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\"The city of Kyoto has undergone radical shifts in its significance as a political and cultural centre, as a hub of the national bureaucracy, as a symbolic and religious centre, and as a site for the production and display of art. However, the field of Japanese history and culture lacks a book which considers Kyoto on its own terms as a historic city with a changing identity. Examining cultural production in the city of Kyoto in two periods of political transition, this book promises to be a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of Kyoto's history and culture. Its chapters focus on two centuries in Kyoto's history in which the old capital was politically marginalised: the seventeenth century, when the centre of power shifted from the old imperial capital to the new warriors' capital of Edo; and the nineteenth century, when the imperial court itself was moved to the new modern centre of Tokyo. The contributors argue that in both periods the response of Kyoto elites--emperors, courtiers, tea masters, municipal leaders, monks, and merchants--was artistic production and cultural revival. As an artistic, cultural and historical study of Japan's most important historic city, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese history, Asian history, the Meiji and Edo periods, art history, visual culture and cultural history\"--Provided by publisher.

The association of art with Japanese national identity originated with the creation of the museum in the modern era. The formation of the Imperial Museums in the second half of the nineteenth century was in direct response to the burgeoning museum and exhibition activities in the Western world, and the Japanese museums grew alongside the nation's stature in the Eurocentric world arena, serving as an index of the emergent nation-state's rapid ascension in the global power structure. The years covered by this dissertation, 1872–1909, mark the formative period of the Imperial Museums (renamed the Imperial Household Museums in 1900). I examine the representation of Japan through the museums during this time as a process of self definition heavily informed by a dominant foreign (that is, Western) lens. Central to the examination are the visual modes of presentation—with an emphasis on the architecture—that were crucial to the construction of a Japanese national image as equal to, yet unique from, Western civilization. While the temporal scope of this study roughly spans the length of the reign of Emperor Meiji (1868–1912), the specific dates mark a period that begins with the coining of the neologism “art” ( bijutsu) in 1872, and ends with the opening of the nation's first permanent “art museum” (bijutsukan) in 1909. During the approximate four decades under consideration, the Meiji government erected four structures in three major cities—Tokyo, Nara, and Kyoto—to form the network of the Imperial Museums. An examination of the four main buildings of the Imperial Museums provides both a chronological overview and ideological register of this institution. Both at the fair and the museum, European and American (pre)conceptions of non-Western nations in general, and of Japan in particular, fundamentally affected the method and structure of Japan's definition of its artistic heritage. The creation of the category of art in the late nineteenth century can therefore be placed in the broader context of Meiji Japan's difficult and paradoxical search for a new yet historically-grounded identity. By analyzing the original circumstances and terms of the Japanese engagement of contemporary Western exhibition practices, this study locates the historical roots of a cross-cultural dialogue between Japan and the West that extends to the present day.