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. Imagined Neighbors 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.

Text by: Paul Berry, Michiyo Morioka