Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868−2000 ed by J. Thomas Rimer (review)

J. Thomas Rimer is rightly credited with making Japanese drama and literature more ac­cessible to anglophone audiences and, along with his mentor, Donald Keene, providing the structure, central narrative, themes, influences, and contradictions by which the casual reader or scholar starting out might begin to understand Japanese drama and literature as a whole. With Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000, he sets himself an equally ambitious and important task: to provide an authoritative outline of the Japanese visual arts from the Meiji period to the end of the twentieth century-and he amply rises to this challenge. While many of the scholars represented in this volume have published significant individual works, Rimer brings together for the first time a body of work whose breadth and quality are sufficient to illuminate the Japanese visual arts of the last century and a half and whose coherence is such that previously disparate areas of research may now begin to be understood as differing parts of a single phenomenon.

This field is not yet at the point where a figure reminiscent of art historian Ernst Gom­brich (1909-2001) might appear and be able to present a single story of art in Japan clear enough to enlighten high school students and the general reader. It seems apparent, though, that Rimer imagines this as a future possibility. He acknowledges that despite this book's excellent contribution, much more critical information must be brought to light and many more central figures remain to be examined before it is possible to construct a history of Japanese arts since Meiji that is unified by a single narrative. The volume represents, how­ever, an important step in a process of academic production effectively bringing together a great wealth of detail and opening up an extensive set of concerns and themes.

In the absence of a unified interpretation or a central theoretical model, many of the es­says have an unfamiliar and exciting flavor to them. Even to a reader very familiar with the period there are surprises and compellingly fresh ideas. Indeed the book marks Alexandra Munroe's Scream Against the Sky catalog of 1994 as the starting point for a new wave of inter­est and scholarship in areas of Japanese arts beyond the perennial favorite of prints. As rea­sons for there being so little previous work in the area, the book cites a lack of more modern Japanese works in European and American museums, a lack of Japanese scholarship in art history, and a general disregard for more modern arts among Japanese academics. It also acknowledges that only with the recent ascendancy of postmodern ideas have critics and scholars been able to go beyond the unexamined presumptions that Japanese arts in the modern period were overly derivative and lacking in unique authenticity. These judgments are very much contested by all the contributions to this book, and the genuine virtues of borrowed and reinterpreted forms and ideas are examined for their own ingenuity.

While it is clear that Japan has always been in many respects cosmopolitan, adopting and reinterpreting forms from abroad since the coming of Buddhism in the sixth century, it is the nature of the ongoing negotiation with foreignness that defines so many areas of Japanese art. In the modern period-as the volume makes clear through its discussions of the many different manifestations of Japanese creativity-there have been various responses, often con­tradictory, to the modern world around the central tension of the national and the interna­tional, resulting in parallel artistic universes all developing at the same time. From painting to clothing fashions and from sculpture to architecture, perhaps a defining feature of Japanese culture has been the way it has held together so many contradictions and differing responses to modernity while at the same time being still clearly recognizable as distinctively Japanese.

One difficulty faced...