Nozomi Naoi

Assoc Prof Naoi’s research interests include Japanese prints and visual culture, Japanese graphic design and department store posters, images of children in modern Japan, the development of new media technologies in modern and contemporary Asia as well as the evolving forms of female imagery in East Asian art and design.
 
Her first book, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020; awarded the Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize 2022) illuminates the work by the hugely popular Japanese artist, Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) and situates his graphic art within the emerging media landscape of the 1900s and 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Assoc Prof Naoi was interviewed for a podcast interview by New Books Network about Yumeji Modern and has written a Press Blog reflecting on Yumeji’s Great Kantō Earthquake series and its meaning in our current pandemic times: “What keeps us calm during the chaos: Nozomi Naoi on Yumeji Modern and finding the “moon-viewing” moment.” Assoc Prof Naoi is on the Steering Committee for the Society for the Promotion of International English-Language Scholarship on East Asian Art History and has helped develop the website platform to promote new books in East Asian Art History, which has two feature videos of highlights from Yumeji Modern. The impact and contribution of this monograph book have also been internationally recognized, and Assoc Prof Naoi is the recipient of the Early Career Award for the Yale-NUS College Annual Research Recognition Awards (2021) and Yumeji Modern is currently being translated into Chinese.
 
Assoc Prof Naoi co-curated the first exhibition focused on Takehisa Yumeji outside of Japan, Takehisa Yumeji: Artist of Romance and Nostalgia (Nihon no hanga Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2015). She is also the co-author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Takehisa Yumeji, for which she received the first Takehisa Yumeji Research Society Award (March 4, 2017) for contributing to Yumeji studies in the English language scholarship.
 
Naoi’s second book, The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life (MIT Press, forthcoming August 2026) demonstrates how material culture via modern design and visual materials creates the modern Japanese subject through the institution of department stores. This book builds upon her previous work on Japanese poster design to examine the relationship between the rise of department stores and the development of modern design, and how they co-evolve to generate visualizations of Japan’s new lifestyle through the nexus of commercial art and design. In addressing this relationship, this book tells the story of the meeting and negotiation between different worlds: business and art; specialty store and corporation; traditional crafts and modern design; fine arts and commercial design; Western artistic styles and Japanese visual culture; the value of children and nation-building; and Japan and its Empire.
 
Naoi  also co-curated the exhibition, “Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York (March 2-September 10, 2023), with Associate Professor Erin Schoneveld (Haverford College).  Made in Japan has received significant press coverage, such as from the New York Times, The Japan Times, and the Guardian and the exhibition was chosen as the winner of the 2023 Communications Arts Design Competition in the category of Design/ Environmental/ Art/Design.
 
Assoc Prof Naoi is currently writing her third book on the development of Japanese posters in the twentieth century with Schoneveld (Haverford College). 
 
 
 
Publications:
 
Books:
 
The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life (MIT Press, forthcoming August 2026)
 
Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020)
 
            [Chinese translation] Social Sciences Academic Press, in-progress.
 
            Publication Awards:
•       Honorable Mention, John Whitney Hall Book Prize 2022, Association for Asian Studies
•       Millard Meiss Publication Fund, College Art Association, 2019 Spring Award
•       JAHF (Japan Art History Forum) First Book Subvention Prize winner (2019)
•       Yale-NUS First Book Subvention Grant (April 2019)
•       Yale-NUS Book Manuscript Workshop Grant (2017-2018)
 
Reviews:
•       Adam Rosenbeck, “Examining twentieth-century artist Takehisa Yumeji and the emergence of a new visual culture.” International Examiner. Aug.
26, 2020.
•       Susan Scott (McDaniel College), CHOICE, December 2020, vol. 58 no. 4. 
•       Xu Yifan (editor of Paragon Book Gallery Beijing), December 2020. (in Chinese)
•       Kendall H. Brown, Monumenta Nipponica, volume 76, number 1, 2021, 209-215.
 
 
Exhibition Catalogues
 
Naoi, Nozomi, Sabine Schenk, and Maureen de Vries. Takehisa Yumeji. Leiden: Hotei Publishing/Brill, 2015.
 
Publication Awards:
•        Takehisa Yumeji Research Society Award (March 4, 2017)
 
 
“The Modern Beauty in Taishō Media.” In The Women of Shin Hanga: The Joseph and Judy Barker Collection of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Prints, edited by Allen Hockley, 23-42. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2013.
 
 
Articles (Peer-reviewed and Editorial Board Journals)
 
“Takehisa Yumeji in Modern Japanese Art—Through the Collection of Elise Wessels.” Aziatische
Kunst, vol. 52 no. 3 (November 2022), 24-32.
 
“Designing Japan’s Orient: Department Stores and the Modern Experience.” The Journal Of the
Society for Asian Humanities, vol. 52 (2020-21), 147-153.
 
“Yumeji Modan: 20seiki no mainichi o dezain suru.” In Nyozegamon roku (Thus Have I Heard),
edited by Collection of Essays for Tan’o Yasunori Memorial Committee, Tokyo: Waseda
University, 2020, 175-178. (in Japanese)
 
“The State and Future of Yumeji Studies: Nihon no Hanga Exhibition and Beyond (欧米にお
ける夢二研究の現状とこれから—アムステルダム夢二展を越えて—).” Takehisa Yumeji Research Society Journal, vol. 1 no. 1 (Dec. 2017), 43-49. (in Japanese)
 
“Beauties and Beyond: Takehisa Yumeji and the Yumeji-shiki.” Andon 98 (2015), 29-39.
 
[Reprint] Arrow Film Blu-ray release of film director Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy box set
(Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji), accompanying essay, release date: July 24, 2017.
 
“Select Annotated Bibliography on Okakura Kakuzō.” The Review of Japanese Culture and Society,
vol XXIV (Dec. 2013), “Okakura Kakuzō: New Perspectives” issue (with Noriko Murai)
 
 
Digital Publications
 
“Takehisa Yumeji,” Newsletter for Bibliothèque, Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris (The Japanese
cultural center in Paris), Autumn 2024.
 
“Takehisa, Yumeji [Takehisa, Mojirō; Yumeji]” in Grove Encyclopedia of Asian Art, Grove
Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press), Grove Dictionary of Art online
(www.oxfordartonline.com) (available online from November 2021) 
 
“What keeps us calm during the chaos: Nozomi Naoi on ‘Yumeji Modern’ and finding the ‘moon-
viewing’ moment.” University of Washington Press Blog (live since July 15, 2020)
 
 
 
Book Reviews
 
Review of Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury, and the Avant-Garde, by Ory Bartal.
caa.reviews (February 4, 2022).