TheEconomistAugust 1st 2020 651T
he bowlis small enough to balance in
the palm of your hand. It is deep
enough for tofu, but too shallow for soup. A
ghostly white glaze, translucent in the right
light, covers the surface. These clay walls
are its maker’s gallery. A lone blue figure
fills the centre of the bowl, his face a blank
oval with a whiskery beard. His spine
curves along the same arc as the rim.
At the Nihon Mingeikan (Japan Folk
Crafts Museum) in Tokyo, visitors find lit-
tle by way of description or context along-
side this artefact or the hundreds of other
simple ceramics, textiles and crafts on dis-
play. Yanagi Soetsu, the museum’s founder,
believed that nothing should distract from
the beauty of the objects. For Yanagi, a prol-
ific writer and collector, “miscellaneous
things represent the most original of Japa-
nese arts.” He and two potters, Hamada
Shoji (who made the plates in the picture)
and Kawai Kanjiro, dubbed these wares
mingei, a neologism fusing the characters
for “the masses” and “crafts”.
Over several decades from the 1910s, he
amassed a collection of more than 17,000
such pieces from around Japan and its ex-
panding empire, which became the foun-
dation of the Mingeikan. By the time Ya-
nagi died in 1961, mingeihad entered the
language. His ideas left an enduring mark
on Japanese design, visible today in the
fashion stylings of Issey Miyake and the
popular homeware sold by the retailer
Muji. At a time when people everywhere
find themselves confined to familiar sur-
roundings, his attentive way of looking at
the world is a salutary consolation.
Mingei encompasses all manner of
everyday things, from clothing and furni-
ture to utensils and stationery. These ob-
jects, Yanagi wrote, are “deeply embedded
in the life of ordinary people”. They stand
in contrast to aristocratic fine arts and es-
chew needless decoration. Works of mingei
are crafted with quotidian use and owners
in mind; they are typically the handmade
creations of anonymous artisans possess-
ing “unconscious grace”. In the parlance of
the pandemic, mingeimight be called the
essential workers of the material world:
“Since these utilitarian objects have a com-monplace task to perform, they are
dressed, so to speak, in modest wear and
lead quiet lives,” Yanagi wrote. “They work
thoughtlessly and unselfishly, carrying out
effortlessly and inconspicuously whatever
duty comes their way.”
Yanagi sought to identify and celebrate
the functional beauty of these overlooked
items. He believed that defining beauty
purely in visual terms, to the exclusion of
practicality, was mistaken. “Our aesthetic
sense has been severely impaired owing to
the fact that beauty and life are treated as
separate realms of being,” he argued. Yet
this did not mean extolling any old (or new)
thing. For Yanagi, objects made with vulgar
colouring, shoddy materials and thought-
less forms were not simply eyesores, but
“amoral and unethical”. Like the Arts and
Crafts movement in Britain which it fol-
lowed, mingeiwas in part a response to
mechanisation, setting out to elevate older
methods over mass production.Eye of the holder
Born in Tokyo in 1889 to a family of Meiji-
era naval officers, Yanagi’s intellectual life
began in the Shirakaba (White Birch)
group, a collective of writers and thinkers
who explored Western art and literature in
their eponymous journal. Yanagi wrote on
topics ranging from Tolstoy to Rodin to
William Blake. He befriended the English
ceramicist Bernard Leach, who would first
render Yanagi’s thoughts into English in
“The Unknown Craftsman” (published inWays of seeing
Attention pays
TOKYO
Take comfort in mingei, an aesthetic which finds beauty in ordinary things
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