Mingei translates to “art of the people” or “folk craft”. During the Edo period in Japan (1603-1867), Japan was almost completely shut off from the rest of the world. The country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the ~300 regional daimyo. During this time the country experienced strong economic growth, and its population took a particular interest in arts and culture. Even everyday objects, like tea bowls, became prized possessions, and potters dedicated entire lives towards throwing the proper tea bowl.
In 1868, Japan experienced rapid industrialization as a result of the Meiji Restoration. Whereas a craftsman could make a few hundred tea bowls imperfectly, a machine could make a few thousand "perfectly". Quickly, the craftsmen began to be replaced by machines.
One critic, Soetsu Yanagi, sought to highlight the inherent beauty of handicraft at a time when it was quickly diminishing.
Yanagi's core proposition was that beauty was found in ordinary and utilitarian everyday objects made by unknown craftsmen. In his first book outlining his concept of mingei, published in 1928, he argued that utilitarian objects made by the common people were "beyond beauty and ugliness”, a theory known in Zen Buddhism as non-dualism. Indeed, much of mingei’s theory is rooted in Zen Buddhism.
Yanagi believed beauty is unchanging and can only be seen through direct perception- seeing an object as though one were seeing it for the first time without any bias or prior knowledge. He outlined the criteria for mingei as follows:
- made by anonymous crafts people
- produced by hand in large quantity
- inexpensive
- used by the masses and functional in daily life
- representative of the region in which it was produced.
Yanagi wrote profusely on the subject of mingei, publishing essays and books, and lecturing on the topic extensively, including a year teaching at Harvard from 1929-1930. He founded the Nihon-Mingeikan, Japan's National Folk Craft Museum in 1936. The Museum regularly publishes a magazine, The Mingei, which has been in publication since 1939.
Nearly 100 years after Yanagi first coined the term mingei, the philosophy is just as relevant today to our appreciation of art, craft, and culture.