La collaborazione di Kanbara Tai con il quotidiano L’Ambrosiano (1924-1925): Prospettive di ricerca

Kanbara Tai (1898-1997) was a prominent exponent of the Japanese avant-garde in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He also was sympathetic to Italian Futurism and popularized it in Japan. In his autobiographical writings, published after WWII, Kanbara reported that he collaborated in the 1920s with L’Ambrosiano, a Milanese newspaper edited by Umberto Notari, also a friend and supporter of F. T. Marinetti. Kanbara’s connections with the Futurists have already been investigated (e.g., Omuka, 1998; Takaoka, 2013), but his collaboration with L’Ambrosiano is still unclear in certain respects. In my paper, I summarize the results of previous research on this episode, present my preliminary findings based on archival and published sources and analyse the contents of Kanbara’s Ambrosiano articles, focussing on the image of Japan that they conveyed to their readers.