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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 examines how Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) critically engaged with the aesthetic thought of John Ruskin in the formation of his theory of mingei (art of the people), and clarifies the theoretical distance between the Japanese mingei movement and the British Arts and Crafts movement. While these two movements are often understood as parallel reactions against modern industrialization that revalued the beauty of handicraft, Yanagi himself repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with Ruskin and William Morris. This tension has not been fully examined in previous studies.

The paper first reassesses the commonly noted affinities between Morris’s idea of “common things” and Yanagi’s early concept of getemono, later theorized as mingei. Although both thinkers valued ordinary utilitarian objects, Yanagi gradually distanced himself from Morris’s moral and intellectual approach to labor. The paper then turns to Yanagi’s explicit critique of Ruskin, focusing on Ruskin’s tendency to conflate art and craft by demanding that artisans become conscious artists. Drawing on Yanagi’s marginal annotations in Nobuyuki Ōkuma’s Ruskin and Morris as Social Thinkers, this study shows that Yanagi regarded Ruskin’s emphasis on artistic self-consciousness and intellectual cultivation as incompatible with the historical reality of medieval craft production, which Yanagi understood as fundamentally non-reflective and unconscious.

The core argument centers on Yanagi’s reconfiguration of craft aesthetics through the Buddhist concept of tariki-bi (beauty of other-power). By incorporating ideas from religious philosophy—particularly analogies with Pure Land Buddhism and Nishida Kitarō’s notion of “pure experience”—Yanagi theorized that the beauty of mingei emerges not from intentional design or individual artistic will, but from selfless labor in which artisans, freed from ego, become united with nature as a transcendent force. This position contrasts sharply with Ruskin’s and Morris’s valorization of conscious intellectual engagement in labor, a stance closely related to Ruskin’s later notion of a “religion of humanity.”

By elucidating these differences, this paper repositions the mingei movement within the international history of the Arts and Crafts movement, not as a Japanese counterpart, but as a distinct theoretical response that redefined craft aesthetics through an original synthesis of art, religion, and labor.