The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan’s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and fashionable images of beautiful women—referred to as “Yumeji-style beauties”—in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Yumeji also played a key role in the reinvention of the woodblock medium. As his art and designs proliferated in Japan’s mass media, Yumeji became a recognizable brand. In the first full-length English-language study of Yumeji’s work, Nozomi Naoi examines the artist’s role in shaping modern Japanese identity. Addressing his output from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his productivity peaked, Yumeji Modern introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji’s texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, and commentary, alongside his illustrations. Naoi situates Yumeji’s graphic art within the emerging media landscape from 1900s through the 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji’s legacy and his present-day following speak to the broader, ongoing implications of his work with respect to commercial art, visual culture, and print media.

Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) is one of the most famous artists of Japan, where six museums are dedicated to his work as a painter, printmaker and illustrator. This publication is the first publication outside Japan dedicated solely to Takehisa Yumeji's life and prolific oeuvre.

"[An] impressive volume, with a valuable amount of information not otherwise available in one source." --Choice Companion volume to Merritt's Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints. This volume is a reference work that is both comprehensive and rigorously chronological.

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

This compelling study of a previously overlooked vice industry explores the larger structural forces that led to the growth of prostitution in Japan, the Pacific region, and the North American West at the turn of the twentieth century. Combining very personal accounts with never before examined Japanese sources, historian Kazuhiro Oharazeki traces these women’s transnational journeys from their origins in Japan to their arrival in Pacific Coast cities. He analyzes their responses to the oppression they faced from pimps and customers, as well as the opposition they faced from American social reformers and Japanese American community leaders. Despite their difficult circumstances, Oharazeki finds, some women were able to parlay their experience into better jobs and lives in America. Though that wasn’t always the case, their mere presence here nonetheless paved the way for other Japanese women to come to America and enter the workforce in more acceptable ways. By focusing on this “invisible” underground economy, Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West sheds new light on Japanese American immigration and labor histories and opens a fascinating window into the development of the American West.

This study reveals the complex combination of cultural particularity and modern universality that underlies the reality of contemporary Japan. The work uses sources such as popular works of art, song, best-selling books and the advice columns of newspapers to draw a striking portrait of the Japanese public. Focussing on the four main phases of modernizing and modernized Japan beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to today’s postmodern society, this groundbreaking work uses quantitative and qualitative data to show that the processes of modernization brought a coexistence of generational variation imbued with tensions, conflicts and synergies, that, taken together, provide the key to understanding the structure and dynamism of contemporary Japan.

Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to change the meaning of “pit bull.” Increasingly represented as loving members of mostly white, middle-class, heteronormative families, pit bulls and pit bull–type dogs are now frequently seen as victims rather than perpetrators, beings deserving not fear or scorn but rather care and compassion. Drawing from the increasingly contentious world of human/dog politics and featuring rich ethnographic research among dogs and their advocates, Bad Dog explores how relationships between humans and animals not only reflect but actively shape experiences of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, breed, and species. Harlan Weaver proposes a critical and queer reading of pit bull politics and animal advocacy, challenging the zero-sum logic through which care for animals is seen as detracting from care for humans. Introducing understandings rooted in examinations of what it means for humans to touch, feel, sense, and think with and through relationships with nonhuman animals, Weaver suggests powerful ways to seek justice for marginalized humans and animals together.