Influence of Okakura Tenshin on the Art of Japan

Japanese scholar and fine art critic (1863–1913)

Okakura Tenshin

Born	(1863-02-xiv)February 14, 1863 Yokohama
Died	September 2, 1913(1913-09-02) (aged 50) Kanagawa, Japan
Other names	Okakura Kakuzō
Occupation	Artist

Okakura Kakuzō ( 岡倉覚三 , February xiv, 1863 – September 2, 1913) (also known equally 岡倉天心 Okakura Tenshin) was a Japanese scholar and art critic who in the era of Meiji- Restoration reform defended traditional forms, customs and beliefs. Outside Japan, he is importantly renowned for The Volume of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Civilization, and the Simple Life (1906).^[1] ^[2] Written in English, and in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, it decried Western caricaturing of the Japanese, and of Asians more than more often than not, and expressed the fear that Nihon gained respect only to the extent that information technology adopted the barbarities of western militarism.

Biography [edit]

The second son of Okakura Kan'emon, a onetime Fukui Domain treasurer turned silk merchant, and Kan'emon'south second wife, Kakuzō was named for the corner warehouse (角蔵) in which he was built-in, just later changed the spelling of his proper noun to different Kanji meaning "awakened boy" (覚三).^[three]

Okakura learned English while attending a school operated by a Christian missionary, Dr. James Curtis Hepburn, of the Hepburn romanization organisation. At 15, he entered the newly renamed Tokyo Purple University, where he first met and studied under Harvard-educated professor Ernest Fenollosa.

In 1889, Okakura co-founded the periodical Kokka.^[four] In 1887^[five] he was one of the principal founders of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (東京美術学校 Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), and a year subsequently became its head, although he was subsequently ousted from the school in an administrative struggle. Later, he also founded the Nippon Fine art Found with Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan. He was invited by William Sturgis Bigelow to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1904 and became the get-go head of the Asian art division in 1910.

Okakura was a high-contour urbanite who had an international sense of self. In the Meiji flow he was the first dean of the Tokyo Fine Arts Schoolhouse (afterwards merged with the Tokyo Music School to grade the current Tokyo University of the Arts). He wrote all of his chief works in English. Okakura researched Japan's traditional fine art and traveled to Europe, the United States, People's republic of china and India. He 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.^{[half dozen]}

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 State of 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, but 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 mutual 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, non the end, of life.^[7]

In his subsequent volume, The Awakening of Nippon, published in 1904, he argued that "the celebrity of the West is the humiliation of Asia."^[8] ^: 107 This was an early expression of Pan-Asianism. In this volume Okakura also noted that Japan'south rapid modernization was not universally applauded in Asia: ″We have go then eager to identify ourselves with European civilisation instead of Asiatic that our continental neighbors regard us as renegades—nay, even as an embodiment of the White Disaster itself."^[8] ^: 101

In The Volume of Tea, written and published in English language in 1906, Okakura argued that "Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; information technology is a religion of the art of life".^[9]

[Teaism] insulates purity and harmony, the mystery of common charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is substantially a worship of the Imperfect, equally it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this incommunicable thing we know as life.^[10]

None of this, he suggested, was appreciated by the Westerner. In his "sleek complacency" In the tea ceremony he sees only "some other case of the thousand and one oddities which constitute and childishness of the Eastward to him". Writing in the backwash of the Russo-Japanese War, he commented that the Westerner regarded Japan every bit "vicious while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace", and began to call her civilized only when "she began to commit wholescale slaugher on the Manchurian battlefields".^[11]

Okakura'southward wellness deteriorated in his later years. "My disquiet the doctors say is the usual complaint of the twentieth century—Brilliant'south disease," he wrote a friend in June 1913. "I have eaten things in various parts of the globe—also varied for the hereditary notions of my tummy and kidneys. However I am getting well over again and I am thinking of going to China in September."^[12] In Baronial, 1913, "Kakuzo insisted on going to his mountain villa in Akakura, and finally his wife, daughter and his sister took him in that location past train. For a week or and then, Kakuzo felt a piffling better and was able to talk with people, but on August 25, he had a heart assail and spent several days in bully pain. Surrounded by his family, relatives and his disciples, he passed away on September 2."^[13]

Legacy [edit]

In Nippon, Okakura, along with Fenollosa, is credited with "saving" Nihonga, or painting done with traditional Japanese technique, as it was threatened with replacement by Western-style painting, or "Yōga", whose chief advocate was artist Kuroda Seiki. In fact this role, nearly assiduously pressed after Okakura's death by his followers, is non taken seriously by art scholars today, nor is the idea that oil painting posed whatsoever serious "threat" to traditional Japanese painting. Yet Okakura was certainly instrumental in modernizing Japanese aesthetics, having recognized the need to preserve Japan's cultural heritage, and thus was one of the major reformers during Japan's flow of modernization beginning with the Meiji Restoration.

Outside Japan, Okakura influenced a number of important figures, straight or indirectly, who include Swami Vivekananda, philosopher Martin Heidegger, poet Ezra Pound, and especially poet Rabindranath Tagore and heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who were close personal friends of his.^[fourteen] He was also ane of a trio of Japanese artists who introduced the launder technique to Abanindranath Tagore, the male parent of modern Indian watercolor. ^[15]

Works [edit]

The Ideals of the E (London: J. Murray, 1903)
The Awakening of Japan (New York: Century, 1904)
The Book of Tea (New York: Putnam'southward, 1906)

References [edit]

^ 'Ambassador of Tea Culture to the Due west' (biography of Okakura), Andrew Forbes and David Henley, The Illustrated Book of Tea (Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books, 2012).
^ Okakura, Kakuzo (2008). The Volume of Tea. Applewood Books. ISBN978-one-4290-1279-9.
^ Horioka Yasuko, The Life of Kakuzo (Tokyo: Hokuseidō Press, 1963), 3.
^ Gosling, Andrew (2011). Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written Word. National Library of Australia. p. 77. ISBN978-0-642-27722-0.
^ founding of Tokyo University of the Arts
^ Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, "The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poesy, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System", Modernism/modernity Book xviii, Number 1, Jan 2011, 27-42. ISSN 1071-6068.
^ Okakura, Kakuzō (1903). The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan. London: J. Murray. p. 1.
^ ^a ^b Okakura, Kakuzō (1904). The Awakening of Japan. New York: The Century Co.
^ Okakura, Kakuzō (2008). The Book of Tea. Applewood Books. p. 43. ISBN978-i-4290-1279-9.
^ Okakura (2008), p. 3
^ Okakura, Kakuzo (2008). The Book of Tea. Applewood Books. p. vii. ISBN978-1-4290-1279-9.
^ Okakura to Priyambada Devi Banerjee, 28 June 1913, in Okakura Kakuzo: Nerveless English Writings, vol. 3, p. 207.
^ Horioka Yasuko, The Life of Kakuzo (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1963), 90.
^ Video of a Lecture discussing the importance of Japanese culture to the Imagists, London University School of Advanced Study, March 2012.
^ THE FIRST WATERCOLORIST OF MODERN INDIA Sagnik Biswas in Watercolour Artist, June 2021

Boosted sources [edit]

Bharucha, Rustom. Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-568285-8.
"We Must Do a Meliorate Job of Explaining Japan to the Globe". 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. ISBN 0-375-50327-7.
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). ISBN i-929280-17-3

External links [edit]

Works by Okakura Kakuzō in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
Works by Okakura Kakuzō at Project Gutenberg
Works past or nigh Okakura Kakuzō at Net Annal
Works by Okakura Kakuzō at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
"History of Japanese Art" past Okakura Kakuzo (English Translation)
Kokka and the Early Neo-Bengal School Masters past Satyasri Ukil Archived 2007-04-10 at the Wayback Automobile
An Artist Remembered past Satyasri Ukil Archived 2009-12-12 at the Wayback Machine
Forget Okakura by Niraj Kumar

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okakura_Kakuz%C5%8D

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