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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Yanagi Sōetsu critically engaged with John Ruskin’s aesthetics in forming his theory of mingei (art of the people). It analyzes the philosophical tension between Ruskin and Yanagi and reassesses the historical relationship between the Arts and Crafts and mingei movements.

Paper long abstract

This paper reconsiders Yanagi Sōetsu’s (1889–1961) engagement with John Ruskin and William Morris in the formation of his theory of mingei (art of the people). Previous studies have largely discussed the relationship between mingei and the British Arts and Crafts movement through comparisons between Yanagi and Morris, while debates over influence have tended to polarise between claims of strong and limited influence. To move beyond this binary, the paper examines Yanagi’s marginal annotations in Nobuyuki Ōkuma’s Ruskin and Morris as Social Thinkers (1927), a book that Yanagi himself acknowledged as having deepened his understanding of both thinkers.

The annotations reveal that Yanagi responded to Ruskin with both sympathy and criticism. He strongly endorsed Ruskin’s affirmation of imperfection in Gothic craftsmanship, finding in it an understanding of beauty close to his own. At the same time, he rejected Ruskin’s demand for intellectual and artistic self-consciousness from craftsmen, regarding this as a confusion of art and craft. A comparison with Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Morris’s “The Lesser Arts” further shows that both British thinkers valued the conscious exercise of intelligence in labour.

By contrast, Yanagi located the source of craft beauty in mushin (no-mindedness), calling the resulting beauty tariki-bi (beauty of other-power): beauty emerges when anonymous craftsmen work selflessly and are sustained by a force beyond the individual ego, namely Nature (shizen). The paper argues that Ruskin served not simply as an influence but as a crucial interlocutor through whom Yanagi clarified the distinctive philosophical foundations of mingei.