- Convenors:
-
Daniel Sastre de la Vega
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Eddy Y. L. Chang (University of Salamanca)
Gonzalo San Emeterio Cabañes (Centre for East Asian Studies)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
Short Abstract
This panel examines how visual materials in Japan, from early illustrated books and rebus puzzles to contemporary temple and secular reconstruction images, actively shape knowledge, guide interpretation, and transmit cultural values, highlighting their role across historical, educational contexts.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how visual materials in Japan have functioned as powerful mediators in the shaping, transmission, and production of knowledge across both historical and contemporary contexts. Bringing together perspectives from visual culture studies, education, semiotics, and Japanese studies, the three papers examine how images do not merely illustrate information, but actively structure understanding, invite interpretation, and enable the application of knowledge.
The first paper examines how the medieval past was reshaped in early musha-ehon, illustrated books produced from the seventeenth century onward for both entertainment and didactic purposes. Focusing on Musha Sakura (c. 1693) by Hishikawa Moronobu, one of the earliest examples attributed to a named author. The paper argues that such works played a significant role in shaping early modern engagements with the past, revealing the flexible functions and representational strategies of illustrated books.
The second paper examines hanjimono (Japanese rebus puzzles) as visual devices for testing and activating knowledge. Originally used as aids for reading sutra and other texts, and later as playful challenges requiring cultural and linguistic competence, hanjimono integrate visual cues, language, and cultural references. The paper further explores their application in contemporary Japanese language education, arguing that they foster active learning and promote broader cultural understanding.
The third paper focuses on the contemporary use of reconstructed religious and secular structures in Nara, such as temples and palatial precincts, and their role in shaping narratives of Nara-period grandeur. Images of rebuilt gates, pagodas, and Golden Halls have become embedded in educational materials, exhibitions, and public outreach initiatives. The paper argues that these visual and material reconstructions actively shape historical knowledge while legitimizing reconstruction practices and the transmission of traditional craftsmanship.
Taken together, the panel demonstrates how visual mediation operates across time periods and genres, from early illustrated books and puzzle prints to contemporary educational imagery and architectural reconstructions, to shape the dissemination and interpretation of knowledge in Japan. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach to visual materials, the panel highlights the central role of images in knowledge production, emphasizing their capacity to structure learning, test understanding, and transmit cultural values within and beyond formal educational settings.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Since 1976, Nara’s temple and palace reconstructions, including Kōfuku-ji and the Heijō Palace gates, reshaped the city’s landscape and visualized Heijō-kyō’s peak. These structures and related media mediate historical knowledge, heritage, and craftsmanship in education and public discourse.
Paper long abstract
The temple reconstruction projects underway in the city of Nara since 1976—initiated with Yakushi-ji Temple—now comprise a total of three locations and nine structures that have significantly reshaped the city’s monumental landscape, encompassing both religious buildings and secular complexes such as the Imperial Palace. The kondō of Kōfuku-ji Temple, completed in 2018, represents the most recent major religious reconstruction and has had the most pronounced impact on the everyday urban experience of Nara’s inhabitants. In the secular sphere, the latest structure to be completed is the Great South Gate (Daigokumon) of the Heijō Imperial Palace (Heijō-kyū) finished in 2022, which will be followed in March 2026 by the reconstruction of the Eastern Pavilion (Higashirō).
These newly erected structures visually materialize the period of greatest prosperity of Heijō-kyō, the old name for Nara, for contemporary Japanese audiences and have gradually come to stand in for that past in educational contexts, including school history textbooks, university-level monographs, and publications aimed at the general public. Equally significant are the videos, infographics, and animations produced by the institutions supporting these reconstruction projects, which demonstrate how digital media have become a primary vehicle for disseminating these architectural forms and the historical narratives that accompany them. Through an analysis of photographs, diagrams, and other visual materials employed to explain the reconstruction process, this paper examines how images mediate complex technical, historical, and cultural information. It argues that such visualizations play a crucial role in conveying ideas of continuity, craftsmanship, and cultural heritage, while simultaneously shaping pedagogical understandings of architectural knowledge and preservation practices and associating the city of Nara with a highly selective moment of its long history—one that appears particularly well suited to the objectives of contemporary social and institutional actors.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines hanjimono as multimodal visual devices for testing and activating knowledge. Drawing on semiotics and learning theories, it shows how hanjimono puzzles integrate images, language, and cultural references to foster active and creative learning and cultural understanding.
Paper long abstract
Hanjimono (also known as hanji-e) are rebus-like visual puzzles that have circulated in Japan for several centuries, combining images, written characters, and culturally embedded associations to generate meaning. Their earliest documented uses can be traced to Buddhist contexts during the Edo period, where they functioned as visual aids for reading and interpreting canonical texts such as the Heart Sutra. Over time, hanjimono developed into popular visual challenges appearing in prints, books, and maps produced for entertainment, later extending into commercial advertising. In contemporary contexts. Today they continue to circulate in the form of nōtore quizu (“brain-training quizzes”).
Drawing on semiotic and learning theories, this paper conceptualises hanjimono as visual devices that actively structure knowledge rather than merely illustrating it. Following Barthes’ distinction between denotation and connotation, hanjimono rely on culturally shared visual codes to prompt layered interpretation, while Eco’s notion of the “open work” helps explain their interpretive indeterminacy and reliance on the viewer’s encyclopaedic knowledge. From a multimodal perspective (Kress & van Leeuwen), hanjimono orchestrate meaning through the interaction of visual composition, written language, spatial arrangement, and cultural reference, requiring readers to negotiate meaning across modes.
Edo-period hanjimono prints typically provided no instructions, answers, or explanations, offering only brief titles that hinted at thematic categories. This absence of explicit guidance positioned viewers as active meaning-makers, testing their linguistic, historical, and cultural competence. As a result, even contemporary Japanese audiences will struggle to decipher such puzzles without historical and cultural contextualisation, highlighting their function as tools for activating and verifying knowledge.
Building on Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning and Inaba’s work on active and creative learning, this paper explores the pedagogical potential of hanjimono in contemporary Japanese language and culture education. It argues that the creative use of hanjimono-style puzzles can function as a form of intercultural mediation, fostering active engagement, deeper cognitive processing, and the integration of prior and new knowledge. Positioned at the intersection of visual culture, semiotics, and education, hanjimono exemplify how visual materials in Japan have long operated as powerful mediators in the production, transmission, and application of knowledge.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how early musha-ehon reshaped the medieval past in seventeenth-century Japan. Focusing on Hishikawa Moronobu’s Musha Sakura (c. 1693), it argues that illustrated books served not only entertainment but also didactic and historical functions.
Paper long abstract
The seventeenth century in Japan witnessed an unprecedented expansion in access to knowledge and cultural production. Social stability and growing demand for information fostered the commercial spread of woodblock printing, giving rise to new forms of printed material. Among the most prominent were kanazōshi, printed booklets that entertained, informed, and/or educated readers. Almost in parallel, the genre of ehon emerged, characterized by a predominance of images accompanied by brief explanatory texts. These illustrated works have often been dismissed as minor forms of entertainment or as utilitarian reference manuals for learning to draw.
This paper challenges such interpretations by examining one of the earliest dated examples of the genre: Musha Sakura (c. 1693), created by the illustrator Hishikawa Moronobu. Commonly classified as a musha-ehon—a compendium of images depicting heroic warriors of the past—Musha Sakura reveals, upon closer analysis, significant affinities with contemporaneous educational kanazōshi. Through a detailed examination of its visual and textual strategies, this study argues that ehon were not merely ancillary or derivative forms, but played an active role in mediating historical knowledge. By foregrounding Musha Sakura as a case study, the paper demonstrates how the highly visual nature of ehon enabled distinctive modes of engagement with the past, contributing to early modern practices of historical understanding, pedagogy, and cultural memory.