Reinventing Tokyo: Japan's Largest City in the Artistic Imagination

Re-Inventing Tokyo is the first examination in either English or Japanese that considers portrayals of Tokyo in light of that city's continuous re-invention since the mid-nineteenth century. Using a carefully selected group of more than 170 prints, photographs, paintings, and textiles, Re-Inventing Tokyo documents the changes that took place as Tokyo modernized and Westernized in the mid-nineteenth century, became the center of modern urban life in Japan before the Second World War, and rebuilt itself as part of the country's economic miracle in the postwar era. This richly illustrated book includes five essays and a checklist of exhibited works divided into ten thematic sections, each prefaced by a narrative introduction.

This volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, organized and curated by Samuel C. Morse.