This paper focuses on the unique interpretation of the concept of Kogei (=Craft), which was presented by YANAGI MUNEYOSHI (1889-1961), a Japanese aesthetician. In the 1920’s, he argued the clear distinction between “Picture” and “Pattern”, and that this distinction is based on the difference between Bijyutu (=Fine Art) and Kogei (=Craft). But, to begin with, can we distinguish clearly “Picture” and “Pattern”? To solve this problem, YANAGI thought that “Picture” can be subsumed into “Pattern” when the former has been reduced to the essential elements for the long time. According to him, “Pattern” is not only one constituent of Kogei, but also the universal aesthetic symbol which subsumes “Picture”. And moreover, all the things in the world can be transformed into abstract “Pattern” in principle. This subsumption of “Picture” into “Pattern”, according to YANAGI, implies the possibility of subsumption of Bijyutu into Kogei. For him, Kogei and “Pattern” are two sides of the same coin, and hence the former is not only useful products, but also the universal principle of Beauty. In the future, Bijyutu will be subsumed into Kogei, and the value of “Picture” will be judged as simple and abstract Kogei — this is YANAGI’s forecast.

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In 1951, Japanese painter and designer Genichiro Inokuma (1902-1993) completed the mural painting, Freedom, for Tokyo’s Ueno Station concourse. It depicts seven animals and twenty human figures, the latter of which are engaged in activities like apple picking, horse grazing, bathing, skiing, felling timber and hunting. Parallels can be drawn between these figures and the images in contemporaneous tourist publications of the Tohoku and Hokuriku regions, both of which were common destinations from Ueno Station. Yet, Inokuma’s mural does not depict local customs and artefacts in detail, despite the cultural fever for handcrafts produced in rural areas, especially in Tohoku region, among Japanese modernist artists throughout the mid-20th century. By paying special attention to the depiction of labours in the mural, this paper places the production of the work in the socio-cultural context of the period—i.e. post-war restoration of the railway system and the accompanying tourist industry in Japan—and argues that Inokuma produced the image of the countryside from the perspective of a modernisttourist who was able to appreciate the labour of the ‘Others’ as a form of spectacle.

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In his 1854 work On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), Eduard Hanslick aimed to establish a theory that focuses on musical beauty and relies exclusively on music itself. But what did “music itself ” mean for Hanslick? To develop this theory, he had to grapple with the challenge of defining the purely musical meaning and content of musical art from which nonmusical elements are removed. This paper focuses on Hanslick’s theory of composing “music itself” and examines his delineation of this pure music. Hanslick writes that pure music is composed by realizing the composer’s musikalische Idee. To show that pure music is indeed pure but not empty, he underscored the productivity and unity of pure music through the metaphor of the arabesque. He assumed that the musikalische Idee, as the core of pure music, is not a product of the composer’s Geist but rather a given concept. Consequently, pure music, as Hanslick conceived of it, has a dual structure. While it is an expression of the composer’s subjectivity, at the fundamental level it is also objectively generated.

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Recently, the reception studies of Western theories of harmony in various countries have become active, such as those of Hugo Riemann’s theory. However, the way Western theories of harmony have been received in Japan has rarely been studied. This study aims to reveal the characteristics and history of their reception in Japan, through 72 books on Waseigaku published in Japanese from the late Meiji-era to around 1964, from two perspectives: how to translate harmonic concepts and how to represent chord symbols. As a result, the books were divided into six types: (1) translation, (2) books based on the specific theory of harmony, (3) books that integrated concepts from multiple theories, (4) books including examples of Japanese and Eastern music, (5) books that reflected circumstances in Japan, and (6) books without referring to specific theories. Various chord symbols were coexisting from (i) figured bass using Arabic numbers, (ii) scale-degrees using Roman numerals, (iii) integrated symbols of both, to (iv) functional symbols TDS, (v) symbols specific to Riemann, and (vi) symbols unique to Japan, while the translated terms tended to become standardized. In this process of dividing the development of Waseigaku from the reception of theory, a qualitative difference between terms and symbols was observed.

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