under in 2011,” said Joseph Chou, the CEO of computer animation studio Sola Digital Arts, when I spoke to him in early May. Work had just been abruptly suspended on major shows such as “Pokemon,” “Doraemon” and “One Piece,” and his own staff were struggling to make progress on their forthcoming series, “Blade Runner: Black Lotus,” due out in spring 2021.

Chou compared interrupting the production process to halting a speeding train: “You can’t go from 100 miles per hour to zero and then expect to get right back to 100 again.”

But the effects of the Tohoku catastrophe in 2011 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 have so far been vastly different. Technology helped salvage anime’s prospects this year and beyond, arguably brightening a few of them.
While the stereotype of Japanese studios filled with fax machines and paint-stained, underpaid illustrators is not wholly inaccurate, anime companies now use computers for a variety of tasks. Even the traditionalist Studio Ghibli, home to septuagenarian master Hayao Miyazaki and once a digital outlier, premiered its first fully CG-animated film “Earwig and the Witch” on Dec. 30, despite the misgivings of diehard followers.
Teleworking via video-call meetings and shared servers proved not only possible for anime creators, but also may have increased productivity, especially for studios that already specialize in CG animation and have the servers and bandwidth to handle it.
By mid-October, during an ebb in Japan’s COVID-19 infections, Polygon Pictures President and CEO Shuzo John Shiota told me that although his CG studio had reopened, more than half of his employees continued to work from home.
“They work just as efficiently as they do in the office,” he said. “Advances in data compression allow us to do things that were inconceivable just a few years ago, so this new type of flexible work arrangement will be permanent for us.”
There are still delays and cancellations industry-wide, of course, and there have been more serious setbacks — notably the tragic death in April of actress Kumiko Okae, who voiced characters for “Pokemon” and Studio Ghibli movies. Okae succumbed to pneumonia caused by COVID-19 at the age of 63.
The entire sector known as “live events,” which covers everything from anisong (anime theme song) concerts to the AnimeJapan trade fair and the Comic Market, a fan-art manga and anime convention better known as Comiket and attended by roughly half a million people, has been dormant since February 2020, causing revenues to plummet for related merchandising businesses.
But technology again provided a virtual lifeline. E-commerce transactions for Comiket’s first-ever internet replacement in May, Air Comiket, were brisk and profitable, according to translator and veteran participant Dan Kanemitsu. Air Comiket 2 Week, an online 45th anniversary celebration, ran for two days at the end of December.
“The overall demand for anime, manga and video games in Japan has never been higher than it is now,” said Kanemitsu. “It’s just being redirected through online portals.”
This explains the rise in Japan of VTubers (virtual YouTube hosts), he said, entertainers who livestream on the video-sharing platform with computer-generated anime avatars. VTubers dominated the top 10 list of online donations last summer via Super Chat, a service that enables viewers to contribute cash while commenting on livestreams.
The other unexpected phenomenon to hit the anime business this autumn was the blockbuster “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie — Mugen Train.” The movie opened on Oct. 16 and became the highest-grossing film in the world for that weekend. It is now the top grossing film ever in Japan.
One month before the theatrical release of “Demon Slayer,” I spoke with professor Tadashi Sudo, anime critic, business analyst and founder of trade site Anime!Anime!. Sudo was compiling the annual anime industry report for 2019, which was published in December by the Association of Japanese Animations.
According to Sudo, the overall industry saw record growth of 15% from 2018 to 2019, driven by the expansion of international markets and streaming services. But the surprise was that the domestic market also grew, with a spike in merchandising sales from two titles launched last year, both based on character goods: “Rilakkuma and Kaoru” and “Sumikkogurashi.”
The anime audience in Japan now spans the “Anpanman” age (young children) to fans in their 60s, he added, “and Japanese studios seem to be handling the COVID-19 crisis pretty well. A lot of big releases have been pushed back to the end of this year, so we’ll soon see what happens.”
The explosive success of “Demon Slayer” is what happened, and it has overshadowed nearly every other anime story in 2020 except one: the equally dramatic surge of anime on streaming platforms.
Shortly after Netflix announced that the number of households watching anime on its service jumped by 50% in the year leading up to September, with anime titles in top 10 most-watched lists across almost 100 countries, Sony Corp. purchased U.S.-based anime streaming service Crunchyroll from WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion.
The Crunchyroll sale capped off a year in which anime became a darling of streaming media platforms. The box office bonanza for “Demon Slayer” is a case in point. Its original manga sold modestly in the three years leading up to 2019, when the anime series was first broadcast on domestic network television.
The staggered rollout of episodes on TV built audience loyalty over enough time for a fan base to develop on social media and go viral. The series was then streamed non-exclusively on a range of sites, making it ubiquitous and accessible prior to the movie’s October premiere.
It’s a lesson Japan’s industry players should heed in 2021. Exclusive co-production and licensing deals with behemoths like Netflix and Amazon have created a price bubble for studios, raising the investment fees paid per-episode by three or four times. But a series that is only streamed on one site and binge-watched in a single session is less likely to become a record-breaking mega-hit — let alone get renewed for another season.

Sony buys anime streamer Crunchyroll for $1.2 billion; here's my take

It's been a pretty crappy year for everyone—except the Anime Industry. I write about Sony's $1.2 billion buy of anime streamer Crunchyroll for Rest of World.

"Covid-19 caused a spike in demand for online anime content that even the rosiest industry forecasts didn’t predict. The shuttering of live-action sets, combined with a stuck-at-home audience desperate for fantasy escapes, has meant that animation, with its low budget, safe-to-make product and unmasked characters, is now the go-to alternative for both producers and viewers."

"'It’s still niche. But it’s a pretty big niche.'"

Meet Japanese-Australian electro-pop music duo, Lastlings, in my last JT culture column for 2020

The state of the world in 2020 is one that Lastlings, a half-Japanese, half-Australian musical sibling duo, seem oddly prepared for, right down to their name.

“Lastlings” was the title of a short story that guitarist and producer Josh Dowdle, 27, wrote in high school about the survivors of an apocalyptic event. Nature has reclaimed the cities, nothing is open and the “lastlings” are the only remaining people on Earth.

“We have a dystopian aesthetic,” Josh says on a video call from a studio in Australia. “I guess it’s a coincidence.”

"Japan Through the Eyes of a MONKEY," Asia launch event w/Live Zoom reading and performance Thursday, December 17th, 4 pm (Jakarta) / 6 pm (Tokyo)

Featuring poet and novelist Hiromi Ito and author/illustrator Satoshi Kitamura. (More TK.) 

"Monkey is Back!" Live Zoom reading and performance Friday, December 11th, 8 pm (New York) / Saturday, December 12th, 10 am (Tokyo)

To celebrate this month's global release of the new issue of MONKEY in print & digital formats:

Novelist Hiroko Oyamada is compared to Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami in this recent New York Times review of her latest novel, "The Hole." 

We are excited to introduce Hiroko to you on Friday, Dec. 11th (US) / Saturday Dec. 12th (Japan) in MONKEY IS BACK! - a celebration of the global print release this month of MONKEY: New Writing from Japan literary magazine.

• The Zoom event is free, and registration is here. 

• You can now purchase your copy of the new English-language MONKEY here.

Hiroko will read with her English-language translator, the scholar David Boyd. Artist Satoshi Kitamura will present kamishibai, a classic form of paper theater visual storytelling that was a precursor to manga. Founding editor Motoyuki Shibata will host, I will moderate. See you soon!

New license for a new Spanish-language edition of JAPANAMERICA

Earlier this year I signed off on another foreign-language license for a new Spanish-language translation of my book JAPANAMERICA: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, which has been updated with a new subtitle (in Spanish, of course): How Japanese Pop Culture has Conquered the West. I'm pleased to announce that the new Spanish edition will be released just in time for Christmas 2020. 

My thanks to Jennifer in Barcelona and Marta in New York for managing the deal via my US publisher St. Martin's Press, and to Samuel and Iñaki for publishing the new edition at Odaiba Ediciones. They had planned some launch events and signings with me in Madrid but all have been postponed until our post-Covid era commences. More info forthcoming.

On 10 years of making the MONKEY

I write about my 10 years helping to make MONKEY, the only annual English-language Japanese literary magazine, in my latest column for the Nikkei. This project has taught me a ton about language, translation, art, culture and friendship, and has taken me around the world on book tours. I am humbled and grateful.

The new issue is available for preorder in print and digital editions here. 

Live in Los Angeles for the US-Asia Entertainment Summit, November 21st

I will be appearing on a panel for the annual US-Asia Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles this Saturday, November 21st, at 10 am Japan Standard Time (Friday the 20th, 5 pm PST, 8 pm EST) to discuss "Hollywood's New Anime Gold Rush." I will be joined by the presidents of Sentai Filmworks and Production I.G USA, and the senior vice president and creative director for Toonami's Adult Swim: John Ledford, Maki Terashima-Furuta and Jason DeMarco. These are some of the finest and best-qualified professionals you could assemble for a discussion of this very hot topic. 

The event is hosted and sponsored by Asia Society of Southern California, Japan House Los Angeles, JETRO and The Cool Japan Fund. 

More info and registration for the livestream is here.

I hope you'll join us this Saturday/Friday the 21st/20th. 

 

Live in Indonesia for the Makassar International Writers Festival 2020, November 14th

I am honored to be a guest again at The Makassar International Writers Festival this Saturday, November 14th at 2pm Japan Standard Time. The in-person event is magical, held on the grounds of a 17th Century Dutch fort along the coast, and featuring live music, readings, art and heaps of Indonesian cuisine. 

Alas, I won't be there this year but will be on Zoom (again!) and hope you'll join us.

Registration is here: https://bit.ly/RegistrasiComicTalkMAAF