The Art of Emptiness

Sakaida Kakiemon XIV
Translated by Gavin Frew

For several hundred years, Japanese porcelain has been highly acclaimed and sought after around the...

The Book of Urushi

Matsuda Gonroku
Translated by Michael Brase and Komada Makiko
Supervised by Murose Kazumi

Urushi, Japanese lacquerware, is perhaps the oldest and most sublime of all the Japanese arts and...

Designing Japan

Hara Kenya
Translated by Maggie Kinser Hohle and Naito Yukiko

Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics presents renowned designer Kenya Hara’s vision of how...

Japanese Art in Perspective

Takashina Shūji
Translated by Matt Treyvaud

How do Japanese and Western aesthetics differ? In this comparative cultural study, Takashina Shūji,...

The Japanese Sense of Beauty

Takashina Shūji
Translated by Matt Treyvaud

What makes Japanese art unique? In The Japanese Sense of Beauty, art critic and historian Takashina...

The Kidai Shōran Scroll

Ozawa Hiromu and Kobayashi Tadashi
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

The Kidai Shōran is a magnificent painted Japanese scroll, an artistic rendering of one of the most...

Mixing Work with Pleasure

Suzuki Toshio
Translated by Roger Speares

Toshio Suzuki has devoted himself to Studio Ghibli for some thirty years, producing such...

The Music of Color

Shimura Fukumi
Translated by Matt Treyvaud
Photographs by Inoue Takao

“I have received color without limit from the natural world in the years since I entered the dyer’s...

Soetsu Yanagi

Yanagi Soetsu
Translated by Michael Brase

● Sixteen incisive essays by Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Japanese folk craft movement and author...

The World of Ito Jakuchu

Sato Yasuhiro
Translated by Michael Brase

In 1760, when the Japanese painter Ito Jakuchu was working on his magnum opus, Plants and Animals...