Woodblock Prints in a Postmodern Edifice: The Sumida Hokusai Museum
Michael Pronko
Down a typical shitamachi street on the east side of Tokyo, an odd-angled metallic structure rises above the office buildings, neat houses and small shops of the neighborhood. The shiny silver panels are the outer face of the impressive -- and greatly needed -- new Sumida Hokusai Museum, dedicated to the life and work of painter and ukiyo-e woodblock print master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). more...
Design by Design in Modern Japanese Ceramics: The Shoto Museum of Art
Alice Gordenker
Ceramics of Japan's modern era -- the span of roughly 70 years between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the end of the Second World War -- has emerged as something of a hot topic within Japan. This is seen in a run of recent exhibitions of ceramics from this period, which began when the country ended hundreds of years of seclusion and embarked on a program of rapid modernization. more...
Adventures in Art Education: the Avant-Garde Professors of Tsukuba
Alan Gleason
Sixty kilometers northeast of Tokyo sits Tsukuba Science City, a planned community at the foot of Mt. Tsukuba built from scratch in the sixties to serve as a national research hub. There was once talk of moving the central government out of Tokyo into a new capital at Tsukuba, too; though this was not to be, the city has grown into a thriving mecca of academic and research institutions. more...
