Nationalism — especially in the Japanese context — routinely gets a bad press.

Just the word seems to call forth visions of braying sound trucks, surly permed fellows in jump suits, and seedy revisionist historians with axes to grind or ungrind. But nationalism can be a force for good, according to Tohru Matsumoto, one of the curators of the exhibition "Modern Age in Japanese Sculpture: From its Beginnings through the 1960s" at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo till Dec. 24.

"The notion of sculpture as art (and separate from religion) in the Western sense started with the notion of nationhood," Matsumoto explains. "Not only in Japan, but in most countries, sculpture was connected to nationalism. In Japan, there was only the National Museum in Tokyo, then in Kyoto and Nara. There weren't any private or prefectural museums in that period."