UPCOMING ZOOM WEBINAR
Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre Through Foreign Eyes
Monday, February 24, 2025 at 5pm (EST)
Live Zoom Webinar
Join us on Monday, February 24, at 5 p.m. ET, for our live Zoom Webinar presented by Samuel Leiter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theater at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Professor Leiter will speak on his latest book, Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre Through Foreign Eyes, an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan’s kabuki theater in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters and reference books, Meiji Kabuki contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners—resident or transient—during the Meiji period (1868–1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published.
Meiji Kabuki provides insights into how Western visitors—missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters and even a precocious teenage girl—responded to a theater that had been almost entirely hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. The book reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theater to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention and the very practice of theater-going.
Professor Leiter has published 31 books on Japanese theater, New York theater, Shakespeare and the great stage directors. Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes (2022) was selected as a Choice Reviews Academic Book of the Year. His most recent book is Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (2024). He served as editor-in-chief of Asian Theatre Journal from 1992 to 2004. Among his many books on Japanese theater are Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre (2014); Kabuki at the Crossroads: Years of Crisis, 1952-1965 (2013); Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theatre in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (2009); and the four-volume Kabuki Plays on Stag.
To register for this talk, click here.
UPCOMING EVENT
Hasegawa Tohaku (Nobuharu), Flowers and Birds of Spring and Summer, Momoyama Period, 1580s, ink, color, and gold on gilded paper, six-panel folding screen, private collection, New York
Birds, Diplomacy and Painting in 16th-Century Japan
Friday, March 14, 2025 from 5-6pm (EST)
Japan Society Auditorium, 333 E. 47th St.
In-person and Online (kindly register in advance)
Preceding our JASA members’ annual meeting, Dr. Matthew McKelway, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Art History and Archeology at Columbia University will give a talk on Birds, Diplomacy and Painting in 16th-Century Japan. This event requires sign-up in advance. Free ticketed events for JASA members. Non-members, please contact the Japan Society box office (212) 832 1155.
To register in person, click here.
To register for Zoom, click here.
Online Lecture Videos
If you missed any of our insightful lectures, you can catch up anytime by watching them on our YouTube channel. Explore a wealth of knowledge from expert speakers, engaging discussions, and exclusive presentations—all available at your convenience!
To view past lectures, click here.
Help Us Celebrate 50 Years of JASA!
The exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan, celebrating 50 years of the Japanese Art Society of America, opened at Asia Society Museum, New York, on October 3, 2023. One review called Meiji Modern a “perfect exhibition,” engaging both scholars and non-specialist visitors who are “thrilled to discover beautiful art they didn’t know and to learn its history in labels that are both clear and serious.”
JASA’s beautiful 272-page full-color catalog for the exhibition (cover above) takes a fresh look at the art of the Meiji period (1868-1912) through a selection of approximately 200 objects drawn from public and private collections across the United States, including newly discovered prints, photographs, textiles, paintings, and craft objects. Copies of the catalog can be ordered through the JASA Store or our online Publications Order Form.
To learn more about the catalog, click here. To order a copy online, click here.
