Our American research project begins with the dramatic appearance in California of a distinctive style, influenced by Japanese Nihonga, by artists who had been trained in Japan. Nihonga refers to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic movement characterized by a return to Japanese-style painting, including ink on paper and silk. The majority of early Japanese artists in the United States worked in oil on canvas, reflecting training still predominant in Japan as well as in America. During this time, artists like Toshio Aoki and Chiura Obata, from different generations (Obata was born more than thirty years after Aoki) and representing different artistic approaches, became among
the most successful artists of their period working in a clearly non-Western style. Aoki signed most of his California-period paintings with an inscription in kanji that translates as “Great Japan.” But Japan’s political environment at that time was in fact categorized by a repressive agenda in which democratic political thought was not much tolerated.

Aoki, born in 1854 in Yokohama, relocated to California in 1880 when he was hired as a professional artist to create Japanese decorative objects for sale in a San Francisco department store. He brought with him a personal aesthetic of darkness and mystery that has been compared to the mood of his Japanese printmaking contemporary Tsukioka Yoshi- toshi.3 In one early painting dating roughly from the period of his relocation to the United States (and in the collection of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California (Fig. 1)), Aoki painted an unusually dark vision of Zhong Kui, the Chinese King of the Ghosts. In that painting, Zhong Kui is shown unconventionally reclining in an underground lair overrun with scores of grotesque demons crawling on and around him. The scroll is itself mounted on unusual batik fabric. This engaging image and uniquely mounted scroll-format presentation suggests why Aoki became something of a sensation in his day. While he occasionally experimented with conventional modeling and the subjects of period oil painting in California, Aoki was most widely recognized for his newspaper and book illustrations, his wall decorations (sometimes on painted leather) for the interiors of lavish homes in Pasadena, and his ink and watercolor paintings of figures from Chinese and Japanese mythology, all in a distinctive style related to what is sometimes called Japonisme. Although we are only at the beginning of understanding Aoki’s oeuvre (only a relatively small percentage of his work has been recovered/documented to date, after a century of art historical disinterest), his artistic success during his lifetime put him in contact with the wealthiest elite of American society, and he was therefore well represented in period press. He exhibited widely across America during his lifetime, including at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, where influential Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki and Indian Buddhist intellectual Anagarika Dharma- pala participated as speakers.