The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Deﬁning “Japanese Art” in America

Tomoko NAKASHIMA*INTRODUCTION
The American concept of “Japanese art” was ethnologically imagined
and commercially created in the nineteenth century. For many Americans
at that time, the term “Japanese art” referred to such items as decorative
objects, illustrated books and ethnic garments. Then in the twentiethcentury, as the concept of “Japanese art” became academically established in the US, what had previously been included in “Japanese art” in
the American idea was marginalized as bric-a-brac, gradually losing its
legitimacy as art. What Americans see presented in their art museums
today as “Japanese art” is material that has been primarily collected anddisplayed by reference to the second, twentieth-century American concept of “Japanese art.” The original American concept has practicallydisappeared.
Recent studies have demonstrated the fact that the twentieth-century
American concept was largely inﬂuenced by the Japanese concept of“Japanese art” that originated during the Meiji period.1 With these studies, it has become possible to inquire further into questions such as how
the current concept of “Japanese art” was universalized and naturalizedin America, as well as, how “Japanese art” was conceptualized in nineteenth-century-America before the Japanese idea of “Japanese art”
Copyright © 2006 Tomoko Nakashima. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Assistant Professor, Tokai University

245

246

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

became gradually dominant in the twentieth century. The latter question
I will examine in this paper.
It is now commonly understood among Japanese art historians that theJapanese concepts of “Japanese art” and the Japanese narrative of“Japanese art history” were, paradoxically, created as a national enterprise by implanting and adopting the Western notion of “art” in the Meiji
period.2 In this process, objects that belonged to the emperor and the aristocracy, as well as religious artifacts, were reinterpreted as “authentic art
objects” by their reclassiﬁcation within Western art categories such as
painting, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, and so on. This
procedure paralleled the process of constituting a modern nation-state.
The attempt to create a narrative of “Japanese art history” by claiming anational body of ﬁne art to equal that of Western classic art was not articulated in text form until 1900, when the Japanese government publisheda book, in French, on the occasion of Japanese participation in the ParisInternational Exhibition. Later this book was translated into Japaneseand set the canon of Japanese art.3 Thus, the comprehensive Japaneseconcept of “Japanese art” was not available for the American audience
until the twentieth century. Nonetheless, this Japanese concept gradually took over from the earlier American idea with the establishment of
the transpaciﬁc networks promoting Japanese studies that appeared after
the end of the 1920s.4 In the latter half of the twentieth century, these
networks ﬁrst inﬂuenced US academia and the acquisition and exhibition policies of American museums, and then started to inﬂuence the general public. According to Japanese art historian Yoshiaki Shimizu, thiscreated the situation in which “the Japanese artworks collected and displayed in museums of the United States have been, directly or indirectly, conditioned by the Japanese national policy toward its cultural
patrimony before they departed their place of origins. This implies thatthose works in collections outside Japan carry ready-made labels thatconvey ofﬁcial Japanese judgments.”5 In other words, Japan was the initiator in creating the twentieth-century American concept of “Japaneseart.”This paper will focus its attention on the often-forgotten, earlier
American idea of “Japanese art” that originated in the nineteenth century and was then marginalized and rendered illegitimate in the twentieth century. In so doing, it will ﬁrst locate the origins of the American
conception of Japan as a country of decorative objects. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, Japanese decorative objects were mostly
categorized as ethnological specimens, and then in the last half of theDEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

247

nineteenth century some of them were promoted as exotic art. This paper
will examine how this American process of discovering “Japanese art”
in the nineteenth century parallels James Clifford’s analysis of theWestern process of discovering (African) “primitive” arts of the twentieth century. Clifford states that “the great modernist ‘pioneers’ areshown promoting formerly despised tribal ‘fetishes’ or mere ethnographic ‘specimens’ to the status of high art and in the process discovering new dimensions of their (‘our’) creative potential.” In his
deﬁnition, this modernism process was intended to constitute “nonWestern arts in its own image” and thus as “a going Western concern.”6
This paper will in turn argue that the American discovery of “Japaneseart” was also a process that constituted “Japanese art” in its own
American image. It can be said that during the nineteenth century
Americans took the initiative in creating the American concept of“Japanese art.” I would like to suggest, therefore, that at the beginningof the twentieth century, a shift occurred from the American-initiatedconcept to the Japanese concept, after which the Japanese concept
became dominant. At the same time, the primary location of “Japaneseart” in the US moved from the spaces of commercial outlets and private
residences to academic spaces such as universities and art museums.
The recuperation of the original American deﬁnition of Japanese art
in the Western art tradition allows for a broader view of the history ofJapanese art in America. It renders visible, for example, the similarities
between “the Japan craze”7 of the nineteenth century and the recent“Cool Japan” phenomenon, making it possible to see this twenty-ﬁrst
century American view of Japanese art as the completion of a circle andthe reassertion of conceptual initiative. Since the 1990s Japan has
become for many Americans better known as the home of Japanese pop
culture characters such as Pokemon, Godzilla and Hello Kitty. In fact,
the recent American vogue for Japanese cultural products such as anime,
manga and art objects is quite noticeable. Journalist Douglas McGray
dubbed this phenomenon Japan’s “Gross National Cool,” and explainedthat “Japan’s global cultural inﬂuence has only grown (since the 1990s).”8
Since the publication of McGray’s article, Japan has often been termed“Cool Japan.” It is clear that there are many similarities between what
Americans imagined “Japanese art” to be in the last half of the nineteenth
century and currently popular Japanese cultural products, more so in fact
than there are between either of those two versions of “Japanese art” andwhat many Americans see as “Japanese art” in American art museums
now.

248

TOMOKO NAKASHIMAI.

THE ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN CONCEPTION OF JAPANAS AN ARTISTIC COUNTRY

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that information about
Japan and the Japanese people became available in American publications, and American people gradually developed their ideas about Japan.
Some of the earliest US writings about Japan appeared in geographybooks. During this period, various geography books were published as
the latest scientiﬁc knowledge, made possible by the accumulation of
information about the non-Western world. The latter half of the eighteenth century was “an era of exploration and scientiﬁc study,”9 and theperiod between 1770 and 1835 has been called “the age of the exploration narrative”10 in the West. It has also been noted that during thisperiod “ideologies and stereotypes [of peoples] were in the process of
being formed” through the descriptions of numerous travel writings.11
Mary Louise Pratt also argues that in this era “scientiﬁc exploration[became] a focus of intense public interest, and a source of some of themost powerful ideational and ideological apparatuses through which
European [and American] citizenries related themselves to other partsof the world.” This kind of “planetary consciousness,” she suggests, was“a basic element constructing modern Eurocentrism.”12 Within this cultural trend, so widespread in the West, Japan also became the subject oftravel writings, and various accounts of Japan were published. These
texts were reproduced in various publication forms, including geography books, thereby reaching an even wider audience, and they graduallycreated the stereotyped image of the Japanese as a people who produced
exquisite decorative art works, thus constructing them as an artistic people even before the arrival of Commodore Perry.
Japan in American geography books
Americans began to publish their own series of geography books soonafter they gained independence. These US geography books included not
only geographical information about various places or nations but also
information about the manners and customs of their people, descriptions
which fostered generalized stereotypes. One of the ﬁrst descriptions ofJapanese decorative objects was seen in Jedidiah Morse’s The American
Universal Geography. In its ﬁfth edition, published in 1805, Morsedepicted Japan as a barbarian and pagan yet well-disciplined country andmentioned Japanese lacquer ware as one of Japan’s most famous

DEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

249

products.13 Morse was a minister of the congregational church inCharlestown, Massachusetts and had published various geographybooks in America from as early as 1784. Later he came to be called thefather of American geography.14 Within the next few decades, Morse’s
description of Japan in his geography books gradually developed an
impression of the Japanese as highly skillful in decorative art industries.
For example, Morse’s geography book of 1824 states that the inhabitantsof Japan are as “highly civilized as the Chinese, and even excel them inseveral manufactures, particularly in silk and cotton goods, and in Japan[lacquer] and porcelain ware. . . . The Japanese cultivate literature andthe useful arts.”15 The Japanese people are characterized as proﬁcient in
useful art skills and their industrial arts perceived as highly developed.
This American perception of the Japanese promoted by American geography books remained the same throughout the nineteenth century.16
Japanese decorative objects collected as ethnological specimens andcuriosAt the beginning of the nineteenth century, as texts were slowly creating an American perception of Japan as a country of superb decorative
objects, actual decorative objects, which had been collected both as ethnological specimens and as curios by Americans who engaged in unofﬁcial trade with Japan, also reinforced this perception. In the years
between 1797 and 1809 unofﬁcial trade existed between America andJapan. This trade led to various Japanese objects being brought backhome by American sea captains and their crews and exhibited locally as
curious objects from Japan.17
During the period when there existed unofﬁcial trade between
America and Japan, the Dutch merchants were facing difﬁculty in continuing their trade in Asia due to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and sochartered vessels from neutral countries such as the United States inorder to continue their annual voyages between Batavia and Nagasaki.
One of the American vessels thus engaged in trade with Japan was theFranklin headed by Captain James Devereux of Salem. Devereux collected a variety of artistic curiosities in Nagasaki, and upon safely
returning to Salem he exhibited these curios in his house.18 Salem’s
famous diarist, Reverend William Bentley, recorded this after he visited
Devereux’s house on June 23, 1800 and saw various Japanese objects.
Bentley admired the quality of the Japanese decorative objects such as“the stone tables, tea tables, servers, knife cases, small cabinets,” most

250

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

of which were lacquered objects. He was also impressed with the luxurious garments made of silk, as well as the excellent quality of Japanese
metal-work. Despite his admiration of Japanese decorative objects intheir intricacy and exquisiteness, he judged Japanese ukiyo-e very
poorly, writing that they “were totally destitute of perspective,” andfailing to appreciate the unique quality of Japanese pictorial art.19 Other
American seamen, such as Captain William V. Hutchings of the
Massachusetts from Boston, and Captain Samuel Gardner Derby of theMargaret from Salem, also engaged in trade with Japan on behalf of the
Dutch East India Company. They both came home with various Japanese
decorative objects some of which they donated to the East India Marine
Society (now the Peabody Essex Museum) in Salem. Through unofﬁcial
trade between America and Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century,
various Japanese curios reached America. They were collected both as
ethnological specimens and purchased as souvenirs. Among theseobjects, decorative art objects were the most admired. This reception
again reinforced the US conception of Japan as a country of excellent
industrial art products.
American books on Japan
Through an era of exploration and scientiﬁc study, then, countlesstravel writings were produced, and as Mary Louise Pratt indicates inImperial Eyes, these travel writings produced “the rest of the world” fortheir readers.20 During this period, successive travel writings about Japan
were also published in Europe.21 With this accumulating body of texts
on Japan, the Western conception of Japan was being gradually formed.
These texts were also gathered, classiﬁed, edited and reproduced in otherpublication forms, thus reaching an even wider segment of society. In
America, a book wholly devoted to Japan was published in 1841 by
Harper and Brothers as one of the hundred volumes selected for theirpeople’s library series. It was entitled Manners and Customs of theJapanese in the Nineteenth Century and published anonymously by an
English author, Mary Margaret Busk.22 Busk herself had not been to
Japan; however, she made the most of the information about Japan
already available in European languages, editing it in the form of a travelaccount for general readers. Her book must have been very popular in
the US as it was reprinted in 1843, 1845, and 1867.23 One other book on
Japan was published in the US before the Commodore Perry expedition
arrived in Japan by an English author, Charles Mac Farlane, in 1852.24

DEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

251

Both Busk and Mac Farlane made a detailed analysis of Japanese art
and art industries. First, Busk commented that the Japanese were an artloving people and stated that the arts were more advanced in Japan thanin China. She pointed out that Japanese ﬁne arts were wholly ignorantin the knowledge of perspective and anatomy, considered to be the mostbasic and important elements of European ﬁne arts since the Renaissanceera. Due to this lack of knowledge, Japanese arts were understood as neither advanced nor civilized in the higher departments such as landscapeand ﬁgure paintings, sculpture and architecture. Japanese artists were notgood at making compositions or creating correct likenesses; however
they were considered to have some merit in the close delineation ofnature and details, as well as in their use of brilliant and beautiful colors.25 Mac Farlane shared a similar opinion with Busk. For example, inregard to Japanese portrait painters he mentioned that their attention was“principally directed to accuracy in the details of costume and to the general air; the face is never a likeness,” and mentioned the exquisitenessof the delineation of ﬂowers and birds in Japanese paintings.26 BothBusk’s and Mac Farlane’s analyses demonstrated that they did not appreciate Japanese pictorial art once it was classiﬁed within the higher
category of the European art hierarchy; however, they esteemed the decorative arts which they classiﬁed into a lower category in the hierarchy.
For example, Mac Farlane asserted that there was “but one opinion as tothe industry, ingenuity and manual dexterity of the Japanese,” and that“arts and manufactures are carried on in every part of the country, andsome of them are brought to such a degree of perfection, as even to
surpass those of Europe.”27 These narratives about “Japanese art” byEuropeans written for American readers had the effect of not only
creating the American “domestic subject”28 but also of marginalizing
Japanese art as ethnic art by interpreting Japanese art in terms of thegrammar of European art. Yet, at the same time, these writings helped
to reinforce the previous American perception of Japan as a country of
excellent decorative objects and showed American eyes how to read
“Japanese art.”
An ofﬁcial encounter between the United States and Japan
Before the publication of the ofﬁcial travel narrative of the American
expedition to Japan of 1853–1854, headed by Commodore Perry, there
were no American narratives about Japan written based on the actual
experience of visiting Japan. Therefore, the Americans including Perry

252

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

himself saw and imagined Japan through European writings before theycame to Japan. In Japan, Perry and his crew conﬁrmed partly if not completely what had been written in European accounts of Japan. For example, when they had an opportunity to exchange gifts ofﬁcially with thegovernment of Japan, they received gifts that mostly consisted of various handmade decorative objects such as lacquer ware, silk textiles,
porcelain, etc.29 Upon receiving these gifts, one American crew member
commented that “every one, the Commodore included remarked on themeager display and the lack of rich brocades and magniﬁcent things
always associated with our ideas of Japan.”30 His comment suggests they
had a preconceived notion about Japan as a country of splendid decorative art objects even before they visited Japan. At the same time, by publishing an American text on Japan and commenting about Japanese art,
the expedition members also contributed to the reinforcement of theWestern interpretation of Japanese art. In The Narrative of the Expedition, the ofﬁcial publication of Perry’s expedition, they basicallyrepeated the European way of seeing Japanese art.31 However, they also
generated some new ideas by examining the Japanese pictorial art works
they collected in Japan. Professor Peter Paul Duggan, instructor of drawing at the time at the Free Academy of New York,32 analyzed Japanese
pictorial art by examining an illustrated children’s book, stating his opinion that the illustrations were drawn with “a freedom and humorous senseof the grotesque and ludicrous.”33 Seeing Japanese art as “grotesque” and“humorous” was a new way of reading it in the West. Within the next
few decades, however, this view became a primary way of reading
Japanese art.
II.

AMERICAN DISCOVERY OF “JAPANESE ART”
IN THE SPHERE OF ART

From exotic curios to exotic art
Once the opening of Japan had been achieved, actual Japanese decorative objects began ﬂowing into Western markets in larger quantities.
With the European and American interest in Japanese art growing among
artists and art critics, an essay about Japanese art was published in
America as early as 1868. The center of expertise in “Japanese art” wasshifting from travel narrative writers to artists and art critics. This fact
also demonstrates that the location of the American concept of “Japaneseart” had begun shifting gradually from the sphere of ethnology to that ofart.

DEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

253

Around 1870, at least three essays on Japanese art were written andpublished by Americans: by Russell Sturgis in 1868, and by John La
Farge and James Jackson Jarves in 1870. In writing their essays all threeshared a similar taste in appreciating Japanese art. These art critics andartists were all followers of John Ruskin’s gothic and mediaeval art ideas
and were in sympathy with the tradition of Romanticism. Romanticism
and the Romantic Movement took a multiplicity of forms in reaction suchas seeking their artistic inspiration in the past traditions of the Middle
Ages, and in worlds beyond the reach of civilization, and in the contemplation of the “primitive” in the natural world.34 The three writers
also shared an interest in the works of the pre-Raphaelists, Italian primitive art and Japanese art. Although it is hard to imagine now, these were
all considered as marginal art forms during the nineteenth century andcategorized as either non-academic, primitive or exotic. The Westernperception of “primitive civilization” has varied with time, and during
the middle of the nineteenth century both Italy and Japan were sometimes included in this category. Mary Louise Pratt argues that “the eighteenth century has been identiﬁed as a period in which Northern Europe
asserted itself as the center of civilization, claiming the legacy of theMediterranean as its own. It is not surprising, then, to ﬁnd German or
British accounts of Italy sounding like German or British accounts ofBrazil.”35 “Brazil” here could just as easily be “Japan.” Anthropologist
Shelly Errington further argues that “in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the aesthetic space of marginality and irrationality was occupied by a changing parade of ‘grotesque’ and ‘decorative’ items, including Trecento Italian, Polynesian, Archaic Greek, Egyptian, andJapanese.”36 By taking account of these arguments, it can be understood
how these American art critics and artists, who were attracted by“grotesque” art works of the Pre-Raphaelite, Italian primitives and gothic
architecture which were produced or discovered from the tradition of
Romanticism, also discovered Japanese art from the same perspective.
Thus, their appreciation of and analysis of Japanese art in their texts wasa process of deﬁning Japanese art as a marginal art situated outside theborders of authentic European classic art.
The allegory of afﬁnity
The writings of Sturgis, La Farge and Jarves commonly ﬁnd Japanese
art to be new and even modern, something able to inspire contemporary
European non-academic/avant-garde artists and their art movements.
Sturgis considered Japanese art to contain “so much clear expression of254

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

a kind of thought which we generally suppose modern and occidental,”and he thought it had been “a wonder to all European artists and critics.”37 These discourses created what James Clifford has referred to as“the allegory of afﬁnity”38 linking Japanese and modern art works. A
similar view can be found in the way in which Picasso, Leger and manyother artists of the early twentieth century discovered African art.39“Japanese art” came to be regarded as a new source of artistic inspiration at a time when European and American artists were seeking new
expressions and ideas in art. In fact, throughout the second half of thenineteenth century Japanese art continued to stimulate various art movements, including Realism and Impressionism, and now this effect as awhole is called Japonisme, just as African art inspired Cubism in theearly twentieth century. What critics found new and inspiring in Japanese
art at that time were its grotesqueness, its realism, its close observationof nature, and its mediaeval and decorative qualities. Mostly on the basisof their observation of Hokusai’s prints, they found it not only grotesquebut also odd, ugly, humorous and diabolic. Both Sturgis and Jarves foundsome similarity between the works of Hokusai and the works of William
Blake and Gustave Doré, both famous for their gothic and realist fancies, as well as with Winslow’s Homer’s drawings in terms of their lackof formality.40 This exempliﬁed the process of how non-Western objects
were, according to Clifford, “integrated, recognized as masterpieces,
given homes within an anthropological-aesthetic object system” in theWest.41
Through the texts such as those produced by these three writers,“Japanese art” was marginalized as exotic and different, and this idea
was further reinforced by contrasting “Japanese art” with European classic art. Jarves stated that the “Japanese esthetic point of view, feeling,
and comprehension is antipodal to the Occidental,” and even though headmitted that the Japanese were a “people possessing remarkable artistic
skill,” he concluded that its “theory and practice” were “widely differing from Europeans.”42 According to Jarves’s interpretation, European
artists were good at drawing, modeling and painting with academic skill,
but lacked any real appreciation of beauty. On the other hand, Japaneseartists “thoroughly enjoy and comprehend the nature of ﬁne art without
any technical knowledge of art”43 La Farge agreed with Jarves on the
point that the Japanese artists drew the essence of the subjects instinctively despite the fact they lacked “the feeling for plastic beauty that we
inherit from the Greek ancestors.”44 Long before these writers examinedDEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

255

Japanese art in this way, it was already perceived as lacking in knowledgeof perspective and anatomy, as mentioned previously. These concepts
created a vague idea of Japanese art as something different. Nonetheless,texts written by American art critics and artists created a more concrete
image of Japanese art as odd, grotesque, humorous and even decadent
by noting its afﬁnity with the works of contemporary European andAmerican avant-garde artists and by contrasting it with European classic
art. James Clifford remarked the same kind of afﬁnity in relation to tribaland modern art. According to Clifford, “tribal and modern artifacts are
similar only in that they do not feature the pictorial illusionism or sculptural naturalism that came to dominate Western European art after the
Renaissance.”45 The American concept of “Japanese art” of the nineteenth century also recognized that Japanese artifacts did not feature“pictorial illusionism or sculptural naturalism” by reading them as
destitute of knowledge of perspective and anatomy. In fact, as Shelly
Errington points out, what eventually became “primitive art in the twentieth century was simply grotesque in the nineteenth.”46 This suggeststhat both Japanese and African art lie in the same line of the history of
the Western discovery of non-Western art. During the nineteenth century, both the conceptualization of the American notion of “Japanese art”
and the appreciation and interpretation of what was important and beautiful was in the hands of Americans.
The “Japan Craze” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century
The American consumption of exotic or grotesque arts mainly took
place in the sphere of the decorative arts. As historian T. J. Jackson Lears
has explained, in the post-Civil War American city eclectic ornament
bedecked nearly everything in sight, from public buildings to the mostordinary objects in private households. There were “Egyptian gatewayson Protestant cemeteries, Greek gods on teapots, Gothic facades on
railway stations.”47 This social phenomenon is now understood as the
Aesthetic movement which describes a period of proliﬁc artistic activities centered on the decorative arts in the 1870s, 1880s, and early 1890s,
and is considered to have played an active role in the transformation ofAmerican life at the time.48 Things Japanese were also enthusiasticallyconsumed in this context. The Aesthetic movement served as the matrixof the “Japan craze” in America, and thus, the “Japan craze” occurred
mostly in the sphere of the decorative arts.49 This naturally led toAmerican appreciation and interpretation of “Japanese art” in that period

256

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

being shaped by the assumption that it was exotic art, and to the fact that
the US selection of Japanese masterpieces centered on decorative
objects. As an article in the New York Times in 1877 put it: Japanese art“is often horrible, usually grotesque, never noble or inspiring. . . . But
none can deny that the Japanese have delicacy of fancy, a thorough sympathy with a few aspects of nature, a ﬁne sense of humor and an intimate
acquaintance with the use of the primitive colors. . . . The Japanese havea soul above household art.”50
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the two concepts of“Japanese art” that originated separately in Japan and in America encountered each other, they had very few points in common. In 1904,
when Tenshin Okakura, with an introduction from William Sturgis
Bigelow, was invited to examine the collections of Japanese art in theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston, he came away with the impression that“the Museum treated Japanese art as a fad or a joke but not seriously.”51
Okakura was one of the key persons involved in creating the narrativeof “Japanese art history” and “Japanese painting” (Nihon-ga). To hiseyes, the appreciation and interpretation of American “Japanese art”
seemed “a fad or joke” when compared to that of the Japanese creationof “Japanese art” as a national enterprise. Okakura’s wish was that “theMuseum collection should be developed in a way to make it the representative collection of oriental art in the West”52 according to the recently created Japanese canon. In the twentieth century, the process by which
the Japanese canon permeated throughout American society was also a
marginalizing and disparaging process, as objects once appreciated as
the major works of Japanese art became reduced to mere bric-a-brac. At
the same time, the primary location of Japanese art in American society
shifted from the hands of general public to the professionals, and fromoutside to inside academia. Through this process, “Japanese art” inAmerican society became objects for professionals and connoisseurs
during the most of the twentieth century until recently when a new waveof American consumption of Japanese artistic objects such as manga andanime came into vogue.
III.

“COOL JAPAN” IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

By the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, many Japanese art historians
located in the United States had begun to express their concern over theextent to which their discipline had been inﬂuenced by Japan and theDEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

257

Japanese academy, as the Japanese conception of “Japanese art” hadbecome increasingly inﬂuential in American academia during the twentieth century. In their view, this situation had created a naturalized hierarchy privileging the Japanese over the American academy, and theyexpressed a felt need to change the present state within their ﬁeld ofstudy.53 The story of American and Japanese cultural geopolitics over“Japanese art” still continues in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
Change has been occurring outside academia as well. At the end of
2003, the Washington Post reported that “Japan’s role in the world haschanged dramatically over the decades, from expansionist militaryempire in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century to economic superpowerin the 1980s. . . . The national conﬁdence has been sapped by a thirteenyear economic slump, Japan is reinventing itself—this time as the coolest
nation of Earth.”54 Recent American appreciation and consumption ofJapanese artifacts has been centered on otaku (geek) and juvenile cultural products such as anime, manga, video games and contemporary art
works. In fact, it was estimated that revenue from royalties and sales
overseas of these artifacts went up 300 percent between 1992 and 2002,
reaching 12.5 billion dollars in 2002,55 the phenomenon that Douglas
McGray dubbed “Gross National Cool” as mentioned previously. These
cultural/art objects are highly admired in America for their grotesque,sexualized, or kawaii (cute) qualities of exoticism that are thought toinherit the traditional Japanese art essence seen in objects such as ukiyoe prints and decorative art works.56
Some US scholars and public organizations began paying attention tothese Japanese cultural/art artifacts as they became increasingly popularin America. From February to December 2004, an exhibition entitled“Godzilla Conquers the Globe” was held at Columbia University.57 In
this exhibition, subtitled “From Folk Monsters to Mass Monsters,”
Gregory M. Pfugfelder exhibited a long line of Japanese “grotesque” and“cute” monstrous creatures, represented in artifacts ranging from theprint works of Hokusai and Utagawa Kuniyoshi to modern Godzillaposters and Pokemon cards, as artifacts that rendered the essence ofJapanese popular culture. For example, in Pfugfelder’s view there is an
afﬁnity between Kuniyoshi’s Genjikumo ukiyo-e awase, which portrayed memorable scenes from the kabuki theater played by famous contemporary actors, and the series of Godzilla movie posters, because bothtypes of objects depict popular visual entertainment of the time in print
form and were circulated widely among the general public. On the same

258

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

grounds, Pfugfelder also pointed to a link between Hokusai manga andpresent day manga, as well as between obake karuta (ghost/monster
cards) of the Edo period and today’s Pokemon cards. In this way, ukiyoe prints, Hokusai manga as well as obake karuta and netsuke are being
considered as precursors of today’s movie posters, manga, Pokemon
cards and anime ﬁgure toys.58 In October, 2004, a scholarly conference
on Godzilla was organized at the University of Kansas to discuss
Japanese pop culture, globalization, and US-Japan relations after WWII.
And from April to July 2005, an art exhibition entitled “Little Boy: The
Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” was held at the Japan Society
gallery in New York. Exhibited there were manga, anime, Hello Kitty,
Godzilla, and many ﬁgure toys as well as art works of Murakami
Takashi, among others. In the exhibition catalogue, Murakami saw thisCool Japan phenomenon as a part of a Western process of modernism,
arguing that “the art world in the West is searching for the next new theory. This search has reached as far as Asia, a less-Westernized cultural
sphere in which Japan, and its capital Tokyo, are receiving the mostattention.”59 This means that “Japanese art” is again being regarded as a
new source of artistic inspiration in the West in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
Recent American consumption and interpretation of Japanese cultural/art objects may suggest another paradigm change in the American ideaof “Japanese art.”
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have examined the formation process of the American
concept of “Japanese art” in the nineteenth century. Japan was ﬁrst discovered as a country of exquisite decorative objects through the descriptions of geography books and the collections of “Japanese art” in the ﬁrst
half of the nineteenth century. During this period, “Japanese art” wascollected and appreciated as a range of exotic curios mostly in relation
to the sphere of ethnology. In the postbellum society, “Japanese art”
began to be discussed in artists and art critics’ texts and gradually moved
over into the sphere of art. Nonetheless, the things imagined as “Japaneseart” at that time were fans, lacquers, ceramics, illustrated books andclothing, objects now largely characterized as bric-a-brac. The locationof “Japanese art” until the beginning of the twentieth century was, as theJapanese art historian Christine M. E. Guth remarked, fairs and expositions, bazaars and curio shops, and private residences.60 The consump-DEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

259

tion and appreciation of “Japanese art” was largely backed by popularinterest in Japanese art among the general public. “Japanese art” wasboth imagined in terms of ethnological specimens and as popular commodities or exotic art in America during the nineteenth century. The conceptualization process was a going American concern. This American
concept of “Japanese art” which seemed a fad or a joke to Okakura’seyes in 1904 went on to contribute greatly to creating the Japanese narrative of “Japanese art” as a national enterprise. This Japanese narrative,
along with other Japanese modernization in all other ﬁelds, was closely
linked with the modernizing endeavors of establishing a national identity for Japan. During the twentieth century, co-operative efforts promoting “Japanese art” as ﬁne art in America involving the Japanese
government, public organizations and the academy both in the UnitedStates and Japan, changed what Americans imagined as “Japanese art”
from ethnological specimens and popular commodities to ﬁne classic art.
During this process, the primary location of “Japanese art” shifted fromcommercial outlets and private residences to academic spaces such asuniversities and museums.
At the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, scholars of the US academy
expressed their need for a change in the current paradigm of Japaneseart. At the same time, outside the academy, a cultural phenomenon arosewith the potential to change the American concept of “Japanese art,” the“Cool Japan” phenomenon. Within this phenomenon, once again theappreciation and interpretation of what is important and beautiful, in
things such as manga, anime, and characters such as Godzilla and Hello
Kitty, are in the hands of Americans. It does not necessary mean thatthings imagined as “Japanese art” during the nineteenth century and thetwenty-ﬁrst century are very similar. However, there are more than a few
afﬁnities between the two. For example, objects most enthusiasticallyappreciated both in the “Japan Craze” and in “Cool Japan” are considered as ethnically unique commodities. The primary locations of theseobjects are commercial outlets and private residences, and they are largely consumed by the general public. It can also be said that in both phases“Japanese art” is regarded as a new source of artistic inspiration, facilitating the discovery of new dimensions of American creative potential.
Most of all, in both cases the US-based interpretation and appreciationof “Japanese art” is primarily in the hands of Americans. Examining thefuture course of the American idea of “Japanese art” is out of the scopeof this paper. Nonetheless, when the twentieth-century paradigm of260

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

American “Japanese art” comes under scrutiny in future, it may be worth
considering how a very different concept of “Japanese art,” created in
the nineteenth century in America, which has now largely dropped outof history, was formed.
NOTES
1
Yoshiaki Shimizu, “Japan in American Museums: But Which Japan?” The Art
Bulletin, 83, 1 (March 2001), 123–134; Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawn, “Japanese Art
History, 2001: The State and Stakes of Research,” The Art Bulletin, 83, 1 (March 2001),
105–122; John Rosenﬁeld, “Japanese Art Studies in America since 1945,” Helen
Hardacre ed., The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States(Leiden, Boston and Koln: Brill, 1998), 161–194.
2
See, for example, Sato Doshin, Meiji Kokka to Kindai Bijutsu [Meiji Japan andModern Art] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1999); Kitazawa Noriaki, Kyokai no
Bijutsu-shi [The Art History of Boundaries] (Tokyo: Brucke, 2000); Takagi Hiroshi,
Tennou-sei no Bunkashiteki Kenkyu [Studies of Modern Emperor Systems as Cultural
History] (Tokyo: Koukura shobo, 1997).
3
Sato, Meiji Kokka, 124–126; Takagi, Tennou-sei, 345–381; Mabuchi Akiko, “1900
nen Paris Bankokuhaku to Histoire de l’Art du Japon wo Megutte,” [1900 Paris Exhibition and Histoire de l’Art du Japon] National Research Institute for Cultural Properties,
Tokyo eds., Kataru Genzai Katarareru Kako [Narrating Present Narrated Past] (Tokyo:
Heibonsha, 1999), 43–45.
4
Tomoko Nakashima, “The Formative Years of the Transpaciﬁc Networks Promoting Japanese Studies in America,” Paciﬁc and American Studies, 4 (March 2004),
111–127.
5
Shimizu, “Japan in American Museums,” 131.
6
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 193, 195.
7
William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford, CT:
Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990), 16.
8
Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2002),
47.
9
Catharina Blomberg, The West’s Encounter with Japanese Civilization 1800–1940
volume 1 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), 7. This series is an anthology of travel writings Westerners wrote about Japan.
10
Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, “General Introduction,” Tim Fulford and Carol
Bolton ed., Travel Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835 volume 1 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), xiii. This is anotherseries which is an anthology of travel writings.
11
ibid., xvi.
12
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writings and Transculturation (London
and New York: Routledge, 1992), 23, 15.
13
Jedidiah Morse, The American Universal Geography, Part Second ﬁfth edition(Boston: J. T. Buckingham, 1805), 491.
14
Jedidiah Morse, Geography Made Easy: Being a Short, but Comprehensive Systemof That Very Useful and Agreeable science (New Haven: Meigs, Owen and Dana, 1784).
Japan was ﬁrst described in the following book, Jedidiah Morse, The American
Geography; Or, A View of the Present Situation of the United States of America ([1789];

DEFINING “JAPANESE ART” IN AMERICA

261

New York: Arno Press, 1970), 525. Kamei Shunsuke, “Toyo no Fushigina Kuni, (Jyou),”[Mysterious Country in the East] Kokusai Bunka 107 (1963), 13–16.
15
Jedidiah Morse and Sidney Edwards Morse, A New System of Geography Twentyfourth edition (Boston: Richardson, 1824), 246–7.
16
See, S. Augustus Mitchell, A System of Modern Geography (Philadelphia: E. H.
Butler, 1870), 301; S. Augustus Mitchell, The New Primary Geography (Philadelphia:
E. H. Butler, 1888), 79.
17
Unofﬁcial American trade with Japan from the period 1797 to 1809, see, Richard
Hildreth, Japan as It Was and Is (Boston: Philips, Sampson, 1855), 446–9; Shunzo
Sakamaki, “Japan and the United States, 1790–1853,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 18 (1939), 4–11; Hina Hirayama, “ ‘A True Japanese Taste’: Constructionof Knowledge about Japan in Boston, 1880–1900,” (Ph. D. Diss., Boston University,1999), 38–52; Worlds Revealed: The Dawn of Japanese and American Exchange(Tokyo: Edo-Tokyo Museum, 1999), 57–92.
18
His collection included ﬁve ukiyo-e prints, various decorative lacquer wares and toy
animals which are now housed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. See, Worlds
Revealed, 57, 62–92.
19
The Diary of William Bentley, D. D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem,
Massachusetts. Volume two (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1962), 342.
20
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, n. p.
21
For example, in 1727 Engelbert Kaempfer’s The History of Japan was published in
London, followed by Carl Peter Thunberg’s Flora Japonica in 1784, and his travelaccount of Asia in 1792. Also in 1816 Russian navy captain Vassili Michailovick
Golownin published his account of his captivity in Japan. Then the narratives of Izaak
Titsingh (1819), G. F. Meijlan (1830), and Hendrick Doeff (1833), who all came to Japanas a members of the Dutch East India Company, were published in Europe, along withGerman physician Philipp Franz von Siebold’s reputed series of books on Japan from1832 to 1851, in German.
22
Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century from the Accountsof Recent Dutch Residents in Japan, and from the German Work of Dr. PH. FR. Von
Siebold (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841).
23
These were reprinted as a collection of Harper’s the family library series as M. M.
Busk ed., Manners and Customs of the Japanese (New York: Harper, 1843).
24
Charles Mac Farlane, Japan: An Account, Geographical and Historical (New York:
George P. Putnam, 1852), 259.
25
Manners and Customs, 225–6.
26
Mac Farlane, Japan, 327–8.
27
ibid., 259.
28
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 4.
29Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron volume 1([1856]; New York: AMS Press, 1967), 369.
30
Rear Admiral George Henry Preble, U. S. N., Boleslaw Szczeniak ed., The Openingof Japan: A Diary of Discovering in the Far East, 1853–1856 (Norman, Okla: Universityof Oklahoma Press, 1962), 146.
31
Hawks, Narrative, 50–1, 59.
32
Christine Wallace Laidlaw, “The American Reaction to Japanese Art 1853–1876,”(Ph. D. diss., New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1996), 12.
33
Hawks, Narrative, 268, 459, 461–463.
34
Jane Turner ed., The Dictionary of Art volume 26 (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries,
1996), 735–744.
35
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 10.

262

TOMOKO NAKASHIMA

Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress(Berkeley and Los Angels: University of California Press, 1998), 75.
37“The Fine Arts of Japan. II.,” The Nation, 7, 159 (July 16, 1868), 57.
38
Clifford, The Predicament, 196.
39
ibid., 189–196.
40“The Fine Arts of Japan. II.,” 57; “The Fine Arts of Japan. IV.,” The Nation, 7, 161(July 30, 1868), 96–7; James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd andHoughton, 1870), 223, 226–8; John La Farge, “An Essay on Japanese Art,” Raphael
Pumpelly, Across America and Asia (London: Sampson Low, and Marston, 1870), 199.
41
Clifford, The Predicament, 213.
42
Jarves, Art Thoughts, 221, 223.
43
ibid., 144.
44
La Farge, “An Essay,” 198.
45
Clifford, The Predicament, 192.
46
Errington, The Death of Authentic, 86.
47
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 33.
48
In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art and Rizzoli, 1987).
49
Hosley, The Japan Idea; Tomoko Nakashima, “The Vogue for Things Japanese in
the American Aesthetic Movement,” The Komaba Journal of Area Studies 4 (2000),
157–176; Christine M. E. Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
50“Japanese Art,” New York Times, February 12, 1877.
51
Edward Robinson, Conversation with Mr. Okakura, 27 November 1904, Archives,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cited in Ann Nishimura Morse, “Promoting Authenticity:
Okakura Kakuzo and the Japanese Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,”
Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Nagoya: Nagoya/Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), 145.
52
ibid., 145.
53
Rosenﬁeld, “Japanese Art Studies”; Yiengpruksawan, “Japanese Art History 2001”;
Shimizu, “Japan in American Museums.”
54“Japan’s Empire of Cool,” Washington Post, December 27, 2003.
55
ibid.
56
Susan J. Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave,2000), 4; “The Giant Cartoon Landing at Rockefeller Center,” New York Times, August24, 2003.
57
This exhibition was held at C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University andsponsored by the Donald Keen Center of Japanese Culture and the Weatherhead East
Asian Institute.
58
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ealac/dkc/calendar/godzilla/gozillaexhibition2.html
Internet accessed on February 22, 2005.
59
Takashi Murakami ed., Little Boy (New York: Japan Society, 2005), 152.
60
Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos, xviii.
36