Over the Rainbow!

Surdadaism and its Heritage: Chapter A

MIYATAKE Gaikotsu: A History of Books Indicted(Hikka-shi), Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1929 (First Edition in 1911).

MIYATAKE Gaikotsu(1867-1955) was one of the oddest characters Japan had ever had. He was a journalist, a publisher of numerous books and magazines, a founder of a library for newspapers and magazines published in the Meiji period, a collector and so on. A man of anti-power, in short.

In this book, he described a lot of cases where the establishment censored and didn't allow to publish items concerned from medieval era to the Meiji period.
In the preface of the book, he wrote that this was "in literature, an explanatory notes on books suppressed; politically, a document of oppression of the government; from a view point of visual art, a chronology of pictures erased out".

Here, in the left page, he showed a copy of a woodcut by UTAGAWA Yoshitora, a pupil of famous painter Kuniyoshi. This print depicted four Samurais making rice cakes. The Tokugawa Shogunate indicted that this was an allegory with wrong interpretation about its founder, Ieyasu, the one at the innermost of the print. It was in 1837.

Gaikotsu's magazines were also censored and suppressed frequently. He was arrested many times. But he was so powerful that he made a blueprint for his next magazine when he was in prison.

From the collection of Morishita Akihiko

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