Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture explores Japan’s engagement with and responses to Japonisme, and presents new perspectives on the history and enduring influence of Japonisme as a cultural discourse. The term “Japonisme” has come to encapsulate the West’s interests in Japanese arts and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Japonisme contributed to Japan’s global reputation as an artistic nation, but it also produced persistent stereotypes about the Japanese, such as the image of “geisha.” This pioneering anthology also demonstrates how Japan has espoused the modern Western fascination with its arts and culture to create and promote its national cultural identity. Japan and Japonisme introduces innovative studies on Japonisme by leading experts in the field, and covers the visual arts, art criticism and exhibitions, fashion, literature, horticulture, and popular culture in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.