influence of Japanese calligraphy on Mark Tobey's abstraction. not accepted as representative of Japanese nationality. While this rejection cut him off from the Japanese art community in important respects, it was not to prevent the transfer of ideas from his Japanism into the branch of the 担whichfound expression in contemporary art and design. One difference-producing discourse or another awaits the artist's product even before it comes out of the studio. On the one hand, Noguchi's nativist Japanese critics could be so ill-disposed toward the Japanese elements in his work that they simply dismissed it as lacking authenticity. And on the other hand, components from Surrealism and the Bauhaus as well as from the Japanese tradition of lantern craft may be distilled from Noguchi's lamp designs, but in the analysis of Kenmochi Isamu, these lamps are firmly identified as "modern Japanese design". Likewise the cultural coordinates of Shirai's Atomic Memorial can include so obviously Western a motif as fluted columns, but even as he enumerates such non-Japanese attributes, Kawazoe Noboru conforms Shirai's design to an emphati-cally Japanese national identity. Nevertheless, such interpretive Japanization of syncratic creations need not be regarded as unique to modern Japan for it corresponds neatly to the Americanization seen in the motives conditioning the The practice of both the Japanese and American artists examined in this study suggests that artworks are powerful if unpredictable instruments in the produc-tion of "imagined communities", Benedict Anderson's influential characteriza-tion of nations. Symptomatic of this process, the artwork which demonstrates a combination of elements affiliated with some formulation of the "East" with others of the "West" --such as many by Isamu Noguchi as well as his American and Japanese contemporaries --are rhetorically driven to a position embodying one of these cultural complexes over the other. -61 Nihon-
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