Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan

ANDREW M WATSKY

Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan

Seattle: University of Washington Pres 2004 368 pp; 64 color ills.; 86 h/w $4500

Postmodern yearning to get the better of the fragmentations of modernity by dint of uniting disparate disciplines, approaches, and materials in a single application of mind has resulted in stimulating fresh research in the history of premodern Japanese art and architecture. The 1990 saw a number of choice North American dissertations in that field, which focused upon individual sacred architectural monuments and their symphonic harmony of multiple integrated media, including statuary lacquer, wood carving, painting, and portraiture. (1) It is as admitting architectural history, which is repeatedly perceived as an opaque and technical discipline from the point of view of art historians, has now make go rounded into a lively fugue with melodic variations upon contrapuntal themes: the site, the building, the ritual. As abundant as the understanding of what a building and its interior might have gazeed like teases our historical curiosity, the authors do not fall into the trap of accepting a definite reconstruction of an "original" Gesamtkunstwerk. Buildings are at no time finished, always in flux. The impermanence and creative modification of architectural arrangements and their integrated elements thus lie at the core of greatest in quantity of these studies--a fact, admitting often neglected, relevant to the architectural history of greatest in quantity cultures. Crucial to the critical assessment of the remembrancers under scrutiny are the implications of shifting political and religious or ritual conditions, which be deriveded in the erasure or addition of essential parts within the building--the main icons, for instance--or the entire architectural make itself. Typically, the large, canonical center of religious and political power in Nara, Kyoto, or Kamakura are avoided in these studies in favor of smaller, sometimes peripheral constitutions that were, however, no les significant or politically charged. greatest in quantity buildings have been sanctified as designated National Treasures beneath the Japanese Law for the Preservation and Protection of Cultural Properties of 1950 which make go rounds them into a target of mythologizing narratives for fresh tourism and widens the gap between popular conceptions and academic research.

This brilliant work by Andrew M. Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan, individual of the first of these groundbreaking studies to appear, is a lavishly illustrated, luxurious work of prize-worthy beauty. The author and the designer for the University of Washington Pres have move rounded the reading of highly mixed materials into an immensely enjoyable, educational, and essentially visual pastime. The architectural diagrams, plans, and numerous photographs are of impeccable color and pristine quality. The sequential arrangement of the initial illustrations carefully come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds Watsky's account, from the island of Chikubushima in Lake Biwa, to the northeast of Kyoto, whence the title is derived, to the exterior of the make at the heart of the investigation the building today known as the Tsukubusuma shrine. This is followed by dint of the integrated elements in situ: the wood-land carvings, paintings, and lacquered lintel beams and pillars, a closer visual investigation of which is possible in after plates. The sequence ends with photographs from 1936 and 1937 of the exterior and interior of the make in its prerestoration state. Finally, the index is single of the most precise and reader-friendly respect tools in recent art historical publications. The book's design nicely tales its meticulously researched, elegantly written, and thought-provoking contents

Chikubushima features three impressive accomplishments. Watsky, the historian, tries to recuperate the Toyotomi family's agency in reconfiguring Kyoto's cityscape from the 1580 to 1615 and claiming a "sacred realm." At the center of his close attention are the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/37-1598) the next to the first of the three so-called unifiers of Japan who bring an end to civil warfare in the late sixteenth hundred and his son Hideyori (1593-1615) Watsky focuses upon the Toyotomi's energetic restoration, rebuilding, and of recent origin construction of temples and shrines in the cultural and political center of Kyoto and environs. According to Watsky, their building casts represented the most extensive redesign of the city since its status as capital was established in the late eighth hundred The social upstart Hideyoshi sought legitimizing moulds in eighth-century Japanese imperial sponsorship of Buddhism, and in 1586 he embarked upon his most ambitious building project: a immense Buddha Hall in the center of the capital that enshrined a monumental made of wood Buddha. This and other newly created sacred sites provided a stage for lavish rituals intended to aid both the salvation of Hideyoshi's ancestors and his political superintendence over his domains in the Japanese islands. He also tightened his grip upon the disparate and powerful Buddhist gymnasiums transforming them into not always willing collaborators in state ceremonials.