Abstract (englisch)

Since the end of the 19th and during the first decades of the 20th century, Japan experienced an unprecedented 'attack' of the Western technological and scientific achievements, and consequently of the industrial miracle that had reached its peak in the West, especially in Great Britain and the United States. This resulted in the rapid, almost leveling up of the, until then, economically, socially and culturally controlled Japan, which however, during the Meiji period (1868-1912), began to renounce its traditional identity borrowing the Western ideology and lifestyle. The prosperity and richness of industrial development resulted in the disappearance of many traditional lifestyles and art forms, which, however, began to recover especially in the 1930s, under the guidance of the important artist and visionary Yanagi Sōetsu . This grandiose personality for the Japanese cultural history, managed to bring back to the forefront the traditional arts and crafts of the country and through the famous Mingei Movement managed to create a new consumer perception in the Japanese markets. These new traditional handmade products constituted a new form of cultural / commercial reaction to the wretched capitalist industrial production, as they brought along with their primal functional and aesthetic qualities, the ethical and social values of the Japanese which had begun to extinct.