| [ history ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): artistry (호연지기) 날 짜 (Date): 1999년 7월 2일 금요일 오전 08시 57분 41초 제 목(Title): 코오진/History as Museum History as Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa Kojin Karatani Japan's modernization of the Meiji era was nothing other than Westernization, which affected all categories of scholastic and artistic domains, not to mention legislation. In this drive, traditions that had been handed down through the Edo period were systematically expelled from the government's cultural policies and university system. Banished subjects included not only Chinese medicine, Chinese literature, and Buddhism, but extended even as far as the study of national classics [Kokugaku], the very discipline that had been one of the main ideological fountainheads of the Meiji Restoration. It was only after being rearticulated by the thinking and methods of Western disciplines that these genres came to be reappreciated.1 There was, however, one exceptional case: the visual arts. From the time of its inauguration in 1889, the curriculum of Japan's first official arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts [Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko], centered on Japanese and Oriental arts. Though this tendency was later overturned by the Westernizationists, the academy's initial policy was remarkable considering the climate, especially when compared with its sister institution, the Tokyo Music School [Tokyo Ongaku Gakko], which omitted Oriental music courses entirely.2 Nevertheless this does not quite mean that the visual arts managed to escape Westernization altogether, for it was an American scholar, Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), who informed the peculiarity of the genre. A graduate of Harvard, Fenollosa arrived in Japan in 1878 to teach Herbert Spencer's "Social Evolutionism" and Hegelian philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University. During his stay, Fenollosa became convinced that Japanese art held something that could go beyond Western modernism. He interpreted Oriental and Japanese art as superior to Western art, particularly the then-popular trend of realistic painting, and he undertook a project of periodizing and categorizing Japanese art. Young Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), who was proficient in English, assisted Fenollosa in this project. It was under these auspices, then, that the Tokyo School of Fine Arts was established by a group led by Fenollosa and Okakura (who had by then been appointed a cultural bureaucrat); thus in this academy, in particular, 'traditionalists' dominated from the very beginning. Why was it, then, that only visual art was accepted as a modern institution, while everything else was despised and abandoned? It was because Japanese painting and crafts had already been highly appreciated in Europe, before Fenollosa's intervention. Beginning in the 1850s, Ukiyo-e prints came to be passionately cherished in Europe, especially by the Impressionist painters. The works presented by the Tokugawa Shogunate at the Paris World's Fair in 1867 made an enormous impact on Parisians. In the end, the Impressionists' appreciation of Japanese painting reflected their attempt to overcome the crisis of representation being confronted in modern European realism by referring to Japanese pictorial space, such as in the Ukiyo-e. The inexorable result was the production of 'Japan' as a sign. Van Gogh, for instance, repeatedly expressed in his letters his admiration for the Japanese way of seeing.3 The enthusiasm this exemplifies was so pervasive as to elicit a warning from Oscar Wilde: "I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. (. . .) In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country. There are no such people."4 The Japan boom or Japonism occurred not only with respect to Ukiyo-e, but widely in arts and crafts in general, including furniture. This influence was hallmarked when the Meiji government categorically exhibited native crafts, furniture, and textiles at the Vienna World's Fair in 1873. Undoubtedly, this exhibit provided the major motive for the advent of Art Nouveau. But this was an event within the context of European culture and representation. That is to say, there was no intention or consciousness of superiority on the part of the Japanese, f the realistic painting of the modern West (that had been introduced as long ago as the Edo period) was much more stimulating for Japanese. Naturally, the Westernizationists were much more influential in Japan. Notwithstanding the Western dominance, the traditionalists overpowered both the art scene and the academy in Japan, because traditional arts and crafts were a commercial success in Europe as well as in America, rather than merely appreciated aesthetically. Pleased with its success at the Vienna World's Fair, the Japanese government sent approximately 4500 works to the Paris World's Fair in 1878; they sold out immediately. For Japan, a nation-state whose only export had been raw silk, the development of a new product for export meant a lot. Okakura the cultural bureaucrat acted upon this success and grasped hegemony over the Westernizationists. However, in the strict sense, Okakura was neither a Westernizationist nor a traditionalist. By definition the traditionalists were those who saw everything from a nationalist centered stance. There were traditionalists/nationalists in various fields beyond the visual arts. Nationalism is always established in the aesthetic consciousness. For instance, an inherent nationalism arose in Motoori Norinaga, the originator of the study of national classics [Kokugaku] in the Edo period, as a result of posing an aestheticized position, mono-no-aware [the sorrow of things], as superior to the intellectual and moral positions derived from India and China. In most cases, nationalist sentiment remains within the enclosure of self-consciousness. This was also the case with Kokugaku, focused as it was on native classics which had never been read outside the country. In comparison, the case of Japanese visual art was different from that in other fields because the works were appreciated as art first in the West, even before they were acknowledged as such by the Japanese. To use the Hegelian term, Japanese visual arts had achieved a "recognition of the other."5 Traditionalists took the initiative in the establishment of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and, again, this was less because they embodied Japanese tradition than because traditional art had been appreciated by Westerners and constituted as industry. And less than a decade after it opened, the leadership of the Tokyo Art Academy was replaced by the Westernizationists, successfully driving out Okakura. Yet ever since, the fate of this Westernization has been to wrestle with a radical paradox: that which is praised as new and anti-traditionalist in Japan appears to be mere mimicry in the West, where, conversely, a return to Japanese traditionalism is viewed as cutting-edge. We remain trapped in this same aporia today. In fact, most of the Westernizationists who are currently admired in Japan could not be less valued in the West, while Japanese artists who achieve some recognition abroad are those who have literally returned to traditionalism in some sense; it is this return that makes them appear avant-garde. This same mechanism can be found in other fields. For instance, in literature in the 1930s, traditionalists formed the dominant wave in a way similar to what had occurred in art. Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Kosei, Mishima Yukio, et al, albeit now renowned as traditionalists in the West, were originally Westernized modernists. At certain points in their careers, they all turned from Westernization to traditionalism, not for reasons of nostalgia, but because they thought it appeared more avant-garde. Even so, 'Japan' as an aestheticized object was predominantly formed in the fine arts, in particular by its own discursive formation. This is where we must consider the peculiarity of fine arts and its surrounding discourses of the Meiji era. This paradigm is presented, above all else, through Okakura Tenshin's discursive practices. Okakura was conscious that art was a commodity and that Japanese art in particular was a good commodity in the world market. In this keen awareness he was different from Westernizationists and traditionalists, and from Fenollosa. It is noteworthy that Okakura, who was against industrial capital his whole life, was nevertheless extremely sensitive and interested in the marketability of art. Okakura intended to make art represent Japan. He claimed, "It is art that represents the spirit of our nation, while literature and religion, though from which many things can be learned, are not strong enough to affect the world, because of their limited concerns. It is solely art that can represent Japan; the scale and singularity of its influence is no comparison with those of literature and religion. Thinking of this, I could not lament more about the fact that, amidst the social turmoil at the end of Tokugawa Shogunate's era, all those treasures handed down from tradition were left and abandoned with no care, disappearing along with pieces of wood or paper trash."6 Okakura's central concern was the issue of "representation." Just when the Tokyo School of Fine Arts firmly established itself, Okakura became its twenty-seven-year-old president and pushed Fenollosa aside. This should not be considered merely as a personal conflict. It was Fenollosa who had actually discovered traditional art and introduced a view to categorize it into a historiographical order; needless to say, Okakura greatly admired Fenollosa for this endeavor. But the fact that Okakura was later compelled to drive Fenollosa away was a reflection of the issue of "representation." Japanese art was once entirely represented by Fenollosa, a Western master. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx spoke of the situation of being represented by the other (in the context of the relationship between small holding peasants and Louis Bonaparte) in the following terms: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them [. . . .]"7 This is precisely what Okakura wished to overcome he wanted self-representation instead of a representative, and the fulfillment of that desire inexorably resulted in the banishment of Fenollosa, the "master." Nevertheless Okakura was well-aware of the aporia-that representing oneself can only be achieved by relying upon the representation produced by the other. From the counter-perspective, it can be said that Fenollosa, too, relied on Japanese/Eastern painting as a crux to go beyond the crisis of representation in the modern West, though he was clearly different from the European Impressionists, for whom Japan might as well have been a mere fiction. Influenced by Emersonian Transcendentalism while living in Boston, Fenollosa was a cosmopolitan who ignored the distinction between East and West. Moved by the discovery that traces of Greek art reached Japan in the Far East, he concentrated his energy on the categorization of Japanese and East Asian painting. Consequently, the difference between Fenollosa's and the Impressionists' receptions of Japanese painting appeared concretized: Fenollosa claimed that the uniqueness of Japanese painting resided in the quality of its explicitly delineating contour line, and he encouraged his student painters to follow this method. In effect, however, it was an opposite style, that of the so-called obscurantists [Moroha], that achieved commercial success in foreign markets, including America. In other words, the Impressionists' manner of appreciation predominated. It was possibly around this time that the relationship between Okakura and Fenollosa began to show the first signs of rupture. Without hesitation, Okakura chose the art that sold. Therefore, it could be said that Fenollosa lost his influence because of the tendency of the world market, which had nothing to do with the struggle between Westernizationists and traditionalists in Japan. But this did not remain merely an issue of commerce. In the course of the development, Okakura came to realize that art is nothing but a field of discursive struggles. Fenollosa informed a position from which to see Japanese art as an 'art.' Art does not exist without being regarded as art, in other words, without a discourse on itself. Although Japanese art had long existed, its status as " art" was asserted by Fenollosa: he singled it out as 'art.' And it was through art academies and museums that the discourse on art was organized. Okakura perceptively sensed the importance of organizing discourse by institutionalization, and in this manner he was totally different from Fenollosa: Fenellosa informed Japan while Okakura attempted to affect the West. It was for this same reason that he wrote his most challenging essays in English. The Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Imperial Household Museum [now the Tokyo National Museum] were established about the same year that Japan's constitution was promulgated and the Imperial parliament assembled. Commonly, when considering modern institutions, the political ones garner the most attention, while the power of the aesthetic ones - which is, in essence, stronger - is overlooked. In form, regardless of content, the museum is an institution of the modern West, specifically of the late eighteenth century. First, it gives the public access to the 'knowledge' that has been monopolized by the privileged class; this is to say that works, as informatics of knowledge, are detached from their original contexts and disposed in an alternative, artificial space. Second, it presents a temporal order spatially. To say it in reverse, the museum is a place where spatial disposition represents temporal development. Thus it is only in the museum that such an event as 'history of painting' can come into existence. The history of painting, however, is not independent from other histories: the "world history" established in the wake of modernity is one and the same apparatus as the museum. In the British Museum, for instance, artifacts that Great Britain has pillaged from all over the world are disposed. Significantly, the Hegelian system of philosophy - that which itself is a history of world philosophy - consists of a disposition similar to that of the museum. Hegel's The Philosophy of History begins its survey with Africa, moves to India, China, etc., and ends with Prussia 8; this scenario only proves Hegel's nationalism. But in principle this system allows any other story which ends any place on earth. Furthermore, since the 'end of history' equals the 'telos of history,' the way of disposing world history automatically determines the telos/idea of world history. It is indisputable that the British Museum came into existence thanks to the British hegemony of the world market. With respect to world history, Marx commented: "The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labor between various nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history."9 From Marx's critical stance, it is the German Idealist philosophers who speculatively distorted the above mentioned process and who made future history into the end of previous history. In other words, the Hegelian philosophy of world history is established by this mechanism. And let's remind ourselves again that this distortion of material and empirical events is isomorphic to the disposition in the museum. Or, more to the point, it is only via spatial disposition in the museum that world history is constructed and viewed teleologically. However, we cannot simply reject this institution; in fact, it was in the British Museum that Marx wrote his major works-his critique of idealist world history. Thus, in world history as modern 'museum,' historical events and matters are placed in an arena where every item is asked whether or not it is appropriate and where it is to be placed. While every nation, equally, has its own self-centralism, so-called 'Western cultural centralism' is that which has been grounded upon the museum and its spatial arrangement. If so, an effectual opposition against it lies not so much in a total rejection of the museum but rather in a radical rearrangement within it - the very strategy Okakura thought necessary and pursued in a full sense. This is not simply an issue of the economico-military hegemony. The Japanese state since the Meiji Restoration had attempted to attain a better position within the West-centered hierarchy by aggressively promoting its "rich state, strong army" [Hukoku Kyohei]policy; this by itself never achieved the complete overturn of the hierarchy that Okakura intended, but only amounted to a competition within the same order. Okakura focused on art, because he intuited that its evaluation and disposition in the museum was concerned less with the neutral judgment of art than with the problematic of world hegemony. It was Fenollosa who introduced Hegelian Aesthetics into Japan. But one does not find the same Western centralism in Fenollosa as one finds in Hegel -for Fenollosa, the Hegelian "World Spirit" had to be literally cosmopolitan: In his major work, Epoch of Chinese and Japanese Art, 10 he connects Japanese art to a broad spectrum that ranges from ancient Greek art all the way to Oceanic art, and it must have been deeply gratifying for him to detect traces of Grecian elements in Japanese art. However, at the same time, it must have appeared to Okakura that a transfigured Western centralism was lurking behind Fenollosa's cosmopolitanism, and it became necessary for Okakura to regard the 'East' separately as one unity, one autonomous world. And this was possible only in the fine arts. 2 Okakura wrote The Ideals of the East in English in 1902, while he was staying in India, just before the Russo-Japanese war broke out. He began as follows: "Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Veda's. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common 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, not the end, of life."11 The first line was later disseminated as a slogan for pan-Asianism, even throughout the Arabic world, by the hand of Rabindranath Tagore; this occurred in part because Okakura had participated in the Bengali independence movement. The political implications of the book are clear: Okakura was well aware that art exists only as a product of its own discursive practices, and therefore is essentially political. Okakura saw the oneness of the East through art; or to be more precise, it was Okakura who invented the "East" through art. Under the aegis of Hegelian philosophy, informed by Fenollosa, he was able to grasp world history aesthetically. The term "ideal" in The Ideals of the East, indicates not a yet-to-be fulfilled ideal form, but the Hegelian Idee, that is, an existing reality.12 According to Hegel, history is a stage in which Idee realizes itself, and art is a form through which Idee is sensually reified. In Hegel, it is not so much that aesthetics is a part of philosophy as that philosophy itself is aesthetic. In this sense, Okakura was quite Hegelian when he grasped Asian history as a history of art, that is, as the history of Idee's self-realization. However, although he did not explicitly announce his intent, through this process Okakura not only inverted Hegel's Western centralism, but also targeted dialectics itself. In Hegelian philosophy, contradiction has a pivotal role, since it produces struggle which in turn propels historical development. But Okakura inserted the Advaitism of Indian philosophy - the oneness that consists of difference and manifold - into the field of dialectics. It was in this way that he came to proclaim, "Asia is one." In The Philosophy of History, Hegel locates India at an early stage from which further development-propelled by contradiction, opposition, and struggle-is prevented because the spirit is wedded to an abstract moment of identity.13 Assessing India in this fashion, Hegel seems to be explaining the so-called Asiatic stagnation in his own terms. In opposition to such a view, Okakura denies Hegelian dialectics, and against it invokes the fundamental identity of the very things that contradict. Okakura's "identity" is not a simple one, but one that allows every possible manifoldness -"love," in his term. Furthermore, it is reminiscent of what a later philosopher, Nishida Kitaro, called the "self-identity of absolute contradictories."14 In the 1930s, Nishida criticized Hegelian dialectics by applying this same logic, and simultaneously used it to theoretically ground the "Great East Asian Coprosperity Sphere." In addition, Okakura's books, which were translated into Japanese in the same climate, attracted attention as pioneering works in the intellectual movement, "Overcoming Modernity [Kindai no Chokoku]"; it is this early reception that, in the post-war years, ended up burdening Okakura with a notorious project that was contradictory to the one he had hoped to develop. As I will touch upon later, this outcome was not necessarily totally ungrounded. Okakura came to represent an agrarianist-i.e., anti-industrial/capitalist-element in fascism, which quickly became Pan-Asianism. All Okakura's work dealt with aesthetic issues, and for this very reason, rather than evading the political, they captured political significance in a full sense. In Okakura's mind, the "oneness" of the East implied the identity of an East doomed to be colonized by Western superpowers. Instead of accepting such a passive identity, however, he sought to discover an active one. It was possible to achieve this only via art; first, because, in reality, the oneness of the East-unlike that of Western Europe-was unthinkable from a politico-religious viewpoint; and second, because art, as Okakura staunchly believed, was the only genre in which the East could stand up to the West. Hence the aestheticism in Okakura's book contains a clear political intention that was absent in Fenollosa; for Okakura, there exists nothing like "Ideals of the East," but rather "the East" itself is an ideal. Contrary to Okakura's hope, however, the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 was made possible by Western civilization-that which was totally unaesthetic and even antipodal to The Ideals of the East. In The Book of Tea, written in Boston after the Russo-Japanese war, Okakura made the following claims: "The beginning of the twentieth century would have been spared the spectacle of sanguinary warfare if Russia had condescended to know Japan better. What dire consequences to humanity lie in the contemptuous ignoring of Eastern problems! European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the absurd cry of the Yellow Peril, fails to realize that Asia may also awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster. You may laugh at us for having "too much tea," but may we not suspect that you of the West have "no tea" in your constitution? Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other. You have gained expansion at the cost of restlessness; we have created a harmony which is weak against aggression. Will you believe it? - the East is better off in some respects than the West! "15 Without Japan's military victory, Okakura could not have spoken of "Eastern superiority" with such rhetorical confidence, and he would have been ignored even if he had. But, whatever Okakura had in mind and however much the Japanese victory encouraged other Asian peoples (from the Far East to the Middle East), the Japanese people themselves could not have been affected less by the sense of Japan as a hopeful example for Asian independence, for they themselves had chosen to gain "expansion at the cost of restlessness." Okakura was deeply disappointed by this turn of events, and his despair also contained the sense that "art" had lost any of the significance it once carried. By this time, Japan had already found products other than art to export. Okakura's disillusionment with Japan drove him to the United States, where he began to work for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts-just the inverse of Fenollosa's move from Boston to Japan. What is crucial here is not the museum in a narrow sense. Earlier, I stressed that modern "world history" is nothing other than an apparatus configured as museum, and it is this concept that Okakura most esteemed when he created his agenda. He was not a nationalist in the narrow sense because he consistently kept the 'East' in his view. While Japanese nationalists commonly insist on the uniqueness of Japan, Okakura, without hesitation, admitted that all Japanese thought and religion was indebted to the Asian continent. In The Ideals of the East, he even used Indian Buddhist philosophy as a basic principle, and for The Book of Tea, the Chinese Buddhism, Ch'an. And yet he persisted in the "great privilege of Japan," which holds that all of the historical rises and falls of India and China are stored in Japan. Buddhism had become extinct in the India where it originated, and in China, the transfigured Ch'an (=Zen) had ceased to exist; only in Japan do they both persist. Of art, the same can be observed. According to Okakura, "insular isolation [. . .] made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture."16 He continues: "The history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness."17 "Thus Japan is a museum of Asiatic civilization; and yet more than a museum, because the singular genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new without losing the old. The Shinto still adheres to his pre-Buddhistic rites of ancestor-worship; and the Buddhists themselves cling to each various school of religious development which has come in its natural order to enrich the soil."18 A similar point, in a more critical context, has been made by the Japanese post-war political scientist, Maruyama Masao.19 Since there is no principle in Japan that functions as a coordinate axis for varied individual thought, all foreign cultures are accepted unconditionally; and because of this very lack of conflict with an axis, there is no development, except for the constant importation of the new. As a result, what we see in Japan is a simultaneous cohabitation of foreign thought, regardless of its cultural or historical origin. Furthermore, nothing is ever abolished entirely, but only forgotten for a moment to be recalled when necessary. The same circumstances hold true for art. It was nevertheless in such a 'Japan' that Okakura saw the "great privilege." Japan, in this sense, is not something substantial, but rather like Nishida's "place of nothingness,"20 an empty receptacle a function of transformation itself. The "Advaitism" that Okakura identified as an Indian philosophy is, in fact, more suitable to a space such as the one peculiar to Japan; that is to say that he composed a "history of the East" in the vacuum so-called Japan. Undoubtedly, it is a transfigured Japanese centralism; therefore, Okakura's notion of "Japan as a museum" inevitably came to be appropriated in the ideology of the "Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" headed by Japan. Okakura's account of Japan as a museum, however, is very much to the point; Fenollosa was able to discover the "Eastern art" in Japan only because ancient and classical Eastern artifacts were cohabiting in Japan; it would have been impossible elsewhere. For instance, even Sassanian artifacts are kept in a more perfect condition in Japan than in Iran. Thus what Fenollosa undertook was a categorization and disposition of the items (art objects)-a curatorial work. At the same time, it might not be simply accidental that it was an American brought up in Boston who "invented" Japanese art history. In the encounter between Fenollosa and Okakura, one finds a complex of problematics that requires more than just a general account of East meets West. If Japan, an insular country of the Far East, is a 'museum,' as Okakura believed, then America-however enormous it might be- is also an insular country of the Far West and thus a sort of 'museum.' It is a "beach" where each successive wave of thought from Europe and other places of the world has left its sand-ripple. If in America one can detect any unchanging principle, the sort unaffected by foreign influence, it is possibly represented by the "Transcendentalism" of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his lecture entitled "American Scholar,"21 Emerson advocates the following points: making a break from books and traditions from the continent, giving a primacy to the intuition that comes from within the self, and affirming the pragmatic against the theoretical. It might be said that American sympathy towards the East, from Henry David Thoreau to Walt Whitman up until the Beat generation, is rooted in such a positionality. Fenollosa's cosmopolitanism is dogged by Emerson's "Transcendentalism"; Fenollosa was not at all European, even if he did identify himself as one who belonged to the 'West.' This is manifest in the differing stances toward art taken by the European Impressionists and Fenollosa; he was elaborating a plan of a "history of world art"-world history seen through art- which clearly derived from his anti-European will. After World War I, America surpassed Great Britain in its seizure of economical and military hegemony around the world, but it was nevertheless not yet well enough developed to reign over the cultural domain. Later, America came to deprive Europe of its cultural hegemony very much by becoming a museum of Western art. Soon after The Museum of Modern Art was established in 1929 in New York, an architect, Philip Johnson, organized the pioneering show of the International Style, "Modern Architecture - International Exhibition" in 1931, a show that normalized modern architecture. In 1936 and 1937, MoMA's director, Alfred Barr, curated two shows: "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art-Dada and Surrealism," in which he categorized the myriad European modern art movements into either geometric abstraction or expressionism, and thereby fabricated a scenario which posited American Abstract Expressionism as a synthesis of the two, and as such the true pioneer of modern art. Subsequently, a group of critics, including Clement Greenberg, formulated an explicit logic to construct the paradigm of modern art and furthermore programmed a process by which to manipulate the paradigm in alternative ways, namely, to have sub-paradigms compete with and replace one another. Accordingly, even the art market, not to mention museums and criticism, joined in this process. It is not too much to say that by means of this process, world art came to be absorbed into the museum called America. At present the program set by the American museum seems to have reached a saturation point, while at the same time so-called multi-cultural movements have been flourishing. These movements might be in a sense similar to what Fenollosa envisioned, but they can be fully executed only by being accompanied by discursive struggles such as those Okakura pursued. Returning to the topic of Japan, at last. Ever since the Japanese modern art movement banished Fenollosa and Okakura, it has never regained its former radiance. It has consistently pointed itself towards Europe, which, nevertheless, has caused little confrontation between foreign and native principles in Japan. It seems that the Japanese cultural space has been producing and reproducing a "cohabitation space," to borrow Maruyama Masao's term, as a consequence of ceaseless importation. If, at this point, Japanese artists insist on advocating 'Japanese-like things' (Japonism) again, it will signify an imminent return to the idea that Okakura once presented - Advaitism, or else Nishida's place of nothingness - and the work will be categorized and exhibited in the museum of America; this routine was predestined nearly a century ago in the encounter between Fenollosa and Okakura. Notes: 1 This Westernization did not cause many problems with respect to those things that had not existed in Japan previously, but it created turmoil in the genres that had existed as authorized disciplines. For instance, Chinese medicine, that had been central to Japanese medical practice, was totally unauthorized and degraded into an old wives' remedy. One has to wait until Mao's postwar revolution to see it reevaluated scientifically. Chinese literature, Buddhist scholarship, National Scholarship [Kokugaku], and so on, were authorized only by being reorganized within the paradigm of modern Western scholarship. Buddhist scholarship, for instance, was considered as a scholastic discipline only when scholars went abroad to Germany to scrutinize its Sanskrit text, as opposed to the earlier accepted scholarship-reading the Chinese translation. Kokugaku came to be acknowledged as a modern science only after Haga Yaichi studied it abroad, in Germany, and conducted a comparative research with German philology. And so on. Only art enjoyed the privilege of being appreciated as vanguard from the beginning. 2 After World War II, Tokyo School of Fine Arts [Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko], and Tokyo Music School [Tokyo Ongaku Gakko] were combined into Tokyo University of Fine Arts [Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku]. 3 See The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1958. For instance, see letters 437, 463, 487, 500, 510, 542, 543, W 71, B 2, B 18. 4 Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writing of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellman, Random House, New York, 1969, "Intentions: The Decay of Lying," p. 315. 5 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977; especially, B. Self-consciousness, A. Independence and dependence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage. 6 Okakura Kakuzo (A.K.A. Tenshin), The History of Japanese Art, 1891, Meiji Bungaku Zenshu, Vol. 38. Chikuma Shobo, Tokyo. 7 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, International Publishers, 1963, p. 124. 8 See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Prometheus Books, 1991 9 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, German Ideology, edited and with introduction by C.J. Arthur, International Publishers, 1970, New York, p. 58. 10 Ernest Fenollosa, Epoch of Chinese and Japanese Art, New York, 1907. 11 Okakura Kakuzo (A.K.A. Tenshin) (1862 1913), The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Arts of Japan, Charles E. Tuttle Co. Publishers: Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan, 1970. p. 1. 12 See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Prometheus Books, 1991; especially the Introduction. 13 See Hegel, ibid.; especially, Part I: The Oriental World, Section II: India. 14 See Nishida Kitaro, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, The World of Action and the Dialectical World, translated and with an introduction by David A. Dilworth, Sophia University, Tokyo, 1970. 15 Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906; reprinted, Rutland. Vermont. and Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1956), p. 10-11. 16 Okakura, The Ideals of the East, p. 5. 17 Ibid., p.8-9. 18 Ibid., p. 8. 19 See Maruyama Masao, Nihon No Shiso [Japanese Thoughts], Iwanami Shinsho: Tokyo, 1961. 20 See Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings Nothingness and the Religious World View, translated and with an introduction by David A. Dilworth, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1987. 21 See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, "The American Scholar (1837), Bantam Books, 1991. 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