FAH262H1 Chap.2 The Arts and Society of Edo Japan
The Arts and Society of Edo Japan
A baseline before Meiji
Week 2 looks backward on purpose. Its stated objective is to give students a working picture of Edo-period visual art so that the social and artistic changes of the Meiji years can be measured against it.
By the end of the week you should be able to outline the structure of Edo society, explain how status shaped who made, paid for and looked at pictures, tell the major forms and genres apart, and connect named artists to the growth of a townspeople's culture. The syllabus gives the period as 1603 to 1868. Christine Guth's chronology table begins it in 1615 instead, so attribute whichever date you use.
Meiji, by contrast, runs from 1868 to 1912, and later chapters keep asking what it inherited.
Peace, rank and the city
Guth traces much of the period's art to the long Tokugawa peace. Warriors without wars moved into towns and offices, and cultural patronage became one of the ways the ruling class showed its right to govern.
The shogunate took direct charge of Kyoto, Osaka and Nagasaki, restrained roughly two hundred regional lords, told the court to confine itself to culture, and closed the country for fear of Christianity and of western domains allying with Europeans. Alternate attendance obliged lords to keep lavish households in Edo, and the roads and waterways built to carry their retinues later helped regional cultures grow.
Guth adds a practical consequence: retainers living in the capital without their families sustained the city's pleasure quarters.
Markets, rivals and the amateur ideal
When wealthy townspeople could choose what to buy, official taste lost its monopoly.
Guth reads the eclecticism of Edo art as a result of artists competing for audiences, which also made them attentive to how they marketed their work and their public image. Because art had become a commodity, the claim to be an amateur carried weight; Guth compares that ideal with the later Western wish to place art outside economics, while noting that it never escaped the market.
The rivalry between Kyoto, heir to the court's refinement, and Edo, proud of its novelty, runs through the period, down to the competing acting styles favoured on each city's Kabuki stage. Guth contrasts the affirmative outlook of Kyoto painters with the visual doubt and satire of Edo print designers working under tighter government control.
Windows onto China and Europe
Seclusion did not mean isolation.
Nagasaki housed a Chinese community and a few Dutch traders on Deshima, and artists travelled there to learn about the outside world. Guth warns that the China admired in Edo art was an imagined one, no closer to the real country than the Japan of nineteenth-century European Japonistes was to Japan.
After 1720, when the shogunate lifted its ban on imported books, illustrated European works on botany, anatomy and geography encouraged a more empirical art. The key-term list collects this strand under Dutch learning and Dutch painting, with Hiraga Gennai, Odano Naotake and Shiba Kokan as its names.
Imported knowledge, in short, entered pictures as a method of looking rather than as a ready-made style.
A manifesto read beside a survey
The conceptual reading is Takashi Murakami's Superflat manifesto of 2000, and the syllabus warns that such readings are meant to be a struggle.
Murakami treats Edo painting as the first chapter of a story that ends in anime: painters who flattened space and steered the viewer's eye prefigure the effects animators of 1970s television. Read him as an artist building a usable past, then test each claim against Guth's patrons, cities and markets.
Note too that his account of the word bijutsu ties it to a Vienna exhibition he dates 1872, a year earlier than Chapter 1's 1873. Murakami ends by proposing superflat as an -ism of his own making, which is a reason to treat it as an argument.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Edo period dates: 1603 or 1615 to 1868
- 02
The four-tier status order and the chonin
- 03
Alternate attendance and the growth of Edo
- 04
Patronage beyond court, shogunate and temples
- 05
Kara-e, yamato-e and the six painting lineages
- 06
Nagasaki, Dutch learning and Akita Ranga
- 07
Murakami's Superflat lineage of eccentrics
Worked example · free
Test Murakami's eccentric lineage against Guth's urban map
- 2Summarise Murakami's claim: Tsuji's eccentrics made flat surfaces that control the path and speed of the gaze, and Kanada's animation repeats the method.
- 2Summarise Guth's frame: art shaped by rank, by rival cities and by patrons who could now choose, so competition produced novelty.
- 2Judge: Murakami explains how the picture is looked at, Guth explains why it was made that way, and a strong answer uses both while naming Murakami's lineage as a modern construction.
Key terms
- Chonin
- Townspeople, literally residents of the block: the artisans and merchants whose urban wealth widened Edo-period patronage beyond court, shogunate and temples.
- Alternate Attendance
- A shogunal rule (sankin kotai) making regional lords keep households in Edo and reside there in alternate periods; Guth dates it 1634, the key-term list 1635.
- Kara-e
- Chinese-style painting, the category the key-term list sets against yamato-e, Japanese-style painting, as the opening pair of Edo terms.
- Literati Painting
- Painting modelled on cultivated Chinese gentleman amateurs, also called bunjinga or nanga (Southern painting); Buson, Taiga and Gyokuran are key-term examples.
- Akita Ranga
- Dutch-style painting by artists of the Akita domain who learned Western perspective from imported books; Odano Naotake is the key-term example.
The Arts and Society of Edo Japan FAQ
What did Hiraga Gennai build with Dutch learning?
Static electricity machines copied from Dutch models. A 1787 woodblock book, A Miscellany of Dutch Studies, illustrated by Keisai Masayoshi, Shiba Kokan and others, shows one treating a patient; Guth notes the medical use failed.
How did Kabuki taste differ between Kyoto and Edo?
Guth reports that Kyoto and Osaka audiences liked wagoto, a refined and sometimes sentimental soft style, while Edo preferred the swagger of aragoto, the rough style. Edo print designers showed actors in those aragoto roles.
Which book gave Murakami his idea of eccentric Edo painters?
Tsuji Nobuo's The Lineage of Eccentricity, which praised six expressionistic Edo painters as the avant-garde of their day and likened them to manga and posters. A sequel added Hokusai and Jakuchu under a theory of decorative culture.
Exam move
Sketch the four-tier status order from memory and attach one painting lineage and one patron to each tier or city. Then write a five-sentence paragraph that tests one Murakami claim against Guth.
