A commonly heard accusation is that Japanese oil painters are followers rather than innovators. It is a criticism that has been made against many early adopters in this country -- be they filmmakers, fashion designers, chefs or rock musicians -- and one that has even come from painters' compatriots.

When discussing the Fusain-kai exhibition of 1912, in which the artists presented an avant-garde Fauve style, Hakutei Ishii, a painter of yoga (Western-style paintings), said: "Most of the works at best rank with the works of the most minor artists of the Salon D'Autumne." Uchida Roan was equally skeptical about the exhibition: "First of all, they lack in originality. I cannot help feeling that they represent not their own impressions but instead reproduce Gauguin's, Matisse's and Cezanne's."

To this day, museums outside Japan, while increasing their collections of nihonga (Japanese-style paintings), continue to ignore yoga. As a result, Western art-lovers are mostly unfamiliar with the 150 years of modern painting in Japan and have a strong bias that what happened at the art-world centers of the 19th and 20th centuries -- Paris, Munich, New York -- is fundamentally more significant than the work produced elsewhere. While people can come up with names like Kurosawa, Miyake and Nobu in other fields, who can name a Japanese equivalent of Picasso or van Gogh?