Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods ─ The Arts of Reinvention

Despite having undergone radical shifts in its significance as a political and cultural center, as a hub of the national bureaucracy, as a symbolic and religious center, and as a site for the production and display of art, the field of Japanese history and culture lacks a book that considers Kyoto on its own terms as a historic city with a changing identity. This book promises to be a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of Kyoto’s history and culture, with the chapters focussing on two centuries in Kyoto’s history in which the old capital was politically marginalized: the seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa established a new shogunate in Edo; and the nineteenth century, when the imperial court itself was moved to the new modern center of Tokyo. The eight authors in this volume argue that in both periods the response of Kyoto elites—emperors, courtiers, tea masters, municipal leaders, monks, and merchants—was artistic production and cultural revival.

As an artistic, cultural and historical study of Japan's most important hisotric city, this book will be invluable to students and scholars of Japanese history, Asian history, the Meiji and Edo periods, art history, visual culture and cultural history alike.

Alice Y. Tseng is associate professor of the history of art and architecture at Boston University, and the author ofThe Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan, as well as articles such as "Kuroda Seiki’sMorning Toilette on Exhibition in Modern Kyoto" in The Art Bulletin.