Angura is the name given to an art movement of the 1960s, which was characterised
by its opposition to modernity. Matsui explores the origins of antimodern
thinking in the wake of the Meiji Government in 1867, through which
‘modernization in Japan has unambiguously meant the acceptance and domestication
of Western theories and aesthetics’ (2002: 142). At the same time, the
preservation of the ie system meant that Japan had, in Matsui’s words