Seigo Taguchi

Who They Were

Seigo Taguchi (田口省吾, たぐち せいご) was a Japanese painter active in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1897 in Akita Prefecture, in the far north of Japan's main island of Honshu, and he died on 14 August 1943. His life therefore spanned the whole of Japan's dramatic transformation from a late-Meiji regional society into an industrialised imperial power, and then into the crisis years of the Pacific War.

He was the son of Kikutei Taguchi, and he was the father of Yuichi Takai. Painting was his profession, and his work reached an international audience when it was entered in the painting event of the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics. That competition was one of the Olympic art contests held alongside the sporting events between 1912 and 1948, in which architects, sculptors, painters, musicians and writers submitted works inspired by sport.

Life and Career

Seigo Taguchi was born in 1897, in the thirtieth year of the Meiji era (明治, めいじ). The Meiji period, which ran from 1868 to 1912, was the era in which Japan dismantled the feudal domains, built a conscript army and a national school system, and sent its artists to study in Europe. A painter born in Akita in 1897 grew up inside that project: the institutions of professional art — the Tokyo art school, the government-sponsored exhibitions known as the Bunten — were all new or newly reformed in his childhood.

His father was Kikutei Taguchi. His son, Yuichi Takai, was born in a later generation, and the family thus carried the Taguchi name across at least three generations in the modern period.

The documented high point of Taguchi's career is the 1932 Summer Olympics. The Games that year were held in Los Angeles, and the art competition there was a juried exhibition rather than a sporting contest: artists submitted paintings, and the entries were judged and awarded medals in the same way as athletics. Taguchi's painting was part of the painting event of that competition, placing his work in a field that drew entries from across Europe, the Americas and Asia. The Olympic art competitions were later discontinued, which makes the artists who took part in them — Taguchi among them — a distinct and finite group.

He died on 14 August 1943, at the age of forty-six, in the middle of the Pacific War. The span of his working life was therefore roughly the 1920s and 1930s, the decades of so-called Taisho and early Showa modernism in Japanese painting, when artists in Tokyo and the provinces were absorbing post-impressionism, fauvism and surrealism while also debating what a distinctly Japanese modern art should look like.

Why They Matter

Taguchi matters for two reasons that reinforce each other. The first is the Olympic entry. The art competitions at the Olympics are a forgotten chapter of both Olympic and art history, and the Japanese painters who entered them are a small, identifiable set. Taguchi's presence in the 1932 painting event is a concrete, dated fact that ties a regional Japanese painter to an international exhibition on the other side of the Pacific.

The second is his position as a provincial artist. Akita Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast, was far from the Tokyo art world that dominated exhibitions and sales. A painter who was born there in 1897, worked through the interwar decades, and died in 1943 represents the broad base of Japanese artistic production that is usually invisible next to the famous names of the Tokyo avant-garde. His biography — a father named Kikutei, a son named Yuichi Takai, a career cut short at forty-six during the war — is a compact record of what a middle-rank modern Japanese painter's life actually looked like.

The Name in Japanese

The painter's name is written 田口省吾. It is read たぐち せいご in kana, and rendered in romaji as Taguchi Seigo. In Japanese order the family name comes first, so 田口 is the surname and 省吾 the given name. The form "Seigo Taguchi" simply reverses the two for English convenience.

田口 (たぐち, Taguchi) — the surname, made of two characters:

• 田 (た, ta): "rice field", "paddy". One of the oldest and most common elements in Japanese surnames, it refers to cultivated wet-rice land and appears in hundreds of family names.
• 口 (ぐち, guchi): "mouth", "opening", "entrance". Here it is voiced — the unvoiced kuchi becomes guchi — because it sits in the middle of the compound, a regular sound change in Japanese word formation. In surnames 口 very often means "mouth of" or "entrance to" a place, so 田口 can be read as "the mouth of the rice fields", that is, the point where the paddies begin.

省吾 (せいご, Seigo) — the given name, also two characters:

• 省 (せい, sei): "to reflect on", "to examine oneself", "to omit" or "to economise". In personal names it carries the sense of introspection and self-examination. It is the same character used in the word 反省 (はんせい, hansei), "reflection on one's conduct".
• 吾 (ご, go): an old first-person pronoun, "I" or "me", and a common closing element in male given names of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Names ending in 吾 were fashionable for boys born in the Meiji and Taisho periods, which fits a child born in 1897 exactly.

Read together, 省吾 suggests something like "self-reflective one" or "the one who examines himself" — a literary, slightly scholarly name of the kind that educated Meiji-era families favoured for sons.

Legacy

Taguchi's legacy rests on a small number of hard facts: a birth in Akita Prefecture in 1897, a place in the painting event of the 1932 Olympic art competition, a death on 14 August 1943, and a family line that continued through his son, Yuichi Takai. He belongs to the generation of Japanese painters whose careers were bracketed by the Meiji-era building of modern art institutions at one end and the Pacific War at the other.

For students of Japanese, his name is also a useful specimen. It shows the standard family-name-first order, the voicing of a consonant inside a compound (口 kuchi to ぐち guchi), and a Meiji-period male given name built from a character of reflection plus the old pronoun 吾. Those patterns recur constantly in the names of Japanese artists, writers and public figures of his era.