Avant-Garde in the South Seas: Akamatsu Toshiko's Micronesia Sketches

Charlotte Eubanks (2015). "Avant-Garde in the South Seas: Akamatsu Toshiko's Micronesia Sketches". 1 (2): 1. doi:10.5749/vergstudglobasia.1.2.0001. ISSN 2373-5058. CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

Abstract: Convergence 1 Portfolio Curated by Charlotte Eubanks Avant-Garde in the South Seas: Akamatsu Toshiko's Micronesia Sketches In fall 1939, the young artist Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2000) could not have been happier. Though surviving more or less hand-to-mouth by selling caricatures of pleasure seekers at Tokyo's Ueno Park, she was living the life of a free artist, having successfully escaped the stifling role of priest's daughter in the small-town frontier of desolate northern Japan for formal training in the Western arts of oil painting and dessin (understood in Japan as a style of quick sketching from life). And she was in love. In October 1939, Akamatsu went to the movies with her lover avantgarde painter Yamamoto Naotake (1907–?) to see the documentary film Yap. She recalls, "Lustrous men and women in straw skirts dancing. Coconut palms in fruit, banana leaves rustling in the breeze. Before we knew it, we both sighed, 'Ah! I'd love to go!'" (Maruki 2013, 84). Two months later, when Yamamoto jilted her for another woman, that is exactly what Akamatsu did. She sold her art, packed her bags, and bought a one-way steerage-class ticket on a boat departing Yokohama on January 19, 1940, bound for the island of Palau, which was the diplomatic and military hub of Japan's imperial infrastructure in the southern Pacific, headed by the South Seas Bureau (Nan'yōchō) in Koror. While traveling south, she began keeping a sketchbook, opening with a detailed study of the deck (Figure 1). Versed in popular maritime literature, both from domestic production and via translations of works by Herman Melville and others, Akamatsu is attentive to the tools of maritime life, while also indulging in romantic fantasy. "Like Gauguin who died in Tahiti," she writes, "I wanted to continue doing my art in the South Seas, I wanted to die…

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