Treasures of Imperial Japan, Volume 1, Selected Essays

This collection of essays by an international team of scholars provides essential background on the administrative, social, and economic, as well as the artistic, history of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912). The first three essays investigate the new government's active role in the modernization and re-orientation of the traditional crafts, which was seen as a vital component in Japan's efforts to become a modern country on a par with the Western powers. Janet Hunter sets the scene, describing the drastic changes wrought by the Meiji revolution and the conflict betwen Western and Japanese civilization that was to become a constant theme of Japan's development. Sato Doshin analyses the Meiji bureaucrats' efforts to promote the craft industries by means of trade exhibitions at home and abroad, while Hida Toyojiro investigates the motivations and working methods of the Japanese entrepreneurs who did so much to bring the domestic craft tradition to an international audience. The next two essays, by Gunhild Avitabile and Ellen Conant, celebrate the lives of two Westerners, the German Gottfried Wagener and the Irishman Captain Frank Brinkley, who profoundly influenced the course of Meiji-period craft industries, Wagener as educator and technical adviser to makers of ceramics and enamels and Brinkley as polymath collector and writer. The last contribution, by Ruper Faulkner and Anna Jackson, explores the formation of the Victoria & Albert Museum's extensive Japanese holdings during the era of Japonisme in the 1870s and '80s, focusing on purchases from great exhibitions in Paris, London, and Philadelphia. Their essay is extensively illustrated with well-documented Meiji-period acquisitions by the V & A, most of which have never before been published. This volume, and the full bibliography of Western and Japanese sources with which it concludes, is an invaluable starting-point for the further study of the Meiji period and its art.