New clothes and a new haircut were Michiko Yamawaki’s priorities when she stopped off in New York in the summer of 1930 with her architect husband, Iwao, on their journey from Tokyo to Berlin. That autumn, both planned to enrol at the Bauhaus art and design school in Dessau, Germany, and Michiko, who was twenty, was eager to ensure that she would look and dress like the most fashionable European students.
At the Bauhaus, Michiko’s short, bobbed hair immediately identified her as a stylish young woman, although her fellow students were equally intrigued by her traditional kimonos. Not that she knew it then, but this fusion of Western modernism and Japanese aesthetic traditions would define her personal identity and her work in textile design for the rest of her life.
For Iwao, studying at the Bauhaus represented the realisation of a long-held ambition. Twelve years older than Michiko, he was a practicing architect when they met in 1928. After their wedding, he adopted her surname at her family’s request. The Yamawakis were wealthy, although Michiko also benefited from growing up in a culturally sophisticated environment thanks to her father, an industrialist who devoted his life to the tea ceremony, regarded as the height of aestheticism in Japan. As he was familiar with the Bauhaus, he agreed to fund not only Iwao’s education there, but Michiko’s too, at a time when very few young Japanese women were permitted to study art or design.
After spending the summer in Berlin with Japanese friends in the city’s experimental theatre scene, the couple moved to Dessau, where they enrolled on the introductory foundation course. As Michiko barely spoke German, she struggled to understand her teachers, the artists Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. Both tried to help, and Kandinsky often repeated his lectures in English for her. Having completed the course, Michiko decided to study textile design in the weaving workshop with two gifted weavers, Albers’s wife, Anni, and Otti Berger. Iwao studied architecture under Mies van Der Rohe as he had planned, but switched to photography after a few months.
She and Iwao flung themselves into the Bauhaus social whirl while also spending weekends with Japanese friends involved with Berlin’s experimental theatre scene. Michiko focused on refining her weaving skills, while Iwao developed an interest in experimental photography, making collages to depict the political turmoil in Nazi Germany. When local Nazis forced the Bauhaus Dessau to close in 1932, they decided to return to Tokyo, rather than to join the school Mies was opening in Berlin. They arrived in Japan laden with furniture for their new home, books and artefacts bought from Bauhaus students and teachers, and two looms, which Michiko installed in a studio space above their apartment.
The Japanese media portrayed the Yamawakis as pioneers of a way of modernising Japan’s visual culture while respecting its history. Michiko firmly believed there were parallels between the two. "Both worlds valued the simple and the functional, and the qualities of the materials used," she wrote. Their apartment and, later, the house Iwao designed for them, were widely covered in the media and studied by fellow designers.
During the 1930s, Michiko and Iwao fulfilled their public personae as a moga and mobo, "modern girl" and "modern boy," while teaching in progressive art and design schools and exhibiting their work. Just as Iwao’s architecture was inspired by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus Dessau buildings, Michiko continued the experiments with combining traditional and modern weaving techniques she had started there.
Yet she stopped weaving after the birth of their second child, and adopted a new public identity, as a modern wife and mother, rather than a moga. During a period of aggressive industrialisation in postwar Japan, Michiko’s emphasis shifted from promoting European modernism to championing the country’s rich artisanal traditions, advancing a gentler, singularly Japanese interpretation of modernity. Even so, she did not return to teaching until her children had grown up in 1960, whereas Iwao’s career continued unabated.
"If I am ever born again . . . I would want to go to the Bauhaus again, and I would marry Iwao again," Michiko wrote in her memoirs, Bauhausu to chanoyu (Bauhaus and the tea ceremony), published in 1995. "Though I would not be so passive and blindly follow Iwao. Next time I hope I would live a more active, self-determined life."
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
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