Edutainment > Meiji Prints

Opening of Azuma Bridge

Meiji Period
Dainippon Tokyo Azuma-bashi Shinkei
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This series of essays written by Dan McKee outlines roughly 120 years of Japanese printmaking from the Edo period under the Tokugawa shogunate until the Westernization of Japan during the Meiji era. The article describes the development of the popular Japanese print as the result of the political, social and economic environment of the times in which they were made and the people for whom they were produced.

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The Meiji Print as Fine Art or Cultural Artifact?

1. Meiji Prints as Fine Art?
2. The Ukiyo-e Makers
3. The Ukiyo-e Public

Political Authority and the Popular Print

4. The Edo Society
5. Tokugawa Bakufu
6. Oppression - Utamaro and the Tempo Reforms
7. Fushi-ga, Period of Satire

The Popular Print Meets Modernity: Tradition and Transition in the Meiji Era

8. From Tokugawa to Meiji
9. Bloody Yoshitoshi Prints
10. Meiji Enlightenment
11. Meiji Nationalism
12. Participation and Identification

Conclusion: Popular Culture and Political Authority

13. The Popular Print in Edo and Meiji

Dan McKee
(June 2003, updated by Dieter Wanczura in June 2009)

Bibliography

• Figal, Gerald: Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Duke University Press, Duhram and London, 1999
• Okamoto Shumpei (with introduction by Donald Keene), Impressions of the Front: Woodcuts of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 23-June 26, 1983
• Stevenson, John: Yoshitoshi's Women: The Woodblock Print Series Fuzoku Sanjuniso, University of Washington Press Revised Edition, 1995
• Takahashi, - hiko, Edo no Nyuh Media: Ukiyo-e Joho to Kohkoku to Asobi, Kadokawa Shoten, 1993
• Kunichika Yakusha Kagami, (Kunichika's Mirror of Kabuki Actors), Riccar Art Museum, Tokyo, 1981
• Kawanabe Kyosai Hanga Hanpon Ten (An Exhibition of Kawanabe Kyosai's Woodblock Prints and Printed Books), Riccar Art Museum, Tokyo April 7- May 5, 1987
• Yokoo Tadanori, Yoshitoshi Kyokai no Kamigami,, Ribun Publishing, 1993
• Hirota Masaki: Bunmei Kaika to Minshu Ishiki, 1980

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