Place: Seisen University (3-16-21 Higashi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-8642, TEL: (03)3447-5551) (map in Japanese), which is about a ten-minute walk from Gotanda station. Turn left coming out of the barrier at Gotanda JR station. Take the road forking right, accessible via the footbridge. Keep going until you eventually pass a pizza and pasta restaurant, "To the Herbs." Take the next turning to the left and continue up the hill until you come to the university gateway on the left. The lecture theatre is approached from No. 1 Building behind the Conder House and is on a lower level; the route will be clearly marked. If you take a taxi from the station, insist on "SeiSEN Joshi Daigaku", not "SeiSHIN".

Information: ASJ Office

Professor Nobuo Tsuji takes his cue from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, the classic study of the play-element in culture, where this is traced in such pursuits of Japanese aristocracy as the poetry-contest or war as 'a game for the valiant' and applies it to the domain of the visual arts. Professor Tsuji finds it throughout the entire range of his subject, from prehistory to the present, discovering playfulness from Jomon pottery to contemporary comics: which, Professor Tsuji insists, he does not necessarily deplore, seeing them as a survival of earlier values through what he regards as the over-seriousness of the Meiji Era.

For reasons of time, Professor Tsuji will confine himself to the Edo Period, where the aristocratic play of earlier periods reappears in the art-forms of the townspeople, from netsuke to ukiyo-e, among which he finds the play-element particularly marked in the elements of parody and illusionism. His lecture will be illustrated with slides.

Professor Nobuo Tsuji entered the world of the fine arts as the result of a vision. Born in 1932 into a doctor's family in Nagoya, he too had intended to practise medicine when he enrolled as a student at Tokyo University. However, in the course of his first year he came down with typhoid, and in the resulting delirium saw himself in terms reminiscent of Munch and van Gogh. The experience impelled him to change his direction in life, and he switched to the study of art history.

Though attracted to European art, he decided to concentrate on Japanese, mainly because it was not at that time a popular subject, and interested him by reason of the problems it offered. After taking his M.A. from Tokyo University, he carried out research at the Tokyo National Institute of Cultural Assets, going on to fill professorships at Tohoku University, Tokyo University, and the International Institute of Japanese culture. He has also worked as Head Curator at the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, and is currently President of Tama Art University.

Professor Tsuji has published extensively, with a concentration on the subjects of ornament, play and animism in Japanese art. His Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas have been published under the title Playfulness in Japanese Art (Spencer Museum of Art, 1986), a copy of which he has kindly presented to the Society.

Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 6", June 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.

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