Since World War II, Japanese art has undergone a transformation as radical as any in the West, from which it somewhat derives. The socialist realism of official
war artists was quickly ousted by expressionistic depictions of devastation and the similarly macabre subject matter of the surrealists, who had been suppressed during the war for their suspected liaison with the communist faction. Among the latter, Kikuji Yamashita tried to be controversially distasteful in his raw and often inane paintings of social injustices. Human vulnerability was treated with more finesse by surrealists such as