66 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 1st 2020
211972). A collection of his essays that was re-
cently released as “The Beauty of Everyday
Things” is the second widely available Eng-
lish-language volume of his work.
Like many of his peers, Yanagi’s inter-
ests drifted towards questions of cultural
identity. How should the East assert itself
in response to the West? What was Japan’s
relationship with the rest of the region?
What made Japanese culture distinctive?
An encounter with Korean ceramics in 1914
led to his interest in folk crafts. He spent
years collecting and promoting Korean
work, ultimately opening a small museum
in Seoul. His engagement with the crafts of
Japan’s colonies led him to speak out
against the Japanese empire’s assimila-
tionist and expansionist policies in both
Korea and Okinawa, another important
venue for his collecting. In “A Letter to My
Korean Friends”, written amid a crackdown
on Korean independence movements in
1919, Yanagi lamented that “Japan does not
yet fully possess a human heart.”
Yet for all his humanism and pacifism,
his views could also be interpreted more
darkly. In recent decades scholars have ad-
vanced a revisionist sense of mingeias a
kind of cultural nationalism, an “oriental
Orientalism” that became the aesthetic ac-
companiment to Japanese imperialism.
Japanese ultranationalists found much to
like in Yanagi’s promotion of the collective
over the individual, his search for beauty
among the masses, his championing of tra-
dition and his quest for an essential Japa-
neseness. As Kim Brandt argues in “King-
dom of Beauty”, her study of mingei,
“Government ideologues and propagan-
dists embraced the arts and crafts of an ide-
alised folk as a means of insisting on na-
tional, and also imperial, unity.” When,
during the second world war, the American
firebombing of Tokyo brought flames to
the Mingeikan’s walls, Yanagi and his wife
doused them with brooms and buckets of
water, their son Yanagi Sori later recalled.
Sori helped give mingei a second life
through his work as a pioneering industri-
al designer. His iconic pieces, such as his
graceful butterfly stool, fused a European
modernist training with his father’s mingei
spirit. Sori saw an overlap with the Bau-
haus movement in mingei’s emphasis on
function over form, and, in its belief in the
craftsman’s unconscious intimation of
beauty, with Surrealism.
After his father’s death, Sori took over as
the Mingeikan’s director, inspiring a gener-
ation of designers to seek models in mingei.
Today there are dozens of affiliated mingei
museums in Japan. Martha Longenecker,
an American potter, founded the Mingei
International Museum in San Diego in the
1970s. Sori’s successor as director of the
Mingeikan, the designer Fukasawa Naoto,
is himself evidence of mingei’s enduring
influence. Mr Fukasawa had a hand inMuji’s designs for suitcases, chairs, lamps,
kettles and much else, aiding the firm’s rise
to global prominence. Its goods, he says,
are examples of “modern-day mingei”. (The
name Muji means “no brand”.)
Mingeiinvolves approaching the world
with a heightened awareness of the objects
that fill everyday lives. Yanagi urges you to
ponder the coffee mug that fuels endless
Zoom meetings with the same intensity as
you contemplate a Cézanne (whose work
he once hung in the reception room of the
Mingeikan). “Today, when everything is
trending toward the frail and sickly, thebeauty we see in these common objects is
both a blessing and a joy,” he wrote with ee-
rie resonance. He asks people, in short, to
appreciate what is under their noses.
Take the humble face mask. Your corre-
spondent’s is sewn out of tan cloth and pat-
terned with fish. Its light-blue ear straps,
now frayed, suggest the ocean. A blue
mahi-mahi stretches its bulbous forehead
over the crease of the nose. A silver tiger-
perch edges towards the ear. The yellow
spines of a John Dory’s dorsal fin spread
across the cheek, evoking the beard of the
man in the bottom of the mingeibowl. 7A
s a youngmanintheBrezhnev-eraSo-
viet Union, Grigory Rodchenkov
dreamed of becoming a champion long-
distance runner. He wasn’t good enough.
Instead, after training as a chemist, he
made it to the top of another discipline:
doping. His engaging memoir tells the
story of how, as head of what was in theory
Russia’s national anti-doping laboratory,
he masterminded a huge, state-sponsored
cheating operation, culminating in the big-
gest fraud in sporting history: the jaw-
droppingly brazen sample-swapping she-
nanigans at the Winter Olympics of 2014 in
the Russian city of Sochi, for which the
host country was eventually fingered and
banned from international competitions.
His book covers a lot of ground at speed:
the history of drugs in sport; the half-heart-
ed efforts of global authorities to crack
down; the geopolitical rivalries driving
cheating; the pettiness and vindictiveness
of Russia bureaucracy; and the morality ofdoping. Despitehiswhistle-blowing,Mr
Rodchenkov himself remains ambivalent
about steroid use. Done judiciously, it can
be less harmful than overtraining, he says.
Doping is in Russia’s sporting blood. It
seemed quite normal to Mr Rodchenkov to
inject Retabolil, a Hungarian steroid, in his
early 20s, his mother administering it in
their cramped flat in Moscow. Elite athletes
took copious quantities. One coach boast-
ed of injecting more than 50 race-walkers a
day. In 1984, the author says, the Soviet Un-
ion had an abortive plan to send a ship with
a secret lab to the port of Los Angeles, to as-
sist with doping for the Olympics (which
the Soviets ultimately boycotted).
The “medals over morals” policy, as MrCheating in sportThrough the mousehole
The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought
Down Russia’s Secret Doping Empire.
By Grigory Rodchenkov. WH Allen;
320 pages; £20A doping supremo-turned-snitch reflects on his country and careerRodchenkov and the tools of the trade