@article{oai:nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp:00007435,
 author = {LARKING, Matthew},
 journal = {Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies},
 month = {Dec},
 note = {Over the course of 1947, four yōga painters, Suda Kunitarō (1891–1961), Nakagawa Kazumasa (1893–1991), Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958) and Kimura Shōhachi (1893–1958), published their views on nihonga in the periodical Sansai. The positions these artists adopted were instrumental in initiating the Westernization discourse in the early postwar nihonga metsubōron. In this essay, I introduce the metsubōron and a number of historical and terminological issues, particularly relating to correspondences between the mid-twentieth century postwar situation and the earlier Meiji period (1869–1912), in which nihonga was emergent as a modern painting idiom. Thereafter I chart the pervasiveness of the nihonga/yōga divide across Japanese modernism, then critically discuss the four yōga painters’ 1947 commentaries that contributed to speculation about nihonga’s postwar death. Following this, in an extended coda, I indicate the pressure exerted upon early postwar nihonga painters by these Westernization discourses, which resulted in artistically productive solutions to nihonga’s mid-twentieth century malaise.},
 pages = {161--190},
 title = {Death and the Prospects of Unification : Nihonga’s Postwar Rapprochements with Yōga},
 volume = {34},
 year = {2019}
}