Before I write anything else, let me say that Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art, 1680–1980 is an utterly magnificent book reproducing numerous stunning images. If for no other good reason, it will make an excellent coffee table book or holiday present (at an extremely reasonable price). But it is far more than just that, far more!

Japanese adoration or profound respect for elite Chinese culture dates back as far as contact between the two peoples, over one and one-half millennia. This volume addresses that topic in the specific realm of literati painting (bunjinga 文人畫; nanga 南畫) from 1680 (high Edo period) until 1980. For Japanese painters (and many others in other intellectual and cultural realms), reference to things Chinese was as natural as breathing. As editor Frank Feltens points out (17), “Throughout the Edo period and into the Meiji era, Chinese paintings, and works by Japanese artists who excelled in their own personal interpretations of Chinese styles, became benchmarks for measuring perfection. The mastery of such Chinese styles became the gold standard against which Japanese painters could measure their own skills.” This is the context in which Feltens, Paul Berry, and Michiyo Morioka have done a deep dive into the extraordinary Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art to produce this volume.

This being the Journal of Chinese History, my mandate is to address what scholars and students of Chinese studies can gain from this work. I would review it very differently for a Japanese studies or Asian studies journal, let alone an art history one. The table of contents runs as follows:

Feltens’s introduction does a fine job of laying out what the volume promises. I have only one quibble. He refers (20) to Japanese “xenophobic tendencies and the othering of China (as embodied in the term Shina).” I would encourage scholars to read an essay that seeks to lay this myth to rest.Footnote ¹ Interestingly, Morioka (124n58) refers to this very article. It is unfortunate that the two authors failed to communicate. There is no more denigration of China in a Japanese person using Shina than there is in an Anglophone person using the ‘cognate’ toponym China.

Feltens’s next chapter examines how Japanese, especially painters, perceived China (or “China”) during the period under study. For the first two-thirds of the period, no Japanese was able to travel to China. Thus, images that appear in literati painting were drawn entirely from much earlier ideas—books, travelogues, and the imagination. The Japanese painted Chinese scenery (e.g., West Lake in Hangzhou) that they had never seen themselves, as well as Chinese poets and philosophers (e.g., Laozi) whom they could never have met or seen. One remarkable example (37–38, 258–59) is the joint painting by Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村 (1716–1784) and Yanagisawa Kien 柳澤淇淵 (1704–1758) of the calligrapher Wang Ziyou 王子猷 (321–379). When Japanese painters were fortunate enough to actually see a painting from China, many would often paint “in the style of” that Chinese artist, usually without the original Chinese painter’s knowledge. An interesting case is the Chinese painter Chen Xiakuang 陳霞狂 (dates unknown), whose work was scarcely known in China but caught the eye of Buson in Japan, amid the “random influx of paintings from China” (43).

Feltens stresses the role of the Huangbo 黃檗 (J. Ōbaku) sect of Chan 禪 (Zen) Buddhism as central to the passage of Chinese culture, especially art, to Japan. The figures of the Ōbaku establishment, located just south of Kyoto in the city of Uji, were revered over the course of the Edo–Meiji years as repositories of mainland wisdom and often sought out by Japanese intellectuals of shared interests. They were much more than simply religious figures.

Why might a Chinese historian be interested in this phenomenon? Other than its intrinsic value to an inquiring mind, the Japanese case affords us an opportunity to see how “things Chinese” (karamono 唐物) played out in a foreign setting. Japanese culture, society, politics, and economics differed, often dramatically, from those on the mainland, and with a little imagination, one can pose the hypothetical question: “What if X?” That is, if circumstances had been somewhat different in China, what might have transpired? Such an exercise affords us the chance to see potential that went unrealized.

Berry has long been working on the early Sino-Japanese encounter in the art world of the mid-nineteenth century. His essay here addresses the elision of Korea in discussions of East Asian art, a topic of considerable interest, including to teachers of “rice paddies” survey courses, and one heretofore little studied. Berry notes that Koreanists have for several generations been struggling to return Korean to its important role in East Asian history and culture.

Finally, in the longest essay in the book, Morioka takes a close look at the work of two prominent prewar artists, Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本關雪 (1883–1945) and Kosugi Hōan 小杉放菴 (1881–1964). The fall of the Qing brought an immense influx of Chinese artifacts to Japan, a topic Walter Davis of the University of Alberta has studied.Footnote ² And, like a cargo cult, these works of art renewed Japanese interest in Chinese art itself. One topic Morioka emphasizes is that this could never have transpired without the continuation well into the twentieth century of Chinese-style education and Chinese-inspired painting. I found especially interesting his delineation of the work of Hashimoto Kansetsu, a man who made over sixty trips to the mainland and whose work manages to evince no hint of haughtiness, while also not worshipping Chinese culture in sycophantic fashion. Images of China in his paintings are numerous, and unlike earlier artists he had seen the actual places and objects.

One philological issue I take with all three of these essays and throughout the following lengthy “Catalogue” is the mixed use of prewar Sinographs (aka Chinese characters) and postwar ones. In virtually every instance in which the book gives characters, the time-frame is prewar. Nonetheless, countless characters usually appear in their postwar, simplified forms, mixed inconsistently with prewar forms of the same characters.Footnote ³

The Catalogue contains beautiful reproductions of fifty-two paintings. They are grouped under five headings: Reclusion (eleven images), Friendship (twelve), Obsessions (nine), Heroes (ten), and Philosophies (ten). Influences from Chinese history and culture over the course of many centuries occur throughout the discussions of these works of art. In sum, minor quibbles aside, this is a superb volume on a much-needed topic, one from which China scholars can learn a great deal.