ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that contemporary art is both a significant part of contemporary Japanese culture and also has a wide significance for the interpretation of Japanese society and beyond, to the issue of Japan's cultural impact on the rest of Asia and maybe the rest of the world. The contemporary academic study of Japanese popular culture in its visual manifestations has itself focused overwhelmingly on these twin, and related, phenomena of anime and manga. Even a recent essay in a fairly authoritative scholarly collection that purports to address the issue of contemporary Japanese visual culture and announces itself as such, in fact only deals with those two highly emphasized manifestations to the exclusion of all other dimensions of visual culture. Japanese studies as a whole is strangely myopic, given the enormous range of interesting issues that the society generates and their comparative significance for culture and social theory.
