East Meets West: The Institute of Oriental Ceramics (Tōyō tōji kenkyūjo) and the Oriental Ceramic Society

• In Event: 286. Collecting and Imagining "Asia": Collectors, Museums, and Scholarship

Abstract

The Institute of Oriental Ceramics (Tōyō tōji kenkyūjo), founded in 1924 by collectors, scholars, and museum professionals, contributed to the development of ceramic scholarship in modern Japan. Modeled on the Oriental Ceramic Society in London (OCS, established in 1921), the institution aspired to be an international research organization from the outset. It began to fulfill this role with the publication of the journal, Tōji (Oriental Ceramics, 1927–1943), aimed for a wider audience in and outside Japan. My paper examines the Japanese and British discourses on Asian ceramics in the 1920s when the seemingly divergent but mutually shared views on Asian ceramics converged through major contact of the members of the Institute of Oriental Ceramics and the OCS. The institution’s formation of Asian (tōyō) ceramics was not simply a translation word for the West’s “Oriental ceramics,” but emblematic of Japan’s new world outlook in relation to the West (rather than China) and imperialism as the leader of Asia. The institution’s main rhetoric of presenting and interpreting Asian ceramics partially advocated the OCS’s orientalist idea that as Edward Said discussed, “Asia cannot represent itself but must be represented” by the ruled. However, it stressed Japan’s unique, historically conditioned role to legitimate its position in rivalry with the West’s advancement of Asian ceramic studies. By elucidating the discrepancy in the Western perception and Japan’s view of Asian ceramics, this paper sheds new light on the ambivalent concept of tōyō ceramics, intended to resist the Western-centric value system but contingent upon its approval.

Author

• Seung Yeon Sang, Harvard Art Museums