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The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan

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The Meiji emperor's opening of Japan to trade in 1868 led to a relentless wave of Yankee artists, writers, and scientists who gravitated to Japan for the peaceful and beautiful alternatives it offered in the aftermath of America's Civil War. A coarse, business- and trade-centered culture of commercialism was replacing what they saw as America's old values as the country rebuilt, and they sought solace and inspiration in a completely different, aesthetic world. In this story of the remarkable interactions of Japanese and American intellectuals from 1868 - 1913, Benfey shows how the two cultures viewed each other, learned from each other, and influenced each other's future, focusing on the literary, artistic, and aesthetic legacy, rather than on the hard political realities.

Like a wave spreading outward in concentric circles, the intellectuals of New England radiated their enthusiasm for Japan and its traditions. The American travelers knew each other, learned from each other, and influenced each other. Edward Sylvester Morse of Salem, Massachusetts, was one of the first to make a life commitment to Japan, attracting in his wake Isabella Stewart Gardner, William Sturgis Bigelow, Percival Lowell, and artist Ernest Fenollosa. Isabella Stewart Gardner, in turn, introduced T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Henry and William James to Japanese art and thought, while historian Henry Adams and painter John La Farge attracted William Morris Hunt, architects H. H. Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. Kakuzo Okakura, journeying to the U.S., had similar influence.

Benfey brings American and Japanese cultural history to life, creating real people with real emotions, problems, and commitments. His insight into the creative process adds verisimilitude to his portraits, and his ability to describe and evoke moods, whether they be in his recreation of samurai life or his depiction of a tired climber's first glimpse of Mt. Fuji, give a liveliness to the prose usually more characteristic of fiction than non-fiction. His nature imagery is so vibrant that the reader experiences journeys to the countryside alongside the participants.

In an Epilogue, which focuses on the year 1913, Benfey ties up the loose ends and finishes the stories of the characters on whom he has focused. His limited time frame has allowed him to explore America's influence on Japan in great detail, along with the "Japanese phenomenon" in this country, bringing to life the individuals who were responsible for it and illustrating the long-term effects. The book is a thoughtful and lively account of one of the most important cultural exchanges in history, and Benfey makes it both understandable and exciting. Mary Whipple

...We've all had the experience of meeting someone, only to discover what a small world it is. They dated your cousin, or you have friends in common, or you are connected by some other uncanny coincidence. It's not six degrees of separation, often its just one or two.
With even a passing familiarity with things Japanese, that's what it is like reading "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan" by Christopher Benfey.
On nearly every page Mr. Benfey introduces an American intellectual, writer or artist, or fact, or Japanese artifact, or incident, that makes the reader smile in wonder at the web of connection.
Mr. Benfey looks at how a wealthy circle of New England friends and relatives introduced Japan to the United States. Aptly named for the Hokusai print, evoking the tsunami - the social and cultural tidal wave that crashed across the United States and over Old Japan - Mr. Benfey has put together a cultural puzzle, linking Herman Melville, John Manjiro, Isabella Gardner, Henry Adams, John LeFarge, Lafcadio Hearn, Kakuzuo Okakura, Frank Lloyd Wright, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roosevelt and a dozen others, mostly friends, relatives, lovers and schoolmates, who made it happen.
The book opens with one such coincidence.
Herman Melville boarded the whaling ship Acushnet, in Fairhaven, Mass. Jan. 3, 1841, bound for Japan. Two days later, on the other side of the world, a 14-year-old boy named Manjiro, set out on a day-trip from a fishing village on Shikoku, Japan, only to be caught in a storm, washed out to sea and rescued by an American whaling ship, which eventually took him to Fairhaven.
Coming from opposite sides of the world, they were befriended by the same missionary in Honolulu, missing each the other by a couple of months. Each was destined to be a player in the introducing of East to West, and West to East, Melville with his books, and Manjiro, once back in Japan, as a translator and diplomat.
It would be 13 more years before Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama harbor to "open" Japan. But from the time Manjiro and Melville passed each other on ships in the night, a handful of individuals, mostly from wealthy New England families, and small group of Japanese diplomats, artists, and writers, were to meet, marry, have affairs, travel, write, collect, catalogue and create art with one another, in an unprecedented intermingling and crosspollination of talent and energy, centered on Japan.
In each chapter of the book, Mr. Benfey picks two individuals and tells their intertwing stories. For example, one chapter is dedicated to Melville and Manjiro. Another to Okakura and Gardner. One of the most fascinating, to my mind, details the lives of Percival Lowell, a Washington astronomer, and Mabel Loomis Todd, who wrote what many consider to be the most erotic diary of the Victorian era. Suffice it to say, you'll never read your Emily Dickinson the same way again.
While the principle characters are familiar as individuals, Mr. Benfey places each in context with the others and Japan. My only complaint is that I wish Mr. Benfey had provided a schematic or genealogy to keep help keep it all straight.
The book is full of surprises.
Washingtonians know Henry Adams, and the Augustus St. Gaudens memorial to his wife "Clover" in Rock Creek Cemetery. Who knew it was inspired by Japan's Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of Mercy, and a trip Adams took to Japan, with the artist John La Farge, after his wife's suicide?
Okukura, who knew India's Rabindranath Tagore, spoke several languages, studied and traveled with Ernest Fenollosa, and scandalized Boston society, with a rumored affair with Isabella Gardner, also collected art for American museums. He produced several books on art, Japanese tea and culture and was something of a cultural ambassador.
He was one of Adams' hosts in Japan, when Adams was traveling with La Farge, who managed to merge East and West in his Church of the Ascension mural in New York, a seminal painting that uses Japan's mountains as background.
His writings influnced at least three American poets: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
One of my favorite stories in the book is that German philosopher Martin Heidegger after reading Okakura's "The Book of Tea," apparently borrowed some of the concepts that were introduced to the West as his own in "Being and Time."
There is plenty more.
The New England collectors criss-crossed Japan, buying art, religious artifacts, ceramics, prints, and whatever else caught their fancy. The ones bent on preserving the Old Japan, may be most familiar to us today - as we have the Sackler Gallery in Washington, the Gardner Museum in Boston and the Peabody in Salem, all of which grew out of the Asia trade first established by New England whaling captains. who brought home stage and wonderful souvenirs from their travels to exotic lands. The New England collectors added to them to create amazing repositories of Asian art.
I found myself marveling at the web of friendships, kinships, relationships and interests this circles' legacy. The characters in Mr. Benfey's "Great Wave" seemed to know every important artist, diplomat, writer and intellectual in the world. It's an adventure to enter their circle and make their acquaintance.

OK.....we all know from our schooldays that there was a Boston Tea Party. We also know that in Japan they have a very elaborate tea ceremony. Early on in this very clever, erudite, and complex book, the author mentions these two facts. Is there a reason for him to do so? Well, yes, there is. It is one of the many interesting ways that Mr. Benfey shows the connection between Boston and Japan. Merchant ships from Boston (and the surrounding area) were deeply involved in the oriental tea trade. Also, ships from nearby ports were involved in whaling and frequently travelled to the whaling grounds off of Japan. Also, as the author shows, quite a few Boston Brahmins were interested in the culture of "Old Japan." They were disgusted with what they perceived to be the material crassness and lack of spirituality of America, as well as the jarring modernity of the Industrial Age. They wanted to go to Japan and to study the Japanese way of life before Japan, which had recently been "opened" by Commodore Perry, became "westernized." It was felt that there was much to learn by studying the religions of Japan, such as Buddhism and Taoism, as well as Japanese art and architecture. Mr. Benfey describes a few Japanese that travelled to the West, but most of the book details traffic going in the other direction. The author does an excellent job of describing how people as diverse as Henry Adams, Herman Melville, Frank Lloyd Wright, the artist John La Farge, the writer Lafcadio Hearn and the astronomer Percival Lowell (the man we mainly remember for his, erroneous, theory regarding the presence of "canals" on Mars) were shaped or influenced by their journeys to (or study of) the "mysterious East." Mr. Benfey weaves a magisterial tapestry, as he has purposely chosen people whose lives intersected. Thus, in a chain-reaction, one person who has fallen in love with Japan sparks an interest in another person, and so on down the line. So, for example, Percival Lowell influenced, through his writings on Japan, his poet-sister Amy Lowell. Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, attempting to get Theodore Roosevelt to adopt a pro-Japanese stance, figured it would be best to appeal to the President's aggressive side. (Roosevelt was well-known for not believing that "the meek shall inherit the earth.) In Bigelow's view the smart thing was to steer clear of oriental art and Buddhism and get the President interested in judo and the warrior ethic of the samurai. If the President could be convinced that the Japanese were manly and not effeminate, he might be more inclined to favor them. Bigelow got Roosevelt hooked on judo by pinning him to the floor in his office. Roosevelt set aside a Judo Room in the White House and studied with an authentic Japanese judo master. The enthusiastic Roosevelt even mentioned at a cabinet meeting "that his 'Japanese wrestler' had throat muscles 'so powerfully developed by training that it is impossible for any ordinary man to strangle him.'" Another interesting section of the book details how Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas on architecture were influenced by the traditional Japanese belief in simple lines and the importance of empty space and lack of clutter. Likewise, we see how Ezra Pound's admiration for the succinctness of Japanese poetry was reflected in his own work. One thing that is very interesting about the book is "the eye of the beholder" aspect: people saw what they wanted to. Some people saw the Japanese as warriors and "masculine" , while others saw only the artistic, "feminine" side of the country. Some thought the Japanese were "mere imitators" while others recognized great creativity. Ironically, while some Westerners longed to see "mystical, unspoiled" Japan, the country was busy trying to catch up to the West- but trying to do so without abandoning its traditions. If the book has one weakness, it is that it is too heavily weighted with examples of Westerners travelling East. It would have been enlightening to have learned about the experiences of some more Japanese who journeyed to America. Still, this is a brilliantly conceived and executed book, which shows how culture is spread and that not only "nature abhors a vacuum"- people do, as well. No matter how creative we are, nobody is able to make something out of nothing. We all need something to build on, and to spark our creativity.

A curious epoch in 19th century American history involved the opening of Japan and the infatuation that many Americans had with that mysterious Asian nation. Christopher Benfey details that era in rich detail that will leave many of his readers nostalgic for a time before Japan began to exert itself through its commerce and militaristic tendencies. A time when Japan symbolized the purity of an exotic culture - as opposed to an economic superpower.

For American Japanophiles, this is a marvelous book. On the other hand, for Japanese readers there will be, no doubt, questions about the impurity of the Japanese ethic as interpreted by the American "eccentrics" (Benfey's term) that visited Japan in the latter half of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century.

Full disclosure: this reviewer is a native Bostonian who spent seven years living in Japan as a foreign correspondent. As such, the reviewer has an affinity for Things Japanese (not to mention the Brahmin way of life) that is probably far above the sensibilities of the average reader.

With that marker laid down, let's proceed to the gist of this book that should be of value to anyone with a serious interest in Japan.

The cast is star studded. The main characters are icons of Brahmin history: Herman Melville, Henry Adams, John La Farge, Edward Sylvester Morse, art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, the astronomer Percival Lowell and Henry Cabot Lodge. Non-Brahmin characters include former presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Spanish/American art impresario Ernest Fenollosa. Cameo appearances include the poet Emily Dickenson (and her dysfunctional family).

Helping all these eager beaver Americans interpret the Japanese culture was Kakuzo Okakura, the son of a Japanese merchant educated by American teachers at a missionary school in Yokohama. Okakura was more fluent in English than he was in Japanese, but he wandered around the United States in a formal Japanese kimono that had a decidedly dramatic effort on his clients in Boston (Okakura was to become the curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

One of the most colorful characters in this book is Lafcadio Hearn, an American/Greek journalist who spent the final decades of his career in Japan, writing articles and books about the Japanese culture that enthralled his audience in the United States.

Author Benfey chronicles the travels and encounters of Americans in Japan with a tsunami of colorful details about their personal lives and endeavors. Some of it is quite salacious as Benfey frequently describes the sexual peccadilloes of his subjects.

As the Brahmins roamed Japan, many of them bought up as much Japanese art as they could and sent it home where much of it ended up in the unparalled collection of Japanese art in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They were no doubt driven by their aesthetic concerns as they scooped up this art, but they come across as a bit craven in their buying sprees, and no doubt many Japanese rue the day when the Brahmin collectors bought up unique Japanese art on an almost indiscriminate basis.

Indeed, one has to wonder what Japanese readers think of this book. Some of the Brahmins were most probably an early rendition of the so-called Ugly Americans who were to appear later in Southeast Asia (thus the "Misfits and Japanese Eccentrics" in the title of this book). With the exception of Lafcadio Hearn who spent the final 14 years of his life in Japan (including several stints in remote sections of Japan) the visiting Americans visited only the most obvious places, such as Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto and Nikko. Few of them ventured into the heartland of Japan and if they did, it was only for a few days or weeks.

And while they came home with wondrous tales of the mysterious Nippon, it was unlikely that they could arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the Japanese people, their innermost thoughts and their fundamental outlook on their introspective lives.

For one thing, Japanese society is distinctly inward looking (almost racist by the contemporary American standards), and the average Japanese looks down on anything foreign, especially the so-called gaijins (foreign people) who have invaded Japan for more than a century.

Kakuzo Okakura, in fact, would no doubt be considered a traitor to the Japanese cause as he helped the Americans sweep up the Japanese cultural artifacts that they sent home. Certainly, his interpretation of the Japanese culture would be viewed as less than an honorable endeavor from the Japanese perspective. For, in fact, Okakawa was more westernized than he was Japanese. Indeed he spent most of his later life in America.

Those comments aside, this is an excellent book that gives insights on both the Japanese and American cultures late in the 19th century.

In 1854, Commodore Perry and his Black Ships sailed into Edo Harbor, demanding that the Japanese sign a commerce treaty acknowledging a new friendship with the United States. Over the next half century, a multitude of Americans would make the long voyage to Japan, hoping to discover that ancient and alien world known as Old Japan. In his book, The Great Wave, Christopher Benfey recounts the misadventures of characters like Henry Adams, John LaFarge, Herman Melville, Okakura Kakuzo, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others.

Japan, for a short time, was an unexplored frontier for Gilded Age Americans. Some searched for spiritual fulfillment in Buddhism, like Henry Adams who traveled there after the death of his wife clover. He was overwhelmed by the funerary shrine at Nikko, but with other Americans in Japan, he was less impressed. Of Ernest Fenollosa, Adams wrote: "He has joined a Buddhist sect: I was myself a Buddhist when I left America, but he has converted me to Calvinism with leanings toward the Methodists."

Adams' traveling companion, the artist John LaFarge, went to Japan for artistic inspiration, which he found in spades. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, whose own architecture would be greatly influenced by Japanese conceptions of negative space, LaFarge found inspiration in everything from tea utensils and the kimono to Buddhist statuary and woodblock prints. Japanese art intrigued not only the artists, but the great collectors of art as well. Mrs. Jack Garner even created a Buddhist meditation room in her Fenway Court museum where she also displayed Japanese art collected by her good friend Okakura. Both the Peabody Essex Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston became the primary beneficiaries of this new interest in Old Japan.

Christopher Benfey has contributed greatly to an unexamined period in American history, which deserves greater attention. The Gilded Age is remembered almost exclusively as the domain of the Robber Barons, but The Great Wave reminds us that Japan was equally important (in fact setting the stage for 20th century events), warranting a trip from the great American mikado, President Ulysses S. Grant.

Japanese art, and more specifically Edo woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many French artists in the late nineteenth century. Painters such as Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin, or musicians such as Claude Debussy and Camille Saint-Saens, were thus heavily influenced by Japonisme, although very few Frenchmen at that time had the occasion to visit the Far Eastern country.

Less well known to the general public, the same period also witnessed a tremendous interest in the United States for all things Japanese, and many Americans undertook the travel to gain first-hand experience. Those intellectuals, however, tended to look at ukiyo-e with some disdain. They maintained that Edo prints were a vulgar form, unique to the period and distinct from the refined, religious, national heritage of Japan as illustrated by Zen masters, haiku poets, and followers of the wabi aesthetic tradition. These New Englanders went on a quest for "Old Japan" and sought to discover a culture untouched by modernist and Western influences, although many were mandated to bring such influences by Japanese authorities who wanted to draw on their expertise to build a strong and confident nation. They were instrumental in the "invention of traditions" that characterized the Meiji period.

American Japonisme exerted its influence on various art forms, in less visible ways than French paintings taking Japanese motives. The Adams memorial, the shrouded sitting figure that is to be found in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., is an American Kannon, a contemporary Western version of the Buddhist deity. John La Farge used his many sketches drawn during his trip with Henry Adams for various paintings, including his mural for the Church of the Ascension which uses a representation of Mount Fuji as background. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was commissioned the Imperial Hotel at a time when he badly needed the money, encountered his key concept of "architecture from within" in The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. This same author also indirectly influenced Ezra Pound through the notes on Chinese poetry and Taoism that he drafted with Ernest Fenollosa.

Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave presents the contribution of these Gilded Age misfits and Japanese eccentrics to the opening of Old Japan. I am not sure that the term 'misfit' adequately describes these Boston Brahmins, who gravitated around the Museum of Fine Arts and were all connected to the central figure of Okakura, whose eccentricity consisted of wearing only traditional attire while speaking flawless English. Certainly the group of aesthetes and art collectors had more than its share of concealed homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and severe mental disorders. But the characters fit a time and place that were "refined beyond the point of civilization", as T.S. Eliot put it.

Although some of the visitors developed a good knowledge of Japan, I must confess that I was not particularly impressed by the depth of their insights, as recorded in their essays and travelogues. This literature is rich in conventional platitudes about the national character, racial considerations based on social Darwinism, or pompous speculations about Asian spirituality. They envisaged the history of Japanese art as the history of pan-Asian ideals, seeing in Asia and Japan the spirituality and feminine element that could counterbalance the male materialism of the West. Only with its victory over Russia on the battlefields of Manchuria in 1905 did Japan discard its gentle, feminine image to claim its rank in the concert of nations. The last character to appear on the stage is Theodore Roosevelt, who developed a passion for jujutsu and helped negotiate the end of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Gilded Age hero perhaps, but misfit he wasn't.

The first half or so of Benfey's account of the influence of Japanese culture on American arts and letters is very fine, particularly his chapters on Melville and Manjiro and on Edward Sylvester Morse. This is academic writing at its very best. Ultimately, as the Japanese influence on American taste becomes more pervasive, the book begins to sink under the sheer volume of information that must be conveyed in order to cover the ground. I found the last half informative, but that's because I have an interest in this particular period in American history and literature. Benfey's a fine writer and cultural historian, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

This is one of those rare, mind opening and truely unforgettable books that one has the chance of tripping upon in impredictable circumstances. I actually picked it up at the Museum Shop of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts while looking for something else. The book probably belonged there because as can be learned by reading it, BMFA is probably the treasure chest that still contains memories of this fascinating and far removed cultural love liason between the USA and Japan.
Starting from as far back as the 1850's, after the forceful opening of Japan by Captain Perry, a certain gropu pf cultivated aristocratic intelligentia from New England started exploring and identifying with Old Japanese culture. At the same time during the so called Meiji Era Japan was trying to modernize and looked to the US for teaching and technology. In eight chapters, beautifully titled (The Floating World, A Collector of Sea-Shells, etc), Christopher Benfey narrates the porous world of the Pacific Islands and the drifters Majiro and Herman Melville, the life and word of the darwinian scholar Edward Morse who probably "started it all", the specific Bostonian interest manifested by Isabella Stewart Gardner and Kakuzo Okakura, the travels abroad and cultural impact at home of Henry Adams and John LaFarge, the madness and geniality of Lowell and Mabel Loomis Todd and the final epigones of the story with downright conversions to Japanese culture and life like that of Lafcadio Hearn and less intense relationships like that of Mary Fenollosa and Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Biegelow. The Author finishes off his story in 1913 at the beginning of WWI, but even today Japan's influence on our occidental culture is immense, through Mangas and Anime and IT.
The book is written in beautiful prose, reads like a novel and has so many cross- cultural references to stand on its own as the gateway to this magnificent period of American and Japanese history.

This is an excellent book on what Japan meant for the people who visited in the early days of the Meiji period. The author concentrates on a series of vignettes to explore the significance of Japanese culture in the lives of some of the leading US citizens of the period. It was not all just collections of fans and diets of raw fish. Some of these early travlers used a trip to Japan to acquire ancient artifacts (many of which are in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), Henry Adams went on quest for nirvana, the artist John La Farge went with him and absorbed new artistic techniques that marked his subsequent work. The cast of characters also includes Isabelle Stewart Gardner and Theodore Roosevelt.
This is a very interesting book, sure to delight the reader who really wants to know what happens when west meets east.

I had great hope for this book -- what promise! Tying together "gilded age misfits, Japanese eccentrics." The first chapter on John Manjiro and Melville has great narrative power, unfortunately the rest of the book falls into a poor mix of ties between New Englanders and the Japanese. One of my big problems with the book is that the Japanese presence is hardly felt -- instead we have long, winding chapters on Henry Adams, Percival Lowell, Mabel Todd, etc. (interesting people in their own right) but whose ties to Japan don't have the sustaining narrative power as those like Melville or Manjiro.

Mr. Benfey's book is definitely informative. I found his list of sources and quotations to be appetizing -- yet I could barely force myself to finish the book. Its focus is more on what the New Englanders, ok white Americans, came away with from Japan even if it was the boiled down crack of Okukura's "Book of Tea" or Nitobe Inazo's "Bushido." Thank god Okakura existed -- otherwise, Mr. Benfey would have not had any glue to keep his American characters in this book.