The first in-depth scholarly study in English of the Japanese performance medium kamishibai, Sharalyn Orbaugh's Propaganda Performed illuminates the vibrant street culture of 1930s Japan as well as the visual and narrative rhetoric of Japanese propaganda in World War II. Emerging from Japan's cities in the late 1920s, kamishibai rapidly transformed from a cheap amusement associated with poverty into the most popular form of juvenile entertainment, eclipsing even film and manga. By the time kamishibai died as a living medium in the 1970s it had left behind indelible...

In this groundbreaking study of a subject intricately tied up with the controversies of Japanese wartime politics and propaganda, Maki Kaneko reexamines the iconic male figures created by artists of yōga (Western-style painting) between 1930 and 1950. Particular attention is given to prominent yōga painters such as Fujita Tsuguharu, Yasui Sōtarō, Matsumoto Shunsuke, and Yamashita Kiyoshi--all of whom achieved fame for their images of men either during or after the Asia-Pacific War. By closely investigating the representation of male figures together with the...

Featuring the renowned seventh-century gilt-bronze Śākyamuni (Shaka) triad at the Hōryūji, Constructing the Dharma King reveals how the impression of a Buddhist image evolved in Yamato, Japan, from the indistinct sense of divine otherness at the early stage of the transmission to more concrete ideals and values concerning families, authority, and kingship. According to the accompanying inscription, the Kashiwade, a low-ranking bureaucratic clan, commissioned the triad to commemorate the deaths of its family members. Considering the triad as an endpoint of a dynamic...

The culture of Japanese poetry, waka, is richly visual. In Poetry as Image Tomoko Sakomura examines the ways the visual culture of waka in sixteenth-century Japan engages with practice and protocol developed over the course of the previous six centuries, and what these engagements reveal about the role of the past in cultural productions of the present. The volume explores key aspects of waka culture--inscription, presentation, transmission, and vocabulary--as manifested in visual representations of noted poems, sites, and poets such as the "thirty-six poetic...

In this comprehensive study of the Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandara, Chari Pradel provides a new interpretation of this assemblage of embroidered textile fragments associated with Prince Shōtoku (574-622). By analyzing the scant visual evidence in the context of East Asian visual art of the period, the author recreates the subject represented on the seventh century artifact and demonstrates that it was not Buddhist (as previously believed), but associated with the funerary iconography of China that arrived in Japan with immigrants from the Korean peninsula. In addition, by closely...

This book examines the cultural networks that connected people during the Edo period (1603-1868) by surveying a wide range of visual representations of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering produced mostly in Japan. The Orchid Pavilion Gathering is one of the most important painting themes in the cultural history of East Asia, yet there has hitherto been no monograph focused on this subject in the English language. This project introduces the many important images representing and related to the Gathering, some of which have never before been published.

This book reconstructs the art, architecture, and rituals of a now-lost Buddhist temple, Amidaji in the Japanese city of Shimonoseki. By exploring artistic, literary, religious, political, and ideological contexts, it reveals a carefully crafted program of visual culture for the salvation of the victims of the tragic Genpei War (1180–1185), among whom the child-emperor Antoku.