History of Western sources on Japanese art

1986 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy S. Allen
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
History Of

Learning about Japanese art has been difficult for Westerners. Limited access, language barriers, and cultural misunderstanding have been almost insurmountable obstacles. Knowledge of Japanese art in the West began over 150 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853. Englebert Kaempfer (1657-1716), sent to Japan as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, befriended a young assistant who provided information for a book on Japanese life and history published in 1727. By 1850, more ethnographic information had been published in Europe. Catalogs of sales of Japanese art in Europe exist prior to 1850 and collection catalogs from major museums follow in the second half of that century. After the Meiji Restoration (1867) cultural exchange was possible and organizations for that purpose were formed. Diaries of 19th century travellers and important international fairs further expanded cross-cultural information. Okakura Kakuzo, a native of Japan, published in English about Japanese art and ultimately became Curator of the important collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The advent of photography made visual images easily accessible to Westerners. Great collectors built up the holdings of major American museums. In the 20th century, materials written and published in Japan in English language have furthered understanding of Japanese culture. During the past twenty years, travelling exhibitions and scholarly catalogs have circulated in the West. Presently monographs, dissertations and translated scholarly texts are available. Unfortunately, there is little understanding in the West of the organization of Japanese art libraries and archives which contain primary source material of interest to art historians.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Regarding Change at Ise Jingū

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 220-232
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Perl
Keyword(s):  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
The West ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Woodblock Prints ◽  
Attitudes Toward Change

This essay introduces the second of three installments of an “elegiac symposium” in Common Knowledge on figures and concepts devalued in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “paradigm shifts.” The essay suggests that Kuhn’s idea is provincial, in three specified senses, and then goes on to show how differently Japanese culture regards and manages major change. The author of this introduction, who is also the journal’s editor, begins by evaluating a triptych of 1895 by Toshikata as a response to the seemingly revolutionary changes brought by the Meiji Restoration a generation before. He then goes on to discuss, as exemplary of Japanese attitudes toward change, the Shinto ritual during which the sacred shrines of Ise Jingū are torn down and rebuilt every twenty years. The essay concludes by explaining how the impetus for this ritual is also involved in less-exalted aspects of Japanese culture; for example, in the peculiarities of the market for ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Overall, this essay shows that Japanese ways of regarding concepts such as “old” and “new,” “continuity” and “change,” differ so radically from those presupposed in the West that the latter should be regarded as provincial rather than as universally valid.

Pride and Prejudice: The Role of Policy and Perception Creation in the Chinese Revolt of 1652 on Dutch Formosa

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Marné Strydom
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch Colonial

The events of September 1652 on the island of Formosa were one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of Dutch management of the island, and could arguably be viewed as one of the most severe suppressions of a rebellious group in the seventeenth century. The unexpected, ill-prepared uprising of thousands of frustrated, angry and impoverished Chinese farmers and field hands against Dutch colonial management were successfully, yet in the most severe and savage way, suppressed through a military collaboration between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the local Aborigines of the island. In total some 3,000 Chinese residents of the island were killed, the ‘hacked-off’ head of the leader ‘displayed on a stake […] to frighten the Chinese as a sign of victory over those dastardly traitors’, while three of his lieutenants were tortured to death by Company officials in an effort to extract confessions and information from them. Indeed severe action towards a section of the Formosan colonial society that was primarily responsible for the economic success of the Dutch settlement enterprise.

scholarly journals No ‘Thing to Wear’: A Brief History of Kimono and Inappropriation from Japonisme to Kimono Protests

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
MICHELLE LIU CARRIGER
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Museum Of Fine Arts ◽  
Claude Monet ◽  
A Performance

In June 2015, a small strange protest erupted in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, around a sumptuous red kimono, provided to visitors to try on and emulate the 1876 painting La Japonaise, by Claude Monet. Protesters named themselves Decolonize Our Museums and took to the gallery and social media with strident messages condemning the Kimono Wednesdays try-on activity as racist, orientalist appropriation; soon after, counterprotesters faced off, defending the programme for sharing Japanese culture with the community. In this article, I consider the kimono protests as part of a history of kimono, internationally created yet indelibly marked as Japanese. In this context, the kimono protests provide an occasion to consider the ramifications of contemporary debates about cultural appropriation and appreciation. Through a performance-theory inflected analysis I propose a theatrical ethic of ‘inappropriation’ as a means of moving discourse and public performances of culture beyond the stultifying binaries of right/wrong or appreciation/appropriation.

The killing of Posthouder Scheerder and Jifar Folfolun (The War of the Breasts): Malukan and Dutch narratives of an incident in the VOC's waning days

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-346
Author(s):  
A. Ross Gordon ◽  
Sonny A. Djonler ◽  
Hans Hägerdal
Keyword(s):  
Sea Cucumber ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Small Islands ◽  
Economic Exchange ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Eastern Side ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
History Of

The Aru Islands in southeastern Maluku have a long history of economic exchange and colonial relations with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and later the Dutch colonial state. Aru was fragmented in smaller autonomous settlements, of which those in the east produced valuable items for export, such as pearls and tripang (edible sea cucumber). The article focuses on a spate of anti-colonial revolts in the waning days of the VOC in the 1790s. It centred on the Batuley villages situated on a few small islands on the eastern side. The central incident leading to the resistance was the killing of a Dutch low-ranking officer, Scheerder, an event which has been preserved in local tradition till the present day. A search in the VOC archives confirms several details, but suggests a rationale for the resistance which is partly different from the traditional version, and linked in with larger movements of resistance in Aru and Maluku. The article discusses the significance of the oral traditions, and how a comparison with archival materials can enrich our understanding of Arunese–Dutch relations.

A Pretender on Gowa' Throne. The War of Batara Gowa I. Singkilang in South West Celebes, 1776–c. 1790

Itinerario ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-177
Author(s):  
M.P.H. Roessingh
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
High Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Hague ◽  
State Archives ◽  
State Of Affairs

The subject of this article is the fight for the throne in the kingdom of Gowa at the end of the 18th century, during the decline of the Dutch East India Company, a period which also saw the downfall of Gowa and the supremacy of Bone. The sources for the history of this period are twofold: on one hand the indigenous sources, “lontara-bilang” (diaries) and other records in Buginese and Makassarese; secondly, the European writings, principally the archival materials from the Dutch government at Makassar, supplemented by travel accounts and reports of the English. My primary sources are almost exclusively Dutch, namely the papers of the VOC, as they are preserved in the General State Archives in The Hague. To be more precise, these sources may be in Dutch, but in addition to the letters etc. written by Company officials, they also contain translations from documents drawn up by the rulers of Bone and Gowa or other of Asians. Moreover, the governors of Makassar often made use of indigenous sources, both oral and written, in preparing their lengthy memoirs about the state of affairs in their district. In 1736, the High Government in Batavia decided that two accurate genealogical tables must be prepared of the royal houses of Bone and Gowa.

Waiting for the ‘Just King’: The Agrarian World of South-Central Java from Giyanti (1755) to the Java War (1825–30)

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Carey
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Central Java ◽  
South Central ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
First Time

Students of Javanese society have long recognized that the Java War (1825–30), the bitter five-year struggle against European colonial rule in Java, constituted a watershed in the history of modern Indonesia. In his recent textbook, Professor Ricklefs has characterized the year 1830 as ‘the beginning of the truly colonial period in Java’, arguing that the Java War marked the transition point between the ‘trading’ era of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the years of ‘colonial’ exploitation ushered in by Johannes van den Bosch's well known ‘cultivation systems’. In military and political terms, the costly Dutch victory over the javanese made them, for the first time in their three and a half centuries of involvement in the archipelago, the undisputed masters of Java. At the same time, scholars of Javanese Islam have suggested that the defeat of the Javanese leader, Dipanagara (1785–1855), and the religious ideals for which he fought (most notably his goal of strengthening the institutional position of Islam in Javanese society), temporarily undermined the morale and self-confidence of the Islamic communities in Java. Specialists in the history of the central Javanese principalities (vorstenlanden), especially those interested in cultural developments, have also seen the Javanese failure in 1825–30 as a setback to the vitality and independence of the Javanese cultural tradition, a time when Javanese society began to turn in on itself and lose something of its strength and flexibility.

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