The Arts of Japan

The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan

Negotiating the Transition to Modernity

Zohar, Ayelet · Miller, Alison J.Routledge · 2023

Details

Title
The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan
Subtitle
Negotiating the Transition to Modernity
Publication Date
2023
Language
English
Media
Print
Page Count
216
Format
Paperback
ISBN 13
978-0367631246
Editors
Zohar, Ayelet
Miller, Alison J.
Publisher
Routledge
Contributors
Benesch, Oleg
Bogdanova-Kummer, Eugenia
Hayashi, Michio
Lucken, Michael
Redfern, Mary
Rode, Katharina
Schulz, Evelyn
Wu, Chinghsin
Yamanashi, Emiko

Blurb

This volume examines the visual culture of Japan’s transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan’s transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. The book presents case studies of creative transformation demonstrating how new concepts and methods were perceived and altered to match views and theories prevalent in Meiji Japan, and by what means different practitioners negotiated between their existing skills and the knowledge generated from incoming ideas to create innovative modes of practice and representation that reflected the specificity of modern Japanese artistic circumstances.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Japanese studies, Asian studies, and Japanese history, as well as those who use approaches and methods related to globalization, cross-cultural studies, transcultural exchange, and interdisciplinary studies.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: In-Between Temporality and Spatiality: Visual Convergences and Meiji Hybridity
  • 1. Between Kanji and Hiragana: An Allegorical Reading of the Katakana (Non-) Space 
    Hayashi, Michio
  • 2. Modernization as Rejection of Westernization: The Case of Japanese Calligraphy
    Bogdanova-Kummer, Eugenia
  • 3. Classical Greece in Japan and Why It Matters: A Postcolonial Perspective
    Lucken, Michael
  • 4. Medievalism, Modernity, and Militarism in Imperial Japan
    Benesch, Oleg
  • 5. Dinner Table Negotiations: Tableware and the presentation of Japan at the Enryōkan
    Redfern, Mary
  • 6. Imaging Industry: Woodblock Prints, Factory Women, and Sericulture in Meiji Japan
    Miller, Alison J.
  • 7. Negotiating Realism: Kawabata Gyokushō’s Strive for Modern Japanese Painting
    Rode, Katharina
  • 8. Mural Paintings in late 19th and early 20th century Western-style Public Buildings in Japan
    Yamanashi, Emiko
  • 9. Framing Scenery: A Potential History of Landscape Photography in Colonial Hokkaidō
    Zohar, Ayelet
  • 10. Colors of Empire: Watercolor in Meiji Japan
    Wu, Chinghsin
  • 11. Exploring Tokyo’s Hidden Spaces in Nagai Kafū’s Hiyorigeta (Fair-Weather Clogs, 1914) with Charles Baudelaire’s Flâneur and Walter Benjamin’s Porosity
    Schulz, Evelyn