Japanese Visual Culture Research Articles

Beyond measure: using digital humanities to unravel the system of perspective within Japanese images in nara-ehon manuscripts of otogi-zōshi tales

The present article illustrates the advantages of digital humanities to unearth new understandings, in this case of the Pre-Modern Japanese visual culture. Precisely, this article serves three purposes. Firstly, it is a guide to digital methods for size analysis in visual studies. Secondly, this study proposes a survey of the collection of nara-ehon manuscripts of yoko-hon format from the “Digital Collections of the Keio University Libraries”. Thirdly, I present my study of perspective in Pre-Modern Japanese images, which have been puzzling scholars. Indeed, the size of characters painted on the images varies greatly. Yet, these fluctuations in measurements are not used to illusorily transform a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional one. The image composition and the varying sizes of characters do not create any spatial depth. Unfortunately, creating a systematic study of this visual conundrum was difficult prior to the rise of digital humanities, leaving researchers only with hypothesises. With these new creative methods, and the measurements of 1040 characters extracted from 244 images, the system of perspective within Japanese images is now clearer. Pre-Modern Japanese images use a psychological perspective intricately informed by a play on social norms restricted by the materiality of the manuscripts.

The Last Emblem. The Frontispiece to Vico’s New Science in the Light of Sugimoto’s Theaters as the Other Side of Aristotelian Language

The article analyses the title page of Vico’s New Science in light of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series Theaters and the emblematic of Goodrich and Legendre, showing how the rhetorical tradition of Italian legal humanism and the Japanese visual culture conceive a vision of Law and Humanities that opposes Cartesian rationalism and the logocentrism of contemporary legal positivism. Visual legal studies question the perspective in painting, theater and cinema, and its cultural and political implications at the time of the media revolution and the emergence of the normativity of the image.

미인화에 그려진 슬픔에 대하여

This thesis focuses on Tsunetomi’s intense and impressive painting Double Ssuicide and Shohaku’s A Ppicture of a Bbeauty, A typical example of the succession method of Japanese visual culture and love and betrayal depicted in paintings was examined. The image of pain and sorrow of a woman leading to death due to this was considered. As a result, the prostitute, who plays a traditional sex role required by the Confucian society and men, created a new image of becoming a ghost of death.BR In general, ukiyoe and School of Maruyama depict women as having idealized beauty, whereas the femininization of Tsunetomi and the beauty of Shohaku discussed in this thesis demonstrate their uniqueness and match the works of Japanese paintings from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, which are transforming into a new female image with continuity. It can be said that these works refer to the beautification tradition in the beautification genre, where further development of the subject repetition and series is impossible, clearly further showing the differences. In particular, it can be said that the work showed a wealth of possibilities beyond traditional painting techniques in terms of the diversity and expression methods of beautification subjects.

When Anne Frank Met Astro Boy

This article examines the evolution and impact of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl on postwar manga (print comics) and Japanese visual culture. The author argues that Anne’s enduring legacy in Japan, dating back to 1952, owes much to the ways in which the content of her Diary capitalizes on certain hallmarks of shōjo (girls’) manga culture, such as affective storytelling and character interiority. Moreover, as shown through a primary analysis of two emonogatari (illustrated story) versions of the Diary from 1964 and two manga versions from 1967, among others referenced, Anne Frank’s life and legacy inspires a hybridized narrative and visual style in manga that blends the emotionality and interiority of shōjo with the more graphic depictions of violence common to shōnen manga for young boys. In so doing, it encourages a reevaluation of the shōjo mode and its ability to bear witness to the physical violence and psychological trauma of the Holocaust.

Anything Goes with Wit and Ambiguity: Playfulness in Japanese Visual Culture

Being witty and being culturally appreciated are two independent things in visual communication design. More often than not, on one hand, the Japanese sense of ‘playfulness’ is manifested in enigmatic images, which express intriguing aspects of Japanese psyche. On the other hand, the Western sense of humor is often light hearted, as its major aim is to raise a smile instead of ambiguity. This ethnographic study examines the essence, categories, and sentiment of playfulness in Japanese context. It also explores in detail the situations in which playfulness is used and, where permitted, how Japanese artists and designers come up with playful ideas and encode meaning in their works. The conclusion focuses on how the Japanese sense of playfulness has long been used to establish cultural influence, social voice, and individual distinction.

Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry

This article introduces the special issue dedicated to global industries around anime, its theoretical commentary and its cross-cultural consumption. The concepts “anime” and “anime studies” are evaluated critically, involving current debates such as those presented in this volume. This discussion will employ the concepts of “manga media” as well as the “popular global”, giving an account of the transmedia and transcultural character of these creative industries. The conclusion critiques the irregular presence of Cultural Studies in the study of Japanese visual culture and advocates for constructing an updated dialogue with this tradition in order to readdress the study of these media as a form of global popular culture.

Postwar Japanese Photography: A Selected Bibliography

Postwar Japanese Photography: A Selected Bibliography Thomas F. O’Leary (bio), Patricia Lenz (bio), and Shir Yeffet (bio) Translated by Anat Icar-Shoham (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Kawada Kikuji, The Last Sunrise of Showa Era, 1989 January 7, from the series The Last Cosmology. © Kikuji Kawada. Courtesy PGI, Michael Hoppen Gallery. [End Page 242] Overview and Introduction The first daguerreotypes and cameras arrived in Japan in 1848, less than a decade after the invention of photography in the West. From that moment on, photography has remained a central aspect of Japanese visual culture, ranging from the portrait studios of Yokohama to the contemporary photographers of today. The history of photography in Japan is as intertwined with its visual and popular culture, as it is in Europe and the United States. The study of Japanese photography in Europe and the United States has been growing steadily since the end of World War Two and, in particular, since 1974 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York held its New Japanese Photography exhibition curated by John Szarkowski and Yamagishi Shōji. This exhibition featured photographers such as Domon Ken, Hosoe Eikoh, Tōmatsu Shōmei, and Moriyama Daidō, names that will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the history of Japanese photography. During the Heisei period, artists and photographers, such as Morimura Yasumasa and Yanagi Miwa, continued pushing the limits of lens-based images by engaging with globalized concepts such as gender, race, and class identity, as well as other forms of contemporary practices, bringing Japanese photographic work to an even wider audience. One of the primary barriers to a deeper engagement with the history of Japanese photography for audiences in Europe and the United States has been linguistic. This bibliography seeks to provide those with an interest in the history of Japanese photography a list of sources published in Western languages on the subject. The list begins with the Shōwa era (1926–89), emphasizing photographers who worked after the war, and continues through the Heisei era (1989–2019), when women photographers entered the field en masse. Within those historical periods, we sought to further divide the list into historical overviews, critical writings, photographers, and museum exhibitions. [End Page 243] This list, like any other, is limited by the historical moment in which it is published, as well as the space allotted in this journal. Therefore, it is the goal of all those who have participated in the creation of this list that it continue to live and grow online. We plan to expand this list to include writings on Japanese photography from Bakumatsu, Meiji, Taishō, and prewar Shōwa photography, making it a live and searchable online application. If fellow scholars and colleagues find any lacuna in the current list, or want to ensure that certain materials will be included in the future bibliography, we warmly welcome any and all contributions. Additionally, all efforts have been made to create accurate and complete references. Please feel free to alert us to any errors so they may be rectified in the online version. For the preliminary collection, we relied on John Clark’s compiled bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Asian Art, self-published in 2011. From that list, we extracted the items related to Japanese photography and then added several Ph.D. bibliographies and course syllabi. Contributions from Japan Art History Forum (JAHF) members and the PoNJA GenKon community have further expanded the list, and the introduction of sources in other European languages (German, French, Italian, and Spanish) has completed the current task. I would like to thank Ayelet Zohar for spearheading and initiating this project; without her dedication and leadership, this bibliography would never have been completed. Additionally, Rebecca Corbett lent invaluable expertise in terms of shaping the organization of this version of the bibliography. Finally, the project would never have come to fruition without the assistance of the following, who put in tremendous time and energy tracking down sources. I would like to thank: Anat Icar-Shoham, who edited the preliminary list, and integrated the addition of the new information we received from the Art History community; Patricia Lenz, who worked on the...

Reading Images, Visualizing Texts: Teaching Visual Analysis through Manga

This paper explains several techniques I use to help students develop visual analysis skills in my Japanese Visual Culture class. The in-class exercises outlined here teach students to examine the media they love—manga—through the lens of context, both historical and visual. By challenging students to closely read images and various forms of media, this pedagogy works to help students expand their understanding of Japanese popular culture while also integrating universal design for learning into the classroom. This gives visually oriented students a chance to participate more fully through privileging the visual over the textual for part of the class. Finally, the pedagogical exercises discussed can be done with manga whether on paper or online, bridging the oft – perceived divide between digital and analog experiences in the classroom.

Conformity and Invention: Learning and Creative Practice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Arts

Research Article| April 01 2018 Conformity and Invention: Learning and Creative Practice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Arts David Raymond Bell David Raymond Bell David Bell is associate professor at the University of Otago, College of Education, in Dunedin, New Zealand. He teaches graduate and postgraduate programs in teacher education, specializing in the visual arts, art history, and education theory. He has also taught Japanese visual culture courses and published extensively on ukiyo-e (floating-world picture) subjects. His research interests embrace pedagogies for aesthetic learning, Japanese art history and aesthetics, and museums as sites for learning between cultures. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Aesthetic Education (2018) 52 (1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Raymond Bell; Conformity and Invention: Learning and Creative Practice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Arts. Journal of Aesthetic Education 1 January 2018; 52 (1): 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Aesthetic Education Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Manga and / as art avant gardism: Japanese comics within 1960s Japanese visual culture

Manga and / as art avant gardism: Japanese comics within 1960s Japanese visual culture

In the Style of Ozu: Critical Making and Postwar Japanese Cinema

Interest in modern and contemporary Japanese visual culture—whether through film, art history, or literature—is growing among students who already have an exposure to and love for Japanese popular culture via visual media such as manga, anime, video, and social media. In combination with student demand for courses that engage with the visual, there is institutional demand for innovative courses that offer experiential and active learning approaches to critical inquiry. This pedagogical essay introduces the concept of “critical making” and the importance of new modes of student assessment that engage with creative acts of making. It discusses the development and application of a semester-long student filmmaking project in Postwar Japanese Cinema and concludes with a critique of the project and the broader implications for including critical making in East Asian studies courses that emphasize the study of visual culture. This student film project reflects my background and training in Japanese art, cinema, and visual culture—not in filmmaking or media production—and is just one example of how to approach the study of postwar Japanese cinema through the lens of critical making.

Fantasy Chronotope in Two Animated Children’s Films: Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001)

The aim of this study is to explore fantasy chronotope as exemplified in the complex spatio-temporal configuration in children’s fantasy films. The notion of fantasy chronotope is revisited to conceptualize the way space and time can interrelate through the in-depth analysis of two portal-quest fantasy films: Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Hayao Miyazaki’s (2001) Spirited Away (2001). The theoretical starting point is to examine the representation of the Alternative World and to articulate the aesthetics of animated children’s films as well. The researcher adopts a comparative/theoretical method to question spatiality in visual media and to analyze spatial practices undertaken by fictional/female narratives within multiple locations. Moreover, Japanese anime has not been studied adequately compared to its North American counterparts such as Disney especially in terms of ethnic/national or gender politics encoded in anime images. The study seeks to establish the two animated films as high fantasy films by presenting a fresh view on fantasy chronotope to examine fantasy—as a genre—not designed or intended to express escapism and childishness because it is simply unrealistic. The study sheds light not only on the significance of animation as a medium that has been considered too trivial for serious research, but also the current study offers a better understanding of how Japanese visual culture has brought about potentially crucial changes in the way the Western perceive Asia.

Cartoons vs. Manga Movies: A Brief History of Anime in the UK

This paper has as main objective to explore, adopting a historical and critical perspective, the release of film and anime TV in UK. This would be a first step towards the studio of the peculiar implementation of manganime Culture in Britain. Compared with other European countries, UK has shown to be slower and even reluctant in importing Japanese television products. Thus, while major markets of anime such as France, Italy or Spain expanded considerably during 1975-1995 period, in a recurrent synergy of television markets, and technological publishing, the implantation of the principal channel (televised anime) in UK has been irregular and unstable. Even today, the catalogue of broadcasting anime is limited to some high success movies, late night television on thematic channels and quite recently, video-on-demand services (Netflix). The offer cannot be compare in importance and diversity to other European countries. This fact, far from being anecdotal, has had an impact on the subsequent implantation of media Japanese cultures such as manga, anime, video games and cosplay. What can be the reason of this irregular development of Japanese visual culture in United Kingdom? Characteristic having the television market and / or the UK audience? Main hypothesis in relation to these issues can be considered to be of sociological character, but are reflected in the idiosyncrasies of British television culture and production system. Thus, compared to other Western markets (including the US) which saw the opportunity to purchase economic products for children’s television audiences in the late 70s and early 80s, the British ‘telly’ already offered a broad catalogue (Roobarb, Super Ted, Danger Mouse, etc. ...). The only exception to this children’s ‘made in Britain’ programming was the co-production model. This caused a leak of few products that were not even considered as “Japanese” (Seven Cities of Gold, Godzilla) but mere ‘cartoons’. This competition with the British children production as well as the wide catalogue of other forms of British Popular Culture would explain why the film, domestic video and later adults programming would be the marginal routes of entry for manganime.

Naoya Hatakeyama and the photographic representation of post-tsunami landscapes in Japan

Abstract This article investigates the role that art photography of in relation to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. The article focuses on an ethical and moral debate that emerged amongst Japanese photographers who questioned how the disaster and its aftermath can be, or should, be represented in a photograph. At the forefront of this debate was the photographer Naoya Hatakeyama whose personal connection to the region turned him into a quasi spokesperson for his profession. Through a close reading of his photographic works, the article situates post-tsunami photography in relation to wider photographic trends in Japanese visual culture.

Corporal Punishment in Early-Twentieth-Century Japanese Visual Culture

Corporal Punishment in Early-Twentieth-Century Japanese Visual Culture

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz

Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club by Ory Bartal

Reviewed by: Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club by Ory Bartal Nobuko Kawashima (bio) Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club. By Ory Bartal. Dartmouth College Press, Lebanon, N.H., 2015. xii, 263 pages. $85.00, cloth; $45.00, paper; $44.99, E-book. It has been some decades since our economy has become culturized and our society media-saturated, and commercial culture in particular permeates our daily lives today. Research on Japanese culture available in English has advanced in recent decades by expanding its earlier focus on classical, high culture to include elements of commercial culture such as manga and anime. However, research on advertising has remained relatively scant until recently, despite the prominence of advertisements in contemporary media and their important role in financing the production of commercial culture. Thus, Postmodern Advertising in Japan, which discusses the visual culture of advertisements in Japan, is a very welcome, long-awaited addition to the literature. Ory Bartal specifically focuses on graphic art (posters) for advertising in Japan designed in the 1980s and the 1990s by members of the Tokyo Art Directors Club (Tokyo ADC), a prestigious and exclusive association to which only highly acclaimed art directors in the commercial advertising world are admitted. For Bartal, these advertisements are postmodernistic, of high artistic quality, and have gained a worldwide reputation. New styles, concepts, and visual strategies are employed in these posters, which, Bartal asserts, blur the distinction between art and commerce. With the ultimate purpose of untangling the “Japanese-ness” of Japanese advertising, Bartal distances himself from an orientalist direction and situates the commercial visual culture of Japan within the global context. He does this not only by undertaking aesthetic and cultural decoding of the advertising posters under investigation but also by emphasizing the exploration of the social, economic, and industrial contexts in which the commercial art works were created. Readers might wonder how the author combined these different approaches so successfully. Bartal holds an MBA and was a marketing expert in Israeli companies for more than ten years before pursuing a doctorate at the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Tel Aviv. Bartal’s mixed academic background straddling the social sciences and humanities is unusual—and valuable for content analysis in advertising. Marketing research (in which advertising research is normally included) is typically about business efficiency and effectiveness with little or no content analysis, whereas aesthetic research is about the textual analysis of [End Page 379] cultural expressions with little regard to how they are made in economic terms. The sociology of advertising may examine the context in which specific advertisements emerge at the macro-societal level but not really at the micro level, leaving aside questions of financing and business interactions that must have influenced the production of those advertisements. Cultural studies of advertising may pay attention to the business structure of the advertising industry that produces art works but are mostly concerned with the power relations between different classes and groups of employees and professionals in the industry. Bartal takes a tack different from any of these approaches and analyzes the structures, colors, and words of the posters; discusses why the posters took the forms they did within the Japanese economic and social contexts of the times; and investigates under what conditions and with what thoughts and intentions they were produced by individual art directors. A useful strategy undertaken by Bartal in exploring the conditions of production at the micro level is his interviews with selected art directors, all of whom are members of the Tokyo ADC, as he saw the club as a pivotal point around which visual expressions of advertising blossomed during the 1980s and the 1990s. The book is organized into four parts: the history of Japanese advertising and the place of the Tokyo ADC within it; the aesthetics of Japanese visual culture and its relevance to the postmodern, commercial posters that are the focus of the book; the marketing and business features of the Japanese advertising industry that are different from the global norm; and, finally, social forces. All these factors, Bartal argues, have contributed to postmodern advertising culture...

Commensurable Distinctions: Intercultural Negotiations of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture

Commensurable Distinctions:Intercultural Negotiations of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture Bert Winther-Tamaki (bio) and Kenichi Yoshida (bio) Over two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War when two leading proponents of Japanese studies in the United States, the literary scholar Masao Miyoshi and the historian Harry Harootunian, declared that “Japan in the world as an isolated national entity is no more meaningful than any other claim to a unique national identity.”1 And more recently it has become commonplace to hear, for example, that art is undergoing a “progressive denationalization” induced by “globalization and worldwide mediatization.”2 Whether or not the demise of the nation is in fact at hand, this discursive environment problematizes the once unthinkingly accepted link between the first two terms of the field “Japanese art history.” For how can Japanese art alone be studied if Japan has no meaning “as an isolated national entity”? And how promising is continued investment in the adjudication of differences between Japanese and non-Japanese art amidst a “progressive denationalization” of art? While recognizing, as even historians of globalization have, that Japan and other nations remain “preferred settings” for organizing group identity and articulating shared aims,3 we would like to explore a less dichotomous logic than has often been deployed, at least with regard to the modern and contemporary periods during which Japanese art has been deeply and increasingly imbricated with other parts of the world. We propose “commensurable distinctions” as an alternative logic to suggest the mutually reinforcing dynamics of increasing sameness and increasing difference that unfold in contact zones arrayed in a strikingly uneven global geography. Historians of post-Edo Japanese art have often prioritized the uniqueness of Japanese transformations or revisions of Euro-American art and privileged purported continuities or vestiges of earlier indigenous practices. Consequently, the closeness of modern Japanese art to transnational ideas and forms has often been overlooked, regretted, or derided for being imitative and lacking in originality. This is a view of modern Japanese art that sociologist Bruno Latour [End Page 1] might regard as exemplifying the modernist “Great Divide” that has historically reduced intricate transcultural entanglements to schematic monumental dichotomies such as nature and culture, or more specifically in this case, Japan and the West, the West and the Other.4 To adhere to this divide is to fail to recognize things and occasions that mediate, travel, and translate between multiple regions and places. Our approach, then, seeks to apprehend the critical role of relations of convergence, similarity, or identity—in conditions where such relations blur and confuse the definition of national culture as well as conditions where they produce artistic tropes of Japaneseness. Focusing on fluidity, mutations, and interstices as opposed to modes of analysis based on contained national and cultural forms, this approach examines the benefits of compatibility and global passages of transfer that lead to situated distinctions and complex drifts. “Commensurable distinctions” may be defined as visual features of the art of a nation or region generated by a transnational framework (format or genre) that positions artists (and artworks, styles, movements) in relative measure to some standard presumed to have global reach or authority. Commensurability is perhaps better understood in other areas of culture than art. The global maritime network of port cities, for example, comprises a well-developed infrastructure dictated by the need for common measurements. The inter-regional standardization of weights and measures began in antiquity, while the wharves, docks, and loading equipment of the vast maritime network of container terminals around the world today are virtually indistinguishable.5 Yet the contents of these standardized containers, sometimes including works of art, often encompass far greater diversity than the hardware used in their transportation, and the circulation of these commodities and search for new markets stimulates further diversification. The currency and exchange of the capitalist market system have been central to these processes driving commensuration and differentiation. In a study titled Ethnicity, Inc., the anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff describe new developments in the commodification of all kinds of cultural properties and the incorporation of identity itself: “Those who seek to brand their otherness, to profit from what makes them different, find themselves...

Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan by Yui Suzuki (review)

Reviewed by: Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan by Yui Suzuki Yoko Hsueh Shirai Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan. By Yui Suzuki. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. 192pages. Hardcover €92.00/$122.00. Medicine Master Buddha is Yui Suzuki’s first book and number three in a new series by Brill, Japanese Visual Culture. This volume is unexpectedly—and refreshingly—unconventional in many ways, reacting against a number of commonly held perceptions concerning Yakushi’s position within the visual and religious landscape of Japan between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, or roughly the Heian and Kamakura periods. This book does not thoroughly examine the earliest history and origins of the Medicine Buddha Yakushi (Sk. Bhaiṣajyaguru), but instead concentrates on a change that occurred around the end of the eighth century in the way Yakushi was portrayed in Japan: the emergence of a standing Medicine Buddha; earlier images had represented Yakushi in a seated position. Suzuki explains that the standing images were adopted by the Saichō-Enryakuji lineage and can therefore be seen as a signature image of this lineage. Saichō (767–822) founded the Tendai school of Buddhism, which flourished during the Heian period, and established the temple complex Enryakuji on Mt. Hiei in Ōmi province (now Shiga prefecture). There is much I did not realize about Yakushi, and my first surprise was Suzuki’s mention of “hundreds” of images: “Although there are hundreds of extant Heian Yakushi images . . . contemporary art history textbooks in English only mention one or two such statues” (p. 2). Unfortunately, the book does not include a list of extant Yakushi images—not even of those that have been designated national treasures. Such a list, and perhaps also a guide to further readings, would have been helpful. Intrigued by Suzuki’s claim, I consulted Mikkyō jiin to butsuzō, a full-color reference volume on Heian sculpture published in 1992, and found that out of 118 color plates, 23 plates, or roughly 20 percent, were of Yakushi images.1 This high percentage lends credibility to Suzuki’s claim of “hundreds” of images. Suzuki is correct in suggesting that “illuminating the primacy of Yakushi images in the context of the Medicine Buddha’s devotional cult is long overdue” (p. 2). [End Page 255] The six chapters in the book proceed in roughly chronological order, and the author frequently circles back to corroborate or reconfirm earlier arguments. She also provides a summary of each chapter of the book as part of the volume’s introductory material. The first few chapters are heavy going, but by chapter 4 the book gains considerable momentum, and the account becomes absolutely captivating. Chapter 1, “The Formation of the Yakushi Cult,” examines the early history of the cult in Japan. Suzuki takes up the cult’s origins and informs us that evidence of Yakushi worship in Japan dates to the last quarter of the seventh century. As the author notes (see pages 20–21, and especially page 134, note 54), there is no easy way to definitively identify a Yakushi image manufactured before the ninth century. Until that time, Yakushi images did not hold medicine jars in their hands, and their manner of depiction was nearly the same as that for Shaka (Sk. Śākyamuni). The Medicine Buddha was often called upon to heal those suffering from illness. By the end of the eighth century, there was a “merging of private healing practices with the larger goal of prosperity and well-being for Japan as a whole” (p. 22). Chapter 2, “The Magical Yakushi: Spirit Pacifier and Healer-God,” discusses the ritual uses of Yakushi during the ninth century, which included appeals to protect the state by warding off epidemics or by preventing natural disasters such as flooding. Chapter 3, “Saichō’s Standing Yakushi and Its Iconic Legacy,” attempts both to visually reconstruct the lost Yakushi icon that once belonged to Saichō and to understand the role this icon may have played in the Buddhist master’s life. This is no easy task, especially because Enryakuji was “put to the torch in 1571 by the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), and most of...

Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. By Steven T. Brown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ix, 256 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).

Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. By Steven T. Brown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ix, 256 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).