A guide to the districts of Kyoto, Nara and Yamada

https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/eastbooks/1255/thumbnail.jp

Art Across Borders: Japanese Artists in the United States, 1895-1955

From the 1880s to the early 1920s, hundreds of artists left Japan for the United States. The length of their stays varied from several months to several decades. Some had studied art in Tokyo, but others became interested in art after working in California. Some became successful in the American art world, some in the Japanese art world, and some in both. They used oil paints on canvas, sumi ink on silk, and Leica cameras. They created images of Buddhist deities, labor protests, farmers harvesting rice, cabaret dancers, and the K.K.K. They saw themselves and were seen by others as Japanese nationals, but whether what they created should be called Japanese art proved a difficult and personal question, The case of Japanese artists in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates that there is a national art - a Japanese art and an American art - but that the category is not fixed. A painting can be classified in the 1910s as Japanese, but the same painting can be included in a show of American art a few decades later. An artist can proclaim himself to be American, but can then be exhibited as a Japanese artist after his death. National constructions of art and artists serve the art market's purpose of selling a work. Categories set along national lines also reinforce the state's projection of a distinct, homogeneous culture to the international community. For non-Western artists, assigning themselves with a national aesthetic allows for easy identification. But for modern Japanese artists like Kuniyoshi Yasuo, Ishigaki Eitarô, and Shimizu Toshi and others, national categories often posed barriers to creativity and to their success in the art world. Shimizu Toshi was awarded for painting a night scene of Yokohama, but his award was rescinded because he was Japanese. Savvy artists like Yoshida Hiroshi and Obata Chiura worked within national aesthetic categories to better market his work. Kuniyoshi Yasuo remained enigmatic, willing to fall into any category that a critic or dealer might determine they should be cast in, while Ishigaki Eitarô associated himself with international leftist politics that precluded notions of Japanese art. Exploring their histories brings several themes to the fore. First, any attempt to use a single, or hyphenated, national category to describe them or their art is problematic and misleading. An artist's "Japaneseness" was not a fixed characteristic: at different points in his career, he might be classified as a Japanese, American, or even a proletarian artist. Artists could sometimes choose to align themselves with one national culture or eschew both, but the denizens of the art world - critics, museum and gallery curators, schools, and other artists - as well as the public nearly always ascribed a national, or at best hybrid, aesthetic character to their work. During the 1910s and 1920s, when Japanese art had fallen out of fashion and modernism was the vanguard, Japanese artists were freer to transcend the preconceptions of what had become by then conventionally defined as a "Japanese aesthetic," which was based in good part on the works of Japanaiserie of earlier years. Artists of many nationalities strove to be "modern" by consciously rejecting "tradition," which for Japanese artists meant the styles and techniques of traditional Japanese painting. Many of the artists from Japan who wanted to make modern art had little practice in traditional art in any case, since they had received their artistic training in the United States. Indeed, it was their American mentors who taught them what Japanese art was supposed to look like. Modern art did not just set itself against the artistic conventions of the past; it also sought to comment on, and intervene in, the rapidly changing ways of modern life. Japanese artists in New York and Los Angeles joined their colleagues in turning to city streets and everyday life for their subjects, rather than reflecting on a safely imagined past. Portraying the streets they walked, in the techniques they learned in American art schools, came more naturally to them than making a woodblock print of a geisha strolling in a Kyoto garden. They used oils to paint flappers they saw on Fourteenth Street, but had no experience with woodblock printing, geisha, or the gardens of Kyoto

The Value, Composition and Significance of Japanese Trade With South-East Asia, 1914-1941.

During the early part of the period 1914-1941 Japan regarded Southeast Asia simply as a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of manufactures. It was only in the 1930s that Southeast Asia became economically vital to Japan, as tension between Japan and the Western powers increased. In particular Japan feared the suspension of exports from the West and from European colonies in Asia. After 1931 Japan had a considerable balance of payments deficit with regard to the West. Consequently Japan attempted to extend her political and economic influence in Southeast Asia in order to reduce her dependence on Western supplies and markets. However, this created tension between Japan and the West as the economies of Southeast Asia were closely integrated with the economies of the Western world. Though Japan succeeded in the 1930s in penetrating these Asian markets to a considerable extent, she was unable to reduce her trade deficit with the West or to create a self-sufficiency area in Asia. Japan further increased her economic expansion into Southeast Asia, but this merely aggravated her already strained relationship with the West. In addition, during this period the Japanese business community, the Zaibatsu, which had close links with the Army, attempted to establish the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." This was to provide an environment free of Western influence, in which the Zaibatsu could protect and develop their economic interests. Ultimately this led to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 and the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia

Japanese Foreign Direct Investment: Varieties of Capitalism, Employment Practices and Worker Resistance in Poland

This research contributes to an understanding of Japanese Foreign Investment (JFDI) in Poland, by using a Variety of Capitalism approach and drawing on literature from employment relations. It examines firstly, the extent to which Japanese production and managerial institutions and practices can be transplanted to different economic and cultural environments; and secondly, the character of workers’ response towards these practices, in the context of JFDI in Poland. It draws on primary data drawn from interviews conducted with the managers and workers in five firms in a Japanese electronics manufacturing cluster in Toruń, Northern Poland, as well as the policy makers, researchers and journalists on a regional level. First, the transfer of Japanese management ‘style’ is considered in terms of recruitment, training practices, issues of monitoring and discipline and quality assurance policies. This study reveals that the transfer of Japanese typical practices is of minor importance to Japanese corporations based in Poland, and the character of these practices in the Polish workplace is peripheral. However, the subordination of labour is brought by the precarisation of employment, rather than the implementation of Japanese quality policies. Second, the focus of the research is on the response of workers and finds that they did not remain passive actors in this process and resisted the adapted form of Japanisation in Poland. Although the role of formal trade unions was limited, the data pointed to other forms of resistance, both conventional and novel, from sabotage, absenteeism, humour to insubordination and the use of blogging sites. In the context of the researched labour process, the empirical findings point to markers of collectivism in all forms of worker resistance and hence identified that the collective worker not only has not disappeared from both the labour process debate and the workplace itself, but, even if not evidently, is present through the resistance to management practices and control

Contested Governance in Japan

Contested Governance in Japan extends the analysis of governance in contemporary Japan by exploring both the sites and issues of governance above and below the state as well as within it. This volume discusses the contested nature of governance in Japan and the ways in which a range of actors are involved in different sites and issues of governance at home, in the region and the globe. It includes chapters on global governance, local policy-making, democracy, environmental governance, the Japanese financial system, corruption, the family and corporate governance

Japanese Pamphlets, Volume III, 1918-1925

Twenty-two politically oriented pamphlets published between 1906 to 1914 that set forth the pros and cons of Japanese continuing to reside in the United States and California. The White population was particularly concerned about the mixing of races and wanted laws that not only excluded the Japanese who were living in the United States (including children born in the United States) from citizenship but also from leasing or owning land. Those who were anti-Japanese described the Japanese as an inferior race incapable of assimilating into the White population and includes a pamphlet entitled “Preliminary Report of the Mental Capacity of Japanese Children in California.” The pamphlets in this volume also include responses from the Japan Society of America and those sympathetic to the Japanese plight. Also, in Volume III was a question about California’s Japanese language schools that fostered solidarity amongst the Japanese living in California. V. S. McClatchy of the Sacramento Bee wrote a large number of the anti-Japanese found in this volume.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_8_b/1002/thumbnail.jp