Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Rika Hiro (bio) The purpose of this section, "Japan Housed in LA," is to highlight instances of "Japan"—its artwork, design, presentation, and at times mispresentation found in Los Angeles. Dianne Lee Shen's case study of Yamashiro, a 1911 castle-style private estate in the Hollywood Hills, historicizes Southern Californians' fascination with Japan and various things Japanese as an example of Hollywood Japonisme in the early twentieth century. Shen's study is juxtaposed with contemporary examples of "Japan" housed in the city nearly a century later at JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, which has been launched by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to showcase "the very best" of Japanese arts and culture along with two other locations in London and São Paulo.1 Izumita Yukiya's (2017) ceramic work and Utagawa Hiroshige's Foxfire at Ōji (1857), from the renowned series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, were included in exhibitions that Hollis Goodall and Meher McArthur, respectively, curated for JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles in 2019 and 2021. Goodall's exhibition KESHIKI attempts to locate Japanese landscape condensed as or appearing within objects in fired clay. In contrast, Foxfire at Ōji, which is drawn from the collection of Hiroshige's prints at Scripps College's Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, shares the historical context of the art and artifacts displayed at Yamashiro. In the final part of this section, Southern California-based artist Bruce Yonemoto's (b. 1949) conceptual presentation of export ware from the Occupation period emblematically merges America in Japan and Japan in America. [End Page 131] Rika Hiro Rika Hiro is a Visiting Assistant Professor, Occidental College, California. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in arts and exhibition culture in postwar Japan. She co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968–1988 at the Getty Research Institute. She is currently researching Japanese diaspora artists in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles with a fellowship of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. (rikahiro@gmail.com) Note 1. "Project Vision," JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, https://www.japanhousela.com/aboutus/ (accessed August 10, 2021). Copyright © 2022 Review of Japanese Culture and Society