Okakura Tenshin and his Works
There was a son of a samurai who was invited to the Museum of Fine Arts, Bostonin 1904 and became the first head of the Asian art division in 1910.
Tenshin Okakura (Kakuzo Okamura) (1862-1913) contributed to introducing Japanese traditional works of art to the world after the Meiji Restoration of Imperial Authority and the end of an isolation policy of samurai Japan of 1868.
In the samurai era, Buddhism was a kind of national religion of Japan. Shinto shrines looked like being overwhelmed by Buddhist temples. Every Japanese was requested to belong to a temple in his village or town which recorded birth, death, etc. of each individual.
But with the Meiji Restoration of the Imperial Authority and with collapse of the samurai regime having been led by shogun, shintoism came to regain its power base. Since the emperor was the supreme priest of the imperial shinto, people came to make light of Buddhist temples and priests. This social turmoil was called "anti-Buddhist movement at the beginning of the Meiji era" (Haibutsu Kisyaku in Japanese). However along with this movement, many valuable and priceless works of Buddhism were destroyed, stolen, and sold by some Japanese who wanted to revenge themselves on Buddhist priests who once ruled and sometimes suppressed people in their daily and religious lives.
But some Europeans and Americans, such as Ernest Fenollosa, who came to new Japan in the Meiji era found a need to save those Buddhist works of art, since they were so excellent and sophisticated. They tried to save those works from being destroyed, while other Westerners were buying them at cheap prices to sell them at high prices in Europe and America.
Okakura cooperated with Fenollosa to protect those precious works of Buddhism and other traditional works of Japanese art. In addition, as Okakura was fluent in English, he wrote some books in English about Japan to promote understanding of Japanese culture in foreign countries. His book titled The Book of Tea identified tea ceremony as a kind of disguised practice of Taoism, though it had only 60 pages.
The Book of Tea (Cha no Hon in Japanese) by Okakura Kakuzō[1] (1906), is a long essay linking the role of tea (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life.
Addressed to a western audience, it was originally written in English and is one of the great English tea classics. Okakura had been taught at a young age to speak English and was proficient at communicating his thoughts to the Western mind. In his book, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things; most importantly, simplicity. Kakuzō argues that this tea-induced simplicity affected art and architecture, and he was a long-time student of the visual arts. He ends the book with a chapter on Tea Masters, and spends some time talking about Sen no Rikyū and his contribution to the Japanese Tea Ceremony.
According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired — although Heidegger remained silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzō’s concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi’s philosophy, which Imamichi’s teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before.[2]And when the Empire of Japan started a war against the Russian Empire in 1904, Okakura left for the US. On this occasion, he wrote a book titled The Awakening of Japan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Tea
Okakura's departure date from Yokohama coincided with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War: February 10th, 1904. An increase of interest in Japan brought their visit and activities to the attention of American journalists. An article in The New York Times reported on their exhibition and described with admiration that Japan was able to achieve artistic excellence in the ancient arts at the same time as it mastered the modern art and technology of war. The headline read: “New and Old Japan. She Has Victories in the Art as Well as Triumphs in War.”
The Awakening of Japan was a book in which Okakura tried to show his interpretation of “the sudden development” 4 of modern Japan. He asserted the existence of an “inner” movement that had began in the late Edo period before the coming of the American black ships. This demonstrated Okakura’s reaction against the general tendency of Western people to consider the “development” of Japan as something owed exclusively to intensive adoption of Western civilization.Tenshin Okakura (Tenshin means heaven mind in Japanese) learnt English in Yokohama, a main port city near Tokyo, from some Western priest and scholar, when he was a small child. He graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo to work in the Imperial Government. He also contributed to establishment of some art schools in Japan. He even received an academic degree from Harvard University.
He emphasized that Japan's “innate virility” 5 was the source of Japan's awakening; more crucial than the adoption of foreign things was “the realization of the self within.” 6 The “spirit of Old Japan,” 7 he said, was alive in the core of the nation in spite of the new appearance of a modern constitutional state. Furthermore, he did not fail to state that while Japan owed much to the West, “we must still regard Asia as the true source of our inspirations.” 8 Okakura previously planned to publish this book in America before his departure. He brought notes from Japan and revised them in the summer of 1904 for publication in autumn.
http://www.princeton.edu/~collcutt/doc/Okamoto_English.pdf
Finally Okakura loved to live in a village in Kitaibaraki, Ibaraki Prefecture northeast of Tokyo, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, building a hexagonal temple-like house, though the house was washed away by the 3/11 Great Tsunami of 2011. It was however rebuilt in 2012.
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