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Brushing with Authority: The Life and Art of Tomiyama Taeko

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Nobuko TANAKA  and
Laura Hein
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Like the reporter Nobuko Tanaka, whose 2010 interview with artist Tomiyama Taeko is published below, I vividly remember my first encounter with Tomiyama's art. That was in 1984, when I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to see Maruki Iri and Toshi's newly completed mural of the Battle of Okinawa, on display before travelling to its permanent home at the Sakima Museum in Ginowan, Okinawa (https://sakima.jp/exhibition-okinawasen.html). The adjacent room held a linked exhibit of Tomiyama's black-and-white lithographs depicting Japan's coal miners, including Koreans who had been forced to work in Japan's wartime mines. I was just then writing about the history of labor relations in Japan's coal industry, including the horrific treatment of Korean and Chinese slave workers during the war. Tomiyama's images, such as “Sending off the Spirits of the Dead,” which evoked not only the Koreans who disappeared into the mines but also the families they left behind, impressed me as both social and aesthetic creations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 13 , March 2010 , e3
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

References

Notes

1 For a recent publication of photographs taken in 1945 of Chinese forced mine workers, see Carolyn Peter, A Letter from Japan: The Photographs of John Swope, Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts: 2006.

2 See Watt, “Imperial Remnants,” and other essays in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson ed. Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, New York and London, Routledge, 2005. Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “War Responsibility and Japanese Civilian Victims of Japanese Biological Warfare in China,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 32.3 (July-September 2000): 13-22.

3 Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, eds. Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, forthcoming fall 2010.