Bunmei Kaika by Monique A D'almeida

Bunmei Kaika by Monique A D'almeida

A fascinating and accessible introduction to political prints from Edo- and Meiji-period JapanOrganized thematically, this catalog explores the connection between government and landscape imagery from the late Edo period (1615–1868) to the Meiji period (1868–1912). The motto bunmei kaika, meaning “civilization and enlightenment,” was used during the latter period to celebrate Western ideas and industrialization as marks of a cultured society. Woodblock prints made throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century reveal how both the Tokugawa shogunate and subsequent Meiji government influenced Japanese social order through propaganda, censorship, and Westernization.

Featuring works largely drawn from Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center alongside select loans, the publication includes such celebrated artists as Hiroshige, Hokusai, Kunisada, Yoshitoshi, and Kiyochika. Bunmei Kaika illuminates a thriving print culture whose clever navigation of government regulations and prohibitions, playful and daring rendering of current events, and feeding of public interest cultivated the national imagination of a modernizing Japan.

Monique A. D’Almeida is the 2023–2026 Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Japanese Works on Paper at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. D’Almeida is a contributing author of catalog entries on Japanese woodblock prints for Art of Japan: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her curated exhibitions and installations include An Unfamiliar Place: Modern Landscape in East Asian and Asian American Works on Paper (2025), Scandal and Virtue: Staging Kabuki in Osaka Prints (2023), and Essence of an Onnagata: Prints from 18th-to 20th-Century Japan (2015).