UC Berkeley

This dissertation employs a landscape-focused approach to examine practical craft objects, fine art, and architecture coated with Jōbōji lacquer that date from the late nineteenth century to the early 2000s. I address lacquered objects made from “Jōbōji lacquer” tree sap tapped from East Asian lacquer tree (Toxicodendron vernicifluum) forests in a remote, mountainous area of northern Japan that I refer to as the “Jōbōji lacquer landscape,” centered in the town of Jōbōji. I examine the dynamic expansions and contractions of Jōbōji lacquer as it is planted, harvested, purified, and rematerialized as craft objects and architectural complexes that serve as visual and material indicators of the modern Japanese nation-state. This landscape approach discloses site-specific responses to a shifting world of craft production; it reveals an ongoing struggle for survival—social, cultural, and biomaterial—of lacquer craft and the specific forest, community, and artisanal practices of Jōbōji. This struggle arose in the face of industrial modernity and its challenge to the value of the “handmade” and “traditional” crafts, mass-production of plastic wares that lowered demand for lacquerware, and the nation-state’s campaign to establish a national art canon and history, as well as a national aesthetics. I show how Meiji period (1868-1912) Jōbōji lacquer artisans conjoined the techniques and designs of Jōbōji lacquer with a nationalized lacquer tradition known as maki-e (“sprinkled picture”) in response to the technique’s promulgation by the Artists for the Imperial Household System, the Tokyo School of the Arts, and International Expositions in the 1880s and 1890s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jōbōji lacquerware appears in magazines, periodicals, and exhibitions formulated by advocates of the Folk Crafts Movement (Mingei Undō), demonstrating how the aesthetic qualities of Jōbōji lacquer—simple designs, practicality, and the lively technique of urushi-e (“lacquer pictures”)—embodied the mingei theorist and collector Yanagi Muneyoshi’s (1889-1961) ideals of the “People’s Art.” In the postwar period, artists such as Koseki Rokuhei (1918-2011) utilized Jōbōji lacquer to execute the traditional maki-e lacquer technique, creating abstract sculptural forms that reveal the possibilities of lacquer material as a medium capable of abstract visual expression in the realm of contemporary “craft art” (kōgei bijutsu). Finally, the use of Jōbōji lacquer in the restoration of the exterior of the Yōmeimon (“Gate of Illuminating Sun”) at the Nikkō Tōshōgū shrine-temple complex—designated as a National Treasure and UNESCO World Heritage Site—points to the growing sense of national pride associated with the tapping of “authentic” Japanese lacquer, and demonstrates how the efforts lacquer sap collectors are now oriented toward national and global cultural heritage preservation and restoration.