Between Shogun, Godzilla Minus One, The Contestant and a host of new quality anime, it’s starting to feel like the only thing Americans can agree on is that we all love Japanese culture. Hearing this call, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art recently opened “Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints,” a large and ambitious show that seeks to examine the origins of certain Japanese aesthetics when they emerged in the Edo years. We caught up with Kit Brooks, The Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art, and Frank Feltens, curator of Japanese art, to hear more about the show.

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The origin of the exhibition dates back more than fifteen years but was buoyed into reality by two major acquisitions by the NMAA. The idea for a ghost-themed exhibition first came about while we were both studying at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama in 2009-2010. At the NMAA, the broad possibilities of a ghost-themed exhibition seemed endless and much had already been done by museums in Japan and elsewhere, so we decided to concentrate on theatrical representations in print.

The recent acquisition of the Pearl and Seymour Moskowitz Collection in 2021, with its rich focus on ghosts on the stage delivered an aperture onto ghosts as carriers of memory, examples of striking stage effects, and culturally significant stories. These narratives linked our world with the world beyond as well as the past with the present. The Moskowitz Collection further supplemented previous acquisitions given to NMAA by Anne van Biema (1915-2004)........

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