After Japan's defeat in World II, its art world fell into the same flux as the rest of the society, as the rules and values that had governed it for decades suddenly vanished. Styles and movements once censored and banned, from Soviet-style socialist realism to surrealism, were now permitted and even encouraged by the U.S.-led Occupation. Traditionalists had a home in the Japan Fine Arts Exhibition (aka Nitten), which had been held under various names since 1907, with government sponsorship, but artists influenced by fresh (and not so fresh) currents from the West needed a new venue. In 1949 Hideo Kaido, a former surrealist painter turned newspaperman for the Yomiuri Shimbun, supplied it with the Yomiuri Independent, an annual exhibition open to all artists, in contrast to the strictly curated Nitten.
In the decade and a half until its final edition in 1963, this event became a refuge for avant-garde artists of the extremer sort that the Nitten panjandrums disdained, but whose innovations and provocation in everything from gallery installations to performance art paved the way for the modernism of the succeeding decades.