| architecture |
| calligraphy |
| ceramics |
| clothing |
| comics |
| gardens |
| lacquerwork |
| literature |
| movies |
| music |
| painting |
| poetry |
| sculpture |
| tea ceremony |
| television |
| theatre |
| weaponry |
| thematic routes |
| timeline |
| the site |
context: This Site
Why
I've been interested in various Japanese art forms for a long time. By this point I've looked at a lot of paintings, seen a lot of movies, read a lot of books and comics, and so on. I've read a lot of books about many of these subjects too. I then ended up talking to friends about these forms and some thoughts about them - and a lot of those thoughts were about the ways they interconnect, what the connections say, and how they relate to western art, and these things didn't seem to me to be much addressed in the books I had read. My friends said I should write a book. I didn't think I was up to the job, but the notion stayed on my mind. One big problem was imagining how to write a book covering such a disparate area, especially when what I really wanted to talk about was connections, contrasts, similarities across the forms, genres, centuries, continents. A website seemed an excellent approach, as I can offer many alternative routes, even kinds of routes, through it, and anyone visiting can choose one of those or make up their own.