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This chapter examines how the revival of a particular past centered on the tastes of the Edo period was expressed through the aestheticization of the culture of everyday life. It first considers how the values of loyalism and honor were put to the test in the early Meiji period following the collapse of the shogunate in 1867. It then explores how rapid changes in the early Meiji era generated disillusionments that gave rise to feelings of dislocation and nostalgia, as shown by the artist Kobayashi Kiyochika in his landscape prints of Tokyo. It also discusses the tricentennial celebration of the founding of Edo in 1889 and the commercialization of tradition through the consumption of the fashions and styles of the Genroku era during the late Meiji period. The chapter argues that nostalgia for Genroku-era tastes in the form of female bodies adorned in Genroku-style fashions was an expression of the eroticization of the past.

The Meiji period saw the development of political tensions between evolutionary theory and the emerging kokutai ideology of the Japanese state. Kokutai ideology emerged as an unstable hybrid of mainly Shintō, but also Confucianism, Bushidō, and other religious and semi-religious elements. Important ideological thinkers began to reject elements of evolutionary theory, finding the “struggle for survival,” materialism, and individualism in tension with kokutai ideology and its emphasis on harmony, obedience, and spirit. Herbert Spencer’s influence waned and his thought was criticized.

This chapter discusses the history of Japanese painting from Edo to Meiji by focusing on the career of more than a dozen artists regarded as the leading painters of the period. It begins by providing a background on painting and prints during the Edo period and goes on to examine the transition in Japanese painting from Edo to the Meiji period. It then considers the Japanese government’s support of Western art before turning to the activities of the first generation of Meiji artists. It also analyzes the rhetoric of Ernest F. Fenollosa and his former pupil and colleague, Okakura Kakuzō regarding the development of modern Japanese art. It argues that the new generation of painters and their pupils successfully negotiated the Meiji Restoration and that it was they, not the iconic painters and disciples of Fenollosa and Okakura, who were responsible for what is generally regarded as the later efflorescence of modern Japanese painting.

I suggest that exhibitions can serve as a model for re-narrating the history of painting across the Edo to Meiji divide. Rather than presenting the “opening” of Japan to trade and diplomacy with the West as a stark temporal boundary between premodern and modern modes of artistic production, exhibitions enable us to understand such epochal events as opportunities for objects and ideas to be re-framed, and the framing process might then be adjusted or undone outside the temporary space of the exhibition hall. I also point out that historically, the public exhibition has been a fraught metaphor, a global symbolic form that structured and confirmed the originally Western perception of a break between pre- and post-Restoration art.

Chapter 1 provides both a background to baseball in Japan and to the origins of the concept of “Samurai baseball” that is central to the issues explored in this book. The first chapter also problematizes the role of the popular press in Japan starting in the Meiji period (1868-1912) of both spreading the gospel of baseball in Japan and of promoting the myths surrounding Japan’s approach to the game, infusing it with dimensions of the rhetoric of Nihonjinron. Many of the qualities that have come to define the myths of Samurai baseball are the result of the press coverage of the Ichikō high school team’s impressive victories against American opponents in the Meiji period. The wide coverage by the popular press of the team’s lopsided victories helped both to initiate Japan’s love affair with baseball and establish the Bushidō-inspired values associated with Samurai baseball.

Japonisme in its earliest phase (until roughly 1900) is most commonly understood as the nineteenth-century Western discovery or even invention (per Oscar Wilde) of Japan. Yet members of the Japanese government and artistic community quickly became aware of Western expectations for Japanese art. Nihonga first emerged in the 1880s within this context.

This chapter focuses on infanticide countermeasures. It covers Japan’s tradition of associating infanticide with peripheries, barbarism, and the past; civilization and infanticide during the early Meiji period; infanticide abolition schemes of the 1870s; and the fading of infanticide from public view with the change in attitudes toward Japan’s status as a civilized nation.

This introduction situates Shimazaki Tōson in the literary scene of the Meiji period. It begins with a discussion of the influx of European culture in Japan dating from 1543 and the first literary responses to the renewed European presence, with particular emphasis on the “literature of enlightenment” and political novels. It then considers how the tensions caused by the problems of translating and emulating European writings gave rise to a movement known as genbun itchi, “unification of the written and spoken,” the linguistic portion of the overall Meiji program of standardization. It also examines how Romanticism became an integral part of Japanese life through works of literature written between the late 1880s and the 1890s. Finally, it looks at the emergence of new poetry in Japan, led by Tōson's Young Herbs of 1897, and Japanese Naturalism.

This chapter traces the genesis of baseball in Japan and its diffusion during the Meiji period. Evidence suggests that baseball played in Japan put the genesis of the game in the nation's capital in 1872 with Horace E. Wilson identified as the pioneer instructor. In Meiji Japan, baseball had established a dedicated following among Japanese adolescents who received education in Gilded Age America. By the end of the nineteenth century, America's national pastime blossomed into a transoceanic pastime fostered in multiple networks built and sustained by aspiring Americans and Japanese.

This chapter looks at how historian Irokawa Daikichi discovered a set of late-nineteenth-century documents, including a draft of a people's constitution. These materials led to the revelation that the village leaders and the men who drafted that constitution, hitherto unknown to history, were family men—in other words, “commoners” with deep ties to the life of the people. Irokawa's discovery and subsequent book Meiji no bunka (The Culture of Meiji Japan) propelled “the people” to the fore of postwar historiographical debates in Japan. The chapter also shows how the rediscovered village records of both Murotsu and Kaminoseki offer a different portrait of the political culture of the Meiji period than that suggested by the Fukasawa storehouse documents.

Religion was a crucial mediating factor in the early transmission of evolutionary theory to Japan. Even before the Meiji period, certain evolutionary ideas appeared within a religious context. Evolutionary theory and Christianity arrived in Japan in the same period, and conflict ensued as the early conveyors of evolutionary theory, such as Edward S. Morse and Ernest Fenollosa presented the theory as one that delegitimized Christianity; simultaneously, several important Christian missionaries and Japanese Christian thinkers, presented science and Christian faith as part of one package necessary for the modernization of Japan.

This chapter examines the emergence of the shōjo and the discourse of spiritual love in Meiji literature. In particular, it considers the formation of the patriarchal image of the shōjo in its foundational moment by analyzing three seminal novels of the Meiji period: Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1887) by Futabatei Shimei; Yabu no uguisu (A Warbler in the Grove, 1888) by Miyake Kaho; and Futon (The Quilt, 1907) by Tayama Katai. The chapter first explains how the concept of spiritual love entered the public discourse in Japan and how closely it was tied to the public status of schoolgirls. It then explores how the intersection of increased educational opportunities for girls and a new philosophy of romantic love gave rise to an image of the shōjo as both alluring and threatening, the embodiment of the promise and the dangers of modernity.

This introduction explains the rationale for coming up with this book, which explores the evolution of Japanese visual arts from the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868 up to 2000. It considers some of the reasons for the prior lack of scholarly interest in Japanese visual arts, including the fact that very few works of Japanese art created during the first half of the twentieth century or even later have found their way into the collections of American or European museums. Another reason is that Japanese contemporary art has come to be regarded as very much a part of world art, and accepted as such. Also discussed are some historical matters relating to Japanese art, such as the cosmopolitan nature of Japanese culture, and a number of interrelated polarities concerning the history of the Japanese visual arts; for example, the polarity expressed in the tension between the national and the international, and the development of an ever more receptive audience in Japan for various kinds of Japanese art created during this period.

This chapter examines the development of a vocabulary of aesthetics in Japan during the Meiji period. It was during the early Meiji period (1868–1912) that the notion of “fine arts” in the Western sense of the word took hold in Japan, at the same time that the idea of “beauty” underwent a significant redefinition. This chapter considers how an understanding of what aesthetics was about evolved in Japan, first by discussing Nishi Amane’s “science of beauty” that created five different words to translate “aesthetics.” It then explores Ernest F. Fenollosa’s “art-idea” and how his 1882 lecture “The True Meaning of Fine Art,” translated in Japanese by Ōmori Ichū, helped redefine the field of practical craft (geijutsu) by making them into objects of aesthetic appreciation (bijutsu).