Kakuzo Okakura was part of the Imperial Art Commission sent out by the Japanese Government in 1886 to study the art history and movements of Europe and the United States.1 Later in his career, he pivoted to Asia, visiting India and China to document and preserve what he perceived as an Asiatic art lineage.2 These surveys gave rise to Kakuzo’s main treatise, The Ideals of The East — a useful focal point to explore the implications for art history and criticism when tied to a national project.3)
Kakuzo suggests an alternative art-lineage of the world — one that begins in Asia and spreads outwards, challenging traditional Hellenic theories of art.4 His work displaces Greece as the center of art, tying analyses of Asian art to civilisational discourse. This draws emotive sway by engaging the East-West binary constructed to justify Japanese imperialism. By drawing civilisational links between Asian art, he aided the construction of transnational Japanese authority.
Conducting a comparative study, he traces similarities in the techniques and characteristics of art across Asia. For example, he compares the Ajanta caves in India with Horiuju in Japan.5 He identifies specific methods as distinctly ‘Asiatic’. Covering the ground with white lime followed by rock-pigments, which are accentuated and marked off from each other with strong black lines is one such method.6
Kakuzo links Asian art and its flows to a broader notion of Asian spirituality that he roots in India and China.7 He sees these forces coalescing in Japan, positioning Japan as the ideal preserve of Asiatic art.8 He references ideas such as Japan’s ‘unbroken sovereignty’ and its people being an ‘unconquered race’, to argue that Japan is the only state in Asia where Asian art and culture was insulated from external influence.9 This insulation is used to justify Japanese superiority and legitimise expansion.
Here, Kakuzo’s arguments mirror British conceptions of knowledge and Empire. He argues for the merits of Japan as collector, as a space for Asia to be understood through its treasured specimens.8 Scholars argue however, that Kakuzo’s cultural proximity to the rest of Asia made him better placed to understand and preserve the art of these other nations.10 His awareness of culturally particular technique contrasted efforts by European scholars who often unintentionally disfigured art and artefacts with the intention of cleaning and uncovering art.11
Still, he maps the particular onto the universal, arguing that “the history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals.”12 Here the tension between the notion of a universal Asian culture and the framing of cultural hegemony becomes apparent. Countering the distinction and differentiation between the people of Asia, he attempts to draw cultural ties to project the notion of a collective civilisation. However, he locates Japan as leader or protector of this civilisation, identifying traits inherent to the nation as legitiimising this superiority.
His arguments are also temporal in nature. He frames India and China as representing Asia’s past, and Japan as presenting Asia’s present and future. This mirrors Japanese imperialist arguments that use the idea of Japan leading Asia’s spiritual rejuvenation as justification for expansion.13 In doing so, Kakuzo provides an alternate pathway for linking past and present in Japanese discourse. While the Japanese imperial state was closely linked to narratives of modernity and a future where Japan led Asia towards a technocratic future, Kakuzo’s emphasis on Japan as a museum of Asiatic civilization provides a cultural legitimacy anchored in notions of an Eastern past.14
- Nivedita, Introduction in Kakuzo Okakura The Ideals of the East (London, 1905), p. ix. [↩]
- Ibid., p.xi. [↩]
- Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (London, 1905 [↩]
- Ibid., p.76. [↩]
- Ibid., p.53. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Ibid., p.19. [↩]
- Ibid., p.6. [↩] [↩]
- Ibid., p.5. [↩]
- Nivedita, Introduction, p.xii. [↩]
- Ibid., p.xii. [↩]
- Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East, p.8. [↩]
- Aaron Peters, Comparisons and Deflections: Indian Nationalists in the Political Economy of Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1938, in Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (8:2, 2019) pp. 548-587, p.561. [↩]
- Duara Prasenjit, Asianism and the New Discourse of Civilisation (2004), p.120.; Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East, p.7. [↩]