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Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle

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In this richly informative volume, art historian Christine Guth illuminates not merely an era of esoteric (to non-Japanese) connoisseurship, but the whole, endlessly fascinating question of how a small island nation emerged from seclusion to dominance.
Masuda Takashi would be an interesting story even if he had had no artistic interests. Arising from modest but favored circumstances, he benefitted from access to Western education when that was a rare and valuable commodity in Japan. Guth does not say much about his business methods, but he was clearly entrepreneurial and -- as proved by success in a Darwinian environment -- as ruthless as he had to be.
He rose to the top of the Mitsui combine, though not a family member, along the way starting Japan's first business newspaper. And, in a familiar turn, he was toppled by a financial scandal in 1912. Guth does not say so, but it appears that his formal retirement did not actually mean he withdrew from substantial involvement with Mitsui.
Masuda lived form 1848 to 1938 and was part of the military-industrial complex that brought Japan low, though Guth does not say much about this either. He was certainly a nationalist, raising the alarm about export of Japan's artworks early in the 20th century, but as presented by Guth, his nationalism sounds positive. There is no hint that Masuda was in the racist, expansionist clique that destroyed most of East Asia.
It was a complex and interesting time, and Guth uses many of her pages to set the scene: the rise of new elite, their interest in the tea ceremony called chanoyu, their interaction with Western critics and collectors, their redefinition of worthiness in Japanese art, their continuity and ancient traditions.
Guth is one of those writers who has such excellent command of her sources that every sentence is crammed with information. Though only 225 pages, "Art, Tea and Industry" reads "long."
Masuda, inspired, he said, by an encounter with a lacquer writing box, was at the center of these often contradictory currents of aestheticism and accumulation. He heightened his social stature by acquiring teawares once owned by famous tea masters and potentates, but he also introduced new ways of tea. The most significant was his innovation in treating Buddhist art as an object of connoisseurship. This was not only expansive, it had to overcome superstitious fears.
Everything about Japanese collecting has a difference, a tang that separates it from the acquisitiveness of, say, J.P. Morgan or William Randolph Hearst, who flourished at the same time as Masuda.
For one thing, teawares were financial assets and could be used to secure loans. For another, adepts at chanoyu almost always tried their hands at making one or another of the objects in the teahouse. Morgan did not paint in oils.
More surprising, however, was the vandalism. Masters of tea ceremonies often cut up handscrolls to display a part in the tokonoma (alcove). Such vandalism also occurred in Europe and America. The difference is that here it is regarded as crude philistinism, while in Japan it was done by leaders of taste.
Masuda's story is full of odd twists, not least that his magnificent collection -- which included several objects now designated as official national treasures -- was broken up after his death. His heir was indifferent to his father's intensely Japanese relationship to art, preferring to stage Broadway-style musical comedies.