In his popular anecdotal encyclopedia of Japan, "Things Japanese," the 19th-century British Japanologist, Basil Hall Chamberlain, included the comment that "the nude is seen in Japan but not looked at." This reflected a reality in 1890, when the book was published: Nudity was not a big deal, at least it wasn't until Western notions took a firmer grip. The latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MoMAT) looks at attitudes to nudity in Japan through artworks from 1880 to 1945.
It starts with some early works that show the state of innocence with which such nudity was viewed in a society where public bathing was part of everyday life for a great many people. These include a pair of watercolors by Tama Eleonora Ragusa, the Japanese wife of the Italian sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa, and a print from "La vie Japonaise" (1898) by the French cartoonist Georges Bigot, who treats the laid-back attitudes toward mixed bathing with a satirical wink.
In order to win the respect of the Western nations, the Japanese felt obliged to not only adopt Western technology but also some of their social and cultural mores. With the spread of Western art in Japanese society, this included a rather complex and conflicted attitude to nudes, which had odd "escape clauses" that allowed full-frontal nudity if it served some mythic or allegorical purpose.