In Brief
In a Historic First, Australia Agrees to Return Ainu Remains to Japan
It would be the first repatriation of remains to the indigenous people by a foreign country.
Japan
Announcement
Explore Japan’s Art and Design Treasures
JAPAN 99+1: Traveling Through Art, Design, and Architecture is a newly released print and companion website of some of Japan’s best spots for the traveler looking beyond the typical tourist areas.
Art
Hand-Colored Photos of Religion in Meiji-Era Japan
A small exhibition at Resobox gallery in Queens offers a glimpse of spiritual activity from the past.
Art
Human Anatomy as Portrayed in Woodblocks of 19th-Century Kabuki Actors
The opening of Japan in the 19th century after its isolationist Edo period caused an influx of foreign influence, including Western approaches to medicine.
Books
Japan, in from the Wilderness: Reiko Tomii’s Expanded Modern-Art History
The Japanese-born art historian Reiko Tomii is one of those researchers who is both passionate about her subjects and recognized among her peers for her meticulous mapping of the cultural-intellectual terrain from which they emerge.
Art
A Photographer Who Exposed the Scars and Traumas of Postwar Japan
LOS ANGELES — The story of Yokosuka, as told by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, takes place in lonely, foreboding streets, where the miracle of Japan’s postwar economy seems to not have shaken off the grit and grime of history.
Books
Why Japan's Futuristic Micro-Homes Are So Popular
Like in many of the world's most densely populated nations, real estate in Japan is tough to come by.
Art
Photography and Foreboding in 1970s Japan
For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 offers an ambitious social and art history of a decade ignited by protest, shaped by global power dynamics, and visualized through new art forms.
Art
Hanging 19th-Century Japanese and Western Masters Side by Side
SAN FRANCISCO — Claude Monet owned more than 200 Japanese prints and once told a critic, “If you insist on forcing me into an affiliation with anyone else ... then compare me with the old Japanese masters; their exquisite taste has always delighted me.”
Art
The Beautifully Dressed Skeletons in Japan’s Closet
In a letter dated July 23, 1938, sent by the Japanese modernist poet Yone Noguchi to the Nobel Prize winning author Rabindrath Tagore — the first non-European to receive the award — Noguchi wrote the following justification for his country’s invasion of China, effectively ending their friendship:
Art
In 1970s Japan, a New Art of Experiments, Edgy Photos, and Big Ideas
There are certain exhibitions in which some or many of the works on display are so interesting, provocative or well-made that they somehow manage to surmount whatever restrictive or overwrought critical-theoretical trappings their organizers have erected around them, defying the analytical filters t
Art
Hand-tinted Photos of Geishas and Idyllic Landscapes in Early Modern Japan
Japan’s Meiji period (1868–1912) is commonly described as a time of quick economic and political modernization and self-conscious competition with Western military might and colonial aspirations.