This article engages with the notion of an aesthetic "chiasma" developed by the Japanese philosopher Imamichi Tomonobu in the 1960s. According to Imamichi, the nineteenth century saw an inversion of basic ideas associated with the artistic traditions of East and West. While in the East, the earlier dominance of expression was replaced by an emphasis on the importance of representation, for the West, the idea of mimesis-representation was superseded by a focus on expression. Imamichi's argument remain influential. Drawing on a series of philologically relevant reflections by several generations of scholars and artists, from Watanabe Kazan to Hashimoto Kansetsu, and situating them in relation to their Western and Chinese counterparts, this article clarifies the developments which occurred and the conflicts which emerged over the course of this interaction. In doing so, it demonstrates that Imamichi's notion of chiasma remains too restricted to capture the degree of exchange between the Eastern and Western aesthetic ideals taking place in modern Japan. The article concludes that Imamichi's chiasma was made possible by the awkward mapping of a pair of fundamental dualities associated with Eastern and Western thought onto one another, in a manner which reveals more about the geopolitical imperatives of the 1960s than the process of intellectual exchange itself.
Shigemi INAGA (Thu,) studied this question.