ASIA 453 - Japanese Travel Literature and Culture

Cartographic Japan offers a rich introduction to the resulting treasure trove, with close analysis of one hundred maps from the late 1500s to the present day, each one treated as a distinctive window onto Japan's tumultuous history.   Forty-seven distinguished contributors--hailing from Japan, North America, Europe, and Australia--uncover the meanings behind a key selection of these maps, situating them in historical context and explaining how they were made, read, and used at the time. With more than one hundred gorgeous full-color illustrations, Cartographic Japan offers an enlightening tour of Japan's magnificent cartographic archive.

This extraordinary book features significant works of art from the Kobe City Museum, whose collection focuses on Western-style Japanese art created between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japan Envisions the West considers how Japan encountered the West and learned about and adopted their arts, culture, and science, and how the West discovered Japanese arts and culture. Maps bear important witness in telling the story of how each region recognized and understood the lands of the other. Selected maps mark milestones in illustrating each state of understanding between Japan and the West. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and merchants from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries conveyed Western culture, religion, art, food, and music to the Japanese, and they were the first Westerners to have a strong impact in Japan. Namban refers to Japanese art created under the influence of Portugal and Spain. After Christianity was excluded from Japan in the 1630s, Nagasaki became the only port open for trading with Dutch merchants. Artists in this region, especially painters serving the government, had the opportunity to see foreign people, culture, and art firsthand. They made visual records, copied important objects, and studied these records for their work. When the Tokugawa Shogunate Yoshimune relaxed restrictions on imported Western books in 1720, with the exception of Christian books, scholarly artists and scientists were free to study them, leading to Komo, Japanese art created under the influence of Holland, and to more popular paintings, prints, and decorative arts that demonstrate the fusion of Japanese and Western styles. At the same time, objects were made specifically for trade with Europe through the East India Companies established in European countries. Finally, visual images produced in the nineteenth century show the effort, surprise, and curiosity of the Japanese as they tried to understand America and Americans.

This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes--including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias--to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.

Japanese woodblock prints, orukiyo-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 famousukiyo-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 forukiyo-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.

A cutting-edge collection exploring identity-making in East Asia This is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural politics of nationalism and national identities in modern East Asia. Combining theoretical insights with empirical research, it explores the cultural dimensions of nationhood and identity-making in China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The essays address issues ranging from the complex relations between popular culture and national consciousness to the representation of ethnic/racial identity and gendered discourse on nationalism. The cutting-edge research on the diverse forms of cultural preacceptance and the various ways in which this participates in the construction and projection of national and ethnic identities in East Asia illuminates several understudied issues in Asian studies, including the ambiguity of Hong Kong identity during World War II and the intricate politics of the post-war Taiwanese trial of collaboration. Addressing a wide range of theoretical and historical issues regarding cultural dimensions of nationalism and national identities all over East Asia, these essays draw insights from such recent theories as cultural studies, postcolonial theories, and archival-researched cultural anthropology. The book will be important reading for students of Asian studies as well as for serious readers interested in issues of nationalism and culture. Kai-wing Chow is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Kevin Doak is Associate Professor of History. Poshek Fu is Associate Professor of History and Cinema Studies. All three teach at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

During the premodern period, Japan had significant political, economic and cultural relations with Korea. This book purports that this period, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, was the formative stage of the East Asian diplomacy and ideology which laid the foundations for foreign relations between these two countries in the modern period. The book also investigates how Japan's and Korea's political and diplomatic ideologies emerged as a nascent form of nationalism which scholars have not previously clarified.