This collection of essays, based on international collaboration by scholars in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, is the first systematic, interdisciplinary attempt to address the social, political, and spiritual significance of the modern arts both in Japan and its empire between 1920 and 1960. These forty years, punctuated by war, occupation, and reconstruction, were turbulent and brutal, but also important and even productive for the arts.

The volume takes a trans-war (rather than an inter-war) approach, beginning with the cultural politics of painting, poetry,...