The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, ... (ISBN 0375503277)

Unexplored Gilded Age Antics:
In 1854, Commodore Perry and his Black Ships sailed into Edo Harbor, demanding that the Japanese sign a commerce treaty acknowledging a new friendship with the United States. Over the next half century, a multitude of Americans would make the long voyage to Japan, hoping to discover that ancient and alien world known as Old Japan. In his book, The Great Wave, Christopher Benfey recounts the misadventures of characters like Henry Adams, John LaFarge, Herman Melville, Okakura Kakuzo, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others. Japan, for a short time, was an unexplored frontier for Gilded Age Americans. Some searched for spiritual fulfillment in Buddhism, like Henry Adams who traveled there after the death of his wife clover. He was overwhelmed by the funerary shrine at Nikko, but with other Americans in Japan, he was less impressed. Of Ernest Fenollosa, Adams wrote: "He has joined a Buddhist sect: I was myself a Buddhist when I left America, but he has converted me to Calvinism with leanings toward the Methodists." Adams' traveling companion, the artist John LaFarge, went to Japan for artistic inspiration, which he found in spades. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, whose own architecture would be greatly influenced by Japanese conceptions of negative space, LaFarge found inspiration in everything from tea utensils and the kimono to Buddhist statuary and woodblock prints. Japanese art intrigued not only the artists, but the great collectors of art as well. Mrs. Jack Garner even created a Buddhist meditation room in her Fenway Court museum where she also displayed Japanese art collected by her good friend Okakura. Both the Peabody Essex Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston became the primary beneficiaries of this new interest in Old Japan. Christopher Benfey has contributed greatly to an unexamined period in American history, which deserves greater attention. The Gilded Age is remembered almost exclusively as the domain of the Robber Barons, but The Great Wave reminds us that Japan was equally important (in fact setting the stage for 20th century events), warranting a trip from the great American mikado, President Ulysses S. Grant.

Uneven but absorbing:
The first half or so of Benfey's account of the influence of Japanese culture on American arts and letters is very fine, particularly his chapters on Melville and Manjiro and on Edward Sylvester Morse. This is academic writing at its very best. Ultimately, as the Japanese influence on American taste becomes more pervasive, the book begins to sink under the sheer volume of information that must be conveyed in order to cover the ground. I found the last half informative, but that's because I have an interest in this particular period in American history and literature. Benfey's a fine writer and cultural historian, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

Swept away:
This is an excellent book on what Japan meant for the people who visited in the early days of the Meiji period. The author concentrates on a series of vignettes to explore the significance of Japanese culture in the lives of some of the leading US citizens of the period. It was not all just collections of fans and diets of raw fish. Some of these early travlers used a trip to Japan to acquire ancient artifacts (many of which are in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), Henry Adams went on quest for nirvana, the artist John La Farge went with him and absorbed new artistic techniques that marked his subsequent work. The cast of characters also includes Isabelle Stewart Gardner and Theodore Roosevelt. This is a very interesting book, sure to delight the reader who really wants to know what happens when west meets east.

Japonisme in Boston:
Japanese art, and more specifically Edo woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many French artists in the late nineteenth century. Painters such as Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin, or musicians such as Claude Debussy and Camille Saint-Saens, were thus heavily influenced by Japonisme, although very few Frenchmen at that time had the occasion to visit the Far Eastern country. Less well known to the general public, the same period also witnessed a tremendous interest in the United States for all things Japanese, and many Americans undertook the travel to gain first-hand experience. Those intellectuals, however, tended to look at ukiyo-e with some disdain. They maintained that Edo prints were a vulgar form, unique to the period and distinct from the refined, religious, national heritage of Japan as illustrated by Zen masters, haiku poets, and followers of the wabi aesthetic tradition. These New Englanders went on a quest for "Old Japan" and sought to discover a culture untouched by modernist and Western influences, although many were mandated to bring such influences by Japanese authorities who wanted to draw on their expertise to build a strong and confident nation. They were instrumental in the "invention of traditions" that characterized the Meiji period. American Japonisme exerted its influence on various art forms, in less visible ways than French paintings taking Japanese motives. The Adams memorial, the shrouded sitting figure that is to be found in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., is an American Kannon, a contemporary Western version of the Buddhist deity. John La Farge used his many sketches drawn during his trip with Henry Adams for various paintings, including his mural for the Church of the Ascension which uses a representation of Mount Fuji as background. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was commissioned the Imperial Hotel at a time when he badly needed the money, encountered his key concept of "architecture from within" in The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. This same author also indirectly influenced Ezra Pound through the notes on Chinese poetry and Taoism that he drafted with Ernest Fenollosa. Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave presents the contribution of these Gilded Age misfits and Japanese eccentrics to the opening of Old Japan. I am not sure that the term 'misfit' adequately describes these Boston Brahmins, who gravitated around the Museum of Fine Arts and were all connected to the central figure of Okakura, whose eccentricity consisted of wearing only traditional attire while speaking flawless English. Certainly the group of aesthetes and art collectors had more than its share of concealed homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and severe mental disorders. But the characters fit a time and place that were "refined beyond the point of civilization", as T.S. Eliot put it. Although some of the visitors developed a good knowledge of Japan, I must confess that I was not particularly impressed by the depth of their insights, as recorded in their essays and travelogues. This literature is rich in conventional platitudes about the national character, racial considerations based on social Darwinism, or pompous speculations about Asian spirituality. They envisaged the history of Japanese art as the history of pan-Asian ideals, seeing in Asia and Japan the spirituality and feminine element that could counterbalance the male materialism of the West. Only with its victory over Russia on the battlefields of Manchuria in 1905 did Japan discard its gentle, feminine image to claim its rank in the concert of nations. The last character to appear on the stage is Theodore Roosevelt, who developed a passion for jujutsu and helped negotiate the end of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

A true gateway to another world - Japanese-American relationship at the end of the Nineteenth Century:
This is one of those rare, mind opening and truely unforgettable books that one has the chance of tripping upon in impredictable circumstances. I actually picked it up at the Museum Shop of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts while looking for something else. The book probably belonged there because as can be learned by reading it, BMFA is probably the treasure chest that still contains memories of this fascinating and far removed cultural love liason between the USA and Japan. Starting from as far back as the 1850's, after the forceful opening of Japan by Captain Perry, a certain gropu pf cultivated aristocratic intelligentia from New England started exploring and identifying with Old Japanese culture. At the same time during the so called Meiji Era Japan was trying to modernize and looked to the US for teaching and technology. In eight chapters, beautifully titled (The Floating World, A Collector of Sea-Shells, etc), Christopher Benfey narrates the porous world of the Pacific Islands and the drifters Majiro and Herman Melville, the life and word of the darwinian scholar Edward Morse who probably "started it all", the specific Bostonian interest manifested by Isabella Stewart Gardner and Kakuzo Okakura, the travels abroad and cultural impact at home of Henry Adams and John LaFarge, the madness and geniality of Lowell and Mabel Loomis Todd and the final epigones of the story with downright conversions to Japanese culture and life like that of Lafcadio Hearn and less intense relationships like that of Mary Fenollosa and Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Biegelow. The Author finishes off his story in 1913 at the beginning of WWI, but even today Japan's influence on our occidental culture is immense, through Mangas and Anime and IT. The book is written in beautiful prose, reads like a novel and has so many cross- cultural references to stand on its own as the gateway to this magnificent period of American and Japanese history.