When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War,
argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its
philosophical moorings and looked eastward to "Old Japan," with its
seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and
perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a
more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in
the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an
international power. This great wave of historical and cultural
reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during
the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life
personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted
pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific.
In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group
of nineteenth-century travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, and
scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving
Old Japan. As Benfey writes, "A sense of urgency impelled them, for
they were convinced--Darwinians that they were--that their quarry
was on the verge of extinction."
These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is "shadowed
by hostile and mysterious Japan"; the historian Henry Adams and the
artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and
find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai's
daughter and becomes Japan's preeminent spokesman in the West;
Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward
Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world's leading expert on both
Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer
Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes
seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless
attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast)
Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come
West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult
favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who
studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre.
Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity
"seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the
Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an
overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril."
"From the Hardcover edition."
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