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A comprehensive overview of Japanese art between 1865 and 1915. The Splendour of Modernity presents a comprehensive overview of Japanese art from 1865 to 1915, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, prints, ceramics, lacquerware, textiles, basketry, metalwork, and cloisonné. It challenges misconceptions that foreign influence diluted the supposed authenticity of Japanese art during this era. Instead, Rosina Buckland highlights the development of distinctively Japanese artistic practices in response to new stimuli from overseas. The book also dispels assumptions of artistic decline in the early Meiji era by examining the period from 1865 to 1885. Meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated, this captivating book showcases the resilience, innovation, and enduring beauty of Japanese art during a transformative period marked by Japan's global engagement and artistic evolution.

Japanese anime plays a major role in modern popular visual culture and aesthetics, yet this is the first study which sets out to put today's anime in historical context by tracking the visual links between Edo- and Meiji- period painters and the post-war period animation and manga series 'Gegegeno Kitaro' by Mizuki Shigeru.

Recasts the commonly dismissed colonial project pursued in Hokkaido during the Meiji era (1868-1912) as a major force in the production of modern Japan's national identity, imperial ideology, and empire.

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.

As described in several recent studies, the appropriation of the concept “religion 宗教” in modern Japan made “Buddhism 仏教” enter a transformation process that led, ultimately, to the reimagining of its very content; according to historian of religions Isomae Junichi, one of these elements was, for instance, an emphasis on “belief” to the detriment of “practice”. However, in terms of Buddhism’s reframing into the category of “religion”, we should also pay attention to the construction of the idea of “superstition 迷信”, which appears during this time as a concept relative to “belief” or “faith”. Often considered the epitome of this belief-centered version of the dharma, the so-called New Buddhism movement (shinbukkyō undō 新仏教運動) that occurred in the turn of the 20th century played a fundamental role in establishing the concept of “superstition”. This paper focuses on Sakaino Kōyō (境野黄洋 1871–1933), a pioneer of Chinese Buddhist studies in modern Japan and one of the main leaders of the movement. In order to explore the intellectual context that gave birth to such reformist efforts, I explore his ideas during the later 1890s, a period in which he was dedicated to differentiating “belief” from “superstition”. During this time, he emphasized the eradication of “superstition”, arguing that it constituted an unsound element both socially and intellectually. Sakaino offered the idea of “poetical Buddhism” (shiteki bukkyō 詩的仏教), a method for interpreting scripture in general, and segments thereof contemporarily regarded as “superstitious” specifically. This paper situates Sakaino’s contributions to Buddhist reform—analyzed through historical and hermeneutical methods and influenced by liberal Christian theology—within the global discourse on religion and science, while critically examining how his reinterpretations navigated tensions between modern rationality and the preservation of Buddhist truth in Meiji Japan.

This book explores how Japanese writers in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan used narratives of romantic and familial love in order to traverse the dangerous currents of empire.

New Times in Modern Japanconcerns the transformation of time--the reckoning of time--during Japan's Meiji period, specifically from around 1870 to 1900. Time literally changed as the archipelago synchronized with the Western imperialists' reckoning of time. The solar calendar and clock became standard timekeeping devices, and society adapted to the abstractions inherent in modern notions of time. This set off a cascade of changes that completely reconfigured how humans interacted with each other and with their environment--a process whose analysis carries implications for other non-Western societies as well. By examining topics ranging from geology, ghosts, childhood, art history, and architecture to nature as a whole, Stefan Tanaka explores how changing conceptions of time destabilized inherited knowledge and practices and ultimately facilitated the reconfiguration of the archipelago's heterogeneous communities into the liberal-capitalist nation-state, Japan. However, this revolutionary transformation--where, in the words of Lewis Mumford, \"the clock, not the steam engine,\" is the key mechanism of the industrial age--has received little more than a footnote in the history of Japan. This book's innovative focus on time not only shifts attention away from debates about the failure (or success) of \"modernization\" toward how individuals interact with the overlay of abstract concepts upon their lives; it also illuminates the roles of history as discourse and as practice in this reconfiguration of society. In doing so, it will influence discussions about modernity well beyond the borders of Japan.

The modernization of leisure in Japan proceeded altogether independently from the modernization of labor. Through the first four decades of the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese learned of Western-style leisure, and summer vacationing particularly, from various sources. These included leisure’s applications for public health maintenance and resident Westerners’ active development of proto-resorts throughout the Japanese countryside. The propagation of vacationing and leisure travel faced a number of ideological obstacles, however, and from the mid-Meiji years was variously contested within public discourse. This article uses the resort region of Hakone as a case study to demonstrate the process by which Western-style leisure practices crystalized in Japan. It then discusses how such practices were received and debated within Japanese print media.

This article shows how inaccurate the category of nativism—derived from American historiography—is when applied to the Japanese context prevailing when National Learning (Kokugaku) was flourishing. It argues that violence is not a distinctive feature of Kokugaku and suggests that the association between nativism and Kokugaku in Japanese studies is flawed. This is further complicated by examining instances of physical violence directed at foreigners and Japanese alike, which surged during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, when the slogan “revere the emperor and expel the barbarian” (sonnō-jō’i) resulted in extreme violence and assassinations. Victims of such attacks were not limited to Westerners, since Katsu Kaishū was almost killed by Sakamoto Ryōma. While significant portions of the Japanese elite began to advocate opening the country (kaikoku), many among them remained divided in their attitude toward Western learning and its necessity. This leads to the conclusion that Kokugaku was not an example of Tokugawa nativism, let alone the example of Tokugawa nativism, and that it would be better to develop a hybrid category of nativism applicable to that era. Such category results from combining Ralph Linton’s concept of nativism with John Higham’s characterization of nativism as marked by extreme hostility.

This article examines the transformation of Sagi, the third school of the traditional comedic performing art kyōgen, from a recognized professional form in the Edo era (1600–1868) to a community-based practice during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Through field and archival research, I will consider the challenges Sagi kyōgen faces operating outside the professional model of the institutionalized iemoto (school grandmaster) system and demonstrate how regionalization plays a key role in interpreting Sagi kyōgen’s unique contemporary practice. Alex Rogals is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, completing his dissertation focused on Sagi kyōgen history and its postprofessional life in Yamaguchi and on Sado Island. He is deeply interested in exploring the role art plays in supporting, representing, and creating communities.