Fit to Print The Dawn of Journalism in Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Lavenberg and Michels Collections

Fay Boyer Preble and Virginia Cooke Murphy Wing

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan’s Tokugawa military regime was in decline. News about political and social events that would previously have been censored began to flood the publication industry during the twilight of the Edo period (1615-1868). With the establishment of the Meiji period (1868-1912), one of the new imperial government’s major modernization efforts was to encourage Western-style journalists to cover, comment, and even critique and satirize, domestic and international events.

Japanese writers and artists embraced new media, including newspapers, political cartoons, and comic strips published using intaglio and lithographic technologies that were faster and more economical than labor-intensive traditional woodblock prints. Those involved in the earlier woodblock industry struggled to keep up with the times and began to cultivate new genres such as “brocade newspapers” (shinbun nishiki-e), “civilization pictures” (kaika-e) and propaganda prints depicting the Sino-Japanese (1894-95) and Russo-Japanese (1904-05) warfronts.

This exhibition explores Meiji-period news and reportage in the context of both its Japanese precursors and contemporaneous journalism in other print media. Co-curated by Art History Professor Akiko Walley, East Asian Languages and Literatures Professor Glynne Walley, and Chief Curator Anne Rose Kitagawa, it features more than 30 loans from two remarkably rich local resources, the Lavenberg Collection of Japanese Prints, and the Lee & Mary Jean Michels Collection, along with works from the UO Library’s Special Collections and the museum’s permanent collection.

Video: The Dawn of Journalism in Japanese Woodblock Prints

Speechifying Pictures: Highlights from Fit to Print

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