Japan Art and Hagiwara Hideo: Post-War 1940s and Travails of Life
Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Hagiwara Hideo (1913-2007) was born during the early Taisho Period (1912-1926). Accordingly, he witnessed the internal political convulsion of the 1930s when a young adult – nationalist and socialist movements. This period ultimately ushered in militarism and war on a scale unimaginable.
All three art pieces were completed in the late 1940s during the post-war period. Hence, it is difficult to envisage the years of death and destruction of the early 1940s – and now a period of enormous poverty for many people in Japan when viewing these stunning art pieces.
The British Museum says, “He was conscripted in 1943 into the army, where his health was so badly affected that he was bedridden for three years from 1945. He had lost his house, atelier and most of his early works in the May 1945 Tokyo air raids, but while sick took up the study of creative woodblock printing.”
It is easy to imagine that Hagiwara Hideo was born in Yamanashi Prefecture. This concerns the stunning and expansive angle of nature in his art.
His father was a police officer who served the interests of Japan in Korea and Manchuria. Accordingly, Hagiwara Hideo was educated outside Japan until he returned home in 1929 to further his studies in Tokyo.
Overall, his stunning art in the late 1940s is like a disconnection with the past years of devastation and uncertainty – and now a feeling of hope pervades where nature blots out the travails of life.
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