This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was among the most significant structures through which people acquired and exchanged art of almost every kind before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The book’s focus on two-dimensional works may make a certain amount of sense in the Western canon, but it misrepresents the cultural history of acquisition in Edo-period Japan, where sculpture, calligraphy, lacquer, and ceramics were frequently held in higher regard and were more in demand than painting. Acquisition is still a useful text, but it is best read alongside recent publications that are not limited to painting and that directly explicate the centrality of the culture of tea in Japan’s early modern art markets and networks of exchange.

Elizabeth Lillehoj’s introductory essay provides a clear and readable overview of the Edo period with particular attention to the issue of patronage, a topic that was also recently explored in a themed issue of the journal Early Modern Japan (XII, no. 2 [Fall/Winter 2004]). She discusses shoguns and warlords as art patrons as well as the sponsorship of members of the imperial court, which is her own area of expertise. She then briefly discusses wealthy urban commoners as patrons and purchasers of art, with particular focus on printed books and painting. She next assesses the second half of the Edo period, again focusing only on painting, before summarizing the chapters that follow.

This introductory essay is admirably concise, making it useful as a reading for undergrads studying the history of Japanese painting. At the same time, its general disregard for the acquisition of other forms of material culture in Edo-period Japan is problematic. Single-sentence mention is made of the tea ceremony and steeped tea, but the author does not reference recent publications that deal substantively with art acquisition in the tea world, such as Patricia Graham, Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998); Morgan Pitelka, ed., Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2003); Gregory Levine, Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Each of these works includes significant new research on the acquisition and ownership of art, and each was widely available well before the publication of this book (which, I should mention, references several other publications from 2005).

Timon Screech’s essay, “Owning Edo-Period Paintings,” addresses “the mechanics of purchase and issues of cost,” topics that, as he notes, have been fully explored in Western art history but largely ignored in studies of Japan. Screech admirably circumscribes his topic and explores it thoroughly, explicating the process by which collectors or commissioners paid for paintings, owned and in many cases lost paintings, and in a concluding section, the peculiar culture of demanding painting as a kind of performance. Unlike other parts of the book, he is careful about his claims, limiting himself to painting and acknowledging that the “anthropology of production” still needs to be considered.

Several contributions explore the question of collecting practices. Daisuke Itō’s “The Kotohiragū Collection: Dedications to the Kompira Deity” examines the voluminous donation of paintings to a provincial Shintō shrine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Janice Katz looks at art collecting by wealthy warriors in “Fools for Art: Two Maeda Daimyo as Collectors in Seventeenth-Century Japan.” Katz sees art collecting by the most powerful of warriors, feudal lords (daimyo), as battles for status and prestige; and unlike other contributors, she acknowledges the fundamental role that tea played in the definition of beauty, the dissemination of aesthetic preferences and practices, and the exchange of art. Lillehoj explores one form of imperial art acquisition in “A Gift for the Retired Empress,” which examines the Tokugawa military government’s gift of painted screens to the influential seventeenth-century aristocrat Tōfukumon’in. Lillehoj adroitly contextualizes this acquisition in the context of Tokugawa foreign policy and the early modern East Asian world order, revealing the content of the screens to be a piece of political propaganda aimed at putting the imperial court in its place.

Katsuya Hirano’s “Social Networks and Production of Public Discourse in Edo Popular Culture” examines Tokugawa government censorship of wood-block prints, and is the only essay in the volume to engage with theoretical questions or refer to literature about art not from the field of Japanese studies, making it quite stimulating and refreshing. Some of the assumptions of the essay are surprising, however, particularly the uncritical application of terms such as “high art” and the binary of elite versus popular art, both of which emerge from European Enlightenment-era discourses and are of questionable value in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan. His supposition that collecting “elite, traditional art” (modern terms that do not translate to the Edo idiom) necessarily “privileged the ideas of singularity, originality, and authenticity” is misguided in the case of pre-Meiji Japan, as has been demonstrated in studies of early modern culture such as Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998); Brenda G. Jordan and Victoria Weston, eds., Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003); and Pitelka, “Tea Taste: Patronage and Collaboration among Tea Masters and Potters in Early Modern Japan” (Early Modern Japan XII, no. 2 [Fall/Winter 2004]: 26–38).

Patronage and exchange are taken up in the final chapters. Satoko Tamamushi’s “Sakai Hōitsu and Art Ownership” looks at patrons of a key painter in what is now known as the Rimpa movement, situating his work and its success in the particular social and cultural context of the city of Edo. The final essay in the book, Joshua Fogel’s “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s,” focuses on Japanese visitors to Shanghai at the end of the Edo period and the impact of these and other Sino-Japanese exchanges on painting in Japan.

Editing multi-author anthologies is a thankless job characterized by difficult and mundane tasks: editing countless drafts, managing and browbeating already busy academics, keeping up with new and relevant scholarship, recruiting authors to cover missing fields, and finding a press willing to publish this format. Yet volumes like Acquisition are vital to the growth of the field because they encourage collaboration, create and sustain scholarly networks, and expose a range of work to a potentially broad readership. Two additional small issues unfortunately prevent this volume from appealing as widely as it might have. First, specialized Japanese terms and titles are dealt with in an inconsistent fashion. Some essays, as expected, provide the English translation for artworks and book titles first, and then provide in parentheses the Japanese title (which is of course only useful to specialists who understand Japanese and know the materials). Other essays, however, use the specialized titles throughout, which is confusing for the majority of readers. Also perplexing is the tendency of many essays to provide an English translation for specialized terms such as “sekiga,” “ema,” and “jūsha” at the first usage, but then revert to the Japanese term rather than continuing to use the English translation. This implies that the intended readership is the very small community of Japanese art historians.

Second, a topic like the acquisition and ownership of art is potentially of interest to a large community of readers, including not just museum professionals, collectors, and dealers of Japanese art, but also art historians who work on other cultural traditions, anthropologists, museum studies and cultural studies scholars, and even some who work in literary theory. Engagement with the rich theoretical literature on collecting (including the works of Arjun Appadurai, Pierre Bourdieu, James Clifford, Craig Clunas, and Susan Stewart, to name just a few) would enrich a volume of this sort and open it up to a more general community of those who study art and its acquisition.

The essays in this volume are without a doubt significant and compelling, and even with their omissions will hopefully inspire more scholarship on the acquisition and ownership of art in Japan. Perhaps the critiques outlined above can best serve as a reminder that the decisions made in the choice of a title—in this case that the book will explore not just painting and prints but the full range of art in a period of incredible artistic diversity—need to be supported not by token references but by multiple examples of substantive and sustained scholarship. Readers likely would not object to the exclusion of tea culture and its various forms of material culture if the title signified that the book was focused on painting and prints.