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This paper explores senses of ‘Japaneseness’ among Japanese musicians today by considering the words of 32 musicians—from koto and shakuhachi masters to jazz saxophonists, rock guitarists, and classical and electronic composers-in a provincial Japanese city. Their diverse senses of cultural identity are analyzed through three metaphors through which they express themselves: Japaneseness as a fence, walling off Japanese from change and foreignness, Japaneseness as a flavor to be enjoyed by anyone in the world who so chooses, and Japaneseness as a phantasm: Japaneseness obliterated, to be created anew if enough people can be convinced of the validity of such a recreation. This paper suggests that these metaphors may be useful in explicating cultural identity across a broad range of settings beyond music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese noh theatre started out as a popular art form which originated among the lower classes of society. The noh master Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443?) refined it so that it conformed with the aesthetic preferences of the élite members of the audience. Within a century of Zeami's death, many members of the audience had crossed the boundary between spectator and performer, and had begun ardently to learn to perform noh. By this time, the performers were able to participate in defining the noh theatre, rather than being constrained by the aesthetic preferences of their patrons as in the earlier times. This paper argues that evidence of the changing social discourse about the noh theatre can be found in historical documents written by both the audience members and noh practitioners. These historical documents, ranging from noh treatises to diary entries, demonstrate how the noh theatre was perceived and related to by both the performers and the audience since Zeami's time. When the genre had successfully established itself as an officially sanctioned theatrical form during the late Muromachi period, noh practitioners were able to create a category of noh plays that were markedly different from the earlier ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses how artist Frank Lloyd Wright described the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan in the 19th century. Background on the encouragement of the former emperor Meiji with ties to Europeans and Americans; Operations of the hotel during the changes in tourism flow; Expansion of the hotel to address the needs of the tourism business.

The article explores Foujita Kimiyo, widow of Japanese artist Foujita Tsuguharu. Particular focus is given to her work as the executor of the Foujita estate. Additional topics discussed include how she kept tight control of the artist's estate, often resorting to litigation following writing and publishing on her husband, how she was Tsuguharu's fifth and final wife and the "widow" stereotype.

The article discusses the trend of new realism art as double projects in the Japanese postwar era. It highlights that artists began to paint realism art, motivated not only by communism but by the hopes of building a new nation. It further informs about some artists who joined the revolutionary act commanded by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in the rural areas in Japan.

The author discusses the art exhibition "From Space to Environment" held at the Environment Society in Tokyo, Japan. The author mentions visual art, music, design, and architecture in Japan. Also mentioned is the Japanese art world, the international world of art, the phrase "international contemporaneity," intermedia art, and cybernetic art.

This article explores the hit chart period of Japanese popular music between January and March in 1990 and in 2004, using the survival model, and examines the factors involved in producing a hit. First, the results showed that fame of the artist, ties with other media, and compilation albums featuring several artists prolonged the hits chart period. Second, the music's survival period on the charts was shorter in 2004 than in 1990. This means that more titles appeared on the charts in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to complicate the opposition between Western modernity and Japanese tradition flint is often said m characterize the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, this essay explores the logic of synaesthesia in some of his works from the early Taisho period such as 'The mermaid's lament', 'The present and of motion pictures', and 'The tumor with a human face'. Synaesthesia in Tanizaki involves not only a decomposition and recombination of different perceptual modalities but also an erotic encounter with the foreign. It affords an intensification of the procedures of Japan's Orientalist history (tōyōshi), by allowing artifacts and ethnographic detail to swarm into the story as spectacle rather than fact. With its emphasis on the hybrid, the awkward and misplaced, synaesthesia Calls attention to the corporeality of perception, to what Jonathan Crary calls 'the emergence of the body as a productive physiological apparatus'. In TaniZaki, the emergence of such synaesthetic, corporeal modes of perception is also intimately linked m questions of race. It is in this way that Tanizaki's use of synaesthesia reminds us that viewers and readers are already deformed, already inscribed in fictive ethnicities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]