1st Edition
The Culture of Copying in Japan Critical and Historical Perspectives
This book challenges the perception of Japan as a ‘copying culture’ through a series of detailed ethnographic and historical case studies.
It addresses a question about why the West has had such a fascination for the adeptness with which the Japanese apparently assimilate all things foreign and at the same time such a fear of their skill at artificially remaking and automating the world around them. Countering the idea of a Japan that deviously or ingenuously copies others, it elucidates the history of creative exchanges with the outside world and the particular myths, philosophies and concepts which are emblematic of the origins and originality of copying in Japan. The volume demonstrates the diversity and creativity of copying in the Japanese context through the translation of a series of otherwise loosely related ideas and concepts into objects, images, texts and practices of reproduction, which include: shamanic theatre, puppetry, tea utensils, Kyoto town houses, architectural models, genres of painting, calligraphy, and poetry, ‘sample’ food displays, and the fashion and car industries.
Series Editor’s Preface: Joy Hendry Introduction: Rupert Cox Section 1: Original Encounters 1. Irit Averbuch Body to Body Transmission: the Copying Tradition of Kagura Performance 2. Jane Marie Law A Spectrum of Copies: Ritual Puppetry in Japan 3. Keiko Tanaka Copying in Japanese Magazines: Unashamed Copiers. Section 2: Arts of Citation 4. Ronald Toby The Originality of the ‘Copy’: Mimesis and Subversion in Hanegawa Toei’s Chosenjin Ukie. 5. Alexandra Curvelo Copy to Convert: Jesuits’ Missionary Practice in Japan. 6. Morgan Pitelka Back to the Fundamentals: "Reproducing" Rikyu and Chojiro in Japanese Tea Culture 7. Rein Raud An Investigation of the Conditions of Literary borrowings in late Heian and early Kamakura Japan. 8. John Carpenter Chinese Calligraphic Models in Heian Japan: Copying practices and Stylistic Transmission. Section 3: Modern Exchanges 9. William Coaldrake Beyond Mimesis: Japanese Architectural Models at the Vienna Exhibition and 1910 Japan British Exhibition 10. Christoph Brumann Copying Kyoto: the Legitimacy of Imitation in Kyoto’s Townscape Debates. 11. Chris Madeley Copying Cars: Forgotten Licensing Agreements. 12. Rupert Cox ‘Hungry Visions’: the Material Life of Japanese Food Samples
Biography
Rupert Cox is Lecturer in Visual Anthropology, Director of the MA programme at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of The Zen Arts: An anthropological study of the culture of aesthetic form in Japan (Routledge, 2002).
