Mr. Fumiaki Yanagisawa came from Tokyo to know the thoughts of Father Aupiais

You are a researcher at the University of Tokyo.  In March 2016, you spent about ten days in the archives of the African Missions in Rome.  You were looking for information on Father Aupiais.  From where do you get your interest in him, and how did you come to know about this missionary?

In Tokyo, I teach Introduction to Aesthetics in several universities.  When I did my doctorate on African art, I discovered a book by Georges Hardy, written in the 1920s, entitled L’art nègre.  This book interested me greatly because its author was a former colonial administrator and Director of the “Colonial School” in Paris.  He therefore had a different point of view from that of art critics.  But this Georges Hardy had also written about the life of Fr. Aupiais.  He knew him in Senegal in 1915, where Fr. Aupiais was mobilized during the war of 1914-1918.  Their thoughts on respect for African cultures coincided.  It was Hardy who brought me to Aupiais.

And Fr. Aupiais interested you?

During his time, the European public thought that masks and statues from Africa were idols, fetish objects that needed to be destroyed.  Aupiais held these objects as representative of the African culture; he saw them as works of art.  He therefore worked to change their attitudes.  A similar phenomenon existed in Japan at the end of the 19th century:  European researchers had introduced the same state of mind.  Our statues of Buddha were hidden in the depths of the temples, and they, these researchers, asked that they be shown to them and even that they be taken to museums so that they could be considered as works of art and witness to the culture of a people.  This change in the manner of considering the objects interests me, and I see the work of Aupiais as important to understanding the African objects in Europe.

Is it your University that paid for this trip to Rome?

The Mitsubishi Foundation is subsidizing my research.  Thanks to a book by Martine Balard on Father Aupiais, in which she clearly presents her sources, I know where to find the documents.  I began by spending three days in Paris, where I went to the Académie des Sciences d’Outremer and then to the Grande Bibliothèque Mitterand.  Then I spent three days in Lyon, at the African Museum (150 Cours Gambetta), especially in its library.  They have there the collection of the bulletin La Reconnaissance Africain, edited by Aupiais.  And finally, I have spent ten days in Rome.

How many students take your introduction to aesthetics course in Tokyo?

The numbers range from two to a hundred students, depending upon the course.  But, these are the general culture courses in the domain of human sciences… and they do not lead to engineer graduates!  The natural sciences or physics have more success.  They lead to employment.  Our government has a tendency to reduce the budget allocated to the humanities.  And yet, these are the important domains for understanding the world, and for understanding how to develop different points of view to explain diversity.