Japan

Kabuki scholar Laurence Kominz discusses a woodblock print of a Kabuki actor and courtesan depicted in a scene from the famous Japanese epic The Tale of Genji.

In Noh theatre (classical Japanese music drama), Japanese ghosts are usually upset females. Portrayed without feet because they have lost their connection to the earth, they are so filled with love, jealousy or rage that they won’t go peacefully into the night. Japanese believe ghosts are people who have died with an unpaid on — “debt” or “obligation.” If not repaid, the debt is passed down for generations, growing with each one like a snowball into an avalanche.

Preparators at the Asian Art Museum install a 2100-pound bronze bell for the Bell Ringing Ceremony on December 31. In this annual tradition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, visitors, led by a Buddhist priest, mark New Year by ringing a 2100-lb., sixteenth-century Japanese bronze bell originally from a temple in Tajima Province in Japan. Now part of the museum’s collection, the bell will be struck 108 times with a large custom-hewn log. According to custom in several Buddhist cultures, this symbolically welcomes the New Year and curbs the 108 mortal desires (bonno) which, according to Buddhist belief, torment humankind.

Watch the installation of two monumental Japanese bronze lion sculptures on granite plinths outside the museum’s front entrance on Larkin Street.

Dr. Andrea Horbinski of the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, discusses Japan and an interconnected world at the Medieval Japan Teacher Institute, held at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Dr. Andrea Horbinski, of the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, discusses Japan and its geography at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco as part of the Medieval Japan Teacher Institute.

The interdisciplinary performance features artists Tatsu Aoki, Kioko Aoki, Francis Wong, Megan Lee, Wesley Hitomo Yee and Melody Takata, as well as master artists Chizuru Kineya and Michikaoru Hanayagi.

The annual Bell-Ringing Ceremony follows the Japanese custom in which the end-of-the-year bell (joya no kane) is struck 108 times before midnight on New Year’s Eve, symbolically welcoming the New Year and curbing the 108 mortal desires (bonno), which according to Buddhist belief torment humankind.

Lesson plan on the monetary and cultural value of Japanese swords and the role they played in Japanese trade.

The first record of tea drinking in Japan occurs early in the Heian period (794–1185) whenit was introduced to the Japanese aristocracy by scholar-monks returning from Tang dynasty China. Learn more.