Animistic Cosmology in Japanese Decorative Art, Color Edition: Compositional Principle of Elemental Symbolism

This study puts forward the general survey of Japanese decorative art, almost for the first time, as a compact text from its origin in prehistory to the postwar contemporary art. Not to get astray in so vast a range of artistic prolificity, the analytical angle is set quite distinctly and consequently in people’s subculture in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “non-official culture” on the one hand, and in genesis and revival of pan-animism in Japanese subsoil on the other. Following the historical development of Japanese decorative art, the reader can acquire also the general notion of Japanese pan-animism as well as the introductory orientation in people’s subculture, including Ukiyoe, comics and animation. The rather unusual combination of genealogical perspective, articulated in decorativism, subculture and pan-animism, throws a fresh, illuminating light on the terra incognita of the deep strata of Japanese psyche, whose peculiarity as well as generality is demonstrated convincingly and coherently as the structural interactivity between decorative arts and animistic undercurrent of folk culture. Simultaneously with the genealogical survey of Japanese art history, the necessary revision of pan-animism is attempted here in terms of its style formation. The author propounds a new paradigm of pan-animism defined as “holistic vitalism”. It is contrasted to the conventional notion of animism in ethnology and anthropology based upon “atomistic reductionism”. This essential paradigm shift is, as the author himself acknowledges, still in the phase of theoretical hypothesis, but one must admit that this new standpoint functions quite stimulating and fresh-avantgardistic as the methodical axis of analysis and description. The work is appropriate to the introduction into Japanese decorativism as well as to the deepening and re-thinking of the animistic culture in general; it offers furthermore the opportunity of general revision concerning our civilizational historicity with its innate limitations and deadlocks. From this angle of actuality, the book can be read as a structural self-criticism of our anti-animistic civilizational atomization.