Capturing Japan In Nineteenth Century New England Photography Collections

"Expanding the canon of photographic history, Capturing Japan in Nineteenth Century New England Photography Collections focuses on six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in late nineteenth-century Boston. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes. The first history of its kind, this study illuminates the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers"--

"Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter-that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for traveling to Japan and studying its culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization. Eleanor Hight focuses on the case studies of six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century Boston area-still visible today in institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes, from images of travel and historic sites, to exotic subjects such as geisha and samurai. The first history of its kind, this study makes fundamental points about the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers."--Provided by publisher.

Revealing that nineteenth-century photography goes beyond the functional to reflect the cultural concerns of the time, this study proposes that each photographic image of architecture be studied both as a primary visual document and an object of aesthetic inquiry. The book offers a socio-historical examination of the material, considering questions of exoticism, gender, the art market, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation-never before comprehensively addressed in a single volume.

Exporting Japanese Aesthetics brings together historical and contemporary case studies addressing the evolution of international impacts and influences of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The volume draws on a wide range of examples from a multidisciplinary team of scholars exploring transnational, regional and global contexts. Studies include the impact of traditional Japanese theatre and art through to the global popularity of contemporary anime and manga. Under the banner of soft power or Cool Japan, cultural commodities that originate in Japan have manifested new meanings outside Japan. By (re)mapping meanings of selected Japanese cultural forms, this volume offers an in-depth examination of how various aspects of Japanese aesthetics have evolved as exportable commodities, the motivations behind this diffusion, and the extent to which the process of diffusion has been the result of strategic planning. Each chapter presents a case study that explores perspectives that situate Japanese aesthetics within a wide-ranging field of inquiry including performance, tourism, and visual arts, as well as providing historical contexts. The importance of interrogating the export of Japanese aesthetics is validated at the highest levels of government, which formed the Office of Cool Japan in 2010, and which perhaps originated in the 19th century at governmentally endorsed cultural courts at world fairs. Increased international consumption of contemporary Japanese culture provides a much needed boost to Japans weakening economy. The case studies are timely and topical. As host of the 2020/2021 Tokyo Olympic Games and the 2025 Osaka Expo, Cool Japan will be under special scrutiny.

A Career of Japan is the first study of one of the major photographers and personalities of nineteenth-century Japan. Baron Raimund von Stillfried was the most important foreign-born photographer of the Meiji era and one of the first globally active photographers of his generation. Based on extensive new primary sources and unpublished documents from archives around the world, this book examines von Stillfried’s significance as a cultural mediator between Japan and Central Europe. Awarded the 2nd Professor Josef Kreiner Hosei University Award for International Japanese Studies.

When Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1860s, delicately hand-tinted photographic prints of Japanese people and landscapes were among its earliest and most popular exports. David Odo studies the collection of Japanese photographs at Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the ways they were produced, acquired, and circulated in the nineteenth century.

Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries presents a critical introduction and nine essays that examine women’s and men’s participation in the art world and gendered visual representations from the premodern through modern eras.

This volume consists of 19 chapters that reflect the titular theme - Voiced and Voiceless in Asia - from a variety of angles, making use of diverse scholarly approaches and disciplines, while focusing specifically on China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. The chapters are broadly divided into two parts: (1) Politics and Society, and (2) Arts and Literature, although the texts included in the second part also deal with social themes. In addition to historical topics, such as Japanese colonialism or Chinese agricultural reforms in the 1950s, the volume also addresses current issues, including restrictive Chinese policies in Xinjiang, Japanese activist movements against gender-based violence and discrimination, or the problems of migrant laborers in India and performing arts in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, it provides insight into satirical woodblock prints from the Boshin War period or works of literature produced in Japanese leprosariums in the first half of the 20th century, as well as into selected topics in contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and Sinophone Tibetan literature. Collectively, the chapters comprised in this volume narrate the multifaceted relationship between 'voice' and 'power,' thus highlighting the fact that the question of 'voice' is closely intertwined with a variety of social, political, and cultural issues.