The Art of Japan: From the Jomon to the Tokugawa Period

P.C. Swann has divided his text into nine chapters, beginning with the pre-Buddhist era, during which the widespread Jomon culture flourished for a very long time, perhaps from as early as the fifth millennium B.C. almost to the Christian Era. The last chapter closes with the opening of the country to the United States in 1868, which forced the Japanese to abandon their isolationist policy and allow foreigners into the country. Immediately thereafter, the Japanese reversed their previous behavior, and began to accept everything Western without discrimination. As a natural reaction after a little more than a decade, Japan turned once more to the preservation of her past. Many museums were founded to protect the nation's treasures, and it is to these that we owe a large number of the masterpieces illustrated in this book.