Making Japanese Heritage is a collection of essays documenting myriad contexts in which actors and institutions—from students of tea ceremony in Los Angeles to a Rinzai denomination grappling with a successor crisis—create and revalue Japanese cultural heritage. The diverse motives and even more diverse effects of their activity, as documented in the volume's twelve chapters, make this a lively collection of essays and a timely contribution to heritage studies in and beyond Japan. In their introduction, Christoph Brumann and Rupert Cox assert that the volume redirects discussions of heritage in Japan to attend to “local knowledge and practice attached to heritage by those actively involved in its making” (p. 4). They thus position the collection against an extensive body of scholarship that, engaging broadly with Hobsbawam and Ranger's “invention of tradition” (1983) paradigm and related debates, illuminates how the past has been appropriated in Japan to legitimate state ideologies, commercial endeavors, and collective imaginaries. The volume responds to conceptual shifts, both popular and scholarly, in understandings of heritage not just as tradition consciously “invented” to bolster political projects of the nation, but as a reflection of “diverse, dissonant, and distinctly local values” (p. 4). The collection highlights “the complex and contradictory life of heritage” (p. 12) as embodied in and sustained by the skill, agency, and devotion of stewards in situated contexts where it accumulates new meaning over time.

The collection's first section, “Performing Japanese Heritage,” examines iconic traditions of tea ceremony, geisha, and Japanese painting (nihonga) as they take on meaning in situated contexts. Kristin Surak investigates the complex ethnic affiliations and social distinctions forged by first and second-generation Japanese as they study and practice tea ceremony in Los Angeles. Turning a historical lens on Gion district geisha, considered today to embody Japanese traditional culture, Mariko Okada argues that they emerged as progressive figures and international ambassadors in the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Finally, Arunas Gelunas explores how students of nihonga self-consciously distinguish their art from western painting traditions by emphasizing the material craft and social context of its production.

Section Two, “Institutionalizing Japanese Heritage,” turns to museums as sites of heritage display expressive of diverse and often contested values. Peter Siegenthaler shows that the creation of the open-air Hida folklore museum in Gifu Prefecture reflected timely priorities of fostering regional pride and local autonomy within the context of an emerging postwar national identity. Turning to corporate heritage displays, Bart Gaens analyzes sites where Sumitomo attempts a creative “re-contextualization” of its corporate past (p. 105), such as by transforming histories of environmental and labor exploitation into entertainment and educational offerings. Rachel Payne reveals disputed understandings of nô masks displayed in Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum: while curators view the masks as relics to conserve, their removal from a performance arena to a display case where they are “deprived of their visual power and mystical aura” deeply disturbs nô practitioners (p. 80).

Section Three, “Japanese Local Heritage and the Wider World,” investigates how localized traditions and heritage objects become invested with new value over time. Focusing on a case of local heritage renewal, Jane Marie Law examines the revitalization of puppetry traditions in Awaiji Island in Japan's inland sea. Amanda Mayer Stinchecum explores contradictory origin myths surrounding woven women's sashes that have become ubiquitous markers of local identity in the Okinawan island group of Yaeyama. Moving from heritage objects to architectural preservation, Christoph Brumann shows that families, individuals, and companies creatively renovate traditional Kyoto townhouses for highly personal motives, rather than to simply preserve traditional architecture. In a case of “negative heritage” (p. 197), Rupert Cox details the rejection of mechanical dolls from the Edo period (1600–1868) as official folk art by Kobe municipal planners because of their racist overtones, despite their status as desired foreign collectables.

The volume's final section, “Perpetuating Japanese Heritage,” reveals that the process of maintaining institutional continuity in two religious traditions entails difficult negotiations. Masaki Matsubara shows that a Rinzai Zen denomination has addressed a “succession problem” (p. 189) by scaling back the rigorous training required of male priests and expanding the role of nuns in “re-populating” empty temples (p. 196). In the final chapter, Michael Schackleton considers debated narratives of Shinkyo's past as reflective of “conflicting visions of the future” and of community authority (p. 205). Rather than ending abruptly here, the volume would benefit from a concluding chapter that highlights some of the cumulative insights gained by the volume's approach to heritage as a dynamic and situational engagement.

One such contribution is in the volume's avoidance of reducing heritage to a commercial strategy of place marketing, even in contexts where it features centrally in tourism promotion. Even where cultural traditions are commodified in regional tourism branding, volume contributors show how they are also intimately related to the identities of their stewards. Thus, Stinchecum asserts that contradictory tales about the origins of minsaa (cotton sashes) and their ongoing use in community celebration and ritual reveal the emergence of a complex post-war identity in Yaeyama. In Law's analysis, kashira (carved puppet heads) are not just a regional icon of Awaji; they represent a “technical and aesthetic” craft (p. 111) expressive of practioners’ moral qualities. In a case of regional identity-making, as Siegenthaler observes, the 1960s founders of the Hida folklore museum wrestled not just with preserving traditional architecture for public consumption: they worked to situate the municipality within contradictory ideals of postwar “cultural democratization” and folkloric notions of national origins (p. 73).

The volume also moves beyond a paradigm of “invention” by attending to the agency exercised by heritage objects over their stewards. Nô masks, Stinchecum insists, embody a spiritual and performative potency, such that professional actors are dismayed to see them displayed in a state of deterioration like “packed faces on a Tokyo commuter train” (p. 80). Similarly animated by a life force, carved puppets improperly disposed of at the end of their life-cycle continue to haunt, if only in stories, the human population of Awaji. In the realm of architecture, occupants and renovators of traditional townhouses in Kyoto understand them to be “alive” and exuding an “emotional harmony” (p. 162) that shapes their inhabitants.

Such insights are, according to Brumann and Cox, made possible by the volume's commitment to fieldwork as a means of delving into “the social relations and active imaginary” in and through which heritage work is situationally meaningful (p. 12). Perhaps due to the disciplinary diversity of the volume—which includes scholarship from anthropology, history, religious studies, and beyond—there is a wide variety in the level of ethnographic engagement represented in each chapter: some contributors detail a systematic research agenda, while for others “fieldwork” seems to entail conversations or just having “been there.” This caveat aside, the volume does collectively point to the importance of acknowledging the often idiosyncratic motives, convictions, and intents of actors and institutions engaged in “making” heritage. Law most actively calls for the need to develop scholarly approaches that can “recognize and accommodate” the “love of and devotion to” cultural traditions that moves stewards to sustain and reinvest heritage with renewed salience (p. 122). Indeed, one of the volume's main successes is in capturing the highly personal and situational dynamics of heritage in its relationship to those who perpetuate and make it.