Shunga, or images of spring, are erotic depictions from Japans 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, usually achieved with a woodblock print process. Shunga appeared in romance novels and instructive albums for young wives, and were even carried by samurai for luck. This book provides an introduction into the world of shunga with a selection of striking full-color images. Pithy text, including descriptions of the historical and cultural settings of the prints, helps explain what this erotica meant to the people of the time.

This publication offers the reader a ravishing selection of erotic prints ("shunga") by the first full-color woodblock-print masters: Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-70) and Isoda Kory{sai (act. c. 1764-88). It is based on a private collection of prints of remarkable quality, their radiant colors perfectly preserved by the albums in which they were kept. The first volume in a popular series on erotic prints by famous Japanese woodblock-print artists, this book contains a detailed general introduction to the genre of "shunga." In addition to a description of the historical and cultural settings of the prints, it focuses in particular on the locations and interiors where the erotic action takes place.

Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll features over 250 unique photographs as well as extensive commentary and background history. Japanese dolls (ningyo) have played an important role in Japanese art and culture since its earliest stages of development, as talismanic figures, centerpieces, in elaborate festivals, medical study tools, theater distractions, decorative objects, and avidly collected art forms, as well as childhood playthings. Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll is the most comprehensive book on antique Japanese dolls and figurines published in English. The book focuses on the many types of Japanese dolls: gosho: palace dolls hina: Girl's Day dolls musha: warrior dolls for the Boy's Day Festival isho: fashion dolls The principal forms of the dolls and their history, stylistic development, cultural context, and economic imperatives are discussed against the backdrop of Edo-period society and popular culture. Beautifully detailed color photographs of ningyo drawn from private collections, many of which are published here for the first time, as well as images of related materials selected from celebrated museums and temple collections, such as folding screens, woodblock prints, sculpture, painting ceramics, and textiles, help place the dolls in context. Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll is a fascinating book for anyone interested in Asian doll art and doll collecting.

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

This is the first modern study on Japanese erotic print art (so called shunga) and shows highlights from the oeuvre of Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Suzuki Harunobu, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and many others. Various essays written by international experts describe this fascinating genre in its social, historical and artistic context, discussing themes like homosexuality, voyeurism, life in Edo's brothels, techniques of composition etc.

Sexuality in Edo culture has long been a taboo subject in literary histories and critical studies in spite of the fact that, as with other major cities, Edo urban culture materialized in narratives grounded in sexual fantasies. In Imaging/Reading Eros, scholars from many disciplines explore the connection between the awareness of the body and the self-consciousness of the city’s culture in an effort to find a place for sexuality in teaching and research on Japan, while establishing a place for Edo popular culture in the canons of world art and literature.