A Bound Model—In Seiu’s Studio

Watanabe Buichi

A full-page historical photograph introduces the Seiu feature through a posed bound model in the artist’s studio. The image establishes the issue’s concern with the relationship between erotic representation, studio practice, and visual documentation.

Gravure: Selected Masterworks by Seiu

A gravure sequence presents selected Seiu-related images and photographic material, establishing the artist’s recurring motifs of posed bodies, elaborate costume, hair, restraint, and theatrical composition.

The Forbidden Photo Album

This visual archive juxtaposes staged photographs of models, Seiu at work, private photographic records, drawings, and paintings. Its accompanying prose frames the photographs as records of artistic experiments and historical erotic imagery rather than…

An Autobiography in Self-Portraits

Itō Seiu

Seiu’s own autobiographical record traces his childhood, education, poverty, entry into newspaper work, artistic formation, marriage, professional struggles, binding practice, illness, and old age. Drawings, photographs, newspaper imagery, and studio scenes make the memoir…

About My Father, Seiu

Itō Kiku

Itō Kiku offers a daughter’s account of Seiu’s personality, household life, artistic work, marriage, and family tensions. The contribution shifts the feature from self-narration to domestic testimony and the preservation of a difficult artistic…

The True Character of Seiu, the Seme-e Artist

This visual and cultural-history section presents Seiu’s drawings and collected observations of peddlers, charms, superstitions, shop signs, lanterns, street life, erotic imagery, and sideshow culture. It portrays the artist as an observer of vernacular…

Seiu and Me

Mochizuki Meika

Mochizuki recounts discovering Seiu’s work in a secondhand bookstore and reflects on collecting, private looking, embarrassment, fascination, and the power of disturbing erotic images. Reproductions of Seiu-related works accompany the personal art-critical narrative.

Seiu’s One Hundred Ghost Stories

A largely visual portfolio of ghostly, grotesque, supernatural, and uncanny imagery associated with Seiu and related collections. It includes long-format paintings, ghost pictures, monsters, spirits, theatrical scenes, and a collection attributed to the rakugo…

My Investigation into Itō Seiu

Fukutomi Tarō

Fukutomi reconstructs Seiu’s career and afterlife through encounters with collectors, dealers, publishers, artists, and surviving works. The essay examines private archives, the circulation of erotic and supernatural imagery, and the effort to restore Seiu…

Guide to Upcoming Exhibitions, Recommended CDs, Books, Films, and More

A service-oriented page supplies references connected with the issue’s art-historical material and announces exhibitions and cultural offerings. It functions as documentary and community-facing editorial back matter rather than a single authored essay.

Super Artist: Yanase Masamu’s Busy Forty-Five Years

Yanase Masamu

This richly illustrated retrospective follows Yanase from childhood talent through avant-garde painting, proletarian art, graphic design, manga, stage work, political illustration, wartime activity, arrest, and repression. Reproduced paintings, posters, cartoons, stage designs, and photographs…

Come Back to Life! Okinawa’s Glittering Gold Figures

The feature introduces Ryūkyū royal portraiture and court culture, explaining Chinese-derived dress and rank systems, maritime exchange, wartime destruction, and the reconstruction of lost cultural heritage from surviving images and prewar records.

Fifty Postwar Years Surveyed through Book Design

A retrospective exhibition surveys Japanese book covers, bindings, typography, materials, and publishing culture from 1946 to 1995. The feature treats book design as a visual record of changing social periods and cultural movements.

What a Curiosity! Sakai Hōitsu’s Rare Folding-Screen Masterpiece

Sakai Hōitsu

A visual presentation of a rare folding screen attributed to Sakai Hōitsu focuses on autumn grasses, flowers, vines, a rabbit, surface texture, and Rimpa atmosphere. Additional works and collection history place the screen within…

Do You Know the Kōshin Belief?

This illustrated cultural history explains Kōshin observance, the three worms that report human wrongdoing, longevity beliefs, communal night gatherings, temples, talismans, statues, and regional devotional practice. Historical images are set beside contemporary photographs of…

Stardust, World Art, and International Exhibition News

Various

A multi-item news department surveys exhibitions, design, fashion, photography, film, contemporary art, political art, collecting, and museum activity in Japan and abroad. It includes short notices on Meiji imperial holdings, Scandinavian design, contemporary Asian…

An Artist’s Happy Home, No. 47: Jim Dine

Minamikawa Sanjirō

Minamikawa profiles Jim Dine through photographs and commentary on his home, studio, furniture, books, ceramics, collections, and working environment. The domestic setting is presented as an extension of Dine’s artistic imagination and transatlantic cultural…

A Plainspoken History of Japanese Art, 21: Tōdai-ji’s Great South Gate

Hashimoto Osamu

Hashimoto revisits Tōdai-ji’s Nandaimon through personal memory and close observation of architecture, weathered materials, reconstruction, scale, and Buddhist guardian figures. The essay questions detached academic categorization in favor of embodied aesthetic experience.

Walking through the Autumn Fields—The Life of Aizu Yaichi, Part 3

Kudō Miyoko

Kudō traces Aizu Yaichi’s family origins, the Aizu inn and pleasure-quarter environment, Niigata’s urban history, education, literature, and cultural formation. Maps, ukiyo-e, family photographs, documents, and genealogy connect individual biography with late-Edo and Meiji…

Serial: Visiting Thousand-Year-Old Hot Springs, No. 11—The Kaga Hot-Spring District

Matsufuji Shōhei

This travel and photo essay moves through Awazu, Katayamazu, Yamanaka, and Yamashiro, combining hot springs, Buddhist monuments, sacred Mount Hakusan, historic inns, local streets, food, tourism, and Yamanaka lacquerware. It presents regional heritage as…