That Double-Bolted Land Japan

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Flower, Dean

That Double-Bolted Land Japan

ONE OF THE BEST KNOWN IMACiES OF JAPAN is surely Hokusai's Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa, commonly known as "The Great Wave." It shows three narrow fishing boats all but immersed in turbulent seas, as "an enormous wave with clawlike froth breaks above them." These apt words are Christopher Benfey's, recalling the first woodblock print in Katsushika Hokusai's series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, done in the 1830s.1 What is unforgettable about the image is not Mount Fuji in the distance but the utter strangeness, to Western eyes, of that stylized claw-like froth. In a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago, two sailors aboard a nineteenth-century whaling vessel look upon just such waves as these, and one of them says, "I think we are in Japanese waters."

A detail from the print serves as a frontispiece to Benfey's book, opposite his title, which he explains as a reference to the great wave of Westernization that swept over Japan following Commodore Matthew Perry's aggressive intrusion of 1853, when his "black ships" steamed into Tokyo Harbor demanding access, trade, and cooperation with America. The title serves equally to represent the counter wave of Japanese influence that swept back over America during the Meiji era, 1868-1912, reaching particularly those intellectuals and idealists of New England who were disaffected by the tawdry materialism of the Gilded Age-figures as various as the zoologist Edward Morse, the painter John LaFarge, the historian Henry Adams, the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, the astronomer Percival Lowell, the aesthete Ernest Fenollosa, and the Japanophile writer Lafcadio Hearn. Equally interesting, but fewer in number, are the Japanese whom Benfey describes, equally carried along by these waves, notably Manjiro-the castaway fisherman who (as "John Mung") became the first Japanese ever to live in America -and the charismatic Kakuzo Okakura, who taught and influenced an astonishing array of Americans in the later nineteenth century from poets and museum directors to philosophers and presidents.

Benfey tells a fascinating story, or rather a many-stranded weave of stories, which reads less like a standard cultural history than "a map of intersecting journeys" meant to suggest "spatially and spiritually," as he puts it, a sort of "pilgrimage from modest beginnings to unexpected arrivals." Many of these arrivals are unexpected indeed, but if there is any pilgrimage here it must be Benfey's own. His acknowledgements page alone testifies to a lifelong fascination with Japan. And his techniques suggest, more often than not, a poetic sense of history's designs. He delights in tracing similarities of metaphor, suggestive accidents of fate, portentous parallels, uncanny coincidences, and unexpected connections. In defense of this kind of fabulation he argues that, to generate his "map of intersecting journeys," the "burden of the narrative will be to get the meaning and shading of those journeys right" (italics mine). Characteristically, he ends his introduction by suggesting that the Great Wave epitomizes, in the last analysis, a "shared mood" of Meiji Japan and Gilded Age America, "an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril."

To begin with, it helps to know that in the early seventeenth century in Japan an attempt at Westernization instigated by Jesuit monks, the Shimabara Rebellion, was so decisively put down that for almost two hundred seventy years Japan was locked away from the world. The Tokugawa shoguns forbade the building of any ships large enough to sail the open ocean, and no one was allowed to leave the country. Those who did and returned were killed. Strangers who were cast ashore usually met the same fate. Sole access to the outside world was permitted at the port of Nagasaki, where limited trade with the Dutch and the Chinese was kept under heavy surveillance. Here is how Kakuzo Okakura, in The Awakening of Japan (1905), describes a nation "buried alive" for almost three centuries:

The Tokugawa shoguns . . . threw the invisible network of their tyranny over all the nation. From the highest to the lowest, all were entangled in a subtle web of mutual espionage, and every element of individuality was crushed under the weight of unbending formalism. Deprived of all stimulus from without, and imprisoned within, our own island realm groped amid a maze of tradition. Darkest over us lay the Night of Asia.

No wonder that when Melville mentions Japan in Moby-Dick it is aways in terms of the utmost mystery, ambiguity, and danger.

Nevertheless, information and artifacts did leak out. Studies of Japanese flora were brought back to Europe by various travelers via the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch physician Engelbert Kaempfer, for example, stayed in Deschima-a small island in Nagasaki Bay assigned to the Dutch traders-from 1690 to 1692. He collected plant specimens and Japanese publications on the medicinal uses of plants and documented his discoveries in Amoenitates exoticae (1712) and History of Japan (1727). Another botanist-doctor, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg, went to Deschima in 1775-76, spent months getting permission to explore Nagasaki, eventually reached Edo (Tokyo) in 1776, and published his Flora Japonica in 1784. Still other images and artifacts trickled out in the form of illustrated books, decorative papers, genre paintings, and the decorated surfaces of textiles, lacquer, and porcelain. Some of Utamaro's pictures of insects and plants travelled out of Japan in the late eighteenth century, but none of his Kabuki actors, fashionable women, or geishas. (It was not until after 1854 that the woodblock prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others came to the excited attention of the West.)