March is Women’s History Month, and while celebrating the achievements of women isn’t something we plan on limiting to one month a year, we are slightly obsessed with Japan, so, we’ll take this opportunity to explore the cultural contributions of a few trailblazing female Japanese artists.
Each of these remarkable women has pushed the boundaries of their time, shaping the history of their homeland, and in some cases the entire world, through their boundless creativity and talent. From the realms of literature and cinema, to avant-garde art, the work of these pioneers resonates through time.
MURASAKI SHIKIBU (973 - 1014)
First up is Murasaki Shikibu, author of the world’s first novel. Hang on a second, we hear you cry, surely the first novel was Beowulf? Nope, that’s a poem. Granted an epic one, but a poem nonetheless. What about Don Quixote? Definitely a novel, but written in the early 1600s, Cervantes is giving up around six hundred years to Ms Shikibu, who crafted The Tale of Genji at the turn of the 11th century.
An intricate saga of romance and mystery, Genji Monogatari, as it’s called in Japanese, is far more than a simple chronicle of events. It’s part soap opera, part existential exploration into the minds of its 400 or so characters. Murasaki’s masterpiece is a powerful statement about the search for happiness in love and ultimately what it means to be human.
Tosa Mitsuoki (1617 - 1691), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A literary child prodigy, Murasaki was raised by her father when her mother died just after she was born. This in itself was an unusual upbringing for Japan at the time. Even more unusual was Murasaki’s appetite for learning. She quickly picked up literary Chinese, the language of the court, studied almost exclusively by men. “If only you were a boy, how happy and proud I should be,” she quotes her father as saying in her diaries.
Eschewing the typical path of marriage at a young age, Murasaki became a lady-in-waiting, teaching Chinese and writing to the Empress. It was during this period that she became privy to the romantic and political intrigue of life in imperial capital, Kyoto, where every appearance in public was like walking the Met Gala red carpet with society’s upper echelons treading a fine line between public favour and exclusion. Cancel culture was a thing even back then.
The plot of Murasaki’s novel centres on Prince Genji, the son of a fictional emperor and something of an imperial court Casanova, sleeping his way around the capital in search of true love and happiness. What sets Murasaki’s work apart is her skilful illumination of his quest through the minds of the multifaceted female characters he encounters, each of whom provides a rare glimpse into the realities of being a woman in this world.
Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Genji was an instant success. Long before demand for Charles Dickens’ serialised stories reached fever pitch, Japanese readers were clamouring for the next instalment of Murasaki’s 54-part epic. As time passed, her legend grew and Genji became a National Treasure, inspiring artists, artisans, poets and playwrights to celebrate Murasaki’s work. By the 17th century, Confucian scholars even decided the novel constituted a guide to living life well. Not only the first novel then, but perhaps the first self-help book?
Yashima Gakutei (1786 – 1868), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The dawn of the 20th century saw the rest of the world catching up with a work that Japan had already loved for nine hundred years. New technologies brought the story into the modern era, with cinema and television adaptations of Prince Genji’s adventures. Since 1991, female Japanese writers have competed for the prestigious Murasaki Shikibu Prize for Literature, while the 1,000th anniversary of “Genji” was celebrated in 2008 with cultural events across the country. Murasaki is such a cultural symbol in Japan that her face now adorns the 2,000 yen note, along with a scene from The Tale of Genji. There is even a crater named Genji on asteroid 433 Eros, the second-largest object closest to Earth, where it not only sits alongside other famous literary lovers like Cathy and Heathcliff, but also Genji’s childhood crush, Lady Fujitsubo. Truly out of this world.
NAGI NODA (1973 - 2008)
Fast-forward a thousand years, to an artist whose star also shone brightly but sadly all too briefly. Nagi Noda was a creative genius. Working as a freelance art director, fashion designer, filmmaker, and pop artist, she was renowned for her bizarre and imaginative techniques such as the music video for “Sentimental Journey” by Yuki, Japan’s answer to Bjork, in which Nagi used 90 Yuki-lookalikes to create a real-life stop motion effect.
So enamoured were the hotshots at UK creative agency, Mother, they brought Nagi in to recreate the technique for a Coca-Cola commercial featuring a soundtrack by rock superstar Jake White.
Nagi’s boldly non-conformist approach made her one of the most talked about creatives of her generation and led to further work with Nike, Harajuku street style mecca LaForet, French retailer Monoprix, Korean electronics firm LG, and a collaboration between kawaii icon Hello Kitty and makeup brand MAC.
A true multidisciplinary artist, Nagi gained further notoriety for her parody short film, “Poodle Fitness”, created for Panasonic during the 2004 Athens Olympics. Nagi explained the idea came to her when she noticed that a typical poodle haircut looked like human muscles.
Alongside her commercials work, Nagi was also an artist, producing a series of life-size, half panda, half other animal artworks, called Hanpanda. Exhibited in art galleries, Hanpanda also appear in the band Halcali’s “Baby Blue” music video, and provided the set dressing for British broadcaster Jonathan Ross’s series “Japanorama”. In an interview with Ross, Nagi revealed the inspiration behind her creation was the split personality of her ex-husband, who she explains could be both scary and cute.
Nagi then added fashion designer to her polymath CV, collaborating with American pop surrealist Mark Ryden on a line called “Broken Label”, which was sold at Colette, the “world’s trendiest store” in Paris. Nagi was said to have been wearing her Mark Ryden dress and a pair of Chanel boots when she tragically passed away in 2008 following complications from a car accident.
UEMURA SHŌEN (1875-1949)
Even in the early 2000s, Nagi Noda stood out in Japan’s male-dominated creative world. Imagine then, what it was like for our next trailblazer: Uemura Shōen. Uemura was born shortly after the end of the Edo Period, a time when for over two hundred years Japan had been closed to the rest of the world. Back then, it wasn’t considered a bad thing for a woman to paint, in fact, brushes and paint supplies were given as wedding gifts. It was, however, an activity to be enjoyed as a hobby and nothing more. Uemura Shōen had other ideas.
Shoen Uemura, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Raised by an ambitious single mother, Uemura was one of the first women allowed to attend art school. Inspired by ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, she developed a talent for figurative depictions of beautiful women, known as bijin-ga, adding her own twist to this traditional form. Instead of the glamorous courtesans typically the subject of this style, Uemura painted ordinary women going about their daily domestic business.
Shoen Uemura, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Uemura Shōen (1875-1949), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Another favourite subject was Japanese Noh theatre. But here, once again, she flipped tradition on its head, replacing the typically all-male cast with depictions of women.
Uemura was only 15 when she shot to stardom after her work was bought by the son of Britain’s Queen Victoria who was visiting Japan at the time. Before long she was selected to show at the Chicago World Exposition in 1893; then the accolades really began to flood in and she won her first national award from the Japan Fine Arts Academy in 1900.
Uemura Shōen (1875-1949), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Uemura was an unconventional soul who became a household name in Japan. She never married but gave birth to a son out of wedlock and raised him as a single mother. And she continued to paint. In 1941, she became the first woman member of the Imperial Art Academy, and only the second to be named the Imperial Household’s official artist.
English: Ihei Kimura日本語： 木村伊兵衛, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A fervent nationalist, towards the end of her life Uemura joined the war effort, creating images of strong women going about their daily chores, and even travelling to China to help rally the troops. The year before her death in 1949, there was a final first when she became the only woman to win Japan’s prestigious Order of Culture, one of only three awards bestowed by the Emperor.
Throughout her life, Uemura was a true trailblazer, fighting courageously to open doors, and relentlessly advocating for women’s rights, not only for herself, but for the next generation of aspiring female Japanese artists.
ATSUKO TANAKA (1932-2005)
This next generation included Atsuko Tanaka, who became one of the most iconic figures in Japan’s post-war avant-garde. Between 1955 and 1965, she was a central figure of the Gutai art movement, a group known for experimental art forms combining painting with performance and site-specific installations.
It’s worth remembering that in the 1950s, Japan was still emerging from the devastation of World War 2 defeat, and the post-war American Occupation. A woman’s role was to provide a stable family life while her husband went out to work rebuilding the nation. Radical, experimental art wasn’t exactly everyone’s cup of green tea.
Japanese magazine "Photograph Gazette, 1 July 1959 issue" published by Government of Japan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Tanaka’s work with the Gutai group challenged the notion of what art should be. In her 1955 work, “Yellow Cloth”, she attached three pieces of fabric to a gallery wall and called it a painting. Later that year, “Bell” featured twenty electric bells and a sign saying “Please feel free to push the button”, breaking the taboo of touching artworks in a gallery and making loud noises.
The following year she created her best known work, “Electric Dress”, a futuristic, kimono-style dress made out of hundreds of coloured light bulbs, inspired by the dazzling neon signs Tanaka saw emerging in Osaka.
She was known to wear the dress to parties and exhibitions, her body confined and emanating heat and light symbolising the technological progress that threatened human flesh. Her artistic statement was also a comment on how fashion confines the female body.
After the Gutai group disbanded, Electric Dress influenced Tanaka’s work as a painter. Her large scale, highly expressive, technicolour paintings use vibrant colour schemes and glossy vinyl paints to create hypnotic compositions of intersecting circles, dots, and lines.
Tanaka’s work can be found in a number of internationally important public collections, including MoMA in New York. Her legacy lives on today in how we perceive what art is, in installation art, digital media, and the fusion of art and technology so prevalent now in participatory immersive experiences.
YAYOI KUSAMA (1929-)
The next artist on our list probably needs no introduction. Over the past five years, five million people have visited her “Infinity Mirror Rooms” exhibition. Her famous polka dots adorn Louis Vuitton bags and the giant statues of her on the streets of Paris have become a viral sensation.
DanielaPDD, via Wikimedia Commons
She is also one of the auction world’s most expensive living female artists. But for 40 years, the now 89-year-old Yayoi Kusama was virtually shunned by the art establishment.
Unlike Uemura Shōen, Kusama’s mother went to great lengths to try and stop her from painting. And although, like Atsuko Tanaka, Kusama also grew up during World War 2, she quickly grew disillusioned with the stifling nature of Japanese society. In the late 1950s, she moved to New York and became friends with a little known advertising illustrator named Andy Warhol.
During the 1960s, influenced by her childhood hatred of conflict, Kusama organised a series of infamous naked happenings to protest the war in Vietnam. These brought her notoriety and critical acclaim. However, the 1970s backlash against ‘60s excess saw her drift into obscurity, a fate that did not befall her male contemporaries who Kusama has long claimed took her ideas and passed them off as their own.
Struggling with her mental health, Kusama retreated to Japan and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital where she has lived for the past 41 years. Every day she works at her studio across the road, using art as a means of self-help. In fact, her signature polka dots stem from hallucinations that have plagued her since childhood. While she rarely gives interviews, like Nagi Noda, Kusama spoke with Jonathan Ross in another episode of “Japanorama”, and explained the origins of this passion.
Kusama has also had a lifelong fascination with pumpkins. A massive part of her diet growing up during World War 2, the vegetables are considered “spiritually balanced” and have become one of Kusama’s most recognizable visual motifs, explored throughout her career in paintings, sculptures, installations, and poetry.
Ncysea, via Wikimedia Commons
Kusama’s rich autobiographical tapestry of intense self-reflection has finally found the huge audience it deserves. After spending almost her whole life in obscurity, she is now arguably the world’s most famous living artist, her universal appeal opening up creativity to a generation typically disengaged with the art world. For that, we are forever grateful.
MARIKO MORI (1967-)
Kusama and Tanaka both paved the way for a new generation of multi-disciplined artists, like Mariko Mori. Mori’s mesmerising work explores the digital intersections between East and West, art and science, antiquity and modernity, culture and discipline, symbolism and ritual, men and women, technology and religion.
Her eclectic works include digital art, video, photography, works on paper, sound, sculpture, and large-scale installations. During her early years as a photographer and model, Mori created a series of images with herself as the subject. These self-portrait photos, in which Mori styles herself as manga-inspired half-woman, half-machine characters, explore Japan’s urban cyberculture and the issues facing women in modern Japan. One of her most iconic images is Red Light (1994), with Mori dressed as a cyborg call-girl in the heart of Shinjuku.
In Play with Me (1994), Mori is a video game avatar brought to life on the bustling neon streets of Shinjuku. Her Tea Ceremony (1995) series is a personal protest and social commentary against the long-standing gender inequality issues in Japan. While in Birth of a Star (1996), Mori explores the concept of the virtual pop star with her own fantasy character, a physical reflection of Japan’s oversaturated obsession with technology.
In her wildly innovative and transformative WAVE UFO (2003) project, Mori’s spaceship-inspired architectural structure pushed the boundaries of interactive art to new levels of ingenuity. Blending installation, art, science, music, video, architecture, and performance into one remarkable zone of immersive user-generated self expression, the work used special headsets to transform participants' brainwaves into real-time visualisations, which were projected onto screens within the space.
MEIKO KAJI (1947-)
From meditative introspection to action movies now and whilst the name Meiko Kaji may not mean much to your average Western movie goer, it certainly did to Quentin Tarantino.
Take a look at the image below:
If you immediately think of Kill Bill, that’s because QT loves paying homage to those who have blazed a trail before him. But that’s not Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii, it’s Meiko Kaji’s Lady Snowblood. Meiko dominated early 1970s Japanese cinema with her electrifying performances in a string of stylized revenge dramas. Comparisons with Kill Bill are no coincidence. Tarantino cites Kaji’s performances in both Lady Snowblood (1973) and Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion (1972) as major influences on his own revenge epic.
And the references go beyond O-Ren Ishii’s costume and Uma Thurman’s character, The Bride. As the climactic fight between Liu and Thurman nears its conclusion, the theme song from Lady Snowblood begins to play. And the voice singing that haunting melody? Why, that’s none other than Meiko Kaji herself who, as well as being an accomplished actress, was also a famous singer, whose first recording was the hit “Urami Bushi” (Grudge Blues).
Kaji has appeared in over 100 film and television roles since the 1960s. Other classics worth seeking out include: Blind Woman’s Curse (1970), Wandering Ginza Butterfly (1972), Jailhouse 41 (1972), Beast Stable (1973), and the film series Stray Cat Rock (1970-71).
With her steely gaze and unmatched blend of beauty, strength and vulnerability, Kaji carved her own niche playing enigmatic, vengeful heroines, fearless femme fatales, silent and deadly outsiders, defiant outlaws, and ice cold assassins seeking justice and revenge. The importance of Kaji and her filmography cannot be understated. There simply weren't any other actresses like her at the time in Japan. She was a true silver screen icon; a one of a kind talent who paved the way for female empowerment in Japanese cinema.
So, there you have it - a few names you may already have known and hopefully a few you didn’t. Of course our list is far from exhaustive, but we hope it’s whetted your appetite for exploring other important Japanese female artists. Women like Ichiyo Higuchi - the first woman writer of the modern era, Hanae Mori - Japan’s first haute couture fashion designer, Momoko Sakura - creator of the Chibi Maruko-chan manga, architect Kazuyo Sejima, photographer Hiromix, ceramicist Fukumoto Fuku, composer Mieko Shiomi who played a key role in the international Fluxus experimental art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and of course, Yoko Ono, a trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory art, film and performance whose groundbreaking work can be seen in Music of the Mind at Tate Modern in London until 1 September 2024.
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