Japan Art and Koichi Okumura: Mountains after the Demons of War (1940s)
Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Koichi Okumura (1904-1974) was a delightful 20th-century print designer and landscape artist. He was born in the late Meiji Period (1868-1912).
Okumura was only a child when he witnessed the ongoing modernization processes of the Meiji Period. However, even in the year he was born, the omens of Japan focusing on war were all too clear concerning the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
It is difficult to imagine that when Okumura was born, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, and others dominated vast parts of the world. At the same time, the growing powers of America and Germany were constantly challenging the old world order.
Slavery was also still a reality. Hence, you could still buy slaves in Iran until the 1920s. Similarly, in the land of Mecca (Saudi Arabia), slaves were still openly sold until the early 1960s and even later in Oman (1970). Accordingly, the world of empires during his early life – and Muslim nations openly involved in slavery (and others) – was a fact of life.
Accordingly, these three prints in the late 1940s by Okumura are a million miles from the Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre, the carpet bombings of Dresden to Tokyo, the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and other brutal massacres that killed tens of millions of people.
It is like nature is soothing the spirit of inhumanity after the brutality of the war period. Hence, Okumura produced these landscapes in the post-war period of the late 1940s. Therefore, irrespective of his reasons, the feeling of tranquility pervades.
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