Fascinating New Book about Japan Opening to the West

Or so I would surmise. The review fascinated me, and I would like to read it. See why at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/books/review/20DERESIT.html?position=&th=&pagewanted=print&position





July 20, 2003
'The Great Wave': A Fateful Encounter of Nations
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

THE GREAT WAVE
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.
By Christopher Benfey.
Illustrated. 332 pp. New York: Random House. $25.95.
o insular was Japan during the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa shogunate that leaving the country was a crime punishable by death. Merchants from China and the Netherlands, the only two countries with trading rights, were confined to a single island in a single port. But then, in 1854, Commodore Perry and his Black Ships steamed into Yokohama Bay to force Japan open at gunpoint. Within 14 years, the shogunate had been overthrown, the imperial line had been restored and Japan had embarked on a crash program of modernization that would make it, within a single long generation, one of the world's major industrial and military powers.

From Perry on, Americans played leading roles in that transformation, overseeing, among other things, the creation of a modern university in Tokyo and a modern public school system throughout the country. But the opening of the Japanese mind incited, inevitably, a reciprocal awakening in the American one. Or rather -- for the idea of a unitary national consciousness is, after all, a fiction -- what occurred in both countries during the half-century before World War I, Japan's Meiji Era and America's Gilded Age, was the emergence of a set of individuals who placed themselves, or found themselves placed by circumstance, at the hot edge where two very different cultures were coming into contact. It was in their minds and lives that these epochal awakenings first took shape, disorientation becoming reorientation and displacement discovery, new costumes outfitting new identities and new languages furnishing the vocabulary of new self-definitions.

It is these gifted, intrepid men and women, American and Japanese, whose stories Christopher Benfey tells in ''The Great Wave.'' Benfey, whose previous books include studies of Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane and late-19th-century New Orleans, brings to his subject a scholar's thoroughness, a critic's astuteness and a storyteller's sense of drama. Sometimes he gets bogged down in excess detail, and sometimes he stretches evidence beyond the breaking point, but his tact and humor almost always carry us through. One can't find too much fault with a writer who tells us that a Japanese description of American toilets c. 1851 includes the observation that ''it is customary to read books in them,'' or who produces illuminations like this: ''The collector thrives by turning chaos into order. His patron saint is Noah -- two of each.''

One of the book's chief beauties lies in the subtlety with which Benfey lays out the connections among his closely intertwined cast of characters. The Americans were mostly New Englanders, members of an intellectual aristocracy that was already tightly knit. Operating within a limited set of institutions -- principally Tokyo Imperial University, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Salem's Peabody Museum -- Americans and Japanese alike were constantly crossing paths as teachers, friends, rivals or lovers. But Benfey lets this fact take shape slowly, with the power of surprise, rather than mapping it out all at once. Bit players in one chapter assume leading roles in the next; crucial events return again and again, gradually accumulating significance. The lives of certain key figures unfold across the whole arc of the book, attaining something approaching the weight of fiction.

Kakuzo Okakura, the connoisseur, curator and cultural historian mentored by Ernest Fenollosa, the Tokyo philosophy professor instrumental in shaping Japanese fine arts policy, mentors in turn John La Farge, the painter most responsible for bringing Japanese aesthetic ideas and methods to American art. La Farge makes a pivotal trip to Japan in the company of Henry Adams, whose lifelong friend John Hay was later responsible for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Fenollosa's own obsession with Japan had been inspired by Edward Sylvester Morse, a principal Western figure at Tokyo Imperial University, who in 1881 delivered a seminal set of lectures in Boston on Japanese folkways. Also fired by Morse's lectures were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who founded a museum of her own, and the astronomer Percival Lowell. Gardner became Okakura's intimate friend and probable lover during his years as curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts. Lowell's writings on Japan became a major source for his sister Amy's Japanese-inflected poetry. Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who disputed control of the Imagist movement in poetry, met in Paris in 1913, the same year that Mary Fenollosa, Ernest's wife, altered the course of Pound's career -- and of 20th-century poetry -- by giving him the notes her late husband had made while studying Chinese poetry with Kakuzo Okakura.

The structure is symphonic, a symphony not only of characters but of ideas. Benfey starts with a bravura chapter interlacing the strikingly symmetrical stories of Herman Melville and Manjiro or ''John Mung,'' a fisher-boy brought to Massachusetts by ill winds and good luck in 1843. When he returned to Japan eight years later -- at the risk of his life -- he brought news of a world beyond his countrymen's imagination: steamships, ''land ships'' (trains), the telegraph. But above all, he brought English, writing the first Japanese guide to the language. And yet, when he turned to translating ''The New American Practical Navigator,'' which contained the secrets of celestial navigation, he found that it was not his new language that failed him, but his old one -- that new words were needed for the new concepts he had absorbed. And while he became for a time a celebrated and important figure in his native country, he never overcame the suspicions with which his foreign sojourn had tainted him, living out his last decades in bitterness and obscurity. Having spent his formative years abroad, Manjiro ever afterward found himself caught between two worlds. His story illustrates the perils of travel, and the greater perils of coming home.

Benfey overstates the significance of Japan to Melville -- as he himself goes on to show, Melville's true second country was the Pacific itself -- but the parallels between him and Manjiro are striking nevertheless. Both saw wonders in places beyond their imaginations, both needed to find new languages for what they had seen, both found it impossible ever to feel at home again. The life of each shows us that there is no self-knowledge -- and thus, in a sense, no true knowledge at all -- without displacement (or as it used to be called, translation). ''For a whale-ship,'' as Ishmael famously declares, ''was my Yale College and my Harvard.''

The story of Okakura, who emerges as something like the book's hero, embodies still other ideas. Having had a thorough education in both the new Western learning and the traditions of old Japan, he became his country's leading cultural ambassador -- but not before La Farge had taught him how to ''be Japanese'' for American audiences, how to suggest, through a certain sad charm, the wisdom of the East. And after learning to perform an identity he already possessed, he went on to write a series of books -- most famously, ''The Book of Tea,'' whose explication of the principles of the tea ceremony had a profound impact on, among many others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger -- in which he explained Japanese culture to the West, and in so doing explained it to himself, discarding received ideas about the imitativeness and femininity of Japanese traditions in favor of notions of creativity and vigor.

But the idea that seems to lie closest to Benfey's heart is the Taoist one of continuous change, embodied in images of water: the river, the waterfall, the ''great wave'' of his title. In a series of beautiful evocations, he connects this idea to the Darwinism that was sweeping Western thought and that Edward Morse brought to Japan. Everything evolves, nothing stands still. Benfey draws a striking symbol of that idea from a story by Lafcadio Hearn, the exoticist writer who ended up living out his life in Japan, becoming so attuned to its spirit that he was finally able to pass through the looking glass and articulate the Japanese view of the West. For Benfey, the title image of Hearn's ''Mountain of Skulls'' becomes a symbol at once of the past lives of Buddhist thought, the chain of one's Darwinian ancestors and the previous identities a figure like Hearn has passed through -- in each sense, an image of the past as it has produced the present, as well as a promise of future transformation. That the encounter between America and Japan is still very much in progress is everywhere implicit in this book.



William Deresiewicz teaches English at Yale. He recently completed a study of Jane Austen and the British Romantic poets.




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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/books/review/20DERESIT.html?position=&th=&pagewanted=print&position

Or:

July 20, 2003
'The Great Wave': A Fateful Encounter of Nations
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

THE GREAT WAVE
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.
By Christopher Benfey.
Illustrated. 332 pp. New York: Random House. $25.95.
o insular was Japan during the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa shogunate that leaving the country was a crime punishable by death. Merchants from China and the Netherlands, the only two countries with trading rights, were confined to a single island in a single port. But then, in 1854, Commodore Perry and his Black Ships steamed into Yokohama Bay to force Japan open at gunpoint. Within 14 years, the shogunate had been overthrown, the imperial line had been restored and Japan had embarked on a crash program of modernization that would make it, within a single long generation, one of the world's major industrial and military powers.

From Perry on, Americans played leading roles in that transformation, overseeing, among other things, the creation of a modern university in Tokyo and a modern public school system throughout the country. But the opening of the Japanese mind incited, inevitably, a reciprocal awakening in the American one. Or rather -- for the idea of a unitary national consciousness is, after all, a fiction -- what occurred in both countries during the half-century before World War I, Japan's Meiji Era and America's Gilded Age, was the emergence of a set of individuals who placed themselves, or found themselves placed by circumstance, at the hot edge where two very different cultures were coming into contact. It was in their minds and lives that these epochal awakenings first took shape, disorientation becoming reorientation and displacement discovery, new costumes outfitting new identities and new languages furnishing the vocabulary of new self-definitions.

It is these gifted, intrepid men and women, American and Japanese, whose stories Christopher Benfey tells in ''The Great Wave.'' Benfey, whose previous books include studies of Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane and late-19th-century New Orleans, brings to his subject a scholar's thoroughness, a critic's astuteness and a storyteller's sense of drama. Sometimes he gets bogged down in excess detail, and sometimes he stretches evidence beyond the breaking point, but his tact and humor almost always carry us through. One can't find too much fault with a writer who tells us that a Japanese description of American toilets c. 1851 includes the observation that ''it is customary to read books in them,'' or who produces illuminations like this: ''The collector thrives by turning chaos into order. His patron saint is Noah -- two of each.''

One of the book's chief beauties lies in the subtlety with which Benfey lays out the connections among his closely intertwined cast of characters. The Americans were mostly New Englanders, members of an intellectual aristocracy that was already tightly knit. Operating within a limited set of institutions -- principally Tokyo Imperial University, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Salem's Peabody Museum -- Americans and Japanese alike were constantly crossing paths as teachers, friends, rivals or lovers. But Benfey lets this fact take shape slowly, with the power of surprise, rather than mapping it out all at once. Bit players in one chapter assume leading roles in the next; crucial events return again and again, gradually accumulating significance. The lives of certain key figures unfold across the whole arc of the book, attaining something approaching the weight of fiction.

Kakuzo Okakura, the connoisseur, curator and cultural historian mentored by Ernest Fenollosa, the Tokyo philosophy professor instrumental in shaping Japanese fine arts policy, mentors in turn John La Farge, the painter most responsible for bringing Japanese aesthetic ideas and methods to American art. La Farge makes a pivotal trip to Japan in the company of Henry Adams, whose lifelong friend John Hay was later responsible for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Fenollosa's own obsession with Japan had been inspired by Edward Sylvester Morse, a principal Western figure at Tokyo Imperial University, who in 1881 delivered a seminal set of lectures in Boston on Japanese folkways. Also fired by Morse's lectures were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who founded a museum of her own, and the astronomer Percival Lowell. Gardner became Okakura's intimate friend and probable lover during his years as curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts. Lowell's writings on Japan became a major source for his sister Amy's Japanese-inflected poetry. Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who disputed control of the Imagist movement in poetry, met in Paris in 1913, the same year that Mary Fenollosa, Ernest's wife, altered the course of Pound's career -- and of 20th-century poetry -- by giving him the notes her late husband had made while studying Chinese poetry with Kakuzo Okakura.

The structure is symphonic, a symphony not only of characters but of ideas. Benfey starts with a bravura chapter interlacing the strikingly symmetrical stories of Herman Melville and Manjiro or ''John Mung,'' a fisher-boy brought to Massachusetts by ill winds and good luck in 1843. When he returned to Japan eight years later -- at the risk of his life -- he brought news of a world beyond his countrymen's imagination: steamships, ''land ships'' (trains), the telegraph. But above all, he brought English, writing the first Japanese guide to the language. And yet, when he turned to translating ''The New American Practical Navigator,'' which contained the secrets of celestial navigation, he found that it was not his new language that failed him, but his old one -- that new words were needed for the new concepts he had absorbed. And while he became for a time a celebrated and important figure in his native country, he never overcame the suspicions with which his foreign sojourn had tainted him, living out his last decades in bitterness and obscurity. Having spent his formative years abroad, Manjiro ever afterward found himself caught between two worlds. His story illustrates the perils of travel, and the greater perils of coming home.

Benfey overstates the significance of Japan to Melville -- as he himself goes on to show, Melville's true second country was the Pacific itself -- but the parallels between him and Manjiro are striking nevertheless. Both saw wonders in places beyond their imaginations, both needed to find new languages for what they had seen, both found it impossible ever to feel at home again. The life of each shows us that there is no self-knowledge -- and thus, in a sense, no true knowledge at all -- without displacement (or as it used to be called, translation). ''For a whale-ship,'' as Ishmael famously declares, ''was my Yale College and my Harvard.''

The story of Okakura, who emerges as something like the book's hero, embodies still other ideas. Having had a thorough education in both the new Western learning and the traditions of old Japan, he became his country's leading cultural ambassador -- but not before La Farge had taught him how to ''be Japanese'' for American audiences, how to suggest, through a certain sad charm, the wisdom of the East. And after learning to perform an identity he already possessed, he went on to write a series of books -- most famously, ''The Book of Tea,'' whose explication of the principles of the tea ceremony had a profound impact on, among many others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger -- in which he explained Japanese culture to the West, and in so doing explained it to himself, discarding received ideas about the imitativeness and femininity of Japanese traditions in favor of notions of creativity and vigor.

But the idea that seems to lie closest to Benfey's heart is the Taoist one of continuous change, embodied in images of water: the river, the waterfall, the ''great wave'' of his title. In a series of beautiful evocations, he connects this idea to the Darwinism that was sweeping Western thought and that Edward Morse brought to Japan. Everything evolves, nothing stands still. Benfey draws a striking symbol of that idea from a story by Lafcadio Hearn, the exoticist writer who ended up living out his life in Japan, becoming so attuned to its spirit that he was finally able to pass through the looking glass and articulate the Japanese view of the West. For Benfey, the title image of Hearn's ''Mountain of Skulls'' becomes a symbol at once of the past lives of Buddhist thought, the chain of one's Darwinian ancestors and the previous identities a figure like Hearn has passed through -- in each sense, an image of the past as it has produced the present, as well as a promise of future transformation. That the encounter between America and Japan is still very much in progress is everywhere implicit in this book.