Imagined Neighbors - Visions of China in Japanese Art 1680 – 1980

This publication examines the Japanese artistic understanding of China from the late 1600s, Japan-s period of seclusion, to its age of modernization after the mid-nineteenth century. The volume focuses on the ways Japanese painters from the late 1600s to the twentieth century pictured China, both as a real place and an imagined promised land. It features three essays by renowned Japanese art historians in addition to more than fifty catalogue entries highlighting unusual artworks revealing Japanese artists- complex responses to Chinese art, history and culture. In recent years, a handful of scholarly studies have tried to push against the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan. "Toward Tomorrow" challenges the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan by offering a more nuanced approach to understanding the country-s struggle with reconciling the old with the new as it reinvented itself into a modern nation-state.