Organizer and Chair: Fred G. Notehelfer, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Ellen P. Conant, Independent Scholar
Okakura Kakuzô (Tenshin) (1862–1913) remains one of the most important, if enigmatic, figures in "interpreting" Japan to the outside word in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Japan, he is known for the central role he played with Ernest Fenollosa and Kuki Ryûichi in preserving and cataloguing Japan’s art treasures in the Meiji Period. He was also important in founding Japan’s Fine Arts Academy (later Geidai) of which he served as head, in the establishment of Japan’s leading art-historical journal, Kokka, and in the creation of Tokyo National Museum, which he served as curator. Concerned about the survival of Japan’s traditional arts he called for the creation of a new art movement, Nihonga, that would combine Japanese and Western elements. Okakura traveled widely, first to China and India, and later to the West. After 1898 he became increasingly concerned about projecting Japanese art ideals abroad. He wrote extensively, producing a series of books that included The Ideals of the Fast (1903) and The Book of Tea (1906). In 1905 he became a part of the American intellectual world by settling down in Boston and serving as Assistant Curator of the Chinese and Japanese departments of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
One of the most important spokesmen for Japanese art, he saw his mission as interpreting not only Japan, but Asia, to the West. He therefore played a key role in the process through which the orientalization of Asia was constructed. Okakura was a complex thinker whose early Western education and brilliant command of English allowed him to work effectively in both his native and the Western environment. He clearly lived between two worlds, and his ideas, often misused and sometimes misunderstood, have still to be wrestled with by those who want to deal with the emergence of Asia in the modern world. It is appropriate that the panel will address new themes that have emerged in Okakura studies in the past decade, particularly those that see him in the complex space between two worlds One new approach, reflected in the Baneji paper, sees Okakura as part of a broader Asian quest for modernity between Colonialism and a native resurgence. Jing He focuses on the new attention that Chinese scholars have paid to Okakura by examining his conception of "China" and his idea of Asian "oneness." Professor Inaga treats the broader theme of the "invention" of Oriental Art History in relation to the "Western impact." He expands the theme of Indian influences, while Anne Morse brings us back to a re-evaluation of Okakura’s collecting policies and "advice" from the perspective of his vision of what Asian art should mean to the West. Ellen Conant, a leading American scholar of Nihonga, who has been working on Okakura for many years, will comment on the current perceptions of Okakura’s significance as they are presented by the panelists.
China in the Mind of Okakura Kakuzo
Jing He, University of California, Los Angeles
The position of Okakura Kakuzô (Tenshin) as a seminal figure in the Meiji art movement is well established. What needs to be reconsidered is the role that China and Chinese culture played in the development of his art ideals. In his most important books, The Ideals of the East and The Book of Tea, Okakura wrote of a "oneness" that united Asia. Yet this oneness was based on diversity. Japan and China’s roles differed. Okakura envisioned Japan’s role as the carrier of Asian art. This is why he saw Japan as Asia’s living museum. Art, he believed, encompassed the highest "ideal" to which philosophy and religion were subordinate. Within this context it should be noted that Okakura identified China with philosophy. The strength of Asia’s civilization, according to his theory, rested on Chinese Philosophy and Japanese Art. The question remains, why did Okakura identify China with philosophy? And how was his perception developed during encounter with China, both from the scholarly and from the direct experience perspective? For Okakura made three major trips to China and collected a wide variety of Chinese art.
As I will show it was through his studies of Chinese art history and art criticism that he developed his focus on Chinese philosophy as playing an important role. My paper examines Okakura’s understanding of Chinese art history and criticism from thee perspectives: (1) The first is a study of Okakura’s art-historical methodology, that is his perception of history and its development in China. Here I will focus on the way that Okakura mobilized a Western Social Darwinist methodology and chronological history to replace the traditional Chinese, Garon style of art history that primarily focused on an artist’s biography and school-heritage; (2) The second will take up the issue of direct experience involving Okakura’s 1894 trip to China and its influence on the development of his fudoron that underscored his linking of China’s philosophical/political transition an the evolution of Chinese artistic styles. I will also take up his concept of Asian "oneness" that emerged at this time; (3) Finally I want to address the question of why Okakura perceived Chinese art to have experienced a serious breakdown between the Song and Yuan Dynasties and why he held such a negative attitude towards literati painting and subsequent Chinese art movements (including even the crafts). Can causes for this be attributed to Ernest Fenollosa’s ideas of Western classicism, or to the Sinology tradition of Tokugawa Japan?
What I want to do in the paper as a whole is explore the issue of "China’ in the mind of Okakura, for I believe that an understanding of how Okakura used China in the development of his thought system will provide important new insights into Okakura’s ideas and methodology. It was precisely Okakura’s use of Chinese art and history that allowed him to develop his theory of civilization, with its emphasis on Asian "oneness" and its curious placement of art at the apex of civilization transcending both philosophy and religion.
Reconsidering Okakura Tenshin as the Inventor of Oriental Art History
Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
The concept of Oriental Art History is a modern invention created under the Western impact. In its construction, Asian, or Oriental art, had to clear a double hurdle. On the one hand, the Oriental, or Asian, objects selected to represent that art to the Western world had to meet the test of fitting into the categories that Westerners had themselves established as defining the fine Arts. At the same time, these objects also had to avoid being seen as mere by-products of World Art History, as Westerners defined it.
It was in this narrow space that the idea of the Orient in Art was pursued in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this paper I will re-examine the role that Okakura Tenshin played in this context. Here I propose to explore three points: (1) To what extent was Okakura influenced by Indian thinkers like Vive Kahnanda in his effort to rehabilitate Oriental values in a world-wide context; and to what extent can we find a parallel between Okakura’s endeavors in Japan and those of Kmalaswami and E. B. Havell in India; (2) To what extent were Okakura’s changing images of Asia and the Orient the results of a changing environment and the particular audiences to which his books were addressed? The Ideals of the East (1903) was written for enlightened British intellectuals; The Awakening of Japan (1904) (which was never published during his lifetime) was written as a declaration of solidarity with his Indian nationalist friends; and The Book of Tea (1906) was, by contrast, a public lecture to the Boston bourgeoisie designed to clarify Japan’s position in the Russo-Japanese War; (3) Finally I want to explore the way in which Okakura was removed from the Editorial Board of the first official Japanese art history that was compiled for the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 and how his "internationalist" vision of Oriental Art History (in which Japan played the role of aesthetically synthesizing Indian philosophy and Chinese ethics) was replaced by a more "nationalistic" perspective by some of the very students Okakura had trained who pretended to be less ideological and more empirical in their research on Buddhism and Chinese Art History.
Addressing the above questions will help us to understand the reasons why Henry Focillon, for one, appreciated Okakura so highly as the most distinctive thinker of the Oriental artistic heritage in the "entre les guerres" cosmopolitan context. Dealing with these issues will also help us to re-evaluate Okakura’s position both in Japan and in the West in the first decade of this century.
Homologies of Cultural Resistance in Turn-of-the-Century Japan and India: A Comparative Study of Okakura Kakuzo and Abanindranath Tagore
Debashish Banerji, University of California, Los Angeles
Turn-of-the-century British Calcutta and Meiji Yokohama presented striking similarities of hybrid culture as a result of the collision of "east" and "west" that played itself out in these cities. The capital of British India, Calcutta saw the rise of a western-educated Bengali elite, the bhadralok, who comprised the spectrum of social and ideological attitudes ranging from unquestioning imitation of British ways to the fashioning of a cultural identity based on oppositional rejection and/or revivalist affirmation. Japan though never colonized, following American humiliation, embarked upon a full-scale process of westernization, a part of which process saw the establishment of Yokohama as a westernized trading center. As in Calcutta, a new Japanese social class emerged here, which found itself in an alien cultural field, where the values and assumptions of tradition were rendered questionable.
The unsettled and contested contexts that resulted formed the fertile ground for self-conscious creative projects of identity-building, based in the articulation of "otherness" from the west. This paper outlines the homologies in the life and work of two such practitioners, Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), born and brought up in Yokohama, Japan, cultural ideologue and founder of the Japanese revivalist Nihonga art movement, and Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), from Calcutta, India, artist and founder of the Bengal School of nationalist Indian art. In studying these two lives, destined at one point to intersect and influence one another, we discover the circumstantial and ideological commonalities that make an attempt at the emergence of a Pan-Asian cultural identity resistant to western representational hegemony; and articulate some of the implications resultant from such efforts.
The Presentation of Art as a Declaration of National Identity: The Tenure of Okakura Kakuzo at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Anne Nishimura Morse, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
During the nineteenth century museums were established in Europe and the United States as encyclopedic institutions in which the collections were organized in taxonomic fashion. Generally the mission of these museums was to provide education to the public about the development of the history of art. In their selection of the objects displayed, these institutions inevitably participated in the definition of national identities. On October 2, 1886—the day that Okakura Kakuzo departed for Europe with the Commission of Enquiry [sic] which included Ernest Fenollosa—the Japan Weekly Mail declared: "We have repeatedly in these columns lamented official indifference to the country’s gradual denudation of art treasures, and pointed to the fact that no art museum exists where an artisan can place himself en rapport with the great schools of national thought. . . ." During his stay in Vienna, Okakura wrote to an American friend, "The difference of national characters from France strikes me clearly . . . Our peculiar position in the East—our duty to Asia must be in the preservation of our national character in literature, in Art, and in everything which constitutes Yamato."
Okakura embarked on a second trip to the West on February 10, 1904—the day of the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War—to act as an advisor to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although he did not form the collection, Okakura was the person who undertook its organization and presentation. At the conclusion of his first year in Boston he declared to the Trustees that he "believe[d] it desirable from the Japanese point of view as well as from [the Museum’s] that this collection should completely illustrate the history of Japanese art for the benefit of the western world."
This paper will explore Okakura’s evaluation of the works of art already in the Boston collection and those that he chose to acquire and will examine the ways in which his presentation of the objects reflected his ideas about Japanese national identity in the context of the Western art museum.