Gilded-Age Bostonians and Old Japan: An Ironic Love Affair

please welcome Christopher Ben fee well I just spent an hour and Sara's marvelous show and I have to say I don't know what you're doing down here in the dark when you could be over there looking at Hoke sighs incredible art the man mad about pain and what an artist a dozen years ago I did publish that book that Sara referred to called the great wave the great wave of the title was was meant primarily to be a metaphor it was a metaphor for the what I thought of as the great wave of cultural exchange between Japan and New England during the American Gilded Age but of course I also wanted readers to visualize hoaxes eyes image the best-known image in all Japanese art and indeed one of the most familiar images and world art in her interesting new book on this image Christine booth calls it a global icon the Great Wave off Kanagawa I remember when my editor at Random House asked me if I had any ideas for a color illustration a cover illustration for my book editors always asked this and they never take your suggestion and I allowed us how there was a famous hoax I image of a great wave and my editor responded a little huffily we don't want the book to look like a t-shirt for God's sake so by the book in order to see what the real cover is so if you're going to tell the story of a love affair it's a good idea to begin at the beginning I'll be showing just a very few slides all of them drawn from the Museum of Fine Arts great collection mainly to give you something to look at instead of me Americans like to imagine that first encounter 150 years ago through a veil of legend and myth a little like a Thanksgiving diorama on the one on one side is Commodore Matthew Perry of Newport Rhode Island with his so-called black ships wrestling with bristling sorry with modern weaponry and here is one image of these black ships on one side the Americans on the other side the Japanese in their wooden boats armed with swords and oars and ornamental helmets like something out of the Middle Ages we now know that the Japanese were far more knowledgeable about the west and about Western learning than the Americans thought we now know that even in those world shifting weeks of 1853 and again in 1854 when Perry returned to extracted treaty we know that the Japanese were developing a strategy it was a strategy that the Japanese writer by adoption loved kario Hearn referred to as Jew Jew to Jew means softness or yielding the master of jujitsu or judo absorbs the strength of the opponent and uses it against him the Japanese would open themselves up they would absorb what the West had to offer Japan would invite capita Japan would invite Western experts many of them from here in New England to come to Japan and instruct the Japanese in the ways of modern steam power the ideas Darwyn and so on Japan would send Japanese young men and a few young women to learn about Swiss watchmaking in the West Prussian war making how to run art museums and so on the Japanese would learn how to teach perspective and other tricks of Western art to Japanese children the Japanese children in turn would learn to write with pencils and fountain pens vanishing the traditional brush and black ink from the classroom in the space of 50 years and especially during the period from about 1868 to 1904 the period we called the Meiji era the whole country was on a crash course in the ways of the modern world Japan would show off its accomplishments like straight A's on a report card at World's Fairs in Philadelphia the famous Centennial Exhibition of 1876 at New Orleans at the cotton exposition at Vienna and Chicago the Japanese would show off their fire trucks their medical apparatus they're amazing literacy rates and so on but the Japanese quickly discovered that Western audiences had no interest whatsoever in such marvels of modern technology things that they we already had in abundance Americans and Europeans much preferred an imaginary Japan what they often referred to as an old Japan a Japan of fans and porcelain woodblock prints by hoax I and Hiroshige a Geisha and Samurai whoops so if you went to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 you could buy a cheap souvenir fan like this one with the image of the ship's again if you wanted to spend a lot more money you could also get a lacquer right in box revelant of old Japan and then came the final exam in the crash course in modernization in the western style the russo-japanese war of 1904 to 1905 the Japanese victory in this unbelievably brutal lead-up to World War one gave the Japanese a place at the table of modern powers the childish and timeless little nation had grown up as the writer for the nation in new york remarked quote the cherry stone carvers have been preparing all along to hold the trigger this is a a charming German version of the risk of Japanese war where you see the nation of taste defeating the Russian barbarians with France on the tail here and these are the these are the spoils of war what these countries were fighting for Korea and so on sophisticated Japanese observers were quick to note the ironies take Okakura kakuzu for example a brilliant Japanese writer philosopher art historian and part and for a time a curator right here at the MFA in Boston curator of Asian art according to Okakura the average Westerner quote was accustomed to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefield and here we have Japan as she a wonderful irony they're barbarians are peaceful civilized nations make war and what about that other character in our little diorama the Americans during this same period of time the second half of the 19th century the United States was on a strangely parallel course of national development after it's little temper tantrum an eighth obey when Commodore Perry told the Japanese that in the name of president Millard Fillmore the Japanese must stop mistreating whaling ships that ran aground on their islands and must let merchant ships refuel reprovision on the way to Calcutta and so on after this temper tantrum the United States basically lost interests in Japan for 20 years we all know why the Americans were distracted the distraction was the American Civil War when Commodore Perry returned to the United States after opening Japan he expected a hero's welcome parades in Washington and New York celebrations at the White House but no Commodore Perry was ignored Washington had other things to think about like the extension of slavery in the western territories and threatening noises about secession from southern senators Commodore Perry being a modern man decided he needed better PR and he asked his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne if Hawthorne would consider writing a book about the opening of Japan with Perry as hero I love this idea Hawthorne was tempted it sounded like a nice little book concept as forth Hawthorne wrote in his journal in December 1854 quote it would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man or for that matter an old one for the world can scarcely heaven reserved a less hackneyed theme than Japan but Hawthorne as I say had other books on his mind and he suggested that Perry might ask Herman Melville who knew something about the Pacific to write the book instead Perri stupidly decided to write the book himself in Herman Melville's history of the opening of Japan is one of the great might of bends and American literature well the United States had its Civil War the industrial north defeated the feudal and agrarian South and embarked on a period of rapid economic and industrial growth appeared that Mark Twain called the Gilded Age Mark Twain meant the name ironically not a golden age but a merely gilded age Japan too had a civil war culminating in the Satsuma rebellion of the late 1870s a war that as in the u.s. ended with modernizers triumphant and feudal arrangements in shambles the samurai went the way of the southern planter into the world of movies and popular nostalgia Gone with the Wind on one side the Seven Samurai on the other more recently the Last Samurai of course we know there will never be a last samurai in the movies oak sighs samurai by the dawn of the 20th century then there were two new players on the international stage to battle-tested young nations in love with modern technology and eager to test the waters of empire we now know that Japan and the United States were on a collision course the encroaching black ships off Yokohama would be avenged a hundred years later in the destruction of the ships in Pearl Harbor but such things could hardly have been predicted in 1905 the high point of Gilded Age America's love affair with Japan may be all love affairs have some built-in ironies we are often dead wrong about what makes us lovable but this Japanese American love affair was more ironic than most Herman Melville in Moby Dick called pre Perry Japan Kuo that double-bolted land japan in fact had to be open not once but twice perry did the relatively easy part forcing japan to open her major ports to western ships and western trade after 200 years of isolation but there was a second more significant opening of japan this second opening happened much more slowly and asked much more of those do in the opening and this opening is still going on in exhibitions like the hoax i extravaganza here at the MFA it was one thing to fire a few cannonballs across a doe bay as the american soldiers did and run a miniature railroad along the beach to impress the gaping samurai as the american sailors also did it was quite another to grasp the tenets of esoteric Buddhism or to appreciate the frenzied manga of hoax I or to understand why the most highly prized vessel in the tea ceremony could be a dun-colored water jar that had buckled in the kiln or a rock ooh tea bowl that looked like several things had gone very wrong in the making this second opening of Japan was the work of men and women who realized that Japan had things to offer besides safe harbor for American whaling crews a sense of urgency impelled these connoisseurs and collectors they were Darwinian they knew that their quarry was on the verge of extinction the irony the irony of my talk tonight the irony was that just as Bostonians were fallen in love with old Japan Japan was reinventing itself as a modern state now we need to remember that every Western country had its own private Japan to some extent this is still the case France for example where Impressionists like Duga and Mary Cassatt discovered the vibrant world of Japanese prints Japan could seem a pleasure garden for the senses people buy two-dimensional geisha and their elegant patrons in the United States by contrast and specifically here and Puritan New England is this still Puritan New England I like to think that it is here in new ways I heard a yes here in New England a distinct that a distinctively different version of old Japan prevailed in accord with the self conception that Boston Brahmins held of themselves this view of Japan was dominated by austere religious practices martial prowess and refined taste TS Eliot once said that Boston was refined beyond the point of civilization from an early period from an early period American collectors of Japanese art conceived of their passion less as a matter of decoration than of spiritual quest less interior decoration than interior transformation this is the kind of art that Bostonians favored Ernest Fenollosa hired by the Japanese to teach Western philosophy in Tokyo became the first head of the Japan collection here at the MFA this is the pattern again come to teach modern philosophy fall in love with ancient Japanese and Chinese art and here at the MFA Fenollosa persuaded himself that paintings like this one of Canon the Japanese deity of compassion were the spiritual counterpart of Italian Renaissance paintings of angels in the Madonna and Child you see this sort of floating in the in the heavens when Fenollosa hosted the Boston born historian Henry Adams and the American painter John lafarge in Japan in 1886 Adams very excited by French taste fell in love with Hoch side and wanted to buy a collection of Hoch size books now Fenollosa considered Japanese prints vulgar in the case of hoax I Fenollosa in tone to Adams we miss all that indefinable something which is implied in the word taste and we hear only the clever talk of the barber and the bartender I love that adams henry adams was so appalled by Fenollosa snootiness that he wrote to his good friend john hey i wish you were here to help us trample on Fenollosa he is he has joined a buddhist sect i was myself a buddhist when I left America but he has converted me to Calvinism with lanes towards the Methodists so what is this ironic love affair that I want to talk about English professors like me love to define their terms so let's try to define that slippery term irony let's call it following the dictionary an incongruity or mismatch between what might be expected and what actually occurs I think that a fundamental incongruity or mismatch occurred in Japanese American relations the idea of an ironic love affair reminds me of a famous Christmas story by the American Gilded Age writer oh Henry called the Gift of the Magi I'm sure many of you know this story a husband and wife who are very short of money are determined to give each other handsome Christmas gifts nonetheless the woman has beautiful long hair the man has a beautiful gold watch the woman cuts off her hair sells it to a wig maker and uses the money to buy a chain for her husband's watch the husband meanwhile sells his watch to buy tortoiseshell combs for his wife's long hair the relationship between Japan and New England was a bit like the Gift of the Magi pari again and here I find myself thinking back to that famous exchange of gifts between Commodore Perry and the Emperor of Japan Perry proudly offered his gifts to the Japanese a telegraph apparatus rifles and revolvers a daguerreotype camera a miniature railroad the Japanese presented in return some small pieces of blue and white porcelain lacquer ware fans seashells dolls a couple of dogs from the Imperial kennel I'm not sure that these are the American dogs or the Japanese dogs you get the idea the Americans gave modernity and the Japanese gave tradition Perris Americans openly scoffed at the Japanese gifts but in retrospect it is not at all clear who made the better bargain in one sense old Japan vanished at the moment of its discovery quote for old Japan was like an oyster to open it was to kill it as longtime resident in Japan hand basil Chamberlain lamented but it turned out that something of old Japan something essential of old Japan like the shrines carried through streets in the great Shinto festivals something of old Japan was supportable and recoverable it could be relocated to Boston or New York or Washington DC and assume a second life President Theodore Roosevelt had a judo room in the White House a private Japan of his own in the heart of American power a big reason why Teddy Roosevelt was chosen to broker the russo-japanese war he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work was because the Japanese trusted him they knew that he admired Japan as a plucky little country that could overcome a stronger opponent through judo there are incredible stories in letters of John Hay and other cabinet members of Teddy Roosevelt bringing his judo teacher into cabinet meetings to demonstrate some of the moves that he had taught the president the recovery of old Japan was the work of men and women who realized that to open Japan culturally meant that they had to open themselves in turn and risk self transformation in the process for the opening of Japan occurred as much in the hearts and minds of individuals as it did in some particular location in Japan or in New England now in the remainder of the talk I want to think about what kind of people would risk such self transformation I believe that one aspect of such figures is that they are for one reason or another unmoored or cut loose from their own society I a a couple of weeks ago I had a I had a review in The New York Times of a wonderful new book called the daughters of the samurai by Janice nee Mora about these three young japanese girls who were from families that had basically lost in the Civil War the civil disturbances in Japan and they were taken along on the famous II WA Kura mission to the United States which was basically sent to explore the possibility of renegotiating the treaties that Perry had had extorted from them exact it from them and these three girls were sent to learn about American ways of educating women one of the girls was six years old you know one was twelve was thirteen and the amazing thing is that they actually accomplished their mission one of them was the first Japanese woman to get a BA at an American College he went to Vassar one became a very distinguished music teacher and they went back to and one went back to Japan and founded the greatest school for women in English language studies just miraculous you know people unmoored in their own country but of course when they got back to Japan they couldn't speak Japanese so that's part of this that the the ironies involved so as I say what kind of people risk this kind of cross cultural transformation well one fabulous example is my hero Edward Sylvester Morse a man who perfectly embodies the irony that I'm describing tonight what cut Moore's loose from his American roots was religion Christian religion he grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine where he collected seashells passionate seashell collector and came of age in the narrow world of American evangelical Christianity it felt like liberation to come under the sway of the Christianized natural science of his first mentor Louis Agassiz of Harvard Agassiz looked to the fossil record to prove the floods and fixed species of the biblical creation story Darwin was the great enemy for Agassiz and young Edward Morse was enlisted in the great battle to prove Darwin wrong Edward Sylvester Morse worked on marine worms Agassiz wanted Morse to show that under the microscope there was no relation whatsoever between fossil brachiopods and living organisms in the ocean more sophora sound just the opposite at the it's actually a very close relation between the fossil record and the living organisms and Morse's adoption of Darwinism had the force of a conversion he was adrift when Morse learned during the late 1870s that the great marine repository of sea worms was actually the coastal waters of Japan he looked for opportunities to make the pilgrimage and Morse was one of many visitors to the Japanese pavilions at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 where he met with officials and worked out an arrangement to teach Darwin to the Japanese hired to teach modern science modern biology and zoology to the Japanese Morse fell in love instead with traditional Japanese culture and he collected Japanese pottery and other artifacts of old Japan to preserve them from extinction Moore said that he developed a kind of neurasthenia many of the American distinguished American men of the Gilded Age like William James and so on developed these mysterious symptoms and their doctors suggested you know a trip to the Riviera or the taking up of a hobby and the hobby that Morris's doctor suggests was maybe he could collect Japanese things and sort of explore the side streets of Tokyo and Morse made a wonderful comment he said he said that there were only side streets in Tokyo still the case if you Tokyo so as I say Morse began to collect Japanese pottery obsessively with the idea that he was preserving these organisms from extinction and he gave much of his collection to the MFA like this lovely Bowl but there are hundreds hundreds of exists Eric probably there probably thousands of examples from Morse's collection Eduard Morse looked at everything as though he was seen it for the first time for Morse one thing led to another and his curiosity recognized no bounds he learned to eat raw the marine worms that he had come to Japan to study then he drew the arrangement of the worms on the serving plate and carefully noticed the clay the glaze and the provenance of the plate itself comparing it carefully with other similar plates he had seen then he examined the joints of the table on which the plate was set the walls and the construction of the room the house itself and its surroundings more sort of path-breaking book on Japanese domestic architecture Japanese houses and their surroundings which became in turn a pattern but for Japan influenced houses all over New England I live in Amherst in every twentieth house has every twentieth Victorian house has these Japanese touches eaves and other ornamental aspects of Japanese architecture that are all taken from Morse's book Morse was one of those people as his good friend Henry James would say on whom nothing was lost hired to modernize Japan Morse tried instead to traditional eyes it there you have it again that ironic love affair but the greatest irony the greatest ironies of all concerning japanese-american relations in my view was Okakura kakuzu also known as tension yeah oka korra was like morse unmoored in his own society his father was born a samurai but was determined that his son would be equipped for a westernized Japan Okakura was enrolled in james Hepburn's missionary school in yokohama hepburn translated the Bible into Japanese and Okakura learned perfect English he also learned how to sing Methodist's hymns what he forgot however was Japanese his father was appalled to learn that his gifted young son could not read the signs on the streets and he promptly moved him to a Buddhist school instead so the Buddhist school Okakura learned to write with brush and ink and to play the koto I love the idea of mastering the Methodist hymns and the koto Okakura then became the art historian Ernest Fenollosa favorite student at Tokyo Imperial University and was assigned the mission of modernizing Japan's art schools and museums along Western lines what Okakura discovered during his month in the United States was that Japan owed her prestige to her traditional arts so he became like Morse a preservationist this is a wonderful statue of Okakura and traditional hermit garb so he became Oklahoma became like Moore's a preservationist and a living embodiment of old Japan here in Boston he served as a curator here at the Museum of Fine Arts a hundred years ago Isabella Gardner around the corner who collected everything collected Okakura as well she showed him off in full kimono in her box at Symphony Hall Isabella Gardner hosted a tea ceremony by candlelight at midnight performed by Okakura in her villa here on the Fenway in his cult masterpiece the book of T written in magnificent and eloquent English Okakura wrote of the tea ceremony as a rite of national independence performed by samurai he compared it to the Boston Tea Party the great Boston tea ceremony this reminds me of another bad moment with my editor my first working title for the Great Wave was the Boston Tea Party of Okakura kakuzu my editor said that's the worst book title I've ever sang I still I still I still think of that as somehow the true title of the book Okakura was even an IRA nest in the language of clothing oka chorus theatrical practice of wearing only Japanese clothing in the West counter to the meiji practice of adopting Western formal attire attracted much notice from an admirer in press okhla cora once remarked that unless once English was flawless as his was one should wear western clothes in the West if your English was good you could wear kimono I think this is a principle to be applied to all kinds of things in life and I want to close with an anecdote testifying to oka chorus habitual irony and to his dexterity with English as recorded from his Boston sojourn in 1904 this story also shows his sensitivity regarding racial stereotypes of Asians as mere copyists of the west of monkey like copies so this is the story Okakura and a couple of Japanese companions in kimono were walking in Boston minding their own business they were stopped by a wagon Lestrade who asked what sort of knees are you people are you Chinese or Japanese or Javanese Okakura calmly responded we are Japanese gentlemen but what sort of key are you are you a Yankee or a donkey or a monkey thank you [Applause] so I'm happy to take a few questions just a mouse mic here if you have a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to come to you was there some sort of a scandal that brought Okakura here or why did he come here in the first place it's my favorite word in book titles scandal so why did Okakura come here in the first place was there some sort of scandal attached to him so I did rashly suggest some possible reasons in my book for oak Icarus departure from Japan where he was a very highly placed figure in the Ministry of Education was running the major art school in Japan was running the National Museum in Japan I imagine that there were three possible reasons why maybe a fourth why Okakura was drawn to a job at the MFA in Boston one should not think that too many reasons are necessary to take a job the era minutes you know but Okakura was um on his first trip to America was called to Washington where the minister Kuki essentially the Japanese ambassador in the United States had a a homesick wife and cooky was a close friend of Henry Adams who I mentioned before they would sit and play go or Japanese chess as Adams called it together mrs. Cokie was homesick she had been in fact a Geisha in the pleasure quarters in Kyoto and wanted to go home and cooky this sounds like a plot out of the Rosenkavalier or something as Okakura to accompany her home and of course they fell madly in love on the long Pacific crossing and and evidently had an affair that was known to people but was nonetheless scandalous and it's it's quite possible that um a child born to this affair kooky shoes oh is that his name who became one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century in Japan it's possible that he was in fact a love child if this Pacific Crossing this is the kind of thing that an American scholar rashly puts into a book but the Japanese are much more restrained about it it's rumored that they that they did live and send together in Tokyo that they drank a lot that Okakura became a sort of outsider figure in the establishment but I think also Okakura had always been a divided figure he had always had this American westernized side to him he never felt comfortable writing calligraphy for example and he developed a very eccentric style to cover up his lack of finesse with with the brush and he loved adulation and Boston was made for a man like Okakura you know and an Isabella Stewart Gardner was it was May it was made for him as well I mean she really fell madly in love with Okakura and he knew just how much to give her to keep ticket for coming back and she I'm so at when Okakura died primarily of alcoholism she established this shrine in in her Museum with the appropriate Buddhist statues and so on and you can still see some of those at the at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum I mean what's it what's so interesting with all of these Boston figures is that there is that their interest in Italian Renaissance painting went went hand in hand with their you know interest in in this kind of esoteric Buddhist painted anyway is that's the short end the short answer to your question yeah there was a scandal tell us a little bit about the sturgis Bigelow or Sturgis big as I think you have roosevelt to everything yes and amongst this this crew of the unmoored and they want him to become yes and moored yes so the question is about William Sturgis Bigelow if you go to the hooks eye exhibition and I and I hope you will you'll see that that roughly 80% of the works on view came through Sturgis Bigelow's generosity his kind of sir ship and his considerable money his his his father was very distinguished doctor in boss and I think pioneered the use of ether and childbirth isn't can somebody tell me that's wrong and young Sturgis Bigelow also wanted to be a doctor he studied with pester and Parris he was the favorite cousin of Henry Adams his wife these are all very closely related people and it was partly Bigelow who persuaded Henry Adams to to go to Japan himself to go on a collecting for a Bigelow also had one of these sort of neurasthenic melancholy Miles's went to Washington one can speculate on his sexual proclivities probably the safest thing to say is that he was not interested in marriage was very interested in in esoteric Buddhism helped fund some of the teaching of Buddhism at Harvard and then you know people like TS Eliot studied Buddhism at Harvard and Buddhism entered the wayside and so on Bigelow was part he had that he had the money to to float some of his obsessions with for example with Japanese samurai traditions incredible collections of of Japanese swords of in what are they called in row what are the what are the little sword slots these incredible hmm - but yes - by sorry and and that's okay and all of the things associated with with with samurai lore but very much another [Music] another displaced American you know all of the training of modernity the latest science the latest medical methods and what he what he really wants to make sense of his is those hoaxes I waterfalls you know that's the real I don't know you probably know more about him than I do I think we're still we're still trying to figure out who Bigelow was I think I was the first person to say in print that he was in the New York Review of Books that he was homosexual and I remember Anne Morrison who you know that grade had quite a quite a stir at the at the MFA not because not because they didn't know where we're we're Bostonians after all the group of Bostonian Japan Oh files Denman Ross and Bigelow and Morris and Fenollosa how unique were they are there any parallels elsewhere in the United States at that time he said the question is how unique were the were the Japan Oh files of of New England there were certainly clusters of Japan o files elsewhere Frank Lloyd Wright belonged to one such cluster in in Chicago there were slightly later clusters and in in California I think what what makes the the Boston clusters so peculiar and so affecting is how different their their Japan was from from the sort of floating world you know the sort of world of vocht in Van Gogh's paintings where there's a Japanese the idea that Japan is the place of of sensual delight and pleasure and so on these were Boston Brahmins they felt that their Puritan world was coming to an end they felt a spiritual echo in a stern samurai world that was also coming to an end and there's something moving Lee elegiac and and in melancholy among these Boston Japanophile you know if you look at the taste for Japan at the pavilions at the Chicago World's Fair for example in 1894 or the pavilion the Japanese pavilions in st. Louis in 1904 you know that maybe in st. Louis Judy Garland think it's it's a very ornate Japan it sort of the Japan of Nikko and red paint and and in a kind of a glitzy import Japan and this that this world of the ones you mentioned Bigelow one and Fenollosa and Okakura and so is a world a world fit for that for Cotton Mather thank you aside from this collection of rather renegade sounding individuals I'm wondering if there were any serious institutional attempts that across cultural exploration or documentation that either out of New England or elsewhere in America in the Gilded Age uh out there then well I mean whether sue did were there serious university-level kinds of inquiries in terms of cross cultural exploration or do you mean specifically Japanese America you know or was it pretty well left to this assortment of these rather Maverick zoning in nicely when I say what you're saying there was a great deal of scholarly curiosity about Japan I'm groping I mean there was a extraordinary interest in in Asian religion for example during this period and one of the major endeavors that the Chicago World's Fair was a gathering of world religious scholars and and Japan and Japanese religion you know of Buddhism and the newer national religion of Shinto based on earlier practices was very much a part of a part of that discussion Buddhist texts were beginning to be translated the first published translations from the sanskrit happened with you know in in the dial back in that this must have been in the 1840s 1850s Thoreau and Emerson were very interested in that but by the 1890s 1900 1910 Harvard was publishing a series of Buddhist texts in in translation one of the Warren brothers Henry Warren was a great scholar of Buddhism so I think there was a scholarly interest in Japan alongside this as you put it maverick tastes but many of these scholars have their own maverick tendencies I mean the truth is that the cross-cultural research is often driven by eccentrics and misfits and the more way the more we learn about cloade Levy's clothes or Margaret Mead already any of the other great cultural interpreters the more eccentric they seem to us because they are literally eccentric they're literally standing outside their national traditions that's a very garbled answer to a very sophisticated question we have been acquiring copies of your paperback we now have quite a pile of them I want a buddy R that I'm hope you're buying them new mission to here the question is is there a hardbound lavishly illustrated version that one could buy also for special friends is there a lab versus traited version of the Great Wave art hard bone yeah we did do a nice version of it those who may have to buy second-hand know you ask a good question I mean I the book is in part an art book The Great Wave but um if you want a book to cost under $30 you can't do all that many illustrations certainly not in color so my editor the same editor with all of the down bait responses said she said Chris the illustrations will just have to be reminders that has a sad sound the illustrations are beautiful another question fantastic note let's bring it back up again and I'll go buy the book and have gotta sign it thank you very much for lecturing

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 8,558

Keywords: japan, boston, japanese art, lecture, art history, art collecting, course

Id: f76KHIadpag

Length: 52min 54sec (3174 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017