Japan and Britain After 1859: Creating Cultural Bridges

xiiPrefaceStrenuous efforts were made in Japan to encourage and market the exportindustry. Although the trading company Kiritsu Kosho Kaisha was not anobvious success, largely because of confusion over objectives, Japan’s strugglesto create a viable export trade were, in the end, triumphant.Paradoxically, using the momentum gained from the exhibition, theJapanese encouraged their craftsmen at home to manufacture masses ofcheap export ware. This could be china, lacquer ware, cloisonné ware, fans orfolding screens. Having visited the exhibition every British housewife wanteda piece of Japan in her home. Japanese government strategy had indeed paidoff. Their cultural bridges were second to none.In Japan curiosity about Britain and the West was tempered by a feelingof shame. How could the Japanese conform and excel when everything theyknew of the West was so remote and alien? In Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi,one of the great inspirators of Meiji Japan, recognised that most of hisfellow countrymen would never visit the West. They would have to learnabout Western culture from foreign books imported into Japan. One ofFukuzawa’s students founded Maruzen, which became an important chainof bookshops handling a wide collection of imported books in English, orother foreign languages.One of the most startling developments was the need in Japan toconform, and this created a demand for ‘Western’-style buildings. Britisharchitects were initially important but they had soon trained the first generationof Japanese architects who built in Western styles. Several Japaneseinstitutions were soon housed in buildings in the Western idiom; these wereimportant symbols for power hungry Japan.Japanese curiosity was assuaged and their leaders reassured when amodern industrial designer like Christopher Dresser visited Japan. Theyhoped to learn more of modern pottery design and the techniques of largescalemanufacture from such a man. Japanese painters also became studentsof and learnt from British painters. This was a controversial matter asJapanese traditionalist artists struggled to maintain Nihon-ga, or theJapanese style of painting. With the new medium, photography, co-operationwas clearly necessary and desirable.In Britain the fever of excitement over Japanese art developed a life of itsown as Japonisme. Everyone was obsessed with Japan; both theatre andmusic hall were involved. Did the excited response to Japanese art and artobjects reflect a staleness in Western art in the mid-nineteenth century? InBritain certainly the art world was being challenged by the competitivenessof mass manufacture of an industrialised society. A voyage to Japan, could,for an impecunious painter, lead to a comfortable living as pictures of aromantic Japan sold well to a small but eager picture-buying public. Otherpainters made contact with Japanese art collectors in Britain and foundthese connections both profitable and stimulating.The magic of fairyland Japan was described in many books written byenchanted travellers. Japan, the British came to believe, was a land apart, an