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Featured Resources
- Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Hiroshige's “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” actually composed of 118 splendid woodblock landscape and genre scenes of mid-nineteenth-century Tokyo, is one of the greatest achievements of Japanese art. In order to protect these very special prints, the Museum can only physically display them periodically, but they are presented here in this ongoing online exhibition. The series, reproduced online in its entirety, contains many of Hiroshige's best loved and most extraordinary prints. It is a celebration of the style and world of Japan's finest cultural flowering at the end of the shogunate.
- Gahōsha. Taishōshin kasai mokuhan gashū Gahōsha, 1924. Digital images of 36 woodblock prints depicting the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. From Harvard University's Yenching Library rare book collection.
- Earthquake Children image archive The images collated in this website visually document children’s experiences of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and daily life in 1920s Tokyo. Sources range from postcards, children’s drawings and photographs, to maps, architectural drawings and memorabilia. In addition to images of and by children, the collection depicts teachers, imperial family members, government officials, policemen, doctors, nurses, foreign tourists, and other adults involved in providing relief, education and care of children in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake.
- MIT Visualizing Cultures Visualizing Cultures weds images and scholarly commentary in innovative ways to illuminate social and cultural history. Founded in 2002 by MIT Professors John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, Visualizing Cultures exploits the unique qualities of the Web as a publishing platform to enable scholars, teachers, and others to: (1) examine large bodies of previously inaccessible images; (2) compose original texts with unlimited numbers of full-color, high-resolution images; and (3) use new technology to explore unprecedented ways of analyzing and presenting images that open windows on modern history.
- Cultural Japan Discover digital resources on Japanese Culture from all over the world
- JapanKnowledge This link opens in a new window JapanKnowledge is an extensive database, mostly in Japanese, with information about Japanese language, culture, history, and more. It Includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, ebooks, news articles, and multimedia.
- AM Explorer This link opens in a new window AM Explorer is a cross-collection search of the entire corpus of Adam Matthew's digitized arts and cultural heritage material in subjects including Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Empire and Globalism, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality, History, Politics, Literature, Theatre, and War and Conflict.
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Featured Books:
A Tokyo Anthology : Literature from Japan's Modern Metropolis, 1850-1920 by
The city of Tokyo, renamed after the Meiji Restoration, developed an urban culture that was a dynamic integration of Edo's highly developed traditions and Meiji renovations, some of which reflected the influence of Western culture. This wide-ranging anthology--including fictional and dramatic works, essays, newspaper articles, political manifestos, and cartoons--tells the story of how the city's literature and arts grew out of an often chaotic and sometimes paradoxical political environment to move toward a consummate Japanese "modernity." Tokyo's downtown audience constituted a market that demanded visuality and spectacle, while the educated uptown favored written, realistic literature. The literary products resulting from these conflicting consumer bases were therefore hybrid entities of old and new technologies. A Tokyo Anthology guides the reader through Japanese literature's journey from classical to spoken, pictocentric to logocentric, and fantastic to realistic--making the novel the dominant form of modern literature. The volume highlights not only familiar masterpieces but also lesser known examples chosen from the city's downtown life and counterculture. Imitating the custom of creative artists of the Edo period, scholars from the United States, Canada, England, and Japan have collaborated in order to produce this intriguing sampling of Meiji works in the best possible translations. The editors have sought out the most reliable first editions of texts, also reproducing most of their original illustrations. With few exceptions the translations presented here are the first in the English language. This rich anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of Japan studies and by a wide general audience interested in Japan's popular culture, media culture, and literature in translation.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2017
Imaging Disaster : Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 by
Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation--the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923--this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.
Location: Mugar Stacks NX584.A1 W45 2012Publication Date: 2012
The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty First Century by
During the twentieth century, Japan was transformed from a poor, primarily rural country into one of the world's largest industrial powers and most highly urbanised countries. Interestingly, while Japanese governments and planners borrowed carefully from the planning ideas and methods of many other countries, Japanese urban planning, urban governance and cities developed very differently from those of other developed countries. Japan's distinctive patterns of urbanisation are partly a product of the highly developed urban system, urban traditions and material culture of the pre-modern period, which remained influential until well after the Pacific War. A second key influence has been the dominance of central government in urban affairs, and its consistent prioritisation of economic growth over the public welfare or urban quality of life. André Sorensen examines Japan's urban trajectory from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the weak development of Japanese civil society, local governments, and land development and planning regulations.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2005
Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City by
Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2010
