Landscape painting in Japan is largely free from an overarching hermeneutical discourse. Rather than finding expression in interpretive literature as a metaphor for the artist’s psyche as in China, or as a visual statement of divine providence or the rationality of the natural world, as in Europe, writing on landscape in late medieval and early modern Japan seldom even mentions it as a separate category; when it does, it is usually within a hierarchical relationship with other painted themes. Japanese landscape has evaded such explication in part because of the diversity of ways in which artists—including landscape architects—have represented their environment, and in part because of the many uses and meanings that these landscapes carry. Be they devotional paintings that map a topos of religious experience, invented vistas of literary imagination, or constructed, "hypernatural" environments designed to aid meditation, Japanese landscape arts have so many functions that they evade easy summary. Our panel will attempt to look at landscape painting in two historical "moments"—the late Muromachi and late Edo periods—in order to examine the relationship between artists and topography and to seek to answer why artists chose to respond to their physical environment in ways that are overtly descriptive.

Sometime between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, Japanese artists began to exhibit a direct engagement with their landscape subjects. Attempts to capture the natural environment’s physical appearance are a recognized part of Japanese art after the eighteenth century, but have seldom been considered in art before the early modern period. The late medieval painter-monk Sesshû Tôyô occupies a vital position in this development. Yamashita Yûji will examine Sesshû in light of his paintings of places he visited in China and Japan, and will explicate how Sesshû’s modulations of real and imagined vistas in his paintings have in turn shaped later perceptions and understanding of his art. Matthew McKelway will examine topographical representations of the area around Lake Biwa (Ômi Province) in sixteenth century painting. The discussion of these depictions will demonstrate how regional politics seem to have provided artists with an impetus to paint their subject with an exceptional degree of topographical accuracy. Kishi Fumikazu will shift the focus to printed representations of locales in the city of Edo, with special attention to the role of these images as communicational media. Morihiro Satow will end by investigating depictions of Edo in "doro-e," a genre of painting in opaque colors in the late Edo period that depicts places that do not appear in woodblock prints, most strikingly mansions of daimyô. We hope that these papers will foster discussion of how painters in late medieval and early modern Japan negotiated the intersecting realities of their objectively perceived surroundings and of the motivations of patronage and style.

Yûji Yamashita, Meiji Gakuin University

Sesshû Tôyô has long been recognized as the preeminent master of landscape painting in late Muromachi-period Japan. Among his works, the paintings of Amanohashidate and "Yamadera" are notable for their depictions of actual Japanese places. Based on the understanding of these landscapes as topographically "accurate," Sesshû has been assumed to have visited them, and to have based his representations on his own experience of seeing them. Along with his other landscapes, some of which depict locales he is thought to have seen in China, these works have been explained as constituting multiple levels of meaning, including religious and philosophical, in addition to that of Sesshû’s personal experience.

This paper will reexamine Sesshû’s Japanese landscapes in relation to the medium of "shigajiku," or poem-picture scrolls conceived in Zen monastic communities, and which combine calligraphed Chinese verse and landscape imagery. Recent research has shown that the above-mentioned Yamadera landscape actually does not represent the famous "mountain temple" in Japan’s northeast, but was conceived as a studio portrait (shosaizu) for a monk—and friend of Sesshû’s—who had retired to a remote region in central Japan. Through a close examination of the Yamadera painting and the Amanohashidate painting, this paper will redefine the nature of "true view" painting in Muromachi Japan, and will demonstrate that topographical accuracy depends as much on the particular relationship between the artist and the patron as on the artist’s direct experience in the landscape he is depicting.

Matthew P. McKelway, New York University

The region of Lake Biwa, or Ômi Province, long a backwater bordering the capital city of Kyoto, suddenly emerges in the mid-sixteenth century as an important subject in Japanese painting. The frequency with which the "Famous Views of Ômi" subject, often in sets of eight, appears in both extant works and in written documents is often described as an extension of the Chinese "Eight Views of Xiao Xiang" painting theme, which represented the landscape of rivers and wetlands around Lake Dongting. While Ômi landscapes eventually came to be formulized along the lines of the Chinese Eight Views, early representations of the area are striking precisely because of the relative obscurity of the landscapes represented and for their highly detailed portrayals of the region’s terrain.

This paper seeks to address the two questions of why the Ômi area became such a popular subject in late medieval painting, and why artists basically abandoned established methods for representing famous places (meisho-e) for fresher, more direct treatments of the Ômi landscape. The paper will investigate extant works that depict the same geographical area but were conceived in different formats and in varying patronage circumstances. It is hoped that this comparative approach, aided by extant documentary evidence will discover the kinds of concerns and motivations the artists had in envisioning their subjects.

Fumikazu Kishi, Doshisha University

Ihara Saikaku’s "Nippon Eitai-gura," published in 1688, refers to dozens of kinds of behavior that those who want to be rich should avoid. Besides associating with kabuki players and prostitutes, they include "monomi-yûzan," or brief excursions to temples and shrines, as well as going on picnics in the country. Although people earnestly wished to move about without a certain productive aim, Saikaku’s work indicates they felt such desires should be suppressed. It is this kind of desire that gave birth to the most popular media of visual communication in the Edo period, ukiyo-e prints such as "yakusha-e" (portraits of actors), "bijin-ga" (pictures of beauties), and "fûkei-hanga" (landscape prints).

This paper takes two objectives. One is to locate the art works of landscape prints into the communication cycle that existed among publishers, ukiyo-e artists, landscape itself (referent), pictorial rules (syntax/pragmatics), ezôshi-ya shops (distributor), and consumers (addressee). The other is to trace briefly the history of landscape prints from Okumura Masanobu’s "uki-e" (perspective prints), to Katsushika Hokusai’s "yôfu-hanga" (western-style prints), as well as Utagawa Hiroshige’s "fûkei-hanga" in its narrow sense, in order to analyze their communicational functions, that is their representational, expressive, directive, meta-pictorial, and aesthetic functions, all of which establish a particular hierarchical order. Through attaining these two objectives, I hope to characterize landscape prints as a media for ukiyo-e artists that allowed views to satisfy their desires to travel in diverse ways.

Morihiro Satow, Doshisha University

In the late eighteenth century, in the middle of Edo period (1603–1868), people started to observe their environment, in order to depict it as text and represent it as image. Naturally, the gaze was directed upon the ever-growing cities, especially Edo. Edo doro-e is one type of urban-view image produced and sold in Edo from the 1840s to the 1860s. Put broadly, doro-e can be defined as a painting which uses doro-enogu (a kind of gouache) as a medium of coloring. On the other hand, in a narrower sense of the word, doro-e is usually defined as a group of paintings produced in the mid-1800s using Western linear perspective and doro-enogu, especially newly imported Prussian Blue. The object of representation was mainly various famous places (meisho) of Edo, especially feudal lords’ (daimyô) residences.

Doro-e were sold in a section of town called the "Picture Shop Quarter" (eya-machi), and they were mainly used as a souvenir. Many book sellers and picture shops gathered at Shiba Shinmei-mae where doro-e are considered to have been produced. Shiba Shinmei-mae was located between the starting point (Nihonbashi) and the first station (Shinagawa) of the Tôkaidô (Road Between Edo and Kyoto) and the site might have been one of the best places to purchase such souvenir pictures.