Japan in the Age of Modernization

Abstract

Japan entered an age of rapid modernization following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s U.S. navy ships on its shores in the 1850s. It soon became the first Asian nation with a military and industry on par with Western imperialist countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Japanese grappled with the massive effects of this rapid Western-inspired modernization, they searched for their cultural identity, increasingly turning to China for inspiration. The distinctively modern identity they built through the arts has only recently begun to be examined by researchers and through exhibitions. This book’s essays, by scholars from the United States, Japan, and Europe, look beyond Japan’s Western industrialization to examine China’s role in forming the nation’s modern identity. It follows a retrospective of the Japanese nun, calligrapher, potter, and political activist Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875) and the modern Japanese painter Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924) on view in late 2022 at the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C.