Download or read book Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State written by Dōshin Satō and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.

Download or read book Making Modern Japanese Style Painting written by Chelsea Foxwell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Nihonga and the historical inscription of the modern -- Exhibitions and the making of modern Japanese painting -- In search of images -- The painter and his audiences -- Decadence and the emergence of Nihonga style -- Naturalizing the double reading -- Transmission and the historicity of Nihonga -- Conclusion.

Download or read book Challenging Past and Present written by Ellen P. Conant and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex and coherent development of Japanese art during the course of the nineteenth century was inadvertently disrupted by a political event: the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Scholars of both the preceding Edo (1615–1868) and the succeeding Meiji (1868–1912) eras have shunned the decades bordering this arbitrary divide, thus creating an art-historical void that the former view as a period of waning technical and creative inventiveness and the latter as one threatened by Meiji reforms and indiscriminate westernization and modernization. Challenging Past and Present, to the contrary, demonstrates that the period 1840–1890, as seen progressively rather than retrospectively, experienced a dramatic transformation in the visual arts, which in turn made possible the creative achievements of the twentieth century. The first group of chapters takes as its theme the diverse cultural currents of the transitional period, particularly as they applied to art.The second section deals with the inconsistent yet determinedly pragmatic courses pursed by artists, entrepreneurs, and patrons to achieve a secure footing in the uncertain terrain of early Meiji. Further chapters look at how painters and sculptors sought to absorb and integrate foreign influences and reinterpret their own stylistic mediums.

Download or read book The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan written by Alice Yu-Ting Tseng and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was not until Japan's opening to the West during the Meiji period (1868-1912) that terms for "art" (bijutsu) and "art museum" (bijutsukan) were coined. The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan documents Japan's unification of national art and cultural resources to forge a modern identity influenced by European museum and exhibition culture. Japan's Imperial Museums were conceived of as national self-representations, and their creation epitomized the Meiji bureaucracy's mission to engage in the international standards and practices of the late nineteenth century. The architecture of the museums, by incorporating Western design elements and construction methods, effectively safeguarded and set off the nation's unique art historical lineage. Western paradigms and expertise, coupled with Japanese resolve and ingenuity, steered the course of the museums' development. Expeditions by high-ranking Japanese officials to Europe and the United States to explore the burgeoning world of art preservation and exhibition, and throughout Japan to inventory important cultural treasures, led to the establishment of the Imperial Museums in the successive imperial cities of Nara, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Over the course of nearly four decades, the English architect Josiah Conder, known as "the father of modern Japanese architecture," and his student Katayama Tokuma, who became the preeminent state architect, designed four main museum buildings to house the national art collection. These buildings articulated the museums' unified mission to preserve and showcase a millennium-long chronology of Japanese art, while reinforcing the distinctive historical and cultural character of their respective cities. This book is the first English-language study of the art, history, and architecture of Japan's Imperial Museums, the predecessors of today's national museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan examines the museums' formative period and highlights cross-cultural influences that enriched and complicated Japan's search for a modern yet historically grounded identity.

Download or read book The Making of Modern Japan written by Marius B. Jansen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.

Download or read book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan written by Denis Gainty and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.

Download or read book The Meiji Restoration written by Robert Hellyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

Download or read book The Influence of Japanese Art on Design written by Hannah Sigur and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2008 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During America's Gilded Age (dates), the country was swept by a mania for all things Japanese. It spread from coast to coast, enticed everyone from robber barons to street vendors with its allure, and touched every aspect of life from patent medicines to wallpaper. Americans of the time found in Japanese art every design language: modernism or tradition, abstraction or realism, technical virtuosity or unfettered naturalism, craft or art, romance or functionalism. The art of Japan had a huge influence on American art and design. Title compares juxtapositions of American glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese material ranging from expensive one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera. Beginning in the Aesthetic movement, this book continues through the Arts & Crafts era and ends in Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing the reader how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept. Hannah Sigur is an art historian, writer, and editor with eight years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. She has a master's degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is completing a PhD in the arts of Japan. Her writings include co-authoring A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (Timber Press, 2002), which is listed in "The Best Books of 2002" by The Christian Science Monitor and is now in its second edition; and "The Golden Ideal: Chinese Landscape Themes in Japanese Art," in Lotus Leaves, A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (2001). She lives in Berkeley.

Download or read book Japan Awakens written by Barry Till and published by Pomegranate Communications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the brief Meiji period, Japan underwent am astonishing metamorphosis from feudal state to modern industrial and military power. The national policy of isolationism, sakoku, initiated in 1639, was abruptly challenged in 1853 when Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay with four awe-inspiring iron vessels, locally known as "black ships." Forced into trade treaties, the Japanese state rushed to modernize under the enlightened leadership of Emperor Meiji.The popular woodblock prints of the Meiji period were snapshots of a modern society in the making. Those reproduced in Japan Awakens, all from the collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, show everything from political events and wars to intimate domestic scenes. Three thematic essays by Barry Till trace the links between the revival of imperial rule and forces both national and international, connecting formal and aesthetic changes in fine-art prints to these events.

Download or read book History of Art in Japan written by Nobuo Tsuji and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the leading authority on Japanese art history sheds light on how Japan has nurtured distinctive aesthetics, prominent artists, and movements that have achieved global influence and popularity. The History of Art in Japan discusses works ranging from earthenware figurines in 13,000 BCE to manga, anime, and modern subcultures.

Download or read book Building a Modern Japan written by M. Low and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

Download or read book Japan s Emergence as a Modern State written by E. Herbert Norman and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1940 by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), this classic work by a leading 20th-century Japanologist has an enduring value. Japan's Emergence as a Modern State examines the problems and accomplishments of the Meiji period (1868-1912).This edition includes forewords by: R. Gordon Robertson, a former member of the Canadian Department of External Affairs; Len Edwards, the present Canadian ambassador to Japan; and William L. Holland, former secretary-general of the IPR; as well as a preface and introduction by Lawrence Woods. Also included are 10 short essays by leading Canadian, Japanese, and American scholars of Japanese politics, history, and economics,

Download or read book To Stand with the Nations of the World written by Mark Ravina and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan? To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global "long nineteenth century" during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing "God Save the King," they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that "ancient globalization" of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.

Download or read book Aesthetic Life written by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties). Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politicians to the discussion of the bijin and to the production of a national discourse on standards of Japanese beauty and art. As Japan worked to establish its place in the world, it actively presented itself as an artistic nation based on these ideals of feminine beauty. The book explores this exemplary figure for modern Japanese aesthetics and analyzes how the deceptively ordinary image of the beautiful Japanese woman--an iconic image that persists to this day--was cultivated as a "national treasure," synonymous with Japanese culture.

Download or read book The Politics of Painting written by Asato Ikeda and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.

Download or read book Traditional Japanese Arts And Culture written by Stephen Addiss and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled in this volume is original material on Japanese arts and culture from the prehistoric era to the Meiji Restoration (1867). These sources, including many translated here for the first time, are placed in their historical context and outfitted with brief commentaries, allowing the reader to make connections to larger concepts and values found in Japanese culture. This book contains material on the visual and literary arts, as well as primary texts on topics not easily classified in Western categories, such as the martial and culinary arts, the art of tea, and flower arranging. More than sixty color and black-and-white illustrations enrich the collection and provide further insights into Japanese artistic and cultural values. Also included are a bibliography of English-language and Japanese sources and an extensive list of suggested further readings.

Download or read book History of Japanese Art written by Penelope E. Mason and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese art, like so many expressions of Japanese culture, is fascinatingly rich in its contrasts and paradoxes. Since the country opened its doors to the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century. Japanese art and culture have enjoyed an immense popularity in the West. When in 1993 renowned scholar Penelope Mason wrote the the first edition of History of Japanese Art, it was the first such volume in thirty yearsto chart a detailed overview of the subject. It remains the only comprehensive survey of its kind in English. This second edition ties together more closely the development of all the media within a well-articulated historical and social context. New to the Second Edition Extended coverage of Japanese art beyond 1945 New discoveries both in archeology and scholarship New material on calligraphy, ceramics, lacquerware, metalware, and textiles An extended glossary A comprehensively updated bibliography 94 new illustrations