About a month ago at Tokyo's Shugoarts, photographer Yasumasa Morimura gave a performance in which he coopted the speech author Yukio Mishima gave from the balcony of the Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo in 1970 before committing ritual seppuku inside the building. In his performance, Morimura repurposed Mishima's manifesto as a call for Japanese artists to return to Japanese culture.

This is a little surprising coming from Morimura, who made his name by inserting himself into familiar Western works of art. But there already are a group of Japanese artists recognized for revitalizing the nihonga tradition first defined in the late Edo Period (1603-1867) in order to differentiate Japanese painting from Western styles, or yoga. Loosely grouping Hisashi Tenmyouya, Kumi Machida, Keizaburo Okamura and Fukuyo Matsui, they have brought back either traditional Japanese subject matter, traditional ink-painting techniques or a recognizably Japanese aesthetic. This approach to contemporary painting has been called shin nihonga, or, by Martin Webb on this page, jidaimono -- "next generation things."

One artist who rests near one side of the rough grouping is Akira Yamaguchi, a painter in his mid-30s who went to school with the controversial artist Makoto Aida at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Yamaguchi's paintings mix traditional Japanese scenes and subjects with a modern sensibility that sometimes features strange hybrids of animals and machines.