International issues: Japanese artists and the problems with borders

This chapter focuses on issues raised by the international travel of artists and writers in the early twentieth century. The painter Fujita Tsuguharu and the poet Kaneko Mitsuharu provide the main examples of the issues encountered by Japanese moving from Tokyo to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. I will show how the ideals of international identities clash with personal interactions in an historical moment that is configured along different assumptions than now, in the twenty-first century. Of particular concern are the trajectories which reveal the ways that international identities were understood to operate in the early twentieth century. A number of questions come into focus: What does it mean to be Japanese, What does it mean to be Japanese abroad, What does it mean to be a transnational world citizen in a time of globalization, and, What does it mean to navigate multiple cultures and nations?