Takehisa Yumeji

Takehisa Yumeji
Author:
Publisher: Hotei Pub
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2015-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789004279827

Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) is one of the most famous artists of Japan, where six museums are dedicated to his work as a painter, printmaker and illustrator. This publication is the first publication outside Japan dedicated solely to Takehisa Yumeji's life and prolific oeuvre.

Yumeji Modern

Yumeji Modern
Author: Nozomi Naoi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780295746838

"Beyond the Modern Beauty is a holistic study of Takehisa Yumeji's (1884-1934) artistry that attempts to unify and understand the multiple discursive and social frameworks within which his images were animated with meaning. The book situates Yumeji's graphic art within the emerging mediascape of the 1900s and 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic media were enabling the creation of new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji's graphic works developed in tandem with this quickly evolving sphere and ranged from illustrations in socialist bulletins with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" in books and magazines targeting a female audience. As such, Yumeji's works circulated widely and reveal his role in the cultivation of a new demographic of young female consumers, along with the reinvention of the woodblock medium from its centuries-long tradition of "floating-world pictures" (ukiyo-e) into a technically diverse vehicle of visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. The book addresses Yumeji's art from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his production of graphic works was the most prolific. The appendix introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji's texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, books, collection of works, and commentary alongside his illustrations. Commentaries and critiques by his contemporaries are also included and are translated for the first time"--

Passionate Friendship

Passionate Friendship
Author: Deborah M. Shamoon
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2012-03-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0824861116

Shojo manga are romance comics for teenage girls. Characterized by a very dense visual style, featuring flowery backgrounds and big-eyed, androgynous boys and girls, it is an extremely popular and prominent genre in Japan. Why is this genre so appealing? Where did it come from? Why do so many of the stories feature androgynous characters and homosexual romance? Passionate Friendship answers these questions by reviewing Japanese girls’ print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls’ literary magazines to the 1970s “revolution” shojo manga, when young women artists took over the genre. It looks at the narrative and aesthetic features of girls’ literature and illustration across the twentieth century, both pre- and postwar, and discusses how these texts addressed and formed a reading community of girls, even as they were informed by competing political and social ideologies. The author traces the development of girls’ culture in pre–World War II magazines and links it to postwar teenage girls’ comics and popular culture. Within this culture, as private and cloistered as the schools most readers attended, a discourse of girlhood arose that avoided heterosexual romance in favor of “S relationships,” passionate friendships between girls. This preference for homogeneity is echoed in the postwar genre of boys’ love manga written for girls. Both prewar S relationships and postwar boys’ love stories gave girls a protected space to develop and explore their identities and sexuality apart from the pressures of a patriarchal society. Shojo manga offered to a reading community of girls a place to share the difficulties of adolescence as well as an alternative to the image of girls purveyed by the media to boys and men. Passionate Friendship’s close literary and visual analysis of modern Japanese girls’ culture will appeal to a wide range of readers, including scholars and students of Japanese studies, gender studies, and popular culture.

War and Popular Culture

War and Popular Culture
Author: Chang-tai Hung
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520354869

This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.

MAVO

MAVO
Author: Gennifer Weisenfeld
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2002-02-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520223387

Mavo were aJapanese group of artists active in Tokyo from 1923-1925.

Waves of Renewal

Waves of Renewal
Author: Chris Uhlenbeck
Publisher: Hotei Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-03-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789004307711

"Waves of renewal" traces the history of Japanese printmaking following an era of decline beginning in the late nineteenth century. The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of two principal printmaking movements. The first "shin hanga" (new print) reinvented and revitalised the conventional genres of landscape, beauties and actors. The second "s saku hanga" (creative print) was inspired by the dialogue between Western and Japanese art and aesthetics. "Waves of renewal" is the most comprehensive publication to date to focus on the holdings of the Nihon no hanga collection in Amsterdam. The 277 prints included showcase the sophistication of "shin hanga" and the boldness of "s saku hanga." An introductory essay sets the stage, followed by ten shorter essays by noted scholars in the field that centre on aspects integral to our understanding of early to mid-twentieth century Japanese printmaking. Each print is documented and annotated in the extensive catalogue section."

Taishō Chic

Taishō Chic
Author: Kendall H. Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Many of these works have never been published and several major paintings, exhibited in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s then lost after the war, are brought to light here for the first time in decades. This catalogue not only presents newly discovered works but also, in bringing together a broad range of objects representative of mainstream Taisho visual culture, reconstructs the styles popular from 1915 to 1935 in a celebration of Taisho Chic."--BOOK JACKET.

Japan Story

Japan Story
Author: Christopher Harding
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780141985374

This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. 'How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it ... Masterly.' Neil MacGregor It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

Manhua Modernity

Manhua Modernity
Author: John A. Crespi
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-12-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520309103

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed—from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda—the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.

Revisiting Japan’s Restoration

Revisiting Japan’s Restoration
Author: Timothy Amos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000508188

This volume presents the reader with thirty-one short chapters that capture an exciting new moment in the study of the Meiji Restoration. The chapters offer a kaleidoscope of approaches and interpretations of the Restoration that showcase the strengths of the most recent interpretative trends in history writing on Japan while simultaneously offering new research pathways. On a scale probably never before seen in the study of the Restoration outside Japan, the short chapters in this volume reveal unique aspects of the transformative event and process not previously explored in previous research. They do this in three core ways: through selecting and deploying different time frames in their historical analysis; by creative experimentation with different spatial units through which to ascertain historical experience; and by innovative selection of unique and highly original topics for analysis. The volume offers students and teachers of Japanese history, modern history, and East Asian studies an important resource for coming to grips with the multifaceted nature of Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation. The volume will also have broader appeal to scholars working in fields such as early modern/modern world history, global history, Asian modernities, gender studies, economic history, and postcolonial studies.