"MFA exhibit tours Japan, will not be seen in Boston" by Sebastian Smee | Globe Staff, March 24, 2013
FUKUOKA, Japan — The “Japanese Masterpieces” show has been a great opportunity for the MFA to let people all over Japan know of its holdings (which number more than 100,000 objects), and to advertise Boston itself.
But the show has also allowed the MFA and Japan to commemorate a long-ago romance, which saw a small number of New Englanders do Japanese culture the great honor of treasuring and preserving it at a time when Japan itself was in turmoil.
“People in Japan a century ago were eating hand-to-mouth,” said Morizane Kumiko, a curator at the Kyushu National Museum. “Appreciation of culture was very low.”
In the second half of the 19th century, when Japan was opened to foreign visitors, “no region of the United States was more enamored of Japan than New England,” wrote Christopher Benfey in his acclaimed account of the relationship, “The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Japan.”
Boston’s love affair with “Old Japan” — which Herman Melville had imagined in “Moby Dick” as “those insulated, immemorial, unalterable” islands — was made possible by the opening up of Japan to the West in 1854, under pressure by US Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of ships anchored offshore.
During the next 50 years, as the United States was struggling with the uncertainties of the Civil War’s aftermath, members of Boston’s elite upper class sought antidotes to the coarsening effects of rampant commercial expansion. These well-traveled intellectuals yearned for simpler, purer modes of living, and for more noble spiritual traditions.
They found what they were looking for in Japan....
The Last Samurai?
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