Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang (review)

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 80.2 (2020): 493–499 実物教授), which introduced the term into Japanese educational discourse at least two decades before Adal dates the introduction of real objects into the curriculum. Although kaihatsu shugi fell out of favor with the Meiji educational establishment by the early 1890s, its underlying philosophy experienced a revival among classroom teachers as part of the interwar free education movement, of which Yamamoto’s free drawing was a part.1 These observations do not diminish the substantial contribution that Beauty in the Age of Empire makes in demonstrating the value of transnational approaches in the study of non-Western history in general, as well as the history of modernization and education in Japan and Egypt, in particular. Like every good monograph, it also prompts new questions for future study. For example, did the history of aesthetic education follow the same trajectory in colonial Taiwan and Korea as the one this book chronicles on the Japanese home islands? And did the transnational movement of ideas about aesthetic education ever flow in the other direction—from East to West—during this time period?