Okakura Kakuzō

Okakura Kakuzō studied at Tokyo University, Ranshadō and Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. Training under James Hamilton Ballagh and Seiko Okuhara is recorded. Bisen Fukuda, Yokoyama Taikan and Kanzan Shimomura are recorded as having studied under Okakura Kakuzō. The recorded working language is Japanese and English. The field of work recorded is philosophy, Japanese art and art criticism. Employment is recorded with Senshu College, Ongaku Torishirabegakari and Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts. Works named in the authority record are The Book of Tea. Work by Okakura Kakuzō is recorded in the collections of J. Paul Getty Museum. Distinctions recorded are Order of the Rising Sun, 5th class.

• Name — Okakura Tenshin • Born — 14 February 1863 • Birthplace — Yokohama • Died — 2 September 1913 • Place of death — Myōkō, Niigata • Occupation — Artist, writer • Other Names — Okakura Kakuzō • Notable Works — The Book of Tea (1906) • Notable Ideas — Teaism • Era — Meiji Period • Influenced — * Ernest Fenollosa • Isabella Stewart Gardner • Abanindranath Tagore • Rabindranath Tagore • Ezra Pound • Heidegger (according to Imamichi) • Swami Vivekananda • Discipline — Art criticism • Main Interests — Japanese art, Japanese tea ceremony • Alma Mater — Tokyo Imperial University • Influences — * Zhuang Zhou Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Okakura Tenshin 2=岡倉 天心, was a Japanese scholar and art critic who in the era of Meiji Restoration reform promoted a critical appreciation of traditional forms, customs and beliefs. Outside Japan, he is chiefly renowned for The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (1906). Written in English, and in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, it decried Western caricaturing of the Japanese, and of Asians more generally, and expressed the fear that Japan gained respect only to the extent that it adopted the barbarities of Western militarism.

• Illustration — Okakura Kakuzō The second son of Okakura Kan'emon, a former Fukui Domain treasurer turned silk merchant, and Kan'emon's second wife, Kakuzō was named for the corner warehouse (角蔵) in which he was born, but later changed the spelling of his name to different Kanji meaning "awakened boy" (覚三). Okakura learned English while attending Yoshisaburō, a school operated by a Christian missionary, Dr. James Curtis Hepburn, of the Hepburn romanization system. Here, he became well-versed in the foreign language but couldn't read Kanji, the characters of his homeland. As a result, his father got him to concurrently study western culture at Yoshisaburō and traditional Japanese in a Buddhist temple. After the abolition of the feudal system in 1871, his family moved from Yokohama to Tokyo. In 1875, Okakura joined them and won a scholarship to the Tokyo Institute of Foreign Languages. Quickly after, the school was renamed to Tokyo Imperial University. It was at this prestigious academy that he first met and studied under the Harvard-educated art historian Ernest Fenollosa.

In 1886, Okakura became secretary to the minister of education and was put in charge of musical affairs. Later in the same year he was named to the Imperial Art Commission and sent abroad to study fine arts in the Western world. After his return from Europe and the United States, in 1887 he helped found, and a year later became director of, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (東京美術学校 Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō). The new arts school represented "the first serious reaction to the lifeless conservatism" of traditionalists and the "equally uninspired imitation of western art" fostered by early Meiji enthusiasts. Limiting himself to more sympathetic aspects of art in the West, at the school, and in a new periodical Kokka, Okakura sought to rehabilitate ancient and native arts, honoring their ideals and exploring their possibilities. When, in 1897, it became clear that European methods were to be given ever increasing prominence in the school curriculum, he resigned his directorship. Six months later he renewed the effort, as he saw it, to draw on western art without impairing national inspiration in the Nihon Bijutsuin (日本美術院, lit. "Japan Visual Arts Academy"), founded with Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan and thirty-seven other leading artists. At the same time, Okakura had opposed the Shintoist Haibutsu Kishaku movement which, in the wake of the Meiji Restoration had sought to expel Buddhism from Japan. With Ernest Fenollosa, he worked to repair damaged Buddhist temples, images and texts. Okakura was a cosmopolitan who retained an international sense of self. He wrote all of his main works in English. Okakura researched Japan's traditional art and traveled to Europe, the United States and China, and lived two years in India during which he engaged in dialogue with Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. Okakura emphasised the importance to the modern world of Asian culture, attempting to bring its influence to realms of art and literature that, in his day, were largely dominated by Western culture. In 1906, he was invited by William Sturgis Bigelow to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and became the Curator of its Department of Japanese and Chinese Art in 1910. From 1886, he was a close friend of American artist John La Farge, to whom he dedicated The Book of Tea. Okakura also advised La Farge in his creation of murals for the Supreme Court of Minnesota.

His 1903 book on Asian artistic and cultural history, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, published on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, is famous for its opening paragraph in which he sees a spiritual unity throughout Asia, which distinguishes it from the West: Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life. In his subsequent book, The Awakening of Japan, published in 1904, he argued that "the glory of the West is the humiliation of Asia." This was an early expression of Pan-Asianism. In this book Okakura also noted that Japan's rapid modernization was not universally applauded in Asia: ″We have become so eager to identify ourselves with European civilization instead of Asiatic that our continental neighbors regard us as renegades—nay, even as an embodiment of the White Disaster itself." In The Book of Tea, written and published in 1906, has been described as "the earliest lucid English-language account of Zen Buddhism and its relation to the arts". Okakura argued that "Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life". [Teaism] insulates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. None of this, he suggested, was appreciated by the Westerner. In his "sleek complacency", the Westerner views the tea ceremony as "but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him". Writing in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Okakura commented that the Westerner regarded Japan as "barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace", and began to call her civilized only when "she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefields". Okakura's final work, The White Fox, written under the patronage of Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1912, was an English-language libretto for the Boston Opera House. The libretto incorporates elements from both kabuki plays and Wagner's epic Tannhäuser and may be understood, metaphorically, as an expression of Okakura's hoped-for reconciliation of East and West. Charles Martin Loeffler agreed to Garner's request to put the poetic drama to music, but the project was never staged. • Illustration — The Book of Tea • Illustration — Le livre du thé, 1927 • Illustration — Translation of work in Esperanto

Okakura's health deteriorated in his later years. "My ailment the doctors say is the usual complaint of the twentieth century—Bright's disease," he wrote a friend in June 1913. "I have eaten things in various parts of the globe—too varied for the hereditary notions of my stomach and kidneys. However I am getting well again and I am thinking of going to China in September." In August, 1913, "Kakuzo insisted on going to his mountain villa in Akakura, and finally his wife, daughter and his sister took him there by train. For a week or so, Kakuzo felt a little better and was able to talk with people, but on August 25, he had a heart attack and spent several days in great pain. Surrounded by his family, relatives and his disciples, he passed away on September 2."

Okakura Kakuzō was recorded at birth as 岡倉 角蔵. He also worked under the name 岡倉 覚三. The authorities additionally record the headings Tenshin Okakura, Kakuzō Okakura, Okakura Kakuzo, Okakura Kakuzou and OKAKURA Tenshin. His recorded languages were Japanese and English. Other recorded relations include Koshirō Okakura.

Okakura Kakuzō worked in philosophy, Japanese art, art criticism and cultural history. He was employed by Senshu College, Ongaku Torishirabegakari, Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo National Museum and Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Nihon Bijutsuin.

• "We Must Do a Better Job of Explaining Japan to the World". Asahi Shimbun, August 12, 2005. • Benfey, Christopher. The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. New York: Random House, 2003.. • Bharucha, Rustom. Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.. • Okakura Kakuzo, The Illustrated Book of Tea. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. 2012. ASIN: B009033C6M. • Westin, Victoria. Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle. Center for Japanese Studies University of Michigan (2003)..