Tomoyoshi Murayama

Murayama Tomoyoshi
Murayama Tomoyoshi
Born	18 January 1901 Kanda, Tokyo, Japan
Died	22 March 1977 Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Writer
Genre	stage plays

Tomoyoshi Murayama (村山 知義, Murayama Tomoyoshi^?, 18 January 1901 – 22 March 1977) was a Japanese artist, playwright, novelist and drama producer active during the Shōwa period of Japan.

Murayama was born in the Kanda Suehiro district of Tokyo. His father, who was a medic in the Imperial Japanese Navy, died when he was nine years old. His mother became a fervent Christian after having been converted by Uchimura Kanzo, and was active in the pacifist movement. Murayama was initially encouraged towards watercolors and traditional Japanese painting, but was later drawn to philosophy, particularly the works of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He converted to Christianity himself after being assaulted by fellow students for echoing his mother's pacifist views.

Murayama started out his career after the Westernization campaign of the Meiji era (1868-1912) Murayama entered Tokyo Imperial University in 1921 with the intention of studying philosophy, but soon left to study art and drama at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Initially drawn to the genre of Constructivism as typified by the work of Wassily Kandinsky, he later became dissatisfied with the detachment of Constructivism from reality and developed his own style by using a collage of real objects to provoke concrete associations. He coined this method ‘conscious constructivism’, which was known as MAVO. The “Mavoists” sought to eliminate the boundaries between art and daily life, and rebelled against convention by combining industrial products with painting or printmaking in a collage. Protests against social injustice were portrayed by use of theatrical eroticism, which also mocked public morality.