This paper has discussed an obvious example of what Japanese art educators have learned from Americans over more than a century. It has also provided a detailed explanation of what American art educators have learned from the Japanese. The cases of both Akira Shirahama and Arthur Dow are interesting because they illustrate the gap between what was learned from others and what was realized in modernist art education. Their cases are also typical of the push-and-pull between traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, liberalism and conservatism in the changing attitudes of art educator toward the modernism in their nations.
Dow's turning East exactly parallels Shirahama?s turning West. There is no doubt that both ways will make us richer and give us ?food for thought as we make a choice for the future? (Carson, 1981, p.46) in art education. On September 19, 1903, ?Dow departed San Francisco for Yokohama on the first leg of an around-the-world journey? and arrived in Yokohama, Japan on October 7 (Dow, 1903). Of his three months in Japan, ?six weeks were spent in Tokyo,? and ?the remaining time at the port of entry, Hakone, Nikko, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, and Nagasaki? (Moffatt, 1977, pp.100-101). In December of that year, he addressed the Japanese audience three times in Kyoto. Shirahama left Yokohama in late February, 1904, and arrived in Boston on April 6. During his stay in America from 1904 to 1905, Shirahama was able to hear Dow lecture at Teachers College of Columbia University, using a projector to show Italian works of art, and providing a comparison of the works with Japanese color prints in order to describe color in the Italian works (Shirahama, 1908).
Shirahama (1907) says, ?drawing models, studying nature and appreciating works of great masters make children understand what composition is by the building up of harmonious beauty through color, shape and space relation? (p.44). It is clear that Shirahama?s interest was not in the Japanese foundation of Dow?s notan (dark-and-light), but in Dow?s ?design methodology,? while notan (dark-and-light) was made so acceptable in the field of American art education. A report from 1929 showed that ? ?dark-light,? a term closely associated with Dow?s theory, was used 528 times in the 36 art books studied; ?notan? was used 157 times? (Stankiewicz, 1990, p.97). Indeed, the term ?value? smelled too much of the traditional scientific scheme in the Western world at that time.
Surely, a two-way street is needed between the American and Japanese art education to enable each of us to achieve cross-cultural understanding in art education. Davenport (2000) says, ?Just as artists can learn to draw more precisely by attending to the spaces between shapes, so too might art education benefit from attending to the spaces between cultures where interaction takes place? (p.372). Thus the two-way street between cultures in art and art education will be wide open. The extensive work of Shirahama and Dow in the early decades of the century is one bridge for the two-way street of cultures through which cross-cultural researchers in art education on each side have to pass. It also becomes the gate to an alternate path for inquiry into art education for multicultural researchers.
The story of modern art education in both America or Japan begins with Shirahama and Dow and continues into the present, but it is more than ever the two-way street suggested by Beittel (1983): ?I know, as Cox . . . pointed out in Turning East, that things Oriental pass through a prism that all but transforms them into their opposite. An irony abounds here. It is as though I have gone a Japanese way, but without the hierarchy; and Japan has gone the American way, but without the free spirit? (p.13). The ambivalent perception of the American and Japanese relationship illustrates the clash between two cultural values in art and art education.
A good example for such a clash might be Christo?s earthwork. The Umbrellas Project of Christo opened for display on October 9, 1991, in two places. Seventy-five miles north of Tokyo, in Ibaragi, Japan, 1,340 huge blue umbrellas were unveiled in a 12 mile range. Simultaneously, 1,760 huge yellow umbrellas were set up in an 18 mile range, north of Los Angeles. The project was exhibited for 18 days and about 540 thousands people enjoyed it in Japan alone (?Kurisuto Ten? [The Exhibition of Christo], 1991).
Experiencing the project helped us see a figure-ground relationship of ambivalence in three ways. First, it made viewers of both countries aware of natural and human-made environments. They were caught by huge umbrellas while they suddenly found the earth itself. Second, it provided the dynamic tension of modernist art and post-modernist art. Viewers could enjoy it as a non-artistic event while they could change their conventional ideas of modern art in order to recognize it as art. Last, it reflected on the seemingly incompatible foreign cultural value of art. Japanese viewers welcomed it while they were reminded of their culture of art in contrast to it. In these ways, the project forced viewers to re-define what is environment, art, and cultural value, by providing Rubin?s famous ?double representation? figure of the philosopher?s cup as the relationship between positive and negative spaces (Okazaki, 1995).
The transformation of seemingly incompatible foreign cultures into art and art education is a gradual process. Yet, to have continually taken and transformed diverse influences is a unique achievement. Without diverse influences, no country has its inherent cultural values as pearls in an oyster. Diverse influences from abroad provide a prime field of cross-cultural and multicultural research in art and art education.