抄録
In 1907 the Ministry of Education established an annual salon called Ministry of Education Art Exhibition or Bunten. The establishment heralded the final stage of modernization of art institutions by the Meiji government. Bunten gathered a tremendous number of visitors. In 1909, The Yorozu Choho, a popular newspaper of the time, ran a new correspondence column on the sense of beauty: “the moment when I felt the beauty”. Between January and June, 26 letters appeared in the column which would be divided into four categories: visual beauty, acoustic beauty, a compounded beauty of both the visual and the acoustic, and an ethical beauty. But there were no letters which directly referred to art works. In the late Meiji period, people were seriously interested in the occult and in pseudo-sciencesuch as hypnotism and clairvoyance. The Yorozu Choho serial was in the same vein: an exploration of a mental and psychological field.
