Word: meiji
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...tradition, but if you can maintain that, and at the same time do something new, that's a formula for success," says Kenji Nishimura, a veteran Tokyo art dealer. Like many supposedly venerable Japanese traditions, however, nihonga actually isn't that ancient. The term was coined during the Meiji period in the late 1800s, when artists and critics-including a number of Japanophile European expatriates-became alarmed at the way the country seemed to be shedding its cultural skin in the process of rapid Westernization. They called for the preservation of classical Japanese brush painting-a genre executed on traditional...
...might add, the bleakness of her subject matter). Her art teachers initially dismissed her new style-"they said it's not painting; it's just manga," she recalls-but Machida persevered, eventually earning critical and popular acceptance. Today Yuji Yamashita, a professor of art history at Tokyo's Meiji Gakuin University, calls Machida perhaps the best of the neo-nihonga artists, and three of her works are already in the public collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art. "She always has people ready to buy," says Nishimura, the art dealer. "My biggest problem is that...
...tradition without even noticing it." And that's the point. As diverse as they are, as different as they are from their flowers-and-Mount Fuji predecessors, the neo-nihonga painters aren't divorced from Japanese tradition-they're part of it, even as they push it forward. The Meiji-era critics who built nihonga as a kind of artistic Great Wall against Western invasion needn't have worried...
...Japanese people are demanding." Abe's allies dismiss that line of criticism as overly simplistic, arguing that constitutional revision is a bold move that will enable Japan to take control of its destiny and reimagine itself as a nation. "Many systems in Japan haven't changed since the Meiji period, and they're not suited to today's situation," says Hidenao Nakagawa, the secretary-general of the LDP. Revision "will help the everyday issues, the small politics...
Monet went on to collect 231 Japanese prints, which greatly influenced his work and that of other practitioners of Impressionism, the movement he helped create. Under the new Meiji Emperor, Japan in the 1870s was just opening to the outside world after centuries of isolation. Japanese handicrafts were flooding into European department stores and art galleries. Japonisme, a fascination with all things Japanese, was soon the rage among French intellectuals and artists, among them Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and the young Monet. Perhaps for that reason Impressionism caught on early in Japan and remains ferociously popular there...