Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (Jun 2020)

Ryuzo Mikimoto and the Ruskin ‘Relics’ Exhibitions of 1926, 1931 and 1933

  • Haruka Miki

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.7551
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 91

Abstract

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One of the foremost Japanese Ruskinians, Ryuzo Mikimoto (1893–1971), held a Ruskin exhibition in Tokyo from 6 to 8 February 1926. Attracting about 2,000 visitors, it was the first exhibition in Japan of the nineteenth-century British art critic and social reformer John Ruskin. The exhibits included the first editions of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, and Ruskin’s autograph manuscripts, drawings, photographs and letters Ryuzo collected in Britain in the 1920s, amounting to nearly 150 pieces in all. As the son of the ‘Pearl King’ Kokichi Mikimoto, Ryuzo was expected to succeed his father’s jewellery business, but instead devoted himself to the introduction of the life and works of the Victorian polymath. Later he organised Ruskin exhibitions again not only in Tokyo, but also in Kyoto and Kobe, where the Christian social movement provided significant momentum toward the labour and peace movements. As in the painting A Stray Child (1902) by Taikan Yokoyama, which shows a Japanese surrounded by Western and Eastern philosophers and redeemers, Japanese young intellectuals faced a spiritual crisis after a massive influx of Western thought and subsequent cultural and social changes to westernize Japan. Ryuzo, a Protestant Christian, stated that he had chosen Ruskin rather than Karl Marx, Buddha and Christ. In fact, he revered Ruskin as a kind of a saviour who could resolve the predicament of the modern industrialised country. Based on primary sources such as a 1926 exhibition catalogue, related newspaper articles, and The Journal of the Ruskin Society of Tokyo Ryuzo issued, this study reconstructs the exhibitions, reconsiders Ryuzo’s Ruskin in the context of the history of religious thought in modern Japan, and sheds light on his peace-oriented and non-elitist endeavours to disseminate Ruskin’s ideas on art and society in Japan.

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