ABSTRACT
In recent decades historians of Japanese art and design have shown a propensity to investigate the history of Japanese art and design through language. This approach has privileged the identi cation of the nineteenth-century adoption of western terminology as an interpretive frame ( Sato¯ 2011 ). In sum, ne art, architecture, and design are among a host of abstract concepts for which, scholars argue, there did not exist a Japanese equivalent. The concepts’ adoption in the late nineteenth century was understood to signal Japan’s entry into the modern civilized world, a world de ned by scienti c thinking and societal progress, and dominated by the values of the then world powers: chie y, Britain, Germany, France, and the United States. It was part of a larger redesign of social, legal, political, economic, and infrastructure systems that followed the enthronement of the Meiji emperor as nominal head of state after two hundred and fty years of military rule by the Tokugawa shoguns. But if such formulations allowed Japan’s bureaucrats and elite academics control over their own history, they also inscribed Japanese culture into linear Eurocentric epistemes that were not always t for purpose.
