Boundaries of Japanese Art
Many people enjoy watching Japanese manga or anime these days regardless of their nationalities due to its irritating and exotic aspects since the boundaries between Eastern and Western cultures became very abstract these days. The root of the contemporary Japanese art began from the Meiji Restoration. A few big political and social changes occurred during that period, so artists’ political stances have also stand out through their artworks. These movements have influenced the contemporary Japanese art such as manga, anime and kawaii even though the contemporary form of Japanese art has less political aspects, but the cultural features of Japanese art that contains patriarchy and seseual portraits of women still remained similar in Japan today.
Print culture in Japanese cities had been flourishing for over a century from the beginning of the Meiji period. Pre-Meiji prints feature brightly colored images of actors, courtesans, and scenic views, which reminds of impressionist and romantic art in European countries, but the Meiji period’s dramatic social, political, and cultural changes provided a wealth of new subjects for printmakers to capture. Japanese art during the Meiji Restoration was highly influenced by Westernization, especially French art. Japanese arts and types of expressions have been evolved technically, but its cultural aspects are still strongly appeared in the contemporary Japanese art. This cultural phenomenon led to the appearance of series of manga to interconnect between media and culture.
During the period of Japanese Sakoku, Fukuzawa Yukichi, who was one of six great educators during Meiji period, advocated Westernization because he believed the concern of the Imperialism was the the basis for promoting modernization. He considered that Japan should “Leave Asia to go towards Europe,” and consequently Japan would quickly imitate Western countries to become an Asian Power nation. During this period, France began its policy of colonization around the world, so France and Japan became important partners. Thus, Japan and France’s art exchanges were flourishing, resulting in the cross-cultural influences on their arts. During this period, Japan adopted lots of Western artistic aspects including painting, architecture, and sculpture. In the middle of nineteenth century, Japan established two arts schools, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and Kyoto Prefectural School in which they both emphasized on Western Romantic art. In consequence, Japanese art became “borderless” during the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
With a long history deeply rooted in the rich Japanese art, unique contemporary Japanese art, such as manga, anime, or kawaii, became one of the most fascinating phenomena in Japan and the whole world. Part of the “otaku” culture, these comics have been a major player in the country’s publishing industry, creating a robust market, reaching millions of readers of all ages and influencing a number of works of comic book art in a variety of other nations. From history and teenage romance to futuristic science fiction and profound themes of life, manga became an important, almost inevitable aspect of Japan’s identity and they helped spread knowledge and understanding of it across the planet.
Manga of the Meiji period shares an intertwined history with the development of newspapers and periodicals in late 19th century. The characteristic of topical relevance, however, while often pertaining to political issues, does not necessarily mean that Meiji manga were invested in any specific political stance. Most early manga remain rich in their shifting, opportunistic refusals of a fixed stance toward contemporary news and politics. Scholars have been interested in early manga periodicals for the insight they yield into important political movements such as the Freedom and People’s Rights movement in the 1880s, or the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century, assessing various writers and artists for engagement with important political issues and for their stance on such issues in a conservative-to-progressive scale.
Ukiyo-e was a kind of artwork on woodblock prints which were mass produced for a popular audience. Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the great example of the flat and minimalistic feature of Japanese artworks. It is surely expressive in colors due to Western influence, but at the same time, it does keep “Japaneseness” in the piece with flat and powerfully graphic forms with its strong lines. Because of its simplistic form of Japanese art, it can be interpreted that it would not probably take a long time to create one artwork and would be able to mass produce and spread it quickly as a tool of media. Therefore, the use of art as media to spread news could be easily accessible in the late 19th century in Japan.
The tradition still remained in Japanese culture that Ukiyo-e tends to portrait beautiful young women which still remained the same in the contemporary art of Japan. Japanese animated films or anime have been popular in the West since the early 1990s. However, media interest in anime has tended to focus on negative representations of anime concerning violence, sexuality and young girls. In examination of the genre of ‘Lolita complex’ rorikon anime, the focus of these concerns. It is argued that the term ‘lolita’ has a culturally specific meaning and that it has a different meaning in Western culture to that in Japan. This has led to a misperception of aspects of Japanese society and its cultural products such as anime. Furthermore it is argued that rorikon anime reflects teenage anxieties about the adult world, and changes in society and gender roles rather than perverse male sexaul desire. An examination of the elements of rorikon anime shows that, rather than the product of a cultural ‘other’, it reflects features common across Japanese and Western culture. For example,