learn...: January 2009

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Thursday, January 1, 2009

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

By Chrstopher Benfey
Random House
2004

Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave is an unlikely history of the relationship between the United States and the Meiji Empire of Japan. Benfey outlines for his readers the influence of Japan on several influential American intellectuals of the Gilded Age. Like most readers, I assumed that the prewar relationship between Japan and the United States was a one-sided one of calculation, domination and control. Politically, that remains true, but in the intellectual sphere, where, until wartime, politics rarely interfere, the relationship between the cultures was much more balanced and active than I had imagined.

Benfey takes us on a tour from New Bedford, Massachusetts, down around the Cape of Good Hope, to The Galopagos Islands of Darwin, through San Francisco, Hawaii, Okinawa and finally to Japan’s mainland—tracing the travels of Herman Mellville, Edward S. Morse, Henry Adams, Percival Lowell, Lafcadio Hearn, John La Farge, and even Theodore Roosevelt. While many of these are no longer household names, the manner and extent to which they influenced their time and our American culture as a whole cannot be understated.

But Benfey not only focuses on the often eccentric habits and travels of these Westerners in Japan, he also dedicates ample analysis to the effects of two influential Japanese who landed on American shores. John Manjiro, the shipwrecked Japanese lad of no more than 15 who was adopted by a Captain of a New Bedford whaling ship and brought to his home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts for a proper western upbringing. Manjiro’s longing to return to Japan touched not only the lives of his adopted family and friends, but of two cultures curious but skeptical of each other, and in need of a unifying factor. While Manjiro himself did much to teach both cultures about each other, his mere existence implied a potential relationship between these seemingly unlikely intellectual powers.

The other Japanese that Benfey highlights is Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese esoteric who, turning increasingly disenchanted by the changes he experienced in his own country, appealed to thinkers and leisure class members of the West to help build appreciatiation and funds to protect the medieval Japanese culture that he feared would soon be extinct. Okakura penned the classic book The Book of Tea
a book that paved the way for a common Westerner’s understanding of the “mystical” Far East. While it can be said of Okakura that his impressions of Japan were at times exaggerated, they did much to lay the groundwork for what now has become the stereotypical Far East experience. Perhaps most of what Okakura believed Japan to be is in fact long gone with the rapid modernization, imperialism and eventual war, but there is some truth to the idea that, through Okakura’s writing and efforts, we Westerners do have some sort of collective memory for Japan under the Samurai rule.

Benfey’s book is not, however, an easy read. Benfey himself adores the people about whom he writes, and through him, we come to appreciate them as well. However, Benfey rarely glorifies his subjects and often does much to bring them down to earth. They were, in fact the same tormented humans as are we, and so Benfey allows them little time to be larger than life. It’s not so much the deflation of these personalities that makes Benfey difficult to read, nor certainly his appreciation of their flawed personas. While I hate to say it, I think what makes this book tough going is simply that Benfey himself gets bogged down in the details of history. He sometimes reads like a dissertation, and sometimes like a gossip column, thankfully without as many footnotes, but still with the overzealous insistence on proving his theory to the reader. I do not mean to say that I don’t appreciate his perspectives or his desire to validate them. I just got tired out a lot. But if you’ve the patience, the strains of pure gold awaiting you in The Great Wave are well worth mining.

¶ 10:45 AM 1 Comments