Japanese-American Modernism of Yasuo Kuniyoshi – A Torn Identity, Without Home and Homeland
In Between
How does one paint the dreams of an emigrant suspended between two entirely different cultures? These dreams are laden with memories, strangeness, and unease. They are tales from the fringes of worlds, none of which can be called home. This was precisely how Yasuo Kuniyoshi painted—a man torn between the Japan of his birth and the America he chose. His canvases—filled with children's toys, masks, animals, peculiar perspectives, and subtle gestures—compose an autobiography not written with a pen, but with a brush. Today, in a world where identity is neither granted permanently nor remains self-evident, Kuniyoshi's work resonates with uncanny relevance.
In this article, we will trace the artist's journey—from his birth into a traditional family in Okayama, through his solitary youth in New York academies, his fascination with American folklore and the development of his personal style, to the challenging war years and contemplative post-war paintings. By examining his works, we will uncover not just the story of one man, but a universal narrative of seeking oneself amidst multiple languages, memories, and cultures. Each chapter of his biography simultaneously unfolds as a chapter in his art—a relentless endeavor to capture emotional truth: the human as a lost child in a chaotic world, not comprehending it, but sensing its essence.
For his art transcends mere aesthetics. It is a language of silence and symbols. In an era of global migrations and increasingly complex forms of identity, Kuniyoshi speaks to us more clearly than ever. His later paintings are enveloped in a quiet light reminiscent of the twilight of a monastic garden—everything here is a sign, yet nothing speaks outright. We observe the world from a distance, as if through a thin layer of rice paper—and perhaps it is precisely for this reason that his paintings continue to resonate with those striving to find themselves in multiple worlds simultaneously.
Childhood and Youth in Japan (1889–1906)
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born in 1889 in Okayama, Japan—a city that at the time still pulsed with the rhythm of age-old traditions, echoed with legends, and was scented with the incense of rural temples. His childhood unfolded during the dynamic transformations of the Meiji era, when Japan was rapidly modernizing in the image of the West. Yet, within Kuniyoshi's family home, old beliefs, folk tales, and rituals remained vibrant, later haunting his canvases like spirits from bygone times.
We can envision young Yasuo seated on a wooden floor, listening to his grandmother's stories about wandering monks, talking animals, and mountain kami. These narratives—whispered by the light of an oil lamp—were more than mere entertainment. They were the language of emotion, fear, and wonder, embedding themselves deeply in his memory. In Japan, one didn't need to believe in yōkai—it was enough to feel their presence.
During his childhood, Kuniyoshi also absorbed the aesthetics of everyday objects—handcrafted papier-mâché toys, wooden dolls, den-den daiko drums, and animal figurines on wheels. These items, crafted by anonymous artisans, were not merely playthings; they served as amulets, talismans warding off illness, misfortune, and evil spirits. Their shapes, colors, and sounds rooted themselves in his imagination as forms of symbolic significance—simple yet deeply embedded in spirituality and folk metaphysics.
It was to these memories that Kuniyoshi returned in 1921, as a mature artist in New York, painting one of the most poignant works of his early period: "Baby and Toy Cow." At first glance, it is merely a scene of an infant crawling toward three toys: a boat, a cow on wheels, and a drum with sticks. But upon closer inspection, layers of meaning emerge.
The cow—likely an aka-beko, a red figurine from the Tōhoku region associated with protection against smallpox—symbolizes not only childhood but also ritual protection. The den-den daiko—a small drum producing a "den-den" sound when its handle is twisted—is not just a toy but an instrument with apotropaic function, used to ward off malevolent forces. Even the boat, seemingly mundane, may allude to numerous Japanese tales of journeys, transformations, and transitions between worlds—as if the infant is about to embark toward its future.
The composition of the painting is austere, almost ascetic, yet full of tension. The white, flat background accentuates the theatricality of the scene, and the monumental depiction of the toys causes them to dominate over the child's figure. In this arrangement, one can perceive an allegory: a world of memory, tradition, and childhood imagination—larger and more powerful than the vulnerable, fragile human "self."
Formally, Kuniyoshi rejects academic approaches, both Japanese and Western. Instead of realistic chiaroscuro, he employs flat color fields and bold contours, reminiscent of the ukiyo-e aesthetic—Japanese woodblock prints he knew from childhood—as well as the simplicity of American folk art, which he collected. Here, his greatest strength already manifests: creating a new, hybrid aesthetic where Eastern symbolism and Western expression are not in opposition but complement each other.
The painting "Baby and Toy Cow" is not merely a recollection of childhood. It is a map of emotional memory, where each toy, each object, becomes a vessel of stories—not only of the artist but also of the culture he left behind and the one he sought to embrace. It is the image of an emigrant who, even then—albeit unconsciously—began painting his life between two worlds.
Emigration to the USA and Early Years in America (1906–1920)
In 1906, sixteen-year-old Yasuo Kuniyoshi left Japan with a single suitcase and an enormous weight on his shoulders—the weight of his family’s hopes, who had sent him to America believing that only there could he build a future. He didn’t speak English well, knew no one, and had no money. But he carried with him what he had known since childhood—a sensitivity to form, color, story, and the strangeness of the world. Emigration for him was not only a physical relocation, but a profound cultural shock that would shape his art for the rest of his life—always on the edge, always “in-between."
He arrived on the West Coast, but quite soon moved eastward in search of artistic opportunities. He studied in Los Angeles, and later at the prestigious Art Students League of New York, where he encountered European modernism as well as a rawer, more “American” aesthetic. He learned not only technique but courage—the courage not to paint like others. In an art world that still divided artists into “East” and “West,” Kuniyoshi didn’t want to belong to either side. He created something else—something “third.”
A breakthrough moment came with his encounter with Hamilton Easter Field, an eccentric collector, critic, and mentor. Field not only supported Kuniyoshi financially and arranged exhibitions for him—more importantly, he saw something exceptional in him: an artist who did not try to copy the West but processed it through his own sensitivity. Field, fascinated by both Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints (like Van Gogh was—see here: What if the restless spirit of Europe encountered the world of mono no aware in Japanese ukiyo-e? Van Gogh and Hiroshige) and American folk art, instilled in Kuniyoshi a passion for simple, naïve objects full of meaning. Over time, Kuniyoshi began collecting old toys, primitive paintings, and rural furniture—not as curiosities but as objects of spiritual power.
This collision of two worlds is vividly evident in his painting Boy Stealing Fruit (1923). On the surface, it’s a genre scene—a boy reaches for a peach and a banana—but this simple act becomes symbolic. The peach is a classic symbol of longevity in Japanese culture, an almost sacred fruit (it’s from a peach that Momotarō, the boy from legend, was born). The banana—an exotic and, at that time, extremely expensive fruit in Japan—was for a child from Okayama a dream seen in advertisements and colonial tales. Kuniyoshi paints a boy who steals not just fruit, but fragments of two worlds, trying to hold them in one grasp. On a formal level, the work draws from the simplified perspective and stylization found in 19th-century American provincial painting, but its emotional and symbolic charge makes it deeply personal.
Another work from the same period—Two Babies (1923)—also touches on childhood, but one filtered through the American experience. The children are depicted in a disturbing, almost grotesque manner: their heads are too large, their eyes unsettlingly wide. One child holds a bird—perhaps a carved rattle, perhaps a Japanese hatobue, a dove-shaped flute meant to ward off evil spirits. In the background appear decorations resembling a Mexican piñata or paper Christmas ornaments—a trace of American festivities. In this single scene converge childhood fears, folk superstitions, and American joie de vivre—all wrapped in the melancholy Kuniyoshi carried throughout his life.
Though these paintings were created after 1920, they carry the emotional weight and themes shaped during his earliest years in America—when, as a young emigrant, he gazed at the new world with awe but also anxiety. His early works are devoid of easy enthusiasm for America. Instead, they portray a subtle taming of foreignness, a painterly search for identity through childhood memories, Japanese symbols, and American everyday objects.
It was in this decade that Kuniyoshi learned the most important lesson: that his place was neither here nor there. That his art—and he himself—would always exist on the threshold, in a state of creative rupture that would become his strength. And his canvases—like images from a dream—would begin to speak more than words ever could.
Early Career and a Hybrid Style (1920–1930)
The 1920s marked a time when Yasuo Kuniyoshi began to consciously construct his own artistic language—distinct, hybrid, defiant. In an art world where one was expected to take a side—academic European technique or “Oriental” heritage—he refused to conform to any convention. He was no longer a provincial Japanese, but he had not become a “true” American either. This tension—this existential polarity—began to manifest in his paintings as a weave of dream, fear, childhood, and a chaos of symbols.
This period saw a rising interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, dream states, and the unconscious, as well as in German Expressionism, especially from the circle of Der Blaue Reiter. In Kuniyoshi’s work, both these sources resonate with his own memories and fears brought from a Japanese childhood. Reality ceased to be something stable—it became a dream, often a nightmare.
In Dream (1922), Kuniyoshi constructs a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory scene: at the center appears a snake, flanked by a little girl with outstretched arms and a cow. The composition seems absurd—yet entirely coherent within dream logic. In Japanese folklore, the snake often symbolizes transformation, sexuality, and danger—it is linked with mountain and water deities but also with tales of female demons. The cow—a recurring motif in Kuniyoshi’s art—is no longer a realistic animal, but a symbolic echo of childhood, a talisman from the past. The girl resembles a sleepwalker—innocent, exposed to forces she cannot comprehend.
Even greater tension can be found in the drawing Bad Dream (1924)—an explosive collage of dragons, female bodies, and transformed animals. Here, Expressionism takes on corporeal brutality: women are abducted by monsters, cows turn into demons, and the lines are so sharp and nervous they seem to tear the paper. Inspirations from Japanese mythology are unmistakable—dragons as forces of nature and desire, ancestral spirits, storm gods. But the manner of depiction is radically personal, saturated with subconscious fear and Western anxieties.
A similar atmosphere can be found in Boy Frightened by Snake (1921).
This is a painting of pure emotion—a child’s fear in the face of something primal and untamed. Although formally situated within the modernist tradition, its semantics reach back to Japanese legends and childhood superstitions. In Japan, snakes were present not only in mythology but also in everyday objects: toys, masks, decorations—always as forms that concealed something. This painting does not tell a single story but conveys an emotional truth—the truth of being a child in a world that is not understood but is deeply felt.
At the same time, Kuniyoshi deepened his interest in folk art—not only Japanese, but American as well. Together with friends—Robert Laurent, Dot Varian, and Alexander Brook—he spent a summer in Maine, hunting for “treasures” in rural antique shops. They bought folk paintings, sculptures, children’s toys, and furniture which, for Kuniyoshi, were not merely aesthetic artifacts. For him, they were manifestos of a nation’s soul—traces of raw emotions, of an instinctive need for expression akin to Japanese mingei (民芸 – Japanese folk art).
The result of this fascination is Still Life (1926)—painted on the reverse side of a pane of glass, modeled after traditional reverse glass paintings found in New England or Bavaria. It is a still life, but not “academic.” Fruits, vessels, perhaps carved figures—everything seems suspended in a void, separated from the world, yet intensely present. The choice of technique is meaningful—painting on glass is a challenge: one cannot correct mistakes, one must be both precise and spontaneous. Kuniyoshi shows that folk art can carry modernity, that raw form can speak of the deepest experiences.
This period marks an artistic explosion, but also a time of searching. Kuniyoshi did not accept any identity without reservations. America was not an unconditional home for him, and Japan—though clearly held in his heart—was not an idealized lost paradise. That is why his paintings sometimes resemble the dreams of an immigrant: full of memories, strangeness, unease. They are stories from the borderlands of cultures, where none of them can be called home anymore.
Return to Japan and Confrontation with Identity (1931–1932)
After twenty-five years spent in the United States, Yasuo Kuniyoshi returned to his homeland for the first—and, as it turned out, last—time. The reason was deeply personal: he had received word of his father’s serious illness. A journey that was initially meant to be a return to his roots, to childhood and the familiar scents of rice, incense, and the sounds of temple bells, quickly turned into a painful collision of imagination with reality. The Japan he remembered from youth no longer existed. The country had changed dramatically: modernized, unified, and stripped of many regional and folkloric hues that Kuniyoshi had remembered as a fairy-tale world.
Although his family welcomed him warmly, the artist himself felt like a foreigner. In a letter to a friend, he wrote with a certain sadness:
“Of course I was happy to see my family again, and they were happy too. I’m glad I came and saw how everything looks now, but in the end—I don’t belong here anymore. I’ll return to America as soon as I can.”
— Yasuo Kuniyoshi, letter to Carl Zigrosser, 1931
This deep sense of alienation accompanied him not only in his hometown but also in his contact with the Japanese art world. His work—already shaped by the modernist artistic language of the West—was received coolly. It was criticized as “too European,” and he himself was accused of lacking respect for native conventions and forms of politeness. Even a simple question addressed to a street policeman ended in stern reprimand—because he had not removed his hat or bowed his head with proper humility, as he wrote in one of his letters.
It was during this time, in melancholic walks through changing Japanese towns, that Kuniyoshi visited Kurashiki—a historic merchant town with its atmospheric black-tiled roofs and the quiet charm of old rice warehouses. There he encountered papier-mâché tigers, the traditional Kurashiki hariko—children’s toys once given on the occasion of a son’s birth. These tigers, with wobbling heads and detachable tails, were not ordinary souvenirs to him—they were a gateway to the past. Their sight evoked his entire childhood: stories, games, the sound of drums, joyful festivals. He returned to New York with a suitcase full of folk toys and a sense of a lost world he would never regain.
In response to that experience, he painted Japanese Toy Tiger and Odd Objects (1932)—one of the most layered works in his entire body of art. The painting features a traditional toy tiger set among ambiguous objects: cigars, tassels, fabrics. Each carries meaning. The cigars allude to the American custom of celebrating the birth of a son—contrasted with the Japanese symbol of the tiger, which in Japanese culture represents strength, courage, and paternal pride. The composition is neither a still life in the Western sense nor a nostalgic portrait of Japan—it is a confession by an artist torn between two worlds, trying to fuse them into a new form of personal truth.
This hybrid of meanings becomes even clearer in earlier and later works that Kuniyoshi himself linked to themes of fatherhood and generational transition. In Upstream (1922), fish swimming against the current surround a couple in a boat—the man rows, the woman sits beside him, slightly behind. The composition, seemingly simple at first glance, carries deep meaning—it is an allegory of life, the father’s effort, and the direction in which the family moves. Fish swimming upstream evoke koi-nobori, the Japanese carp streamers flown on May 5th for Boys’ Day. Carps symbolize strength and determination—the ability to overcome adversity.
The motif reappeared nearly two decades later in the painting "Fish Kite" (1950), where a young boy with raised arms holds a koi-nobori above his head, with an American calendar displaying July 4th—Independence Day—in the background. This juxtaposition symbolizes the convergence of his two homelands: Japanese childhood and American future. It may also serve as a tribute to his father, who, as the artist recalled in his memoirs, sacrificed much to enable his son's emigration. Themes of filial piety, gratitude, and spiritual connection across generations consistently permeated his work, both overtly and subtly.
A visit to Japan, though filled with disappointment, marked an internal turning point for Kuniyoshi. He realized that he did not fully belong to either world—but could make this state the foundation of his art. The Japan of his childhood might have disappeared physically, but it survived in his memory, in symbols, in brushstrokes, and layers of paint. From that moment, folk props, toys, masks, and even the sounds of drums or songs about a good boy became carriers of identity in his paintings—not of nostalgia, but of a conscious synthesis of who he truly was.
The 1930s: Folklore or Modernity? (1932–1941)
After returning from Japan, Kuniyoshi was no longer the same artist. The journey to his former world, full of dissonances and symbolic fractures, opened a new, more reflective chapter within him. Toys, dolls, masks—objects once joyful and unpretentious—began to acquire deeper meaning in his eyes; they were not just nostalgic mementos but icons of a lost childhood, carriers of identity, and sometimes even defensive masks allowing survival in an increasingly unfamiliar world.
His home in Woodstock transformed into a microcosm of cultural motifs—he collected not only Japanese folk trinkets but also American folk art: sculptures, glass paintings, children's furniture, items from small New England towns. To him, these were not relics of naive craftsmanship but signs of spiritual continuity, samples of authentic, sincere life—the kind he did not see in art academies and university halls. Through them, he sought to build a bridge between cultures: American and Japanese, traditional and modernist.
In this spirit, the painting "Upside Down Table and Mask" (1940) was created—one of the most personal and symbolic in his oeuvre. The overturned table—the center of domestic order—loses its function, becoming absurd. Beside it, a mask—silent, motionless, suspended in space like a question. This is not only an allusion to the Japanese festivals he loved but also a metaphor for his dual identity: who is the artist with a Japanese face but an American life story? In times of escalating racism and anti-Asian sentiments in the United States, the mask was also protection, a means of survival—as if saying: "You see something, but it's not me!"
In 1930s America, especially after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded Japanese from naturalization, being of Asian descent meant a lack of civil rights, inability to purchase land, uncertainty, and fear. Yet Kuniyoshi not only created—he organized exhibitions, taught, and engaged publicly. He was a recognized painter, a member of the community, an authority—but never a full-fledged citizen. This ambivalence must have been painful—and was to deepen dramatically with the onset of war.
World War II—The Artist as "Enemy" and Loyalist (1941–1945)
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 8, the United States declared war. At the same time, Yasuo Kuniyoshi—a painter, patriot, lecturer, New Yorker for 35 years—was designated an "enemy alien." His camera, radio, and binoculars were confiscated. He was placed under house arrest, prohibited from traveling freely, and barred from participating in certain exhibitions.
But this was not the end. Instead of retreating inward, Kuniyoshi fought for his place in society. Despite the humiliation associated with the status of "enemy," he became an active participant in the U.S. war effort. He took part in information campaigns, designed propaganda posters, and wrote radio speeches condemning Japan's aggression, which were broadcast in Japanese. In one, he described Japan as "a land of pines and flowers, full of volcanic shapes, traditions, and beauty"—but did so with melancholy, as if speaking of a homeland he had already lost.
At the same time, he co-organized the grand exhibition "Artists for Victory" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but—ironically—could not participate because he was not an American citizen. His involvement was questioned despite his significant contribution. As he said in a 1940 speech at MoMA:
"If a man creates in a given country for a long time, regardless of origin—his work becomes part of that land."
The most poignant artistic expression of this internal conflict and existential loneliness was the painting "Between Two Worlds" (1939)—created just before the war but with great prophetic power. Three women in shorts wander through a desolate space. A dead tree, a broken wheel, in the distance a building resembling a prison or barracks. A cemetery. They do not look at each other. This is not a social scene—it is a psychological landscape of exclusion.
Kuniyoshi once said that "the world is chaotic, but one must go on." But his wartime paintings show how deeply this chaos plowed through his soul. The compositions become increasingly symbolic, dark, unsettling. And at the same time, increasingly truthful—not as documents of reality, but as self-portraits of the internal fate of a man torn between cultures.
His masks were no longer festival ornaments. They had become weapons of survival.
Postwar Work and Reflection (1945–1953)
After the war, Kuniyoshi’s life took on a new, quiet intensity. Following years of disconnection from Japan, the opportunity to reconnect with his family and old friends suddenly returned. In letters to Yoshie Nakata, an acquaintance from his 1931 exhibition in Tokyo, he shared glimpses of daily life in which small gestures became bridges between worlds: he bought tofu, eel, and dried squid in New York’s Japanese stores; together with his wife Sara, he learned to prepare tsukemono, traditional Japanese pickles. When describing the changing seasons in Woodstock, he saw in them echoes of the Japanese landscape—not the real one, but the one that had lived within him since childhood, veiled in the mist of nostalgia.
During this period, a motif emerged that would come to dominate his final years: the mask. No longer a festival keepsake or a child’s toy, the mask became a symbol of psychological survival, an attempt to come to terms with his inner fragmentation. In paintings such as I Wear a Mask Today (1946–47), The Clown, Charade, and Mr. Ace (1952), the masks do not conceal—they speak. They carry emotions too deep to be expressed directly. Their theatricality is deceptive; behind the caricatured expressions lies pain, anxiety, and the search for identity in a world that—even after the war’s end—had not become any less chaotic.
In these works, Kuniyoshi increasingly moved toward a kind of spiritual abstraction that revealed the influence of Zen. This was not about religious adherence—Kuniyoshi was not a follower of any doctrine—but about a way of seeing: silent, distanced, contemplative. The silence surrounding the figures in his late paintings recalls the silence of a monastic garden—everything here is a sign, but nothing speaks openly. We observe the world from a distance, as if through a thin layer of rice paper.
It is precisely in this phase of his art that the full arc of his internal transformation resonates: from a young boy in Okayama, through an immigrant fighting for his place in America, to an artist who told the story of his life through his art—not linearly, but symbolically.
Kuniyoshi died in 1953, never having received the American citizenship he had so deeply desired. He was buried in New York, the city he had called home for decades—though never on paper.
Today, his art is returning to us. Increasing numbers of exhibitions, publications, and studies are restoring him to his rightful place in the history of American modernist art, as well as in the context of Japan’s cultural legacy in exile. In his paintings we find themes of our time: hybrid identity, the crisis of belonging, the symbolic language as a form of resistance and communication. In an era of global migration and ever more complex notions of identity, Kuniyoshi speaks to us more clearly than ever before.
He did not seek an easy synthesis between East and West. His art was no mosaic—it was a fabric stitched together from fragments of memory, pain, and beauty. And perhaps that is precisely why his paintings continue to resonate with those who are trying to find themselves across many worlds at once.
>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:
Faulty Man in a Box: The Mechanical Nightmare of Tetsuya Ishida's Paintings
Obsession with Self-Destruction: How Yayoi Kusama's Art Delves into the Nightmare of Mental Illness
"Strong Japanese Women"
see book by the author
of the page
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
Write us...
Ciechanów, Polska
dr.imyon@gmail.com
___________________
inari.smart
Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!