The curse of early Western-style Japanese painters is the charge of derivativeness. Simply because they embraced foreign artistic idioms rather than their own indigenous artistic traditions, it is easy to dismiss them as mere copyists, "regurgitating" whatever it was they saw in the latest imported art photo books or magazines.
Harue Koga (1895-1933), whose art is now being celebrated with a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, is particularly susceptible to this accusation because his career shows sharp changes in artistic style that can be correlated to the changing fashions of Western art.
First wetting his brush with a lyrical watercolor style, he later switched to an oil style heavily influenced by cubism and primitivism. A few years after this, his works owe a clear debt to Paul Klee, and then toward the end of his short career there are textbook examples of Surrealism.