Arts Section of the Classified Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Books
Now, let us look at the 800 Arts section of the catalogue. This rather mundane classification of books into subsections, designed to improve access to information, largely followed the categorization scheme developed for the Imperial Library in the Meiji period. It reflected hierarchies between the genres and mapped out the boundaries of painting very loosely along geographic (but not necessarily ethnic) lines.
The subject headings in the "Arts" section of the Japanese and Chinese language books (Wakan tosho) catalogue contains the following subheadings:
800 Arts (Geijutsu)
810 Calligraphy and Painting (Shoga)
820 Sculpture and Metalwork
830 Lacquer
840 Plate-making and Printing
850 Photography
860 Music
870 Entertainment and Leisure
The 810 subsection for Calligraphy and Painting contains the following subheadings:
811 Painting / General
812 Japanese Painting (Nihonga) and Chinese Painting (Shinaga)
813 Japanese Painting (Nihonga) and Chinese Painting (Shinaga) / Organized by School
814 Western Painting (Yōga) and Contemporary Painting (Gendaiga)
815 Calligraphy (Sho)
816 Stylized Signatures (Kaō)
817 Seal Engraving, Books of Seals, Seals
Interestingly enough, the library's categorization does not include a subheading named "tōyōga," which was the word Guo Xuehu used to describe one kind of painting he was studying at the library. The word tōyōga (lit. Eastern Painting) has appeared in some publications in Japan at least since the latter Meiji period to compare and distinguish East Asian painting from its Western counterpart, yōga (also known as seiyōga). Japanese artists and critics, faced with the appeal of western-made (imperial) oil painting and with an Orientalism, responded with their own discourse on Japanese and East Asian art, conflating nihonga with tōyōga. In fact, subheading 812/813 corresponds to tōyōga and perhaps makes the use of this term superfluous (For example, section 8137, a subsection of 813, encompassed Chinese painting, Southern School, Northern School, and Literati Painting. The few books on Korean painting in the catalogue can also be found under the 812/813 subject heading.) (Compare also: Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient.)
It is important to add that the category of yōga encompassed both paintings produced in Europe as well as works in oil and watercolor by Japanese artists. Thus, the distinction between tōyōga/nihonga and yōga was one of medium and widely conceived artistic traditions or "schools" rather than simply a geographic designation or a label referring to the artist’s ethnicity/national origins. In a world where the access to art knowledge was growing globally and the differences in art education would shrink considerably in the decades to come (notice how Guo Xuehu points out the "dozens of thousands people" as his potential art teachers in the library), policing regional differences became an increasingly complex and cumbersome undertaking, with large stakes.