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

Natural History, June, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Christopher Benfey Random House, 2003; $25.95

Many of my college friends spent the early 1960s dreaming of smoke-filled San Francisco cafes where poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder would intone the deep wisdom of the Orient. Snyder, perhaps because he had disappeared from the scene for a while, was the most alluring. After a prolonged Zen pilgrimage to Japan, he had returned with epigrammatic mantras extolling nature and the quest for unity with the cosmos. It was exhilarating to feel that our Western culture, its soul having been wasted by industrialization, was at last discovering the liberating philosophy of the East.

But in fact, that discovery had been made a century earlier. In the years following the "opening" of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1850s, a group of intellectuals centered in New England had turned to Japan as a source of spiritual renewal. They viewed the austere aestheticism of Japanese culture as an antidote to the decorative excess of the Victorian era, and as a palliative for the spiritual agony of the Civil War. Ironically, at that same moment Japan was opening its doors to the West and, driven by an impulse toward modernization, moving away from the ceremonial formalism of feudal society. The Old Japan of the samurai and the Zen master was disappearing just as the West was coming to know it.

Christopher Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, has written a series of perceptive biographical essays that illustrate what happens when two such literate and disparate cultures begin to intermix. His opening essay cleverly contrasts the careers of the Japanese intellectual John Manjiro and the American author Herman Melville. Manjiro was adopted in the 1840s by a New England sea captain, who rescued him from a Pacific island after a shipwreck. He eventually returned to Japan, where he became one of the principal agents of modernization; he served as a go-between when Perry visited Yokohama, translated a seminal work on navigation from English into Japanese, and introduced such Western innovations as photography and telegraphy to the islands.

Melville, who crossed the Pacific in the other direction at almost the same time, never knew Manjiro, though they had acquaintances in Honolulu in common. Unlike Manjiro, who interpreted the material ingenuity of the West as a way to a better life, Melville was searching for moral renewal, and he associated that quest with the mysterious culture of Japan. The climactic scenes in Moby Dick, set near the Japanese coast, epitomized the yearning of the famous author and his contemporaries for what he described as "unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans."

The cultural dichotomy is reflected in the lives of the remarkable figures who appear in Benfey's book: Henry Adams, chronicler of fin-desiecle angst, was a pilgrim to the East; Percival Lowell, known today as the astronomer who thought Mars was inhabited, made his reputation by writing several books on life in out-of-the-way corners of Japan; Edward Sylvester Morse, who made the first archaeological digs in Japan, amassed immense collections that formed the core of museums on both sides of the Pacific; Isabella Gardner, Boston patron of the arts, had a love affair with the East that included Japanese intellectual Kakuzo Okakura, whose writings introduced Western socialites to the romance of the tea ceremony.

The dawn of the twentieth century, the point at which Benfey concludes his book, was of course only the beginning of cultural interchange between East and West. In the clean lines of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, in the Japanese design of energy-efficient automobiles, and in the idealized orientalism of New Age culture, one can see elements of the same process of cross-fertilization that began in the late 1800s. Benfey calls it "the great wave," an expression of the power and precariousness portrayed in Katsushika Hokusai's famous woodblock print. The ripples of that great wave are still coming ashore today.