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Popular Protest in Postwar Japan: The Antiwar Art of Shikoku Gorō Overview This exhibit explores the vibrant grassroots artistic culture of Hiroshima, known as the atomic bombed city. From 1949 through the 1990s, local artist Shikoku Gorō advanced a bold and democratic vision for cultural life by bringing poetry to the streets & mobilizing visual arts to represent the vitality, beauty, and complexity of Hiroshima. The exhibit explores a set of influential books, along with other examples of socially committed art. Shikoku and his circles of collaborators illuminated pathways to civic engagement for the citizens of Hiroshima—hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), vets, & younger generations.

Soldier Artist

During the months after his repatriation from Siberia, Shikoku created a thousand-page hand-written and drawn memoir of his experiences in militarist Japan, the army, internment in Siberia, and repatriation to Japan titled Memorandum of my Youth. (1949). Then he turned to integration into Hiroshima society, with Our Poems circle as a primary means of engaging. Many, but certainly not all, circles understood themselves as being engaged in cultural and creative activities that were part of the “cultural front” fighting against imperialism and fascism, or as a site of developing a new subjectivity indispensable in a democracy. Rather than collaborating with the project of Free World economic progress that held appeal to many in the midst of material and economic devastation, the culture circle originated in progressive and leftist associations that sought to confront the inequities implicit in capitalism, the unresolved hierarchies and “difference” that meant discrimination and social and economic marginalization for many groups of people. The democratic thought encouraged by the Soviet authorities in the internment camps taught that art should serve the people, and art belonged in the hands of the workers, not solely in an elite art establishment. In Occupation-era Hiroshima, Shikoku was initially able to engage productively with a city energized by the optimism of the New Japan, and with like-minded people like Toge Sankichi and the Our Poems circle.

Shikoku’s blue ink self portrait as young artist with easel & still life is one of several he drew upon his return to Japan. Toge and his Our Poems circle responded to the experiences, political analysis, artistry and determination that Shikoku brought back from the Siberian camps.

Shikoku wrote Memorandum in a time before the revelations of the brutality of Stalin’s regime, before the fracture in the JCP, and the changes in cultural policy from the Cominform.

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