Few people today have heard of Kajiwara Hisako (梶原緋佐子, 1896-1988) so it is welcome news indeed that four of her paintings have been included in a major exhibition in Japan this year. Kajiwara was a Nihonga painter, active in Kyoto, who worked primarily in the “bijinga” genre of lusciously detailed images of idealized female beauty….

By Alice Gordenker Shima Seien (島成園, 1892–1970) worked as a Nihonga painter at a time when few women in Japan were able to pursue art as a profession. Throughout her career, she struggled against overt discrimination against women artists. This frustration is palpable in her 1918 painting “Untitled” (無題), in which a woman in a…

Millions of people around the world have seen the work of Tokolo Asao, yet few would be able to produce his name or identify a single project to which he’s contributed. Tokolo — and that’s the spelling he prefers for a surname usually romanized as “Tokoro” — is the man behind the distinctive indigo checkered…

Readers of Japan Living Arts are invited to attend special performances of Noh and Kyogen at the Oyama Afuri Shrine on Mt. Oyama in Kanagawa Prefecture.  On Oct. 2 and 3, 2019, top actors from the Kanze School of Noh — including Living National Treasures — will share their art outdoors, as Noh was originally…

Japan’s relationship with tattoos is notoriously complicated. Even at the height of their popularity during the Edo period, the samurai class made attempts to ban these creative decorations that depicted designs that were considered subversive. Because of their popularity, the bans were ineffective and so the culture of horimono — literally “engraving” — remained strong for…

Two years ago, at the age of 58, potter Zenzo Fukushima was tapped to become what is commonly known as a “Living National Treasure.” The title, one of Japan’s highest honors, is often misunderstood to be recognition of an individual’s superior accomplishment. In fact, it is a directive from the nation to preserve something that…

No matter how much a woman enjoys lovemaking, it has to be fit in around the more mundane activities of life, whether that be cooking, child rearing or work. It therefore seems appropriate that a new exhibition examining the lives of Japanese women as pictured in ukiyo-e paintings and prints, originally envisioned as a show…

Call her works playful. Call them sensuous. Call them decorative, even, and ceramic artist Yuriko Matsuda won’t mind a bit.  “It’s such a shame that the term “decoration” is so often applied as a pejorative,” Matsuda told me, using the Japanese word sōshoku. “The implication seems to be that anything that is decorative or ornamental…

At age 91, artist Toshiko Okanoue is very much in the spotlight. An influential publisher just released a book of her photo collages and her largest-ever retrospective at a public museum is now showing in Tokyo. But it hasn’t always been this way. After a brief but successful career in the 1950s, Okanoue and her…

Text and Photos by Alice Gordenker Masao Nagata of Nagata Indigo Dyeing Works (長田染工場) in Izumo, Shimane demonstrates their hands-on dyeing process done just as in the olden days before mechanization. First, he moistens the cloth before lowering it into a high-alkaline dye bath of fermented indigo and lye. Indigo appears green when lifted from…