Exquisite depictions of romantically idealized landscapes from woodcut master's superb Fifty-three Stages on the Tokaido. Reproduced from the Collection of the Elvehjem Museum of Art. Includes The Bridge on the Toyo River, The Ferryboat at Rokugo, The Junction of the Pilgrims' Road and Mt. Fuji in the Morning from Hara.
From the striking ceramics of the Jomon period to the serene ink landscapes of the Muromachi era and beyond, this elegant book will elucidate and enhance your appreciation of every aspect of Japan's rich artistic culture. Packed with historical information, cultural context, and wonderful examples, Stephen Adiss and Audry Seo present a comprehensive guide to interacting with the art of Japan. From technical details to broad characteristics and speculative interpretations, the authors offer up a variety of considerations to keep in mind when looking at Japanese art. A captivating lesson in detail, focus, and aesthetics, How to Look at Japanese Art makes for a wonderful addition to any art-lover's collection. Readers interested in related titles from Stephen Addiss or Audrey Yoshiko Seo will also want to see: Art of Zen (ISBN: 9781635610741).
For the first time in an English language edition published outside Japan, all 55 prints of Hiroshige’s ‘Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido’ are reproduced in full colour, supporting a detailed and intriguing account of the author's rediscovery on foot of the historic 303-mile road from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto. Remarkably, the Old Tokaido can still be found in many locations and photographs of the modern parallel the old.
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.
2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Basho's Haiku offers the most comprehensive translation yet of the poetry of Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), who is credited with perfecting and popularizing the haiku form of poetry. One of the most widely read Japanese writers, both within his own country and worldwide, Bashō is especially beloved by those who appreciate nature and those who practice Zen Buddhism. Born into the samurai class, Bashō rejected that world after the death of his master and became a wandering poet and teacher. During his travels across Japan, he became a lay Zen monk and studied history and classical poetry. His poems contained a mystical quality and expressed universal themes through simple images from the natural world. David Landis Barnhill's brilliant book strives for literal translations of Bashō's work, arranged chronologically in order to show Bashō's development as a writer. Avoiding wordy and explanatory translations, Barnhill captures the brevity and vitality of the original Japanese, letting the images suggest the depth of meaning involved. Barnhill also presents an overview of haiku poetry and analyzes the significance of nature in this literary form, while suggesting the importance of Bashō to contemporary American literature and environmental thought.
Illustrated with color and black-and-white images of the mountain and its associated religious practices, H. Byron Earhart's study utilizes his decades of fieldwork—including climbing Fuji with three pilgrimage groups—and his research into Japanese and Western sources to offer a comprehensive overview of the evolving imagery of Mount Fuji from ancient times to the present day. Included in the book is a link to his twenty-eight minute streaming video documentary of Fuji pilgrimage and practice, Fuji: Sacred Mountain of Japan. Beginning with early reflections on the beauty and power associated with the mountain in medieval Japanese literature, Earhart examines how these qualities fostered spiritual practices such as Shugendo, which established rituals and a temple complex at the mountain as a portal to an ascetic otherworld. As a focus of worship, the mountain became a source of spiritual insight, rebirth, and prophecy through the practitioners Kakugyo and Jikigyo, whose teachings led to social movements such as Fujido (the way of Fuji) and to a variety of pilgrimage confraternities making images and replicas of the mountain for use in local rituals. Earhart shows how the seventeenth-century commodification of Mount Fuji inspired powerful interpretive renderings of the "peerless" mountain of Japan, such as those of the nineteenth-century print masters Hiroshige and Hokusai, which were largely responsible for creating the international reputation of Mount Fuji. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, images of Fuji served as an expression of a unique and superior Japanese culture. With its distinctive shape firmly embedded in Japanese culture but its ethical, ritual, and spiritual associations made malleable over time, Mount Fuji came to symbolize ultranationalistic ambitions in the 1930s and early 1940s, peacetime democracy as early as 1946, and a host of artistic, naturalistic, and commercial causes, even the exotic and erotic, in the decades since.
In the years following Japan's long period of self-imposed isolation from the world, Japan developed a new relationship with the West, and especially with Britain, where relations grew to be particularly close. The Japanese, embarrassed by their perceived comparative backwardness, looked to the West to learn modern industrial techniques, including the design and engineering skills which underpinned them. At the same time, taking great pride in their own culture, they exhibited and sold high quality products of traditional Japanese craftsmanship in the West, stimulating a thirst for, and appreciation of, Japanese arts and crafts. This book examines the two-way bridge-building cultural exchange which took place between Japan and Britain in the years after 1859 and into the early years of the twentieth century. Topics covered include architecture, industrial design, prints, painting and photographs, together with a consideration of Japanese government policy, the Japan-Britain Exhibition of 1910, and commercial spin-offs. In addition, there are case studies of key individuals who were particularly influential in fostering British-Japanese cultural bridges in this period.
Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” as it is commonly known today, is arguably one of Japan’s most successful exports, its commanding cresting profile instantly recognizable no matter how different its representations in media and style. In this richly illustrated and highly original study, Christine Guth examines the iconic wave from its first publication in 1831 through the remarkable range of its articulations, arguing that it has been a site where the tensions, contradictions, and, especially, the productive creativities of the local and the global have been negotiated and expressed. She follows the wave’s trajectory across geographies, linking its movements with larger political, economic, technological, and sociocultural developments. Adopting a case study approach, Guth explores issues that map the social life of the iconic wave across time and place, from the initial reception of the woodblock print in Japan, to the image’s adaptations as part of “international nationalism,” its place in American perceptions of Japan, its commercial adoption for lifestyle branding, and finally to its identification as a tsunami, bringing not culture but disaster in its wake. Wide ranging in scope yet grounded in close readings of disparate iterations of the wave, multidisciplinary and theoretically informed in its approach, Hokusai’s Great Wave will change both how we look at this global icon and the way we study the circulation of Japanese prints. This accessible and engagingly written work moves beyond the standard hagiographical approach to recognize, as categories of analysis, historical and geographic contingency as well as visual and technical brilliance. It is a book that will interest students of Japan and its culture and more generally those seeking fresh perspectives on the dynamics of cultural globalization.