Farewell to a 107-year-old Japanese artist

Toko Shinoda had her first public exhibition in 1940. I attach the chapter which included her in my book, Japan's Far More Female Future

This is my bad photo of a fairly recent piece of Toko Shinoda’s abstract work, which is hanging in my kitchen. Here is the tribute published yesterday in the New York Times.

Below is the chapter in Japan's Far More Female Future about her and two other prominent women working in the arts, Tomomi Nishimoto (an orchestra conductor) and Naomi Kawase (a film director). For the book I used Japanese naming order, of family name first followed by given name.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Creating art, interpreting life

Shinoda Toko, Nishimoto Tomomi, Kawase Naomi

The field research for this book began in the spring of 2016 when I went to visit, and interview[1], the-then 103-year-old artist, Shinoda Toko, in the studio in Aoyama in Tokyo where she has lived and worked for more than seventy years. As this seemingly frail woman, who in my eyes resembled a thin bird dressed in a kimono, showed me the huge ink-stone that she bought from a shop in Kanda in Tokyo in the 1940s and has used ever since, I understood that one of the vital things about her art is its physicality. I suspect that the physical connection she makes with her brushes, ink and paint on a daily basis is almost more important to her life and her art than what she is thinking and perhaps even than what she is feeling. Many months later, as I watched the-then 48-year-old orchestra conductor, Nishimoto Tomomi, in her third rehearsal of the day, I had a similar sensation. Her physical exertion, her display of energy, her bodily involvement all play a central role in her music. After just sitting watching her and the orchestra I felt I needed to take a shower.

            Shinoda-san’s art began as abstract, sumi-e[2] calligraphy but in the eight decades since her first solo exhibition took place in Tokyo in 1940 it has evolved into far more abstract forms although still often involving a strong calligraphic element. Among her art the most memorable example has to be her 100-foot-long mural at the Zojoji temple next to Shiba Park in Tokyo which consists of huge calligraphic black-ink shapes interspersed with white space, which she painted in 1974. She became internationally known during the 1950s when the art form known as Abstract Expressionism came into vogue in New York, led by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and some of her work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. She had gone to spend about two years in New York in 1956-58, renewing her visa every two months and finding her way ingeniously past restrictions on access to the foreign currency that any Japanese needed if they were to finance such a trip. That, as it happens, was the year when I was born, so I needed no other proof of the difference in our ages and eras than when she spoke about the New York of 1956. ‘I thought America was a great country, just for the fact that so many top galleries could be owned by women,’ she said. Her own paintings were taken up by one of the main dealerships promoting Abstract Expressionism, the Betty Parsons Gallery.

***

Calligraphy is a particularly physical art form, dealing as it does in the immediate impact of brush and ink on to paper, and so in the direct transmission of feelings by the artist to the art and ultimately to its viewers. Orchestral conducting, Nishimoto-san told[3] me, is similarly about the transmission of passions and of feelings through physical actions. Unlike with painting or calligraphy, of course, such orchestral performance is almost always of music that someone else has written. Yet even then the important part lies in the difference that particular conductors and musicians make to the performances. ‘I think the job of an artist is to add my words to that tune, like adding my blood, my flesh, recreating the work to make it my work’, Nishimoto-san said. She first felt she was really achieving what she wanted to, she said, when in her mid-30s she found that audiences were truly sensing ‘that my performances reflected my bitter experiences’. ‘It was a kind of a breakthrough,’ she said.

            Seeing this successful, popular woman, looking to be in her absolute element in a Tokyo concert hall surrounded by the orchestra, I wondered what sort of bitterness she could possibly harbour? As she answered, it was clear that in some ways she has had to struggle to achieve what she has. She came from quite a musical family – her mother was a vocalist, her aunt plays the piano and the organ, and among her relatives were five people who had graduated at one time or other from music college. Nishimoto-san too went to music college after graduating from high school, but then at the age of 26 decided she should go to St Petersburg, in Russia, to study to be a conductor. No one in her family would help to finance her study abroad, however, so she had to raise the funds on her own. While at music college she worked as an assistant to an opera director, ultimately saving up the $10,000 she needed to pay the St Petersburg fees and living costs for one year. After that year, she moved to and fro between Japan and St Petersburg, returning home each time to earn and save up the money to be able to go back for periods of study.

            While Shinoda-san found inspiration in America and in the freedoms adopted by artists there, Nishimoto-san found her inspiration in Russian teachers and conductors. She says she felt even as a child that with Russian pianists, violinists, cellists and other musicians, ‘although they were playing their instruments, they were actually talking through their music.’ She cites her teacher in St Petersburg, Ilya Mushin, as a special influence because he was very passionate in his conducting, even at the age of 94.

            In truth, as a successful female orchestra conductor Nishimoto-san is unusual all over the world, not just in Japan. This remains a predominantly male profession, globally. She says that her teacher Ilya Mushin ‘used to say that it was far more difficult for a woman to be a conductor than to be a lieutenant in the Russian army’, as the role is physically demanding. Someone with a weak and soft voice and quite a small appearance would find it difficult to have an impact. But as Nishimoto-san said, although physical impact is necessary, what is most needed ‘is mental energy, mental strength.’ She is fortunately quite tall, which probably helps, and she has done physical training so as to gain stamina. She says conducting puts particular burdens on to her neck, which I can imagine as I watch the rehearsal and see her head moving violently, her hair flying from side to side. But she nevertheless says that now that she is able to build more immediate trust with the players, she doesn’t need to exaggerate her movements as much as in the past.

            Another source of the bitterness that she says is reflected in her performances is the difficulty she encountered at first by virtue of being a conductor who was younger than many of the players in her orchestras. ‘In Japan it is always hard to be in a leadership position as a younger person and as a woman…I felt that as well as a glass ceiling there were also glass walls all around me,’ she added. ‘But I don’t feel there are glass walls around me any more.’ 

Nonetheless, she is clearly sensitive about some of the things music critics have written about her, especially in the early days when she was making her reputation. ‘At first rumours were spread for example that I had paid a bribe to win something, but this was not true at all.’ Reading about it, I think plenty of even nastier rumours were spread, but that is unfortunately not unusual in male-dominated societies when women achieve success. Nishimoto-san places it in a particular Japanese context: ‘I am the one among musical people who came from a totally different course from the path normally followed by graduates from music school. There had been no such example like me, so people asked why and how this could have happened,’ she said. And she added ruefully something that Mayor Hayashi also pointed out: ‘In Japan when one does something that is unprecedented people don’t react well.’

            Nishimoto-san is now well-known in other Asian countries, including Taiwan and China, and performs regularly at the Vatican in Rome. The Vatican performances originated from the fact that although her own family are not Catholics, some of her relatives came from Ikitsuki Island near Nagasaki in Kyushu in south-west Japan, which was one of the main centres of ‘Hidden Christians’[4] in the 17th and 18th centuries. When she was first invited to perform at the Vatican, she suggested that a chant by Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary, which had remained in use on Ikitsuki island as part of local culture should form part of her repertoire at the Vatican. ‘One thing I feel is that history is always told from the winners’ side. Always the people who lost are perished and their voices are lost. But in local culture they are preserved, and I feel a mission to restore those things.’

            She mentioned another historical project which took my mind also back to Shinoda-san, albeit tangentially. Nishimoto-san said that in the autumn of 2017 she was going to be conducting a performance of the musical Noh play Sotoba Komachi and was not just conducting but also arranging the music and acting as art director. In this play, a very old woman is found sitting on a Buddhist gravepost, a wooden stupa. She is Ono no Komachi, one of the great poets of the Heian Period[5] and who was said to have been a great beauty in her youth. Now 100 years old in the play, as she is sitting on the ruined stupa two priests come across her and tell her she must get off the stupa and show it more respect. 

            In hearing and reading about this story, I thought of Shinoda Toko not merely because like Ono no Komachi she is over 100 years old. It was something she said. I asked her whether she teaches others and whether there are artists and architects who she admires. Her answer to the first question was dismissive: she doesn’t take apprentices or teach anybody because ‘art is individual. It is not something I can teach.’ And to the second question her answer was also somewhat quirky, perhaps even rather critical, in a way that could even have come from the mouth of Ono no Komachi, in the parts of the play when she is being confident and poetic. Shinoda-san answered my question about whether she admired the architect Tange Kenzo, by saying, yes, she had met him a few times. But, she added, ‘I think people who admire are people who want to be admired by others. I respect people who do not want to be respected.’

***

Kawase Naomi was somewhat gentler in her responses to my questions when I met[6] the film director in her production company’s office in Nara. But I still suspect that she might agree with Shinoda-san’s point, or at least she acts as if she does. Her films are not the work of someone who is trying to be popular, or liked, or even admired, although she often is in fact admired, especially in film festivals such as the one held every year in Cannes in France, where she has won prizes. Shinoda-san said to me ‘I did all my work in the way I wanted’, and I think Kawase-san would say something very similar. 

At the time I met her, in July 2017, she was preparing for an unusual role, as director of a production of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera Tosca. This was to be the first time she had directed in a theatre. But there was to be something else innovative about this production. In Puccini’s original, Tosca ends in tragedy, with all the main characters dying, including the heroine, Floria Tosca. Kawase-san’s production, however, was to end differently, I was told: she was adapting it to have a more hopeful, less tragic ending. She was doing her work in the way she wanted. Whether or not Puccini would have approved must remain a matter for speculation. But in 2019 it was announced that she had been commissioned to direct the official film of the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo, which can be sure to have a hopeful, aspirational flavour.

            In film, she says, ‘the most important thing is to have one’s own originality and strength. Unless you have a strong belief that “I have just got to film this” you cannot stand out.’ Her films are not easy to watch nor, in some respects, are they easy to understand. Making things easy is not her intention or interest. By making the central character of An [‘Sweet Bean’, 2015] a victim of Hansen’s disease (i.e., leprosy), or the main character of Hikari [‘Radiance’, 2017] someone who is going blind, she is not seeking to make audiences feel comfortable or happy. Rather, she seems to want to explore and portray the difficult and complex relationships that people have with each other. Family is a recurrent theme in her films, but her families are generally not either happy or united, but rather are broken or else breaking up, which reflects her own experience as a child. Her parents split up early in her childhood, and she was raised in rural Nara by her great-aunt. She divorced from her own husband after less than 3 years of marriage. She has a young son, who in fact came into the production company office while I was there, and who she is raising as a single mother.

I asked her what was her measure of success? ‘For me,’ she replied, ‘success means to be able to stay calm, to be able to meet people, and to create something new.’ Knowing that many of her films find fairly small audiences – An has won her biggest audience so far – she says with gratitude that ‘still there are people who want to finance the kind of films I want to make’. ‘An interesting thing I have noticed is that more people who have made a success in business want to invest in me and in other directors who might win prizes in Cannes and so get fame through my works.’ I can see that although films are not at all cheap to make – the budget for Hikari was $1.5 million, Kawase san told me, which is nonetheless at the cheaper end of feature-film making – for those businesspeople who have made a lot of money, an investment in such a film can represent a relatively economical way to gain an association with fame and with art.

            Such investors will have been encouraged by learning of Kawase-san’s first full feature film, Moe no Suzaku, which in 1997 won the ‘Camera d’Or’ prize in Cannes for the best new film, a prize of which she was the youngest ever winner (at the age then of 28). She had previously made documentaries, and a cameraman who saw a showing of a private documentary she had made in 1992 introduced her to the WoWoW satellite and pay-per-view TV company which was keen on backing some original, independent films. That private documentary, called Ni tsutsumarete (‘Embracing’), was about her search for her father, which was ‘very important to me personally’. She made it while working as a lecturer at the Osaka School of Photography, where she had studied film as an undergraduate.

When she started filming Moe no Suzaku, which tells the story of the dissolution of a rural family, she was just 26 years old. By her account, the team that was making the film almost dissolved too, partway through the filming. She says she felt very isolated, amid a cast and crew who were mainly male and mostly older, and who ‘felt I was very young and inexperienced’. Suddenly, some of the cast became so frustrated with her that they threatened to leave, including the main actor, Kunimura Jun, who was the only then-professional in the cast. ‘I was determined to carry on. Even if I could only use 8mm film [rather than professional 35mm] I was going to finish it. The producer from WoWoW asked me whether I really wanted to continue. I said yes. So he then persuaded the cast and crew to stay.’ Perhaps, she says with hindsight, it was fortunate that the WoWoW producer was not so much older than her, was from TV, and worked for a company that was committed to doing something new and outside their usual TV world. ‘If I had said I might quit, then that would have been the end.’

‘Women,’ says Kawase-san, ‘have to stay tougher as directors. Overcoming difficulties makes you stronger.’ It is a familiar refrain, but it is also true that as for orchestra conductors it is relatively rare for women to have sustained careers as film directors. As she told me, ‘artists and actors can be quite self-contained, but directors have to have more strength so as to supervise a crew and cast as well as to maintain a schedule.’ She certainly also thinks that female directors suffer discrimination: ‘I recently heard that the guarantees that female directors are receiving are only 50% of those received by men’, and by this she meant worldwide. By ‘guarantee’ she was referring to the system of payment in the film industry under which directors get paid a fixed amount as a guarantee, and then on top of that receive a share of income if it surpasses a certain level.

Naturally, she speaks about discrimination against women with strong feelings and emotions. I asked her whether she would find the story of women’s place in society interesting enough to film. Her response was candid and straightforward: ‘That is not something I am aiming at, as it may require energy that I don’t want to use.’ She felt, she said, that if she were to focus on women struggling to succeed in work or society she might ‘be seen as an activist or political’ and she doesn’t want that. She says that ‘it is OK if my films have some impact on society. But I don't want a secondary role as an activist.’

***

Shinoda Toko, with whom we began this chapter, has certainly seen a lot of battles during her life, though she has clearly always chosen to focus on her art rather than on what was going on around her. Born in Dalian in China in 1913, in the area that Japan controlled following the Russo-Japanese war of 1904/05, she grew up mainly in Gifu prefecture as her family soon moved back to Japan from China. She told me ‘I never thought to become an artist when I was young. I just became one.’ Her oldest memory of art is as a student in art class at age 14 or 15, when she was asked to draw anything she liked, chose a plant but opted to draw the leaves rather than the whole flower. She says her teacher said that her style was rather like French ‘secessionist’ art, which she says started her thinking about art.

            Shinoda-san’s parents told her she should get married. But ‘I wanted my own way, and to live on my own. I couldn’t get married, I was timid and did not want to go to a stranger’s house.’ So instead she took a job as a calligraphy teacher to earn a living. ‘I started to teach in a very free way, encouraging my pupils to make their own characters. That is the first time when I felt I was different. I didn’t want to emulate or imitate other people.’ Then war broke out and, as she said, ‘art became obscure’. But still she put on an exhibition at Kyukyodo gallery in Ginza in central Tokyo, her first solo showing. I asked whether that exhibition was successful. ‘There were some reviews in art newspapers who said mine was a self-taught style. Others described my work as “brilliant, with excellent touches”. But others said I was derailed from the long history of calligraphy. This was true, as I did not follow tradition.’

            Not following tradition: that seems a good summary of Shinoda-san’s approach to life. As mentioned before, her stay in New York in 1956-58 played an important role and she sold some of her works to John D. Rockefeller and his wife, who were employing curators to build their collection. But she nevertheless returned to Japan and stayed home ever since. ‘I felt Japanese society did change after the war, liberating women to a certain extent. A woman could establish herself on her own, if she had the will.’ I asked her what she thought of young Japanese women today, but she refused to answer: ‘I am not interested in other people, so I couldn’t have been a critic. I do not observe. I am a person who creates. I am indifferent to other people.’

            As we finished our formal conversation, Shinoda-san invited me to stay for tea. This was served by her (then) 78-year-old assistant, Imamura-san, who at that time came to look after her on six days a week, travelling an hour each way to do so, having worked for Shinoda-san for about 50 years. As a symbol of the demography of modern Japan, there couldn’t have been a better example. 

I don’t however think Shinoda-san would want to think of herself as an ‘example’ of anything: 

I have never regarded myself as an artist. I have always just wanted to make something as a form, but I never know what kind of force made me produce this art. A person is mysterious. For everyone what is beautiful is different. I still don’t have an answer to what ‘art’ is after 100 years. Food, yes; language yes; but art – I don’t know if art is really important to a human being and what it really is. And I have never given a thought to whether art is a man’s world or a woman’s world. It is a job.

[1] Interview with Shinoda Toko, Aoyama, Tokyo 12 April 2016

[2]Sumi-e means black ink painting. Common across East Asia, it originated in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907AD)

[3] Interview with Nishimoto Tomomi, Suginami Public Hall, Ogikubo, Tokyo 13 July 2017

[4] Known as Kakure Kirishitan in Japanese, Hidden Christians were people who continued to practise their faith during the period when Christianity was banned in Japan, from 1614 to 1873. As Jesuit missionaries had previously landed and made conversions mainly in the Nagasaki area, most Hidden Christians were there http://kirishitan.jp/values_en/val002

[5] 794-1185 AD

[6] Interview with Kawase Naomi, Kumie Productions Head Office, Nara, 6 July 2017