Despite the volume of scholarly work devoted to Japan, the sociology of art remains a neglected field. While art history flourishes and the study of popular culture is endemic, the sociological study of contemporary visual and performing arts lags behind. A survey of recent handbooks of contemporary Japanese culture shows clearly that with the exception of the popular and over researched forms of manga , anime , and film, little attention has been paid to the substantial volume of artistic production that forms an important part of the culture, and which in many ways shape Japanese identity. This essay is an attempt to provide a guide to remedying this deficiency by providing a “map” of the main sociological issues in the study of contemporary Japanese visual and performance arts and to identify the key questions for a more developed sociological study of art forms, practices, audiences, and institutions, and the relationships of these to Japanese social structure, cultural history, and the embeddedness of the arts in an advanced capitalist economy and national polity concerned with projecting itself through “Soft Power” and the role of the arts and culture as vehicles for international communication.