Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu

Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity offers an entirely new perspective on the concept of constructing nation-states. The book explores the nature of national identity constructs produced in pre-modern Japan by examining two aspects of its cultural production, the sphere of fine arts and the sphere of literature intertwined with a genre of poetry pictorialization.
The discussion is centered on the artistic practice of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and contextualizes his woodblock print series entitled Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki in a wider perspective of Japanese historical, political, social, cultural and artistic phenomena emerging prior to the birth of the modern Japanese nation. Hokusai’s work, oscillating between the domain of text and the domain of image, transposes the classical Japanese poetry into late Edo period (1603-1868) popular culture. Machotka argues that in the process of text/image translation Hokusai projected a new image of «Japaneseness», thereby contributing to the development of national identity prior to the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state.

The Author: Ewa Machotka is a researcher of Japanese art specializing in the interrelations between text and image in pre-modern visual culture. She studied in Krakow (M.A. in art history and classical Japanese literature) and Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese art history from the Gakushuin University. Formerly she served as a curator of the Department of Far Eastern Art of the National Museum in Krakow and currently she works at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm.