title: Perfect competition

text: Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit. As new firms enter the industry, they increase the supply of the product available in the market, and these new firms are forced to charge a lower price to entice consumers to buy the additional supply these new firms are supplying as the firms all compete for customers (See "Persistence" in the "Monopoly Profit" discussion). Incumbent firms within the industry face losing their existing customers to the new firms entering the industry, and are therefore forced to lower their prices to match the lower prices set by the new firms. New firms will continue to enter the industry until the price of the product is lowered to the point that it is the same as the average cost of producing the product, and all of the economic profit disappears. When this happens, economic agents outside of the industry find no advantage to forming new firms that enter into the industry, the supply of the product stops increasing, and the price charged for the product stabilizes, settling into an equilibrium.


title: Perfect competition

text: The same is likewise true of the long run equilibria of monopolistically competitive industries and, more generally, any market which is held to be contestable. Normally, a firm that introduces a differentiated product can initially secure a "temporary" market power for a "short while" (See "Persistence" in "Monopoly Profit"). At this stage, the initial price the consumer must pay for the product is high, and the demand for, as well as the availability of the product in the market, will be limited. In the long run, however, when the profitability of the product is well established, and because there are few barriers to entry, the number of firms that produce this product will increase until the available supply of the product eventually becomes relatively large, the price of the product shrinks down to the level of the average cost of producing the product. When this finally occurs, all monopoly profit associated with producing and selling the product disappears, and the initial monopoly turns into a competitive industry. In the case of contestable markets, the cycle is often ended with the departure of the former "hit and run" entrants to the market, returning the industry to its previous state, just with a lower price and no economic profit for the incumbent firms.


title: Perfect competition

text: Profit can, however, occur in competitive and contestable markets in the short run, as firms jostle for market position. Once risk is accounted for, long-lasting economic profit in a competitive market is thus viewed as the result of constant cost-cutting and performance improvement ahead of industry competitors, allowing costs to be below the market-set price.


title: Perfect competition

text: Economic profit is, however, much more prevalent in uncompetitive markets such as in a perfect monopoly or oligopoly situation. In these scenarios, individual firms have some element of market power: Though monopolists are constrained by consumer demand, they are not price takers, but instead either price-setters or quantity setters. This allows the firm to set a price that is higher than that which would be found in a similar but more competitive industry, allowing them economic profit in both the long and short run.


title: Perfect competition

text: The existence of economic profits depends on the prevalence of barriers to entry: these stop other firms from entering into the industry and sapping away profits, as they would in a more competitive market. In cases where barriers are present, but more than one firm, firms can collude to limit production, thereby restricting supply in order to ensure that the price of the product remains high enough for all firms in the industry to achieve an economic profit.


title: Perfect competition

text: However, some economists, for instance Steve Keen, a professor at the University of Western Sydney, argue that even an infinitesimal amount of market power can allow a firm to produce a profit and that the absence of economic profit in an industry, or even merely that some production occurs at a loss, in and of itself constitutes a barrier to entry.


title: Perfect competition

text: In a single-goods case, a positive economic profit happens when the firm's average cost is less than the price of the product or service at the profit-maximizing output. The economic profit is equal to the quantity of output multiplied by the difference between the average cost and the price.


title: Perfect competition

text: Often, governments will try to intervene in uncompetitive markets to make them more competitive. Antitrust (US) or competition (elsewhere) laws were created to prevent powerful firms from using their economic power to artificially create the barriers to entry they need to protect their economic profits. This includes the use of predatory pricing toward smaller competitors. For example, in the United States, Microsoft Corporation was initially convicted of breaking Anti-Trust Law and engaging in anti-competitive behavior in order to form one such barrier in "United States v. Microsoft"; after a successful appeal on technical grounds, Microsoft agreed to a settlement with the Department of Justice in which they were faced with stringent oversight procedures and explicit requirements designed to prevent this predatory behaviour. With lower barriers, new firms can enter the market again, making the long run equilibrium more like that of a competitive industry, with no economic profit for firms.


title: Perfect competition

text: If a government feels it is impractical to have a competitive market – such as in the case of a natural monopoly – it will sometimes try to regulate the existing uncompetitive market by controlling the price firms charge for their product. For example, the old AT&T (regulated) monopoly, which existed before the courts ordered its breakup, had to get government approval to raise its prices. The government examined the monopoly's costs to determine whether the monopoly should be able raise its price, and could reject the monopoly's application for a higher price if the cost did not justify it. Although a regulated firm will not have an economic profit as large as it would in an unregulated situation, it can still make profits well above a competitive firm in a truly competitive market.


title: Perfect competition

text: As mentioned above, the perfect competition model, if interpreted as applying also to short-period or very-short-period behaviour, is approximated only by markets of homogeneous products produced and purchased by very many sellers and buyers, usually organized markets for agricultural products or raw materials. In real-world markets, assumptions such as perfect information cannot be verified and are only approximated in organized double-auction markets where most agents wait and observe the behaviour of prices before deciding to exchange (but in the long-period interpretation perfect information is not necessary, the analysis only aims at determining the average around which market prices gravitate, and for gravitation to operate one does not need perfect information).


title: Perfect competition

text: In the absence of externalities and public goods, perfectly competitive equilibria are Pareto-efficient, i.e. no improvement in the utility of a consumer is possible without a worsening of the utility of some other consumer. This is called the First Theorem of Welfare Economics. The basic reason is that no productive factor with a non-zero marginal product is left unutilized, and the units of each factor are so allocated as to yield the same indirect marginal utility in all uses, a basic efficiency condition (if this indirect marginal utility were higher in one use than in other ones, a Pareto improvement could be achieved by transferring a small amount of the factor to the use where it yields a higher marginal utility).


title: Perfect competition

text: A simple proof assuming differentiable utility functions and production functions is the following. Let formula_1 be the 'price' (the rental) of a certain factor formula_2, let formula_3 and formula_4 be its marginal product in the production of goods formula_5 and formula_6, and let formula_7 and formula_8 be these goods' prices. In equilibrium these prices must equal the respective marginal costs formula_9 and formula_10; remember that marginal cost equals factor 'price' divided by factor marginal productivity (because increasing the production of good by one very small unit through an increase of the employment of factor formula_2 requires increasing the factor employment by formula_12 and thus increasing the cost by formula_13, and through the condition of cost minimization that marginal products must be proportional to factor 'prices' it can be shown that the cost increase is the same if the output increase is obtained by optimally varying all factors). Optimal factor employment by a price-taking firm requires equality of factor rental and factor marginal revenue product, formula_14, so we obtain formula_15, formula_16.


title: Perfect competition

text: Now choose any consumer purchasing both goods, and measure his utility in such units that in equilibrium his marginal utility of money (the increase in utility due to the last unit of money spent on each good), formula_17, is 1. Then formula_18, formula_19. The indirect marginal utility of the factor is the increase in the utility of our consumer achieved by an increase in the employment of the factor by one (very small) unit; this increase in utility through allocating the small increase in factor utilization to good formula_5 is formula_21, and through allocating it to good formula_6 it is formula_23 again. With our choice of units the marginal utility of the amount of the factor consumed directly by the optimizing consumer is again w, so the amount supplied of the factor too satisfies the condition of optimal allocation.


title: Perfect competition

text: Monopoly violates this optimal allocation condition, because in a monopolized industry market price is above marginal cost, and this means that factors are underutilized in the monopolized industry, they have a higher indirect marginal utility than in their uses in competitive industries. Of course, this theorem is considered irrelevant by economists who do not believe that general equilibrium theory correctly predicts the functioning of market economies; but it is given great importance by neoclassical economists and it is the theoretical reason given by them for combating monopolies and for antitrust legislation.


title: Perfect competition

text: In contrast to a monopoly or oligopoly, in perfect competition it is impossible for a firm to earn economic profit in the long run, which is to say that a firm cannot make any more money than is necessary to cover its economic costs. In order not to misinterpret this zero-long-run-profits thesis, it must be remembered that the term 'profit' is used in different ways:


title: Perfect competition

text: Thus, if one leaves aside risk coverage for simplicity, the neoclassical zero-long-run-profit thesis would be re-expressed in classical parlance as profits coinciding with interest in the long period (i.e. the rate of profit tending to coincide with the rate of interest). Profits in the classical meaning do not necessarily disappear in the long period but tend to normal profit.


title: Perfect competition

text: With this terminology, if a firm is earning abnormal profit in the short term, this will act as a trigger for other firms to enter the market. As other firms enter the market, the market supply curve will shift out, causing prices to fall. Existing firms will react to this lower price by adjusting their capital stock downward. This adjustment will cause their marginal cost to shift to the left causing the market supply curve to shift inward. However, the net effect of entry by new firms and adjustment by existing firms will be to shift the supply curve outward. The market price will be driven down until all firms are earning normal profit only.


title: Perfect competition

text: It is important to note that perfect competition is a sufficient condition for allocative and productive efficiency, but it is not a necessary condition. Laboratory experiments in which participants have significant price setting power and little or no information about their counterparts consistently produce efficient results given the proper trading institutions.


title: Perfect competition

text: In the short run, a firm operating at a loss [formula_24 (revenue less than total cost) or formula_25 (price less than unit cost)] must decide whether to continue to operate or temporarily shut down. The shutdown rule states "in the short run a firm should continue to operate if price exceeds average variable costs". Restated, the rule is that for a firm to continue producing in the short run it must earn sufficient revenue to cover its variable costs. The rationale for the rule is straightforward: By shutting down a firm avoids all variable costs. However, the firm must still pay fixed costs. Because fixed costs must be paid regardless of whether a firm operates they should not be considered in deciding whether to produce or shut down. Thus in determining whether to shut down a firm should compare total revenue to total variable costs (formula_26) rather than total costs (formula_27). If the revenue the firm is receiving is greater than its total variable cost (formula_28), then the firm is covering all variable costs and there is additional revenue ("contribution"), which can be applied to fixed costs. (The size of the fixed costs is irrelevant as it is a sunk cost. The same consideration is used whether fixed costs are one dollar or one million dollars.) On the other hand, if formula_29 then the firm is not covering its production costs and it should immediately shut down. The rule is conventionally stated in terms of price (average revenue) and average variable costs. The rules are equivalent (if one divides both sides of inequality formula_30 by formula_31 gives formula_32). If the firm decides to operate, the firm will continue to produce where marginal revenue equals marginal costs because these conditions insure not only profit maximization (loss minimization) but also maximum contribution.


title: Perfect competition

text: Another way to state the rule is that a firm should compare the profits from operating to those realized if it shut down and select the option that produces the greater profit. A firm that is shut down is generating zero revenue and incurring no variable costs. However, the firm still has to pay fixed cost. So the firm's profit equals fixed costs or formula_33. An operating firm is generating revenue, incurring variable costs and paying fixed costs. The operating firm's profit is formula_34. The firm should continue to operate if formula_35, which simplified is formula_36. The difference between revenue, formula_37, and variable costs, formula_26, is the contribution to fixed costs and any contribution is better than none. Thus, if formula_36 then firm should operate. If formula_40 the firm should shut down.


title: Perfect competition

text: A decision to shut down means that the firm is temporarily suspending production. It does not mean that the firm is going out of business (exiting the industry). If market conditions improve, and prices increase, the firm can resume production. Shutting down is a short-run decision. A firm that has shut down is not producing. The firm still retains its capital assets; however, the firm cannot leave the industry or avoid its fixed costs in the short run. Exit is a long-term decision. A firm that has exited an industry has avoided all commitments and freed all capital for use in more profitable enterprises.


title: Perfect competition

text: However, a firm cannot continue to incur losses indefinitely. In the long run, the firm will have to earn sufficient revenue to cover all its expenses and must decide whether to continue in business or to leave the industry and pursue profits elsewhere. The long-run decision is based on the relationship of the price and long-run average costs. If formula_41 then the firm will not exit the industry. If formula_42, then the firm will exit the industry. These comparisons will be made after the firm has made the necessary and feasible long-term adjustments. In the long run a firm operates where marginal revenue equals long-run marginal costs.


title: Perfect competition

text: The short-run (formula_43) supply curve for a perfectly competitive firm is the marginal cost (formula_44) curve at and above the shutdown point. Portions of the marginal cost curve below the shutdown point are not part of the formula_43 supply curve because the firm is not producing any positive quantity in that range. Technically the formula_43 supply curve is a discontinuous function composed of the segment of the formula_44 curve at and above minimum of the average variable cost curve and a segment that runs on the vertical axis from the origin to but not including a point at the height of the minimum average variable cost.


title: Perfect competition

text: The use of the assumption of perfect competition as the foundation of price theory for product markets is often criticized as representing all agents as passive, thus removing the active attempts to increase one's welfare or profits by price undercutting, product design, advertising, innovation, activities that – the critics argue – characterize most industries and markets. These criticisms point to the frequent lack of realism of the assumptions of product homogeneity and impossibility to differentiate it, but apart from this, the accusation of passivity appears correct only for short-period or very-short-period analyses, in long-period analyses the inability of price to diverge from the natural or long-period price is due to active reactions of entry or exit.


title: Perfect competition

text: Some economists have a different kind of criticism concerning perfect competition model. They are not criticizing the price taker assumption because it makes economic agents too "passive", but because it then raises the question of who sets the prices. Indeed, if everyone is price taker, there is the need for a benevolent planner who gives and sets the prices, in other word, there is a need for a "price maker". Therefore, it makes the perfect competition model appropriate not to describe a decentralized "market" economy but a centralized one. This in turn means that such kind of model has more to do with communism than capitalism.


title: Perfect competition

text: Another frequent criticism is that it is often not true that in the short run differences between supply and demand cause changes in price; especially in manufacturing, the more common behaviour is alteration of production without nearly any alteration of price.


title: Perfect competition

text: The critics of the assumption of perfect competition in product markets seldom question the basic neoclassical view of the working of market economies for this reason. The Austrian School insists strongly on this criticism, and yet the neoclassical view of the working of market economies as fundamentally efficient, reflecting consumer choices and assigning to each agent his contribution to social welfare, is esteemed to be fundamentally correct. Some non-neoclassical schools, like Post-Keynesians, reject the neoclassical approach to value and distribution, but not because of their rejection of perfect competition as a reasonable approximation to the working of most product markets; the reasons for rejection of the neoclassical 'vision' are different views of the determinants of income distribution and of aggregated demand.


title: Perfect competition

text: In particular, the rejection of perfect competition does not generally entail the rejection of free competition as characterizing most product markets; indeed it has been argued that competition is stronger nowadays than in 19th century capitalism, owing to the increasing capacity of big conglomerate firms to enter any industry: therefore the classical idea of a tendency toward a uniform rate of return on investment in all industries owing to free entry is even more valid today; and the reason why General Motors, Exxon or Nestlé do not enter the computers or pharmaceutical industries is not insurmountable barriers to entry but rather that the rate of return in the latter industries is already sufficiently in line with the average rate of return elsewhere as not to justify entry. On this few economists, it would seem, would disagree, even among the neoclassical ones. Thus when the issue is normal, or long-period, product prices, differences on the validity of the perfect competition assumption do not appear to imply important differences on the existence or not of a tendency of rates of return toward uniformity as long as entry is possible, and what is found fundamentally lacking in the perfect competition model is the absence of marketing expenses and innovation as causes of costs that do enter normal average cost.


title: Perfect competition

text: The issue is different with respect to factor markets. Here the acceptance or denial of perfect competition in labour markets does make a big difference to the view of the working of market economies. One must distinguish neoclassical from non-neoclassical economists. For the former, absence of perfect competition in labour markets, e.g. due to the existence of trade unions, impedes the smooth working of competition, which if left free to operate would cause a decrease of wages as long as there were unemployment, and would finally ensure the full employment of labour: labour unemployment is due to absence of perfect competition in labour markets. Most non-neoclassical economists deny that a full flexibility of wages would ensure the full employment of labour and find a stickiness of wages an indispensable component of a market economy, without which the economy would lack the regularity and persistence indispensable to its smooth working. This was, for example, John Maynard Keynes's opinion.


title: Perfect competition

text: Particularly radical is the view of the Sraffian school on this issue: the labour demand curve cannot be determined hence a level of wages ensuring the equality between supply and demand for labour does not exist, and economics should resume the viewpoint of the classical economists, according to whom competition in labour markets does not and cannot mean indefinite price flexibility as long as supply and demand are unequal, it only means a tendency to equality of wages for similar work, but the level of wages is necessarily determined by complex sociopolitical elements; custom, feelings of justice, informal allegiances to classes, as well as overt coalitions such as trade unions, far from being impediments to a smooth working of labour markets that would be able to determine wages even without these elements, are on the contrary indispensable because without them there would be no way to determine wages.


title: Perfect competition

text: Equilibrium in perfect competition is the point where market demands will be equal to market supply. A firm's price will be determined at this point. In the short run, equilibrium will be affected by demand. In the long run, both demand and supply of a product will affect the equilibrium in perfect competition. A firm will receive only normal profit in the long run at the equilibrium point.


title: Perfect competition

text: As it is well known, requirements for firm's cost-curve under perfect competition is for the slope to move upwards after a certain amount is produced. This amount is small enough to leave a sufficiently large number of firms in the field (for any given total outputs in the industry) for the conditions of perfect competition to be preserved. For the short-run, the supply of some factors are assumed to be fixed and as the price of the other factors are given, costs per unit must necessarily rise after a certain point. From a theoretical point of view, given the assumptions that there will be a tendency for continuous growth in size for firms, long-period static equilibrium alongside perfect competition may be incompatible.


title: Iron Lad

text: Iron Lad (Nathaniel "Nate" Richards) is a fictional superhero character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He is an adolescent version of Kang the Conqueror, armed with a bio-metal suit that responds to mental commands. He is named after his ancestor of the same name.


title: Iron Lad

text: Iron Lad first appeared in "Young Avengers" #1 (April 2005), created by writer Allan Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung.


title: Iron Lad

text: Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel "Nate" Richards is rescued by his time-traveling adult self, the villainous Kang the Conqueror, moments before bullies would cause him to be hospitalized for years of his life from a knife attack, an event that originally shaped his development into a villain. Kang takes his teenage self through time to witness the future battles and glory that would result in his transformation into Kang the Conqueror, hoping to inspire his younger self. However, it backfires and Nate is horrified at the life of evil his future self shows him. Kang presses Nate to accept his future by killing the bully who would have hospitalized him. Instead, Nate takes the time travel technology given to him by Kang and transports himself to the past, hoping to avoid his sinister destiny.


title: Iron Lad

text: He seeks the Avengers for assistance, but finds the Avengers disbanded. Seeking answers, he downloads the remnants of the destroyed Vision's operating system into his armor. This reveals a fail-safe plan created by the android to reform the Avengers should they disband or fall in action by locating the next generation of Avengers, all of whom have some tie to the original team. Using this plan, Nate assembles his new team, the Young Avengers, with the sole purpose of defeating his future self and reshaping his own future. He models his armor after the Avenger Iron Man, calling himself Iron Lad, and forming a romantic relationship with fellow Young Avenger teammate Cassie "Stature" Lang.


title: Iron Lad

text: Eventually, Kang comes to the past looking for Nate, wanting to return his younger self to his proper place in the timestream. Nate refuses to return, unwilling to become the infamous future villain. The team battle the Growing Man, a robot created by Kang, and are able to defeat him. Kang battles the remaining Avengers and the teen heroes, seemingly gaining the upper hand until Iron Lad runs Hawkeye's sword through Kang's chest. This kills Kang, but the ramifications cause several changes to the timeline, including all the Avengers being dead and Young Avengers Wiccan and Hulkling disappearing as well as Jessica Jones losing her baby. Iron Lad realizes that the only way to restore everything is to go back to his time and assume his role as Kang the Conqueror. In doing so he will also lose his memories of his time in the past as a Young Avenger. Before he goes back in time, he asks his teammates to forgive him for the actions he will commit in the future and kisses Cassie goodbye. He leaves behind his armor, which has activated the Vision's operating software, effectively recreating the armor into a sentient being—an inexperienced "young" Vision, Jonas. Jonas carries Nate's brain patterns and memories, similar to the original Vision and Wonder Man.


title: Iron Lad

text: Cassie and Jonas eventually feel attracted to one another, due initially to Nate's mental imprint. They later begin a relationship. While fighting the cosmic cube-altered Absorbing Man, during the "Dark Reign" storyline, Jonas (now a joint member of the Young Avengers and the Mighty Avengers) is affected by the cube's cosmic radiation and splits into both Iron Lad (Nate) and the original Vision. Iron Lad appears to maintain the memories of the events prior to going back in time. After the Absorbing Man is defeated, the original Vision and Iron Lad merge back together as the new Vision once again.


title: Iron Lad

text: Iron Lad appears in the 2010-12 miniseries, "", in which he prevents Wolverine from killing an amnesiac and de-powered Wanda Maximoff (whom Wolverine feels presents too great a threat). Iron Lad states that he does this because the future depends on their survival. Soon thereafter, Cassie's deceased father Scott Lang is plucked from the past and saved, but Cassie is killed. Iron Lad insists upon travelling back to the past to save her, and he kills Jonas when he protests. When the Young Avengers tell Iron Lad that this is most likely the event that will lead him down the path to becoming Kang the Conqueror, he states that "I will be better than Kang the Conqueror", and disappears into the timestream.


title: Iron Lad

text: Nate, now going by the name Kid Immortus, later provides information to Doctor Doom regarding the Future Foundation. He is also seen in the company of a young Ravonna.


title: Iron Lad

text: After Doom's plan fails, Iron Lad returns and rescues Captain America from the timestream. He and two of his future counterparts, Kang the Conqueror and Immortus, attempt to hold Captain America prisoner so that he cannot interfere with the Illuminati's plan to save Earth by destroying numerous alternate worlds during the "Time Runs Out" storyline, but Captain America manages to escape.


title: Iron Lad

text: Richards returns once again as Iron Lad in the "Exiles" series alongside original member Blink and new members including Wolvie, Sharon Carter and Valkyrie, fighting a multiversal conglomerate of Kangs known as the "Time-Eater", later sacrificing himself to save the rest of the Exiles from a group of rogue Watchers.


title: Iron Lad

text: Nate's Iron Lad armor is composed of neuro-kinetic nano-metal and he can alter its appearance and shape with his thoughts. The armor grants Iron Lad superhuman strength and allows him to fly. It also enables him to fire blasts of various kinds of energy, hack into computer systems, create magnetic fields and travel through time. Kang's psychic link with his armor also enables him to mentally control the Iron Lad armor from a close range.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Fisher's exact test is a statistical significance test used in the analysis of contingency tables. Although in practice it is employed when sample sizes are small, it is valid for all sample sizes. It is named after its inventor, Ronald Fisher, and is one of a class of exact tests, so called because the significance of the deviation from a null hypothesis (e.g., P-value) can be calculated exactly, rather than relying on an approximation that becomes exact in the limit as the sample size grows to infinity, as with many statistical tests.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Fisher is said to have devised the test following a comment from Muriel Bristol, who claimed to be able to detect whether the tea or the milk was added first to her cup. He tested her claim in the "lady tasting tea" experiment.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The test is useful for categorical data that result from classifying objects in two different ways; it is used to examine the significance of the association (contingency) between the two kinds of classification. So in Fisher's original example, one criterion of classification could be whether milk or tea was put in the cup first; the other could be whether Bristol thinks that the milk or tea was put in first. We want to know whether these two classifications are associated—that is, whether Bristol really can tell whether milk or tea was poured in first. Most uses of the Fisher test involve, like this example, a 2 × 2 contingency table (discussed below). The p-value from the test is computed as if the margins of the table are fixed, i.e. as if, in the tea-tasting example, Bristol knows the number of cups with each treatment (milk or tea first) and will therefore provide guesses with the correct number in each category. As pointed out by Fisher, this leads under a null hypothesis of independence to a hypergeometric distribution of the numbers in the cells of the table.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: With large samples, a chi-squared test (or better yet, a G-test) can be used in this situation. However, the significance value it provides is only an approximation, because the sampling distribution of the test statistic that is calculated is only approximately equal to the theoretical chi-squared distribution. The approximation is inadequate when sample sizes are small, or the data are very unequally distributed among the cells of the table, resulting in the cell counts predicted on the null hypothesis (the "expected values") being low. The usual rule for deciding whether the chi-squared approximation is good enough is that the chi-squared test is not suitable when the expected values in any of the cells of a contingency table are below 5, or below 10 when there is only one degree of freedom (this rule is now known to be overly conservative). In fact, for small, sparse, or unbalanced data, the exact and asymptotic "p"-values can be quite different and may lead to opposite conclusions concerning the hypothesis of interest. In contrast the Fisher exact test is, as its name states, exact as long as the experimental procedure keeps the row and column totals fixed, and it can therefore be used regardless of the sample characteristics. It becomes difficult to calculate with large samples or well-balanced tables, but fortunately these are exactly the conditions where the chi-squared test is appropriate.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For hand calculations, the test is feasible only in the case of a 2 × 2 contingency table. However the principle of the test can be extended to the general case of an "m" × "n" table, and some statistical packages provide a calculation (sometimes using a Monte Carlo method to obtain an approximation) for the more general case.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For example, in enrichment analyses in statistical genetics one set of genes may be annotated for a given phenotype and the user may be interested in testing the overlap of their own set with those.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: In this case a 2 × 2 contingency table may be generated and Fisher's exact test applied through identifying


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The test assumes genes in either list are taken from a broader set of genes (e.g. all remaining genes).


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For example, a sample of teenagers might be divided into male and female on one hand and those who are and are not currently studying for a statistics exam on the other. For example, we hypothesize that the proportion of studying students is higher among the women than among the men, and we want to test whether any difference in proportions that we observe is significant. The data might look like this:


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The question we ask about these data is: Knowing that 10 of these 24 teenagers are studying and that 12 of the 24 are female, and assuming the null hypothesis that men and women are equally likely to study, what is the probability that these 10 teenagers who are studying would be so unevenly distributed between the women and the men? If we were to choose 10 of the teenagers at random, what is the probability that 9 or more of them would be among the 12 women and only 1 or fewer from among the 12 men?


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Before we proceed with the Fisher test, we first introduce some notations. We represent the cells by the letters "a, b, c" and "d", call the totals across rows and columns "marginal totals", and represent the grand total by "n". So the table now looks like this:


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Fisher showed that conditional on the margins of the table, "a" is distributed as a hypergeometric distribution with "a+c" draws from a population with "a+b" successes and "c+d" failures. The probability of obtaining such set of values is given by:


title: Fisher's exact test

text: This can be seen as follows. If the marginal totals (i.e. formula_2, formula_3, formula_4, and formula_5) are known, only a single degree of freedom is left: the value e.g. of formula_6 suffices to deduce the other values.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Now, formula_7 is the probability that formula_6 elements are positive in a random selection (without replacement) of formula_4 elements from a larger set containing formula_10 elements in total out of which formula_2 are positive, which is precisely the definition of the hypergeometric distribution.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The formula above gives the exact hypergeometric probability of observing this particular arrangement of the data, assuming the given marginal totals, on the null hypothesis that men and women are equally likely to be studiers. To put it another way, if we assume that the probability that a man is a studier is formula_12, the probability that a woman is a studier is also formula_12, and we assume that both men and women enter our sample independently of whether or not they are studiers, then this hypergeometric formula gives the conditional probability of observing the values "a, b, c, d" in the four cells, conditionally on the observed marginals (i.e., assuming the row and column totals shown in the margins of the table are given). This remains true even if men enter our sample with different probabilities than women. The requirement is merely that the two classification characteristics—gender, and studier (or not)—are not associated.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For example, suppose we knew probabilities formula_14 with formula_15 such that (male studier, male non-studier, female studier, female non-studier) had respective probabilities formula_16 for each individual encountered under our sampling procedure. Then still, were we to calculate the distribution of cell entries conditional given marginals, we would obtain the above formula in which neither formula_12 nor formula_18 occurs. Thus, we can calculate the exact probability of any arrangement of the 24 teenagers into the four cells of the table, but Fisher showed that to generate a significance level, we need consider only the cases where the marginal totals are the same as in the observed table, and among those, only the cases where the arrangement is as extreme as the observed arrangement, or more so. (Barnard's test relaxes this constraint on one set of the marginal totals.) In the example, there are 11 such cases. Of these only one is more extreme in the same direction as our data; it looks like this:


title: Fisher's exact test

text: In order to calculate the significance of the observed data, i.e. the total probability of observing data as extreme or more extreme if the null hypothesis is true, we have to calculate the values of "p" for both these tables, and add them together. This gives a one-tailed test, with "p" approximately 0.001346076 + 0.000033652 = 0.001379728. For example, in the R statistical computing environment, this value can be obtained as codice_1, or in python, using codice_2 (where one receives both the prior odds ratio and the p-value). This value can be interpreted as the sum of evidence provided by the observed data—or any more extreme table—for the null hypothesis (that there is no difference in the proportions of studiers between men and women). The smaller the value of "p", the greater the evidence for rejecting the null hypothesis; so here the evidence is strong that men and women are not equally likely to be studiers.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For a two-tailed test we must also consider tables that are equally extreme, but in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, classification of the tables according to whether or not they are 'as extreme' is problematic. An approach used by the codice_3 function in R is to compute the p-value by summing the probabilities for all tables with probabilities less than or equal to that of the observed table. In the example here, the 2-sided p-value is twice the 1-sided value—but in general these can differ substantially for tables with small counts, unlike the case with test statistics that have a symmetric sampling distribution.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: As noted above, most modern statistical packages will calculate the significance of Fisher tests, in some cases even where the chi-squared approximation would also be acceptable. The actual computations as performed by statistical software packages will as a rule differ from those described above, because numerical difficulties may result from the large values taken by the factorials. A simple, somewhat better computational approach relies on a gamma function or log-gamma function, but methods for accurate computation of hypergeometric and binomial probabilities remains an active research area.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Despite the fact that Fisher's test gives exact p-values, some authors have argued that it is conservative, i.e. that its actual rejection rate is below the nominal significance level. The apparent contradiction stems from the combination of a discrete statistic with fixed significance levels. To be more precise, consider the following proposal for a significance test at the 5%-level: reject the null hypothesis for each table to which Fisher's test assigns a p-value equal to or smaller than 5%. Because the set of all tables is discrete, there may not be a table for which equality is achieved. If formula_20 is the largest p-value smaller than 5% which can actually occur for some table, then the proposed test effectively tests at the formula_20-level. For small sample sizes, formula_20 might be significantly lower than 5%. While this effect occurs for any discrete statistic (not just in contingency tables, or for Fisher's test), it has been argued that the problem is compounded by the fact that Fisher's test conditions on the marginals. To avoid the problem, many authors discourage the use of fixed significance levels when dealing with discrete problems.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The decision to condition on the margins of the table is also controversial. The p-values derived from Fisher's test come from the distribution that conditions on the margin totals. In this sense, the test is exact only for the conditional distribution and not the original table where the margin totals may change from experiment to experiment. It is possible to obtain an exact p-value for the 2×2 table when the margins are not held fixed. Barnard's test, for example, allows for random margins. However, some authors (including, later, Barnard himself) have criticized Barnard's test based on this property. They argue that the marginal success total is an (almost) ancillary statistic, containing (almost) no information about the tested property.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: The act of conditioning on the marginal success rate from a 2×2 table can be shown to ignore some information in the data about the unknown odds ratio. The argument that the marginal totals are (almost) ancillary implies that the appropriate likelihood function for making inferences about this odds ratio should be conditioned on the marginal success rate. Whether this lost information is important for inferential purposes is the essence of the controversy.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: An alternative exact test, Barnard's exact test, has been developed and proponents of it suggest that this method is more powerful, particularly in 2×2 tables. Furthermore, Boschloo's test is an exact test that is uniformly more powerful than Fisher's exact test by construction. Another alternative is to use maximum likelihood estimates to calculate a p-value from the exact binomial or multinomial distributions and reject or fail to reject based on the p-value.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: For stratified categorical data the Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel test must be used instead of Fisher's test.


title: Fisher's exact test

text: Choi et al. propose a p-value derived from the likelihood ratio test based on the conditional distribution of the odds ratio given the marginal success rate. This p-value is inferentially consistent with classical tests of normally distributed data as well as with likelihood ratios and support intervals based on this conditional likelihood function. It is also readily computable.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive Ann Oatman (September 7, 1837March 21, 1903) was an American woman celebrated in her time for her captivity and later release by Native Americans in the Mojave Desert region when she was a teenager. She later lectured about her experiences.


title: Olive Oatman

text: In 1850, while traveling from Illinois to California with a company of Brewsterites, her family was attacked by a small group from a Native American tribe. Though she identified them as Apache, they were most likely Tolkepayas (Western Yavapai). They clubbed many to death, left her brother Lorenzo for dead, and enslaved Olive and her younger sister Mary Ann, holding them captive as slaves for one year before they traded them to the Mohave people, where they were well treated. While Lorenzo exhaustively attempted to recruit governmental help in searching for them, Mary Ann died from starvation and Olive spent four years with the Mohave.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Five years after the attack, she was repatriated into American society. The story of the Oatman Massacre began to be retold with dramatic license in the press, as well as in her own memoir and speeches. Novels, plays, movies, and poetry were inspired, which resonated in the media of the time and long afterward. She had become an oddity in 1860s America, partly because of the prominent blue tattooing of her face by the Mohave, making her the first known white woman with Native tattoo on record. Much of what actually occurred during her time with the Native Americans remains unknown.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Oatman was born in La Harpe in Hancock County, Illinois. She was the daughter of Mary Ann (née Sperry) and Roys (aka Royce) Oatman. She had six siblings. In 1839, her parents left the Methodist church for the Mormon religion under Joseph Smith. When Smith was killed in 1844, Mary Ann and Roys Oatman did not follow Brigham Young, but instead chose to become Brewsterites, a dissident group of Mormons under the leadership of James C. Brewster.


title: Olive Oatman

text: August 5, 1850, the Oatman family joined a wagon train led by Brewster from Independence, Missouri, to the border of Arizona and California. There, Brewster claimed was the "intended place of gathering" for the Mormons. The wagon train numbered between 85 and 93 people. Dissension caused the group to split near Santa Fe in New Mexico Territory with Brewster following the northern route. Royce Oatman and several other families chose the southern route via Socorro and Tucson. Near Socorro, Roys Oatman assumed command of the party. They reached New Mexico Territory early in 1851 only to find the country and climate wholly unsuited to their purpose. The other wagons gradually abandoned the goal of reaching the mouth of the Colorado River.


title: Olive Oatman

text: The party had reached Maricopa Wells, when they were told that not only was the stretch of trail ahead barren and dangerous, but that the Native Americans ahead were very hostile and that they would risk their lives if they proceeded further. The other families resolved to stay. The Oatman family, eventually traveling alone, was nearly annihilated in what became known as the "Oatman Massacre" on the banks of the Gila River about east of Yuma, in what is now Arizona.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Mary Ann and Roys Oatman had seven children, and Mary Ann was pregnant with their eighth during their journey from Illinois to the Gila River. The Oatman children ranged in age from one to 17, the eldest being Lucy Oatman. On the Oatmans' fourth day out from Maricopa Wells, they were approached by a group of Native Americans who were asking for tobacco and food. Due to the lack of supplies, Royce Oatman was hesitant to share too much with the small party of Yavapais. They became irate at his stinginess. During the encounter, the Yavapais attacked the Oatman family. The Yavapais clubbed the family to death. All were killed except for three of the children: 15-year-old Lorenzo, who was left for dead, and 14-year-old Olive and 7-year-old Mary Ann, who were taken to be slaves for the Yavapais.


title: Olive Oatman

text: After the attack, Lorenzo awoke to find his parents and siblings dead, but he saw no sign of little Mary Ann or Olive. Lorenzo attempted the hazardous trek to find help. He eventually reached a settlement, where his wounds were treated. Lorenzo rejoined the emigrant train, and three days later returned to the bodies of his slain family. In a detailed retelling which was reprinted in newspapers over the decades, he said, "We buried the bodies of father, mother and babe in one common grave." The men had no way of digging proper graves in the volcanic rocky soil, so they gathered the bodies together and formed a cairn over them. It has been said the remains were reburied several times and finally moved to the river for re-interment by early Arizona colonizer Charles Poston. Lorenzo Oatman became determined to never give up the search for his only surviving siblings.


title: Olive Oatman

text: After the attack, the Native Americans took some of the Oatman family's belongings, along with Olive and Mary Ann. Although Olive Oatman later identified her captors as members of the Tonto Apache tribe, they were probably of the Tolkepaya tribe (Western Yavapais) living in a village southwest of Aguila, Arizona, in the Harquahala Mountains. After arriving at the village, the girls were initially treated in a way that appeared threatening, and Oatman later said she thought they would be killed. However, the girls were used as slaves to forage for food, to lug water and firewood, and for other menial tasks.


title: Olive Oatman

text: During the girls' stay with the Yavapais, another group of Native Americans came to trade with the tribe. This group was made up of Mohave Native Americans. The daughter of the Mohave Chief Espaniole saw the girls and their poor treatment during a trading expedition. She tried to make a trade for the girls. The Yavapais refused, but the chief's daughter, Topeka, was persistent and returned once more offering a trade for the girls. Eventually the Yavapais gave in and traded the girls for two horses, some vegetables, blankets, and beads. After being taken into Mohave custody, the girls walked for days to a Mohave village along the Colorado River (in the center of what today is Needles, California). They were immediately taken in by the family of a tribal leader (kohot) whose non-Mohave name was Espaniole. The Mohave tribe was more prosperous than the group that had held the girls captive, and both Espaniole's wife, Aespaneo, and daughter, Topeka, took an interest in the Oatman girls' welfare. Oatman expressed her deep affection for these two women numerous times over the years after her captivity.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Aespaneo arranged for the Oatman girls to be given plots of land to farm. A Mohave tribesman, Llewelyn Barrackman, said in an interview that Olive was most likely fully adopted into the tribe because she was given a Mohave nickname, something only presented to those who have fully assimilated into the tribe. Olive herself would later claim that she and Mary Ann were held captive by the Mohave and that she feared to leave, but this statement could have been colored by the Reverend Royal Byron Stratton, who sponsored the publication of Olive's captivity narrative shortly after her return to White society. For example Olive did not attempt to contact a large group of whites that visited the Mohaves during her period with them, and years later she went to meet with a Mohave leader, Irataba, in New York City and spoke with him of old times.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber wrote in an article about the Oatman captivity: "The Mohaves always told her she could go to the white settlements when she pleased but they dared not go with her, fearing they might be punished for having kept a white woman so long among them, nor did they dare to let it be known that she was among them".


title: Olive Oatman

text: Another thing that suggests Olive and Mary Ann were not held in forced captivity by the Mohave is that both girls were tattooed on their chins and arms, in keeping with the tribal custom. Oatman later claimed (in Stratton's book and in her lectures) that she was tattooed to mark her as a slave, but this is not consistent with the Mohave tradition, where such marks were given only to their own people to ensure that they would enter the land of the dead and be recognized there by their ancestors as members of the Mohave tribe. The tribe did not care if their slaves could reach the land of the dead, however, so they did not tattoo them. It has also been suggested that the evenness of Olive’s facial markings may indicate her compliance with the procedure.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive Oatman 1860s lecture notes tell of her younger sister often yearning to join that better "world" where their "Father and Mother" had gone. Mary Ann died of starvation while the girls were living with the Mohave. This happened in about 1855–56, when Mary Ann was ten or eleven. It has been claimed that there was a drought in the region, and that the tribe experienced a dire shortage of food supplies, and Olive herself would have died had not Aespaneo, the matriarch of the tribe, saved her life by making a gruel to sustain her.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive later spoke with fondness of the Mohaves, who she said treated her better than her first captors. She most likely considered herself assimilated. She was given a clan name, Oach, and a nickname, Spantsa, a Mohave word having to do with unquenchable lust or thirst. And she chose not to reveal herself to white railroad surveyors who spent nearly a week in the Mohave Valley trading and socializing with the tribe in February 1854. Because she did not know that Lorenzo had survived the massacre, she believed she had no immediate family, and the Mohave treated her as one of their own.


title: Olive Oatman

text: When Olive was 19 years old, Francisco, a Yuma Indian messenger, arrived at the village with a message from the authorities at Fort Yuma. Rumors suggested that a white girl was living with the Mohaves, and the post commander requested her return, or to know the reason why she did not choose to return. The Mohaves initially sequestered Olive and resisted the request. At first they denied that Olive was even white. Over the course of negotiations some expressed their affection for Olive, others their fear of reprisal from whites. The messenger Francisco, meanwhile, withdrew to the homes of other nearby Mohaves; shortly thereafter he made a second fervent attempt to persuade the Mohaves to part with Olive. Trade items were included this time, including blankets and a white horse, and he passed on threats that the whites would destroy the Mohaves if they did not release Olive.


title: Olive Oatman

text: After some discussion, in which Olive was this time included, the Mohaves decided to accept these terms, and Olive was escorted to Fort Yuma in a 20-day journey. Topeka (the daughter of Espianola/Espanesay and Aespaneo) went on the journey with her. Before entering the fort, Olive was given Western clothing lent by the wife of an army officer, as she was clad in a traditional Mohave skirt with no covering above her waist. Inside the fort, Olive was surrounded by cheering people.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive’s childhood friend Susan Thompson, whom she befriended again at this time, stated many years later that she believed Olive was "grieving" upon her forced return because she had been married to a Mohave man and had given birth to two boys.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive, however, denied rumors during her lifetime that she either had been married to a Mohave or had been sexually mistreated by the Yavapai or Mohave. In Stratton's book, she declared that "to the honor of these savages let it be said, they never offered the least unchaste abuse to me." However, her nickname, Spantsa, may have meant "rotten womb" and implied that she was sexually active, although historians have argued that the name could have different meanings.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Within a few days of her arrival at the fort, Olive discovered that her brother Lorenzo was alive and had been looking for her and Mary Ann. Their meeting made headline news across the West.


title: Olive Oatman

text: In 1857, a pastor named Royal Byron Stratton sought out Olive and Lorenzo Oatman. He co-wrote a book about the Oatman Massacre and the girls' captivity titled "Life among the Indians: or, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls Among the Apache & Mohave Indians". It was a bestseller for that era, at 30,000 copies. Stratton used the royalties from the book to pay for Olive and her brother Lorenzo to attend the University of the Pacific (1857). Olive and Lorenzo accompanied Stratton across the country on a book tour, promoting the book and lecturing in book circuits. Olive was a curiosity. Her boldly tattooed chin was on display and people came to hear her story and witness the blue tattoo for themselves. She was the first known tattooed White American woman as well as one of the first female public speakers. Olive entered the lecture circuit as feminism was developing. Though she herself never claimed to be part of the movement, her story entered the American consciousness shortly after the Seneca Falls Convention.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Both Oatman and Mary Brown, Sallie Fox's mother and Rose–Baley Party survivor, lived in San Jose, California, at the same time. Mary Brown refused a meeting.


title: Olive Oatman

text: In November 1865, Oatman married a cattleman named John B. Fairchild. They met at a lecture she was giving alongside Stratton in Michigan. Fairchild had lost his brother to an attack by Native Americans during a cattle drive in Arizona in 1854, the same time Oatman was living among the Mohave. Stratton did not receive an invitation to the wedding, and Olive never reached out to him again. Though it was rumored that Olive died in a mental asylum in New York State in 1877, it was Stratton who became institutionalized after the development of hereditary insanity and died shortly after.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Olive and John Fairchild moved to Sherman, Texas, a boom town ripe for a businessman like Fairchild to start a new and prosperous life. Fairchild founded the City Bank of Sherman and together they lived quietly in a large Victorian mansion. Olive began wearing a veil to cover her famous tattoo and became involved in charity work. She was particularly interested in helping a local orphanage. She and Fairchild never had their own children, but they did adopt a little girl and named her Mary Elizabeth after their mothers, nicknaming her Mamie. Her husband went on to track down copies of Stratton's book and burn them.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Her brother Lorenzo died on October 8, 1901. She outlived him by less than 2 years. Olive Oatman Fairchild died of a heart attack on March 20, 1903, at the age of 65. She is buried at the West Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas.


title: Olive Oatman

text: The town of Oatman, Arizona, located near her release site, was named in her honor in 1915. It was part of the Oatman Gold District. The once thriving gold rush town is now a tourist stop.


title: Olive Oatman

text: Named in her honor, the historic town of Olive City, Arizona, near the present town of Ehrenberg, was a steamboat stop on the Colorado River during the gold rush days. Other namesakes in Arizona are Oatman Mountain and the adjacent Oatman Flat. Oatman Flat Station was a stage stop for the Butterfield Overland Mail from 1858 to 1861.


title: Japanese art

text: Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture, ink painting and calligraphy on silk and paper, "ukiyo-e" paintings and woodblock prints, ceramics, origami, and more recently manga and anime. It has a long history, ranging from the beginnings of human habitation in Japan, sometime in the 10th millennium BC, to the present-day country.


title: Japanese art

text: Japan has been subject to sudden invasions of new ideas followed by long periods of minimal contact with the outside world. Over time the Japanese developed the ability to absorb, imitate, and finally assimilate those elements of foreign culture that complemented their aesthetic preferences. The earliest complex art in Japan was produced in the 7th and 8th centuries in connection with Buddhism. In the 9th century, as the Japanese began to turn away from China and develop indigenous forms of expression, the secular arts became increasingly important; until the late 15th century, both religious and secular arts flourished. After the Ōnin War (1467–1477), Japan entered a period of political, social, and economic disruption that lasted for over a century. In the state that emerged under the leadership of the Tokugawa shogunate, organized religion played a much less important role in people's lives, and the arts that survived were primarily secular. The Meiji Period (1868-1912) saw an abrupt influx of Western styles, which have continued to be important.


title: Japanese art

text: Painting is the preferred artistic expression in Japan, practiced by amateurs and professionals alike. Until modern times, the Japanese wrote with a brush rather than a pen, and their familiarity with brush techniques has made them particularly sensitive to the values and aesthetics of painting. With the rise of popular culture in the Edo period, a style of woodblock prints became a major form and its techniques were fine-tuned to produce colorful prints. The Japanese, in this period, found sculpture a much less sympathetic medium for artistic expression; most large Japanese sculpture is associated with religion, and the medium's use declined with the lessening importance of traditional Buddhism.


title: Japanese art

text: Japanese pottery is among the finest in the world and includes the earliest known Japanese artifacts; Japanese export porcelain has been a major industry at various points. Japanese lacquerware is also one of the world's leading arts and crafts, and works gorgeously decorated with "maki-e" were exported to Europe and China, remaining important exports until the 19th century. In architecture, Japanese preferences for natural materials and an interaction of interior and exterior space are clearly expressed.


title: Japanese art

text: The first settlers of Japan were the Jōmon people (c. 10,500 – c. 300 BCE), named for the cord markings that decorated the surfaces of their clay vessels, were nomadic hunter-gatherers who later practiced organized farming and built cities with populations of hundreds if not thousands. They built simple houses of wood and thatch set into shallow earthen pits to provide warmth from the soil. They crafted lavishly decorated pottery storage vessels, clay figurines called "dogū", and crystal jewels.


title: Japanese art

text: During the Early Jōmon period (5000-2500 BCE), villages started to be discovered and ordinary everyday objects were found such as ceramic pots purposed for boiling water. The pots that were found during this time had flat bottoms and had elaborate designs made out of materials such as bamboo. In addition, another important find was the early Jōmon figurines which might have been used as fertility objects due to the breasts and swelling hips that they exhibited.


title: Japanese art

text: The Middle Jōmon period (2500-1500 BCE), contrasted from the Early Jōmon Period in many ways. These people became less nomadic and began to settle in villages. They created useful tools that were able to process the food that they gathered and hunted which made living easier for them. Through the numerous aesthetically pleasing ceramics that were found during this time period, it is evident that these people had a stable economy and more leisure time to establish beautiful pieces. In addition, the people of the Middle Jōmon period differed from their preceding ancestors because they developed vessels according to their function, for example, they produced pots in order to store items. The decorations on these vessels started to become more realistic looking as opposed to the early Jōmon ceramics. Overall, the production of works not only increased during this period, but these individuals made them more decorative and naturalistic.


title: Japanese art

text: During the Late and Final Jōmon period (1500-300 BCE), the weather started to get colder, therefore forcing them to move away from the mountains. The main food source during this time was fish, which made them improve their fishing supplies and tools. This advancement was a very important achievement during this time. In addition, the numbers of vessels largely increased which could possibly conclude that each house had their own figurine displayed in them. Although various vessels were found during the Late and Final Jōmon Period, these pieces were found damaged which might indicate that they used them for rituals. In addition, figurines were also found and were characterized by their fleshy bodies and goggle like eyes.


title: Japanese art

text: "Dogū" ("earthen figure") are small humanoid and animal figurines made during the later part of the Jōmon period. They were made across all of Japan, except Okinawa. Some scholars theorize the "dogū" acted as effigies of people, that manifested some kind of sympathetic magic. "Dogū" are made of clay and are small, typically 10 to 30 cm high. Most of the figurines appear to be modeled as female, and have big eyes, small waists, and wide hips. They are considered by many to be representative of goddesses. Many have large abdomens associated with pregnancy, suggesting that the Jomon considered them mother goddesses.


title: Japanese art

text: The next wave of immigrants was the Yayoi people, named for the district in Tokyo where remnants of their settlements first were found. These people, arriving in Japan about 300 BCE, brought their knowledge of wetland rice cultivation, the manufacture of copper weapons and bronze bells ("dōtaku"), and wheel-thrown, kiln-fired ceramics.


title: Japanese art

text: The third stage in Japanese prehistory, the Kofun period (c. 300 – 710 AD), represents a modification of Yayoi culture, attributable either to internal development or external force. This period is most notable for its tomb culture and other artifacts such as bronze mirrors and clay sculptures called "haniwa" which were erected outside these tombs. Throughout the Kofun period, the characteristics of these tombs evolved from smaller tombs erected on hilltops and ridges to much larger tombs built on flat land. The largest tomb in Japan, the tomb of Emperor Nintoku, houses 46 burial mounds and is shaped like a keyhole, a distinct characteristic found within later Kofun tombs.


title: Japanese art

text: During the Asuka and Nara periods, so named because the seat of Japanese government was located in the Asuka Valley from 542 to 645 and in the city of Nara until 784, the first significant influx of continental Asian culture took place in Japan.


title: Japanese art

text: The transmission of Buddhism provided the initial impetus for contacts between China and Japan. The Japanese recognized the facets of Chinese culture that could profitably be incorporated into their own: a system for converting ideas and sounds into writing; historiography; complex theories of government, such as an effective bureaucracy; and, most important for the arts, new technologies, new building techniques, more advanced methods of casting in bronze, and new techniques and media for painting.


title: Japanese art

text: Throughout the 7th and 8th centuries, however, the major focus in contacts between Japan and the Asian continent was the development of Buddhism. Not all scholars agree on the significant dates and the appropriate names to apply to various time periods between 552, the official date of the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, and 784, when the Japanese capital was transferred from Nara. The most common designations are the Suiko period, 552–645; the Hakuhō period, 645–710, and the Tenpyō period, 710–784.


title: Japanese art

text: The earliest Japanese sculptures of the Buddha are dated to the 6th and 7th century. They ultimately derive from the 1st- to 3rd-century AD Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, characterized by flowing dress patterns and realistic rendering, on which Chinese artistic traits were superimposed. After the Chinese Northern Wei buddhist art had infiltrated a Korean peninsula, Buddhist icons were brought to Japan by Various immigrant groups. Particularly, the semi-seated Maitreya form was adapted into a highly developed Ancient Greek art style which was transmitted to Japan as evidenced by the Kōryū-ji Miroku Bosatsu and the Chūgū-ji Siddhartha statues. Many historians portray Korea as a mere transmitter of Buddhism. The Three Kingdoms, and particularly Baekje, were instrumental as active agents in the introduction and formation of a Buddhist tradition in Japan in 538 or 552.


title: Japanese art

text: They illustrate the terminal point of the Silk Road transmission of art during the first few centuries of our era. Other examples can be found in the development of the iconography of the Japanese Fūjin Wind God, the Niō guardians, and the near-Classical floral patterns in temple decorations.


title: Japanese art

text: The earliest Buddhist structures still extant in Japan, and the oldest wooden buildings in the Far East are found at the Hōryū-ji to the southwest of Nara. First built in the early 7th century as the private temple of Crown Prince Shōtoku, it consists of 41 independent buildings. The most important ones, the main worship hall, or "Kondō" (Golden Hall), and "Gojū-no-tō" (Five-story Pagoda), stand in the center of an open area surrounded by a roofed cloister. The "Kondō", in the style of Chinese worship halls, is a two-story structure of post-and-beam construction, capped by an "irimoya", or hipped-gabled roof of ceramic tiles.


title: Japanese art

text: Inside the "Kondō", on a large rectangular platform, are some of the most important sculptures of the period. The central image is a Shaka Trinity (623), the historical Buddha flanked by two bodhisattvas, sculpture cast in bronze by the sculptor Tori Busshi (flourished early 7th century) in homage to the recently deceased Prince Shōtoku. At the four corners of the platform are the Guardian Kings of the Four Directions, carved in wood around 650. Also housed at Hōryū-ji is the Tamamushi Shrine, a wooden replica of a "Kondō", which is set on a high wooden base that is decorated with figural paintings executed in a medium of mineral pigments mixed with lacquer.


title: Japanese art

text: Temple building in the 8th century was focused around the Tōdai-ji in Nara. Constructed as the headquarters for a network of temples in each of the provinces, the Tōdaiji is the most ambitious religious complex erected in the early centuries of Buddhist worship in Japan. Appropriately, the 16.2-m (53-ft) Buddha (completed 752) enshrined in the main Buddha hall, or "Daibutsuden", is a Rushana Buddha, the figure that represents the essence of Buddhahood, just as the Tōdaiji represented the center for Imperially sponsored Buddhism and its dissemination throughout Japan. Only a few fragments of the original statue survive, and the present hall and central Buddha are reconstructions from the Edo period.


title: Japanese art

text: Clustered around the Daibutsuden on a gently sloping hillside are a number of secondary halls: the "Hokke-dō" (Lotus Sutra Hall), with its principal image, the Fukukenjaku Kannon (不空羂索観音立像, the most popular bodhisattva), crafted of dry lacquer (cloth dipped in lacquer and shaped over a wooden armature); the "Kaidanin" (戒壇院, Ordination Hall) with its magnificent clay statues of the Four Guardian Kings; and the storehouse, called the "Shōsōin". This last structure is of great importance as an art-historical cache, because in it are stored the utensils that were used in the temple's dedication ceremony in 752, the eye-opening ritual for the Rushana image, as well as government documents and many secular objects owned by the Imperial family.


title: Japanese art

text: Choukin (or chōkin), the art of metal engraving or sculpting, is thought to have started in the Nara period.


title: Japanese art

text: In 794 the capital of Japan was officially transferred to Heian-kyō (present-day Kyoto), where it remained until 1868. The term "Heian period" refers to the years between 794 and 1185, when the Kamakura shogunate was established at the end of the Genpei War. The period is further divided into the early Heian and the late Heian, or Fujiwara era, the pivotal date being 894, the year imperial embassies to China were officially discontinued.


title: Japanese art

text: Early Heian art: In reaction to the growing wealth and power of organized Buddhism in Nara, the priest Kūkai (best known by his posthumous title Kōbō Daishi, 774–835) journeyed to China to study Shingon, a form of Vajrayana Buddhism, which he introduced into Japan in 806. At the core of Shingon worship is mandalas, diagrams of the spiritual universe, which then began to influence temple design. Japanese Buddhist architecture also adopted the stupa, originally an Indian architectural form, in its Chinese-style pagoda.


title: Japanese art

text: The temples erected for this new sect were built in the mountains, far away from the Court and the laity in the capital. The irregular topography of these sites forced Japanese architects to rethink the problems of temple construction, and in so doing to choose more indigenous elements of design. Cypress-bark roofs replaced those of ceramic tile, wood planks were used instead of earthen floors, and a separate worship area for the laity was added in front of the main sanctuary.


title: Japanese art

text: The temple that best reflects the spirit of early Heian Shingon temples is the Murō-ji (early 9th century), set deep in a stand of cypress trees on a mountain southeast of Nara. The wooden image (also early 9th century) of Shakyamuni, the "historic" Buddha, enshrined in a secondary building at the Murō-ji, is typical of the early Heian sculpture, with its ponderous body, covered by thick drapery folds carved in the "honpa-shiki" (rolling-wave) style, and its austere, withdrawn facial expression.


title: Japanese art

text: Fujiwara art: In the Fujiwara period, Pure Land Buddhism, which offered easy salvation through belief in Amida (the Buddha of the Western Paradise), became popular. This period is named after the Fujiwara family, then the most powerful in the country, who ruled as regents for the Emperor, becoming, in effect, civil dictators. Concurrently, the Kyoto nobility developed a society devoted to elegant aesthetic pursuits. So secure and beautiful was their world that they could not conceive of Paradise as being much different. They created a new form of Buddha hall, the Amida hall, which blends the secular with the religious, and houses one or more Buddha images within a structure resembling the mansions of the nobility.


title: Japanese art

text: The "Hō-ō-dō" (Phoenix Hall, completed 1053) of the Byōdō-in, a temple in Uji to the southeast of Kyoto, is the exemplar of Fujiwara Amida halls. It consists of a main rectangular structure flanked by two L-shaped wing corridors and a tail corridor, set at the edge of a large artificial pond. Inside, a single golden image of Amida (c. 1053) is installed on a high platform. The Amida sculpture was executed by Jōchō, who used a new canon of proportions and a new technique ("yosegi"), in which multiple pieces of wood are carved out like shells and joined from the inside. Applied to the walls of the hall are small relief carvings of celestials, the host believed to have accompanied Amida when he descended from the Western Paradise to gather the souls of believers at the moment of death and transport them in lotus blossoms to Paradise. "Raigō" paintings on the wooden doors of the Hō-ō-dō, depicting the Descent of the Amida Buddha, are an early example of Yamato-e, Japanese-style painting, and contain representations of the scenery around Kyoto.


title: Japanese art

text: E-maki: In the last century of the Heian period, the horizontal, illustrated narrative handscroll, known as "e-maki" (絵巻, lit. "picture scroll"), came to the fore. Dating from about 1130, the "Genji Monogatari Emaki", a famous illustrated "Tale of Genji" represents the earliest surviving yamato-e handscroll, and one of the high points of Japanese painting. Written about the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Shōshi, the novel deals with the life and loves of Genji and the world of the Heian court after his death. The 12th-century artists of the "e-maki" version devised a system of pictorial conventions that convey visually the emotional content of each scene. In the second half of the century, a different, livelier style of continuous narrative illustration became popular. The "Ban Dainagon Ekotoba" (late 12th century), a scroll that deals with an intrigue at court, emphasizes figures in active motion depicted in rapidly executed brush strokes and thin but vibrant colors.


title: Japanese art

text: "E-maki" also serve as some of the earliest and greatest examples of the "otoko-e" ("men's pictures") and "onna-e" ("women's pictures") styles of painting. There are many fine differences in the two styles, appealing to the aesthetic preferences of the genders. But perhaps most easily noticeable are the differences in subject matter. "Onna-e", epitomized by the Tale of Genji handscroll, typically deals with court life, particularly the court ladies, and with romantic themes. "Otoko-e" often recorded historical events, particularly battles. The Siege of the Sanjō Palace (1160), depicted in the "Night Attack on the Sanjō Palace" section of the Heiji Monogatari handscroll is a famous example of this style.


title: Japanese art

text: In 1180, a war broke out between the two most powerful warrior clans: the Taira and the Minamoto; five years later the Minamoto emerged victorious and established a de facto seat of government at the seaside village of Kamakura, where it remained until 1333. With the shift of power from the nobility to the warrior class, the arts had to satisfy a new audience: men devoted to the skills of warfare, priests committed to making Buddhism available to illiterate commoners, and conservatives, the nobility and some members of the priesthood who regretted the declining power of the court. Thus, realism, a popularizing trend, and a classical revival characterize the art of the Kamakura period. In the Kamakura period, Kyoto and Nara remained the centres of artistic production and high culture.


title: Japanese art

text: Sculpture: The Kei school of sculptors, particularly Unkei, created a new, more realistic style of sculpture. The two Niō guardian images (1203) in the Great South Gate of the Tōdai-ji in Nara illustrate .Unkei's dynamic supra-realistic style. The images, about 8 m (about 26 ft) tall, were carved of multiple blocks in a period of about three months, a feat indicative of a developed studio system of artisans working under the direction of a master sculptor. Unkei's polychromed wood sculptures (1208, Kōfuku-ji, Nara) of two Indian sages, Muchaku and Seshin, the legendary founders of the Hossō sect, are among the most accomplished realistic works of the period; as rendered by Unkei, they are remarkably individualized and believable images. One of the most famous works of this period is an Amitabha Triad (completed in 1195), in Jōdo-ji in Ono, created by Kaikei, Unkei's successor.


title: Japanese art

text: Calligraphy and painting: The "Kegon Engi Emaki", the illustrated history of the founding of the Kegon sect, is an excellent example of the popularizing trend in Kamakura painting. The Kegon sect, one of the most important in the Nara period, fell on hard times during the ascendancy of the Pure Land sects. After the Genpei War (1180–1185), Priest Myōe of Kōzan-ji sought to revive the sect and also to provide a refuge for women widowed by the war. The wives of samurai had been discouraged from learning more than a syllabary system for transcribing sounds and ideas (see kana), and most were incapable of reading texts that employed Chinese ideographs (kanji).


title: Japanese art

text: Thus, the "Kegon Engi Emaki" combines passages of text, written with a maximum of easily readable syllables, and illustrations that have the dialogue between characters written next to the speakers, a technique comparable to contemporary comic strips. The plot of the "e-maki", the lives of the two Korean priests who founded the Kegon sect, is swiftly paced and filled with fantastic feats such as a journey to the palace of the Ocean King, and a poignant mom story.


title: Japanese art

text: A work in a more conservative vein is the illustrated version of Murasaki Shikibu's diary. "E-maki" versions of her novel continued to be produced, but the nobility, attuned to the new interest in realism yet nostalgic for past days of wealth and power, revived and illustrated the diary in order to recapture the splendor of the author's times. One of the most beautiful passages illustrates the episode in which Murasaki Shikibu is playfully held prisoner in her room by two young courtiers, while, just outside, moonlight gleams on the mossy banks of a rivulet in the imperial garden.


title: Japanese art

text: During the Muromachi period (1338–1573), also called the Ashikaga period, a profound change took place in Japanese culture. The Ashikaga clan took control of the shogunate and moved its headquarters back to Kyoto, to the Muromachi district of the city. With the return of government to the capital, the popularizing trends of the Kamakura period came to an end, and cultural expression took on a more aristocratic, elitist character. Zen Buddhism, the Ch'an sect traditionally thought to have been founded in China in the 6th century, was introduced for a second time into Japan and took root.


title: Japanese art

text: Painting: Because of secular ventures and trading missions to China organized by Zen temples, many Chinese paintings and objects of art were imported into Japan and profoundly influenced Japanese artists working for Zen temples and the shogunate. Not only did these imports change the subject matter of painting, but they also modified the use of color; the bright colors of Yamato-e yielded to the monochromes of painting in the Chinese manner, where paintings generally only have black and white or different tones of a single color.


title: Japanese art

text: Typical of early Muromachi painting is the depiction by the priest-painter Kao (active early 15th century) of the legendary monk Kensu (Hsien-tzu in Chinese) at the moment he achieved enlightenment. This type of painting was executed with quick brush strokes and a minimum of detail. "Catching a Catfish with a Gourd" (early 15th century, Taizō-in, Myōshin-ji, Kyoto), by the priest-painter Josetsu (active c. 1400), marks a turning point in Muromachi painting. Executed originally for a low-standing screen, it has been remounted as a hanging scroll with inscriptions by contemporary figures above, one of which refers to the painting as being in the "new style". In the foreground a man is depicted on the bank of a stream holding a small gourd and looking at a large slithery catfish. Mist fills the middle ground, and the background mountains appear to be far in the distance. It is generally assumed that the "new style" of the painting, executed about 1413, refers to a more Chinese sense of deep space within the picture plane.


title: Japanese art

text: The foremost artists of the Muromachi period are the priest-painters Shūbun and Sesshū. Shūbun, a monk at the Kyoto temple of Shōkoku-ji, created in the painting "Reading in a Bamboo Grove" (1446) a realistic landscape with deep recession into space. Sesshū, unlike most artists of the period, was able to journey to China and study Chinese painting at its source. "Landscape of the Four Seasons" ("Sansui Chokan"; c. 1486) is one of Sesshu's most accomplished works, depicting a continuing landscape through the four seasons.


title: Japanese art

text: In the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573–1603), a succession of military leaders, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, attempted to bring peace and political stability to Japan after an era of almost 100 years of warfare. Oda, a minor chieftain, acquired power sufficient to take de facto control of the government in 1568 and, five years later, to oust the last Ashikaga shōgun. Hideyoshi took command after Oda's death, but his plans to establish hereditary rule were foiled by Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603.


title: Japanese art

text: Painting: The most important school of painting in the Momoyama period was that of the Kanō school, and the greatest innovation of the period was the formula, developed by Kanō Eitoku, for the creation of monumental landscapes on the sliding doors enclosing a room. The decoration of the main room facing the garden of the Jukō-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji (a Zen temple in Kyoto), is perhaps the best extant example of Eitoku's work. A massive "ume" tree and twin pines are depicted on pairs of sliding screens in diagonally opposite corners, their trunks repeating the verticals of the corner posts and their branches extending to left and right, unifying the adjoining panels. Eitoku's screen, "Chinese Lions", also in Kyoto, reveals the bold, brightly colored style of painting preferred by the samurai.


title: Japanese art

text: Hasegawa Tōhaku, a contemporary of Eitoku, developed a somewhat different and more decorative style for large-scale screen paintings. In his "Maple Screen" (楓図), now in the temple of Chishaku-in (), Kyoto, he placed the trunk of the tree in the center and extended the limbs nearly to the edge of the composition, creating a flatter, less architectonic work than Eitoku, but a visually gorgeous painting. His sixfold screen, "Pine Wood" (松林図), is a masterly rendering in monochrome ink of a grove of trees enveloped in mist.


title: Japanese art

text: The Tokugawa shogunate gained undisputed control of the government in 1603 with a commitment to bring peace and economic and political stability to the country; in large measure it was successful. The shogunate survived until 1867, when it was forced to capitulate because of its failure to deal with pressure from Western nations to open the country to foreign trade. One of the dominant themes in the Edo period was the repressive policies of the shogunate and the attempts of artists to escape these strictures. The foremost of these was the closing of the country to foreigners and the accoutrements of their cultures, and the imposition of strict codes of behaviour affecting every aspect of life, the clothes one wore, the person one married, and the activities one could or should not pursue.


title: Japanese art

text: In the early years of the Edo period, however, the full impact of Tokugawa policies had not yet been felt, and some of Japan's finest expressions in architecture and painting were produced: Katsura Palace in Kyoto and the paintings of Tawaraya Sōtatsu, pioneer of the Rinpa school.


title: Japanese art

text: Woodblock printing: Woodblock prints were originally used to translate Buddhist scriptures in the eighth century in Japan. Woodblock printing consist of the engraving of images or pictures on a piece of wood, which is then pressed against a piece of paper. In the eighth century woodblock was considered a convenient method of the reproduction of printed text until further innovations allowed for color to be translated on paper or better known as Nishik-e prints. Wood block printing was the common method of printing from the eleventh until the nineteenth century. Nishiki-e prints produced goods such as calendars that were commonly sold to wealthy members of society during the Edo period. In the Edo period these prints were depicted events and scenes of prominent actors. Ukiyo then was associated to woodblock printing in the early Edo period. These Ukiyo paintings depicted daily lives of prominent members of society. Ukiyo first started out as hand sculpted scrolls depicted life as a normal commoner.


title: Japanese art

text: Architecture: Katsura Detached Palace, built in imitation of Genji's palace, contains a cluster of shoin buildings that combine elements of classic Japanese architecture with innovative restatements. The whole complex is surrounded by a beautiful garden with paths for walking.


title: Japanese art

text: Many of powerful "daimyōs" (feudal lords) built a Circuit style Japanese garden in the territory country, and competed for the beauty.


title: Japanese art

text: Painting: Sōtatsu evolved a superb decorative style by re-creating themes from classical literature, using brilliantly colored figures and motifs from the natural world set against gold-leaf backgrounds. One of his finest works is the pair of screens "The Waves at Matsushima" in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. A century later, Kōrin reworked Sōtatsu's style and created visually gorgeous works uniquely his own. Perhaps his finest are the screen paintings of "Red and White Plum Blossoms".


title: Japanese art

text: Ukiyo-e and nanga (bunjinga): The school of art best known in the West is that of the ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints of the demimonde, the world of the kabuki theater and the pleasure districts. Ukiyo-e prints began to be produced in the late 17th century; in 1765 Harunobu produced the first polychrome print. Print designers of the next generation, including Torii Kiyonaga and Utamaro, created elegant and sometimes insightful depictions of courtesans.


title: Japanese art

text: In the 19th century the dominant figures were Hokusai and Hiroshige, the latter a creator of romantic and somewhat sentimental landscape prints. The odd angles and shapes through which Hiroshige often viewed landscape, and the work of Kiyonaga and Utamaro, with its emphasis on flat planes and strong linear outlines, had a profound impact on such Western artists as Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh. Via artworks held in Western museums, these same printmakers would later exert a powerful influence on the imagery and aesthetic approaches used by early Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and H.D.


title: Japanese art

text: A school of painting contemporary with ukiyo-e was nanga, or bunjinga, a style based on paintings executed by Chinese scholar-painters. Just as ukiyo-e artists chose to depict figures from life outside the strictures of the Tokugawa shogunate, bunjin artists turned to Chinese culture. The exemplars of this style are Ike no Taiga, Yosa Buson, Tanomura Chikuden, and Yamamoto Baiitsu ().


title: Japanese art

text: Traditional, mostly stoneware, styles continued in many parts of Japan, but Japanese ceramics were transformed around the start of the Edo period, by a large influx of Korean potters, captured or persuaded to emigrate in the course of the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s. Many of these were settled on the southern island of Kyushu, and they brought with them experience of versions of the Chinese-style chambered climbing kiln, called "noborigama" in Japan, which allowed high temperatures with more precise control. By around 1620 they had discovered deposits of kaolinite, and started to make porcelain for the first time in Japan. The early wares (called "Early Imari") were relatively small and imitated the Chinese underglaze blue and white porcelain, which Japan had been importing for some time.


title: Japanese art

text: The porcelain industry greatly expanded in the late 1650s, as the collapse of the Chinese industry from civil war led to very large orders from the Chinese traders and the Dutch East India Company, by then the traders only permitted to do business in Japan. The first great period of Japanese export porcelain lasted until about the 1740s, and the great bulk of Japanese porcelain was made for export, mostly to Europe, but also the Islamic world to the west and south of Japan. Japanese pottery is among the finest in the world.


title: Japanese art

text: With the development of economy and culture, the artistic quality of lacquered furniture has improved. Hon'ami Kōetsu and Ogata Kōrin brought the designs of the Rinpa school of painting into lacquerware. After the middle of the Edo period, "inrō" for portable medicine containers began to be decorated gorgeously with maki-e and raden, and it became popular among samurai class and wealthy merchants in the "chōnin" class, and at the end of the Edo period, it changed from practical accessories to art collections. The export of lacquerware continued following the Azuchi-Momoyama period. Marie Antoinette and Maria Theresa are known as collectors of Japanese lacquerware in this period.


title: Japanese art

text: When the Emperor of Japan regained ruling power in 1868, Japan was once again invaded by new and alien forms of culture. During the Prewar period, The introduction of Western cultural values led to a dichotomy in Japanese art, as well as in nearly every other aspect of culture, between traditional values and attempts to duplicate and assimilate a variety of clashing new ideas. This split remained evident in the late 20th century, although much synthesis had by then already occurred, and created an international cultural atmosphere and stimulated contemporary Japanese arts toward ever more innovative forms.


title: Japanese art

text: The government took an active interest in the art export market, promoting Japanese arts at a succession of world's fairs, beginning with the 1873 Vienna World's Fair.


title: Japanese art

text: As well as heavily funding the fairs, the government took an active role organising how Japan's culture was presented to the world. It created a semi-public company — the (First Industrial Manufacturing Company) — to promote and commercialize exports of art and established the (Exhibition Bureau) to maintain quality standards. For the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Japanese government created a Centennial Office and sent a special envoy to secure space for the 30,000 items that would be displayed. The Imperial Household also took an active interest in arts and crafts, commissioning works ("presentation wares") as gifts for foreign dignitaries. In 1890, the (Artist to the Imperial Household) system was created to recognise distinguished artists; seventy were appointed from 1890 to 1944. Among these were the painter and lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin, ceramicist Makuzu Kōzan, painter Hashimoto Gahō, and cloisonné enamel artist Namikawa Yasuyuki.


title: Japanese art

text: As Western imports became popular, demand for Japanese art declined within Japan itself. In Europe and America, the new availability of Japanese art led to a fascination for Japanese culture; a craze known in Europe as Japonisme. Imperial patronage, government sponsorship, promotion to new audiences, and Western technology combined to foster an era of Japanese artistic innovation. In the decorative arts, Japanese artists reached new levels of technical sophistication.


title: Japanese art

text: Today, Masayuki Murata owns more than 10,000 Meiji art works and is one of the most enthusiastic collectors. From that time, most of the excellent works of Meiji Art were bought by foreign collectors and only a few of them remained in Japan, but because he bought back many works from foreign countries and opened the , the study and reevaluation of Meiji Art rapidly advanced in Japan after the 21st century. Nasser Khalili is also one of the world's most dedicated collectors of Meiji art, and his collection encompasses many categories of Meiji art. The Japanese Imperial Family also owns excellent works of Meiji Art, some of which were donated to the state and are now stored in the Museum of the Imperial Collections.


title: Japanese art

text: By the early 20th century, European art forms were well introduced and their marriage produced notable buildings like the Tokyo Train Station and the National Diet Building that still exist today. Tokyo Station, a building of Giyōfū architecture, full of bricks and pseudo-European style. This style of building was built in urban areas.


title: Japanese art

text: The first response of the Japanese to Western art forms was open-hearted acceptance, and in 1876 the Technological Art School() was opened, employing Italian instructors to teach Western methods. The second response was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction spearheaded by Okakura Kakuzō and the American Ernest Fenollosa, who encouraged Japanese artists to retain traditional themes and techniques while creating works more in keeping with contemporary taste. This was a strategy that eventually served to extend the influence of Japanese art as far as Calcutta, London, and Boston in the years leading up to World War I. Out of these two poles of artistic theory—derived from Europe and from East Asia respectively—developed "yōga" ("Western-style painting") and Nihonga ("Japanese painting"), categories that have maintained currency.