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

by Christopher E.G. Benfey

Book Overview

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to "Old Japan," with its... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375503277
• ISBN13: 9780375503276
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A Unique American Perspective of Japan from the 19th Century

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 t

A true gateway to another world - Japanese-American relationship at the end of the Nineteenth Centur

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.

"To open Japan culturally meant to open themselves in turn."

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

How friends introduced Japan to America in mid-19th century

...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 p

Ripple-Effect

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 interesti