"Revised and updated, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art presents new interpretations of the evolution of Japanese garden art. Its depth and much-needed emphasis on a practical context for garden creation will appeal to art and literary historians as well as scholars, students, and appreciators of garden and landscape art, Asian and Western."--BOOK JACKET.

The manual Sakuteiki does not cover this subject.

Mirei Shigemori had a major impact on the development of Japanese landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Active from the 1920s, he founded the Kyoto Garden Society in 1932. In 1939 he designed his own first masterpiece, the garden at the main hall of the Tôfuku-ji temple. From then on he designed 240 gardens all over Japan until his death in 1975; amongst the most famous are the Tenrai-an tea garden (1969) and the Matsuo Taisha garden (1975). The main characteristic of his gardens is that they respect tradition and, at the same time, depart from conventional paradigms by opening up to the influence of Western modernism with its own language. The first part of the book covers Shigemori’s life and factors that influenced his work. The second part contains a detailed illustration of 17 gardens. The book is published as a new and revised edition.

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West. The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West. Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to ikebana and other forms of Japanese flower culture. Unlike other books on the subject which focus on practice, the book provides both an academic discussion of the subject and an introduction to practice. It examines ikebana and flower culture from anthropological and sociological perspectives, analyses Japanese aesthetics, customs and rituals related to flower arrangements, and outlines ikebana history and the Grand Master Iemoto system. It considers how the traditional arts are taught in Japan, and links traditional arts to current issues in today’s society, such as gender and class. This book also covers how to prepare ikebana utensils, preserve flowers and branches, and how to appreciate arrangements, placing an emphasis on acknowledging our five senses throughout each stage of the process. The book will be of interest to a wide range of people interested in Japanese flower culture – university professors and students, tourists and people interested in traditional Japanese arts.

A resource ideal for students as well as general readers, this two-volume encyclopedia examines the diversity of the Asian American and Pacific Islander spiritual experience. Despite constituting a fairly small proportion of the U.S. population—roughly 5 percent—Asian Americans are a widely diverse group with equally heterogeneous religious beliefs and traditions. This encyclopedia provides a single source for authoritative information on the Asian American and Pacific Islander religious experience, addressing South Asian Americans, such as Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans; East Asian Americans, including Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans; and Southeast Asian Americans, whose ethnicities include Filipino Americans, Thai Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. Pacific Islanders include Hawaiians, Samoans, Marshallese, Tongan, and Chamorro. The coverage includes not only traditional eastern belief systems and traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism as well as Micronesian and Polynesian religious traditions in the United States, but also the culture and religious rituals of Asian American Christians.

Michael D. Fowler presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the sound world of traditional Japanese gardens by drawing from the diverse fields of semiotics, acoustic ecology, philosophy, mathematical modelling, architecture, music, landscape theory and acoustic analysis. Using projects - ranging from data-visualisations, immersive sound installations, algorithmically generated meta-gardens and proto-architectural form finding missions - as creative paradigms, the book offers a new framework for artistic inquiry in which the sole objective is the generation of new knowledge through the act of spatial thinking.

The classic essay on the "karesansui" garden by French art historian Berthier has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of Zen rock gardens. 37 halftones.

Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? In Sensible Politics, William A. Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in "affective communities of sense." The book's rich analysis of visual images (photographs, film, art) and visual artifacts (maps, veils, walls, gardens, cyberspace) shows how critical scholarship needs to push beyond issues of identity and security to appreciate the creative politics of social-ordering and world-ordering. Here "sensible politics" isn't just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. It challenges our Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics offers a unique approach to politics that allows us to not only think visually, but also feel visually-and creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.

This book focuses on Luis Frois, a 16th-century Portuguese Jesuit and chronicler, who recorded his impressions of Japanese gardens, cities and building practices, tea-drinking rituals, Japan’s unification efforts, cultural traditions, and the many differences between Europe and Japan in remarkable manuscripts almost lost to time. This research also draws on other Portuguese descriptions from contemporary sources spanning the years 1543 – 1597, later validated by Japanese history and iconography. Importantly, explorer Jorge Alvares recorded his experiences of discovery, prompting St. Francis Xavier to visit Japan in 1549, thus ushering in the “Christian Century” in Japan. During this long period of accord and reciprocal curiosity, the Portuguese wrote in excess of 1500 pages of letters to European Jesuits that detail their impressions of the island nation—not to mention their observations of powerful public figures such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Sen no Rikyu. In addition to examining these letters, the authors translated and researched early descriptions of 23 gardens in Kyoto and Nara and 9 important cities—later visited by the authors, sketched, photographed and compared with the imagery painted on 16th-century Japanese screens. However, the data gathered for this project was found mainly within five large volumes of Frois’ História do Japão (2500 pages) and his Treaty on Contradictions—two incomparable anthropological works that were unpublished until the mid-20th century for reasons detailed herein. His volumes continue to be explored for their insightful observations of places, cultural practices, and the formidable historical figures with whom he interacted. Thus, this book examines the world’s first globalization efforts that resulted in profitable commerce, the introduction of Portuguese firearms that changed Japan’s history, scientific advances, religious expansion, and many artistic exchanges that have endured the centuries.