My essay, published in The Artist as Professional in Japan grew out of a panel debate held at the College Art Association Meeting in 1990 on modes of artistic production in Japan. It addressed the issue of how the introduction of European concepts of the fine arts, especially sculpture, informed and altered the practices and perceptions of Japanese craftsmen. I focused on Takamura Koûn, a wood craftsman specialising in Buddhist icons whose life spanned the 19th- and 20th century, and his son Kôtarô, a leading modernist sculptor, poet and an art critic during the first half of the 20th century.

My key primary sources were Takamura Kôun's autobiography and the poetic and critical writings of his son. These primary source materials are rare in the history of 19th-and early 20th-centrury Japanese art, offering a rare vantage point from which to understand the personal and professional struggles for self-definition that were part of the intense debates of the period about the nature of the artistic profession, and most notably the distinction between 'craftsman' and 'artist'. The volume is now widely used as a text in teaching about Japanese art and culture.