HART2130: Arts of Japan

This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of the influences that have shaped modern-day Japan. Spanning one and a half centuries from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, this volume covers topics such as technology, food, nationalism and rise of anime and manga in the visual arts. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture traces the cultural transformation that took place over the course of the twentieth century, and paints a picture of a nation rich in cultural diversity. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars in the field, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture is an authoritative introduction to this subject.

More than ever before, scholars recognize that nearly every form of religion or spirituality has a vital connection with art. World religions, from Hinduism to The Eastern Orthodox Church, have a long and rich relationship with an array of artistic traditions. In recent decades, the academicstudy of religion and the arts has burgeoned. Yet a broad and serious consideration of the topic has yet to reach readers. The first comprehensive book of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts provides expert guidance to artistry and aesthetic theory in religion.Edited by Frank Burch Brown, the Handbook brings together an international team of leading scholars to present an interdisciplinary volume of nearly forty original essays. Readers are presented the main topics, issues, methods, and resources for the study of religious and theological aesthetics. Theessays give light to the dynamic interaction of world religions and art making. The volume ranges from antiquity to present day to examine idolatry, aesthetics in liturgy, and the role of art in popular religion.Ranging from music and poetry to architecture and film, the Handbook crosses the boundaries of different faiths and art forms to survey established and pioneering voices within the field. An authoritative text for scholars and students, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts will remain aninvaluable resource for years to come.

Magnificent art and architecture created for the emperor with the financial support of powerful warlords at the beginning of Japan's early modern era (1580s-1680s) testify to the continued cultural and ideological significance of the imperial family. Works created in this context are discussed in this groundbreaking study, with over 100 illustrations in color.

The main theme of this book is that art and an aesthetic sense of beauty is central to all aspects of Japanese life and that this was an important aspect of Japanese tradition and Japanese international success. The book covers such topics as natural beauty, gardens and flowers, architecture, applied art, manners and customs and many more areas of the Japanese.

A timeless classic that points to tea as Asia's unique power to influence the world.

A Bowl for a Coin is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant's introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the herb was processed into a palatable beverage, ultimately resulting in the wide variety of teas we enjoy today. Along the way, he traces in fascinating detail the shift in tea's status from exotic gift item from China, tied to Heian (794-1185) court ritual and medicinal uses, to tax and commodity for exchange in the 1350s, to its complete nativization in Edo (1603-1868) art and literature and its eventual place on the table of every Japanese household. Farris maintains that the increasing sophistication of Japanese agriculture after 1350 is exemplified by tea farming, which became so advanced that Meiji (1868-1912) entrepreneurs were able to export significant amounts of Japanese tea to Euro-American markets. This in turn provided the much-needed foreign capital necessary to help secure Japan a place among the world's industrialized nations. Tea also had a hand in initiating Japan's "industrious revolution": From 1400, tea was being drunk in larger quantities by commoners as well as elites, and the stimulating, habit-forming beverage made it possible for laborers to apply handicraft skills in a meticulous, efficient, and prolonged manner. In addition to aiding in the protoindustrialization of Japan by 1800, tea had by that time become a central commodity in the formation of a burgeoning consumer society. The demand-pull of tea consumption necessitated even greater production into the postwar period--and this despite challenges posed to the industry by consumers' growing taste for coffee. A Bowl for a Coin makes a convincing case for how tea--an age-old drink that continues to adapt itself to changing tastes in Japan and the world--can serve as a broad lens through which to view the development of Japanese society over many centuries.

According to the contributors to this volume, the relationship of Buddhism and the arts in Japan is less the rendering of Buddhist philosophical ideas through artistic imagery than it is the development of concepts and expressions in a virtually inseparable unity. By challenging those who consider religion to be the primary phenomenon and art the secondary arena for the apprehension of religious meanings, these essays reveal the collapse of other dichotomies as well. Touching on works produced at every social level, they explore a fascinating set of connections within Japanese culture and move to re-envision such usual distinctions as religion and art, sacred and secular, Buddhism and Shinto, theory and substance, elite and popular, and even audience and artist. The essays range from visual and literary hagiographies to No drama, to Sermon-Ballads, to a painting of the Nirvana of Vegetables. The contributors to the volume are James H. Foard, Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, Frank Hoff, Laura S. Kaufman, William R. LaFleur, Susan Matisoff, Barbara Ruch, Yoshiaki Shimizu, and Royall Tyler. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Momoyama period of Japanese art history, at the turn of the 16th century, is perhaps best known to the West through the resplendent paintings of the Kano masters and their fellow artists. Yet this same period offers such a variety of architectural pleasures that, in at least one of its many facets, it makes an appeal to every taste. It ranges from the largest and most imposing castles to the smallest and most tastefully designed teahouses. Paintings and gardens are an integral part of it, as they are in all Japanese architecture, and here, also, the range extends from the gorgeous and elaborate to the utmost in simplicity and restraint. It is with this exuberant period in Japanese history that the present book is concerned. Its purpose is to present, against a background of colorful history, the architectural achievements of an elegant age. In the first part of this book, Mr. Kirby discusses and illustrates the principal forms of castle, shoin, and sukiya architecture that he considers to the most important contributions of the Momoyama period. The second part presents existing examples of Momoyama structures together with a brief section on developments of less importance in religious architecture and construction of an essentially engineering nature. All of these are pictured in a generous selection of excellent photographs accompanied by plans and elevations for a number of the structures discussed.

"Gardens of the Gods" reveals the symbolic language of garden design, exploring the gardens of China, with their moon gates and immortal rocks, the Zen gardens of Japan, the paradise gardens of Islam, those of Renaissance Italy with their richly mythological imagery, the landscaped parks of England, the gardens of New Harmony in the US and some striking, modern examples of symbolic gardens, including the Tarot Garden of the sculptress Niki de Saint Phalle in Italy. This illustrated book also includes a chapter with suggestions for creating a "garden of meaning" and a selected catalogue of plants with symbolic or mythological associations. Based on ten years of research, travel and curiostiy, this text is also the result of a personal quest - to reveal the mystical codes written in the astonishing worlds of gardens worldwide.

The classic work on Japanese beauty and values as seen in Japanese art and culture.
Contents; Introduction 1; The Range of Ideals 9; The Primitive Art of Japan 17; Confucianism-Northern China 23; Laoism and Taoism-Southern China 33; Buddhism and Indian Art 43; The Asuka Period (550-700 A.D.) 55; The Nara Period (700-800 A.D.) 69; The Heian Period (800-900 A.D.) 79; The Fujiwara Period (900-1200 A.D.) 87; The Kamakura Period (1200-1400 A.D.) 95; Ashikaga Period (1400-1600 A.D.) 101; Toyotomi and Early Tokugawa Period(1600-1700 A.D.) 113; Later Tokugawa Period (1700-1850 A.D.) 119; The Meiji Period (1850 to the present day) - 125; The Vista - 141 Chronology of Asian Art

"The best book on Japanese architecture ever produced by a Westerner." —The American Architect Japanese architecture is undoubtedly less well known and less appreciated than the architecture of any other civilized nation. Not only this, but it is almost universally misjudged, and while the world has by degrees come to know and admire the pictorial and industrial arts of Japan, her architecture, which is the rot and vehicle of all other modes of art, is passed over with a casual reference to its fantastic quality or a patronizing tribute to the excellence of some of its carved decoration. Written at a time when Japanese art was only beginning to be appreciated in the West, Impressions of Japanese Architecture conveys a sense of discovery and enthusiasm that modern readers will find as interesting and infectious as the book's first readers did. Long considered a classic, this new edition contains a foreword by acclaimed contemporary architect and author, Mira Locher. Originally published about one hundred years ago, Impressions of Japanese Architecture is still of immense value to anyone wishing for a better understanding of Japanese architecture, art and culture.

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media-from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

This is a revision of the long successful, short, illustrated cultural history of Japan, from its beginnings about 3000 BC to the present day, first published in 1970 and continuously in use over several editions in colleges and universities nationwide. It is designed as a straightforward, detail-rich portrait of a nation not well understood in the West. The position of Japan on the international scene has changed markedly since the current edition was published in 1994: Japan had been a star of postwar industrial production and methods; over the past few years, it has encountered serious trouble with market forces; its financial practices, particularly the tacit collaboration between powerful factions in government and industry, has come under question and even attack.; In a traditionally extremely conservative country, social changes and departure from tradition have begun to have a significant presence. The book is distinctive in its incorporation of cultural elements, at their high point, into the unfolding story of political events. Rather than just following the political and military course of history, treating them separately from the cultural side, Morton presents an integrated view, showing the parallel development of cultural and political events, as well as their influence on each other. For example, the sweeping effect of Chinese culture on Japanese is treated as an organic whole, exploring its results in government, social life, religion and art. The book also casts fascinating sidelights on significant personalities, works of literature and historic events. Balanced treatment is key; each period in the past is given equal treatment, with somewhat more emphasis on contemporary history and recent developments.

This Japanese design book presents the arts, aesthetics and culture of Japan with over 160 stunning color photos and extensive historical and cultural commentary . The Japanese sensibility often possesses an intuitive, emotional appeal, whether it's a silk kimono, a carefully raked garden path, an architectural marvel, a teapot, or a contemporary work of art. This allure has come to permeate the entire culture of Japan—it is manifest in the most mundane utensil and snack food packaging, as well as in Japanese architecture and fine art. In Japanese Design, Asian art expert and author Patricia J. Graham explains how Japanese aesthetics based in fine craftsmanship and simplicity developed. Her unusual, full-color presentation reveals this design aesthetic in an absorbing way. Focusing on ten elements of Japanese design, Graham explores how visual qualities, the cultural parameters and the Japanese religious traditions of Buddhism and Shinto have impacted the appearance of its arts. Japanese Design is a handbook for the millions of us who have felt the special allure of Japanese art, culture and crafts. Art and design fans and professionals have been clamoring for this—a book that fills the need for an intelligent, culture-rich overview of what Japanese design is and means.

Filled with gorgeous photographs, this book explains the theory, history, and intricacies of Japanese gardening. The creation of a Japanese garden combines respect for nature with adherence to simple principles of aesthetics and structure. In Japanese Garden Design, landscape architect Marc Peter Keane presents the history and development of the classical metaphors that underlie all Japanese gardens. Keane describes the influences of Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist principles that have linked poetry and philosophy to the tangible metaphor of the garden in Japanese culture. Creative inspiration is found in the prehistoric origin of Japanese concepts of nature; the gardens of Heian aristocrats; the world-renowned Zen garden, or rock garden; the tea garden; courtyard garden; and stroll garden. Detailed explanations of basic design concepts identify and interpret the symbolism of various garden forms and demonstrate these principles in use today in Japanese landscape architecture.

The first broad study of Japanese mandalas to appear in a Western language, this volume interprets mandalas as sanctified realms where identification between the human and the sacred occurs. The author investigates eighth- to seventeenth-century paintings from three traditions: Esoteric Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the kami-worshipping (Shinto) tradition. It is generally recognized that many of these mandalas are connected with texts and images from India and the Himalayas. A pioneering theme of this study is that, in addition to the South Asian connections, certain paradigmatic Japanese mandalas reflect pre-Buddhist Chinese concepts, including geographical concepts. In convincing and lucid prose, ten Grotenhuis chronicles an intermingling of visual, doctrinal, ritual, and literary elements in these mandalas that has come to be seen as characteristic of the Japanese religious tradition as a whole. This beautifully illustrated work begins in the first millennium B.C.E. in China with an introduction to the Book of Documents and ends in present-day Japan at the sacred site of Kumano. Ten Grotenhuis focuses on the Diamond and Womb World mandalas of Esoteric Buddhist tradition, on the Taima mandala and other related mandalas from the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, and on mandalas associated with the kami-worshipping sites of Kasuga and Kumano. She identifies specific sacred places in Japan with sacred places in India and with Buddhist cosmic diagrams. Through these identifications, the realm of the buddhas is identified with the realms of the kami and of human beings, and Japanese geographical areas are identified with Buddhist sacred geography. Explaining why certain fundamental Japanese mandalas look the way they do and how certain visual forms came to embody the sacred, ten Grotenhuis presents works that show a complex mixture of Indian Buddhist elements, pre-Buddhist Chinese elements, Chinese Buddhist elements, and indigenous Japanese elements.

From its origins as a distinct set of ritualised practices in the sixteenth century to its international expansion in the twentieth, tea culture has had a major impact on artistic production, connoisseurship, etiquette, food, design and more recently, on notions of Japaneseness. The authors dispel the myths around the development of tea practice, dispute the fiction of the dominance of aesthetics over politics in tea, and demonstrate that writing history has always been an integral part of tea culture.

Japanese woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, are the most recognizable Japanese art form. Their massive popularity has spread from Japan to be embraced by a worldwide audience. Covering the period from the beginning of the Japanese woodblock print in the 1680s until the year 1900, Japanese Woodblock Prints provides a detailed survey of all the famous ukiyo-e artists, along with over 500 full color prints. Unlike previous examinations of this art form, Japanese Woodblock Prints includes detailed histories of the publishers of woodblock prints—who were often the driving force determining which prints, and therefore which artists, would make it into mass circulation for a chance at critical and popular success. Invaluable as a guide for ukiyo-e enthusiasts looking for detailed information about their favorite Japanese woodblock print artists and prints, it is also an ideal introduction for newcomers to the world of the woodblock print. This lavishly illustrated book will be a valued addition to the libraries of scholars, as well as the general art enthusiast.

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."

Shodo, or Japanese brush calligraphy, is a traditional art that is much-loved in Japan. In Shodo, respected Japanese master calligrapher Shozo Sato teaches this art form through the power and wisdom of Zen poetry. Designed for all learners, from beginner to advanced, Shodo will inspire all with the intersection of Japanese aesthetics and Zen Buddhist thought found within its pages. Shodo is practiced regularly by all students of Zen Buddhism in Japan, since this art form is thought to be one of the key disciplines in fostering the focused, meditative state of mind so essential to Zen. In this book, Shozo Sato guides beginning and advanced shodo students alike to a deeper understanding of this unique brush painting art form. The basic supplies and fundamental brushstroke skills are clearly laid out, and 30 selected zengo or single-line Zen koan aphorisms are included. Examples of classic shodo masterwork by a skilled Zen monk or master calligrapher appear throughout, along with a set of guided step-by-step instructions showing you how to paint the Zen koan in a number of styles (Kaisho, Gyosho, Sosho). Discover the quiet joy and introspection Japanese calligraphy can bring with Shodo.

The poetry of the Heian court of Japan has typically been linked with the emergence of a distinct Japanese language and culture. This concept of a linguistically homogeneous and ethnically pure "Japaneseness" has been integral to the construction of a modern Japanese nation, especially during periods of western colonial expansion and cultural encroachment. But Thomas LaMarre argues in Uncovering Heian Japan that this need for a cultural unity--a singular Japanese identity--has resulted in an overemphasis of a relatively minor aspect of Heian poetry, obscuring not only its other significant elements but also the porousness of Heian society and the politics of poetic expression. Combining a pathbreaking visual analysis of the calligraphy with which this poetry was transcribed, a more traditional textual analysis, and a review of the politics of the period, LaMarre presents a dramatically new view of Heian poetry and culture. He challenges the assumption of a cohesive "national imagination," seeing instead an early Japan that is ethnically diverse, territorially porous, and indifferent to linguistic boundaries. Working through the problems posed by institutionalized notions of nationalism, nativism, and modernism, LaMarre rethinks the theories of scholars such as Suzuki Hideo, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Komatsu Shigemi, in conjunction with theorists such as Derrida, Karatani, Foucault, and Deleuze. Contesting the notion that speech is central to the formation of community, Uncovering Heian Japan focuses instead on the potential centrality of the more figural operations of poetic practice. Specialists in Japanese history and culture as well as scholars working in other areas of cultural criticism will find that this book enriches their understanding of an early Japan that has exerted so much influence on later concepts of what it means to be Japanese.

The tea ceremony and the martial arts are intimately linked in the popular and historical imagination with Zen Buddhism, and Japanese culture. They are commonly interpreted as religio-aesthetic pursuits which express core spiritual values through bodily gesture and the creation of highly valued objects. Ideally, the experience of practising the Zen arts culminates in enlightenment. This book challenges that long-held view and proposes that the Zen arts should be understood as part of a literary and visual history of representing Japanese culture through the arts. Cox argues that these texts and images emerged fully as systems for representing the arts during the modern period, produced within Japan as a form of cultural nationalism and outside Japan as part of an orientalist discourse. Practitioners' experiences are in fact rarely referred to in terms of Zen or art, but instead are spatially and socially grounded. Combining anthropological description with historical criticism, Cox shows that the Zen arts are best understood in terms of a dynamic relationship between an aesthetic discourse on art and culture and the social and embodied experiences of those who participate in them.

Explores Japanese literary Zen through the landscape arts of poetry, prose, painting, and gardens expressed in the writings of Japan's Five Mountain monks.

1. Jōmon, Yayoi, Kofun jidai, Nihon bijutsu sōseiki -- 2. Asuka, Nara jidai, I. Hōryūji to Nara no jiin -- 3. Nara jidai. II. Tōdaiji, Shōsōin to Kōfukuji -- 4. Heian jidai. I, Mikkyō jiin kara Byōdōin e -- 5. Heian jidai. II, Ōchō emaki to kizoku no itonami -- 6. Tēma-kan. 1, Higashi Ajia no naka no Nihon bijutsu -- 7. Kamakura, Nanbokuchō jidai. I, Unkei, Kaikei to chūsei jiin -- 8. Kamakura, Nanbokuchō jidai. II, Chūsei emaki to shōzōga -- 9. Muromachi jidai, suibokuga to yamatoe -- 10. Momoyama jidai, ōgon to wabi -- 11. Tēma-kan. 2, Shinkō to bijutsu -- 12. Edo jidai. I, Kanō-ha to yūrakuzu -- 13. Edo jidai. II, Sōtatsu, Kōrin to Katsura Rikyū -- 14. Edo jidai, III, Jakuchū, Ōkyo, miyako no kisō -- 15. Edo jidai, IV, Ukiyoe to Edo no bijutsu -- 16. Bakumatsu kara Meiji jidai zenki, gekidōki no bijutsu -- 17. Meiji jidai kōki--Taishō jidai, zen'ei to modan -- 18. Senzen, senchū, Sensō to bijutsu -- 19. Sengo--1995, kakuchōsuru sengo bijutsu -- 20. 1996--genzai, Nihon bijutsu no genzai, mirai.
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The Ainu, a seafaring people of northern Japan and formerly Sakhalin and Kuril Islands, share many cultural traits with other North Pacific peoples. This richly illustrated, encyclopedic book complementing a 1999 exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, documents Ainu archaeology, ethnology, history, and modern life, presenting their traditional artifacts, clothing, art, and belief systems in the past and today.

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. Yet despite this cultural wealth, nothing has appeared in English on the subject in over thirty years. Sarah Strong's Ainu Spirits Singing breaks this decades-long silence with a nuanced study and English translation of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri's collection belong to the genre known as kamui yukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena)--all regarded as spiritual beings (kamui) within the animate Ainu world--assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. The first-person speakers include imposing animals such as the revered orca, the Hokkaido wolf, and Blakiston's fish owl, as well as the more "humble" Hokkaido brown frog, snowshoe hare, and pearl mussel. Each has its own story and own signature refrain. Strong provides readers with an intimate and perceptive view of this extraordinary text. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, she brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. The result is a rich fusion of knowledge that allows the reader to feel at home within the animistic frame of reference of the narratives. Strong's study also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments' policies of assimilation. Chiri's receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signalled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of "Ainu studies." Mired in a colonial mindset of abject academic practices, Ainu Studies was an umbrella term for an approach that claimed scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu, who became its research objects. As a result of this legacy, a latent sense of suspicion still hangs over the purposes and intentions of non-Ainu researchers. This major new volume seeks to re-address the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. Placing Ainu firmly into current debates over Indigeneity, Beyond Ainu Studies provides a broad yet critical overview of the history and current status of Ainu research. With chapters from scholars as well as Ainu activists and artists, it addresses a range of topics including history, ethnography, linguistics, tourism, legal mobilization, hunter-gatherer studies, the Ainu diaspora, gender, and clothwork. In its ambition to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in Indigenous studies as well as in anthropology and Asian studies. Contributors: Misa Adele Honde, David L. Howell, Mark J. Hudson, Deriha Kōji, ann-elise lewallen, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Hans Dieter Ölschleger, Kirsten Refsing, Georgina Stevens, Sunazawa Kayo, Tsuda Nobuko, Uzawa Kanako, Mark K. Watson, Yūki Kōji.

This five volume set contains a number of texts on Ainu religious beliefs as seen through the eyes of foreign visitors to Hokkaido. Other texts included are translations or re-tellings of Ainu folk tales and other orally transmitted literature, which - to the extent that they are accurately rendered - present Ainu beliefs in the words of the Ainu themselves. The texts, over thirty in total, were published between 1875 and 1950 by Western European visitors to, and scholars in, Japan. Among the authors are John Batchelor (with eight separate texts), Basil Hall Chamberlain and Neil Gordon Munro. This is an invaluable anthology of original sources, as many earlier works on the Ainu were published in limited quantity and in obscure places, and they are often hard to trace for a researcher today. This collection of early Western works will be of immense help to scholars studying the Ainu, and will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, religion, oral traditions, folklore, and narrative.

In present-day Japan, Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization in which they can move between "being Ainu" through their natal and affinal relationships and actively "becoming Ainu" through their craftwork. They craft these spaces despite the specter of loss that haunts the efforts of former colonial subjects, like Ainu, to reconnect with their pasts. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles. She examines the connections between the transnational dialogue on global indigeneity and multiculturalism, material culture, and the social construction of gender and ethnicity in Japanese society, and she proposes new directions for the study of settler colonialism and indigenous mobilization in other Asian and Pacific nations.

This English translation of a key work by one of Okinawa's most respected historians, Mamoru Akamine, provides a compelling new picture of the role played by the Ryukyu Kingdom in the history of East Asia. Okinawa Island, from which the present-day Japanese prefecture derives its name, is the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, an archipelago that stretches between Japan and Taiwan. In the present volume, Akamine chronicles the rise of the Ryukyu Kingdom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it played a major part in East Asian trade and diplomacy. Then Ryukyu was indeed the cornerstone in a vibrant East Asian trade sphere centered on Ming China, linking what we now call Japan, Korea, and China to Southeast Asia. With historical and cultural connections to both Japan and China, Ryukyu also mediated diplomatically between the two nations, whose leaders more often than not refused to deal with each other directly. But eventually the kingdom became a victim of its own success. Political developments in China and Japan starting in the sixteenth century brought great changes to the region, and in 1609 Ryukyu was invaded by Satsuma, Japan's southernmost domain. The China-Japan geopolitical rivalry would in time be acted out within Ryukyu itself, as one faction strove to maintain ties with China while another supported union with rapidly modernizing Japan. Throughout the work Akamine's approach to Ryukyu history is distinguished by his expert use of Chinese and Korean sources, which allows him to examine events from several different angles. This contributes to a broad, sweeping narrative, revealing an East Asia made up of many shifting and interrelated parts--not just nation states pursuing their own interests. Akamine's facility with Chinese texts in particular uncovers telling details that add considerably to the historical record. His meticulous account of one of Ryukyu's tribute missions to China, for example, or the role of feng shui in the design of Shuri Castle, the royal and administrative center of the kingdom, is detailed without being pedantic. As a result, readers will come away with a broader, more informed understanding of Ryukyu's significance in the region and the complexity of its relations with its neighbors.

Between 1609 and 1879, the geographical, political, and ideological status of the Kingdom of Ryukyu (modern Okinawa) was characterized by its ambiguity. It was subordinate to its larger neighbors, China and Japan, yet an integral part of neither. A Japanese invasion force from Satsuma had conquered the kingdom in 1609, resulting in its partial incorporation into Tokugawa Japan's bakuhan state. Given Ryukyu's long-standing ties with China and East Asian foreign relations following the rise of the Qing dynasty, however, the bakufu maintained only an indirect link with Ryukyu from the mid-seventeenth century onward. Thus Ryukyu was able to exist as a quasi-independent kingdom for more than two centuries--albeit amidst a complex web of trade and diplomatic agreements involving the bakufu, Satsuma, Fujian, and Beijing. During this time, Ryukyu's ambiguous position relative to China and Japan prompted its elites to fashion their own visions of Ryukyuan identity. Created in a dialogic relationship to both a Chinese and Japanese Other, these visions informed political programs intended to remake Ryukyu. In this innovative and provocative study, Gregory Smits explores early modern perceptions of Ryukyu and their effect on its political culture and institutions. He describes the major historical circumstances that informed early modern discourses of Ryukyuan identity and examines the strategies used by leading intellectual and political figures to fashion, promote, and implement their visions of Ryukyu. Early modern visions of Ryukyu were based on Confucianism, Buddhism, and other ideologies of the time. Eventually one vision prevailed, becoming the theoretical basis of the early modern state by the middle of the eighteenth century. Employing elements of Confucianism, the scholar and government official Sai On (1682-1761) argued that the kingdom's destiny lay primarily with Ryukyuans themselves and that moral parity with Japan and China was within its grasp. Despite Satsuma's control over its diplomatic and economic affairs, Sai envisioned Ryukyu as an ideal Confucian state with government and state rituals based on the Chinese model. In examining Sai's thought and political program, this volume sheds new light on Confucian praxis and, conversely, uncovers one variety of an East Asian "prenational" imagined political/cultural community.