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The Re-Envisioning Japan Project includes digitized images, texts, and moving images curated and made available through a website platform for research and educational purposes. This site may contain copyrighted material that is presented without the direct permission of the copyright owner: we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If users wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of their own that go beyond ‘fair use’, they must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Users agree to hold University of Rochester and its employees harmless against claims and actions related to use of the reproductions provided on the ReEnvisioning Japan website. We are committed to identifying and clearly acknowledging copyright holders, and encourage copyright holders who believe their work is not properly credited, or anyone with relevant information on properly crediting material on this website, to contact us. Use of any material provided on this website must be properly cited. 

You will notice as part of the background to this site's pages an image from the cover of Playbill vol. 121 issue 1 (Jan. 2005) for the 2005 Roundabout Theatre Company/Studio 54 encore production of Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures (originally staged in 1976). This stylized image of a female Noh theater mask with gunboats in place of eyes alludes to the 1853 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's "Black Ships" (kurofune) that signaled the end of Japan's 200 years of selective seclusion from the rest of the world. Sondhem's musical focuses on a tangle of individual lives, high and low, irrevocably altered by this event. Used by Permission. All rights reserved, Playbill, Inc.