Article from the Japan Times

This month’s Artifact of the Month is an article from The Japan Times on April 24, 1962, detailing the collaboration of Masayoshi Kasugai and Erna Mecklenburg (#2022.03.001). Kasugai was a pulp and fiber artist as well as a farmer in central Japan. Mecklenburg was a German art and book dealer based in Tokyo at the time. This article explains how they met and began to work together to show the world Kasugai’s art in a new discipline, Kozoyama Paper Composition, which is also known as Obara Washi Art. Mecklenburg happened to see Kasugai’s paper in an exhibition about washi and insisted on buying a piece despite it not being for sale. Two years later, they finally met, and Mecklenburg became Kasugai’s patron in their quest to obtain international recognition of his artwork. 

Masayoshi Kasugai was born in 1921 in Oharamura (also known as Obara) in central Japan. In the 1940s, he was trained by Tatsukichi Fujii, a retired papermaker who had settled in the Aichi prefecture, which is known for papermaking. Kasugai had to devote most of his time to farming, which is why his artistic flourishing and partnership with Mecklenburg did not occur until the 1960s. Like Fujii and his fellow protégées, Kasugai drew on the traditions of Japanese washi by using paper mulberry, kozo, as well as the techniques of the papermaking process. Kozoyama paper composition artists followed traditional practices in the preparation of kozo from cleaning to dying to mixing the pulp. The deviation from washi developed with the molding and manipulation of the pulp in a screen-bottomed vat and introducing inclusions like foil, fiber, and unmacerated kozo bark. Kasugai’s work in Obara Washi Art resulted in beautiful, abstract landscapes inspired by traditional Japanese paintings but with a modern twist, reflective of the 20th century.