Cultural light, political shadow: Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) and the Japanese crisis of national identity, 1880–1941

Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) became an overnight celebrity in Japan at the outbreak of the Pacific War. The first line of his 1903 publication The Ideals of the East—“Asia is one”—was celebrated posthumously as the most powerful expression of Japanese wartime aspirations, and Okakura was considered a visionary of Japanese political ascendancy in Asia. But during his lifetime, Okakura was known as a bureaucrat, art philosopher, and museum curator devoted to the protection of Asian art. His most important achievement was the restoration of Japanese pictorial art (nihonga). Employing the individualism and art philosophy of the West, he encouraged artists in latter nineteenth-century Japan to create a new artistic tradition and cultural identity that could reflect the dynamic social and cultural change of modern Japan. This thesis aims to transcend the gap between the principally intellectual and aesthetic investigations of Okakura\u27s lifetime achievements and the primarily political examinations of his appropriation in wartime Japan. By exploring both Okakura\u27s writings and activities during his lifetime and the posthumous debate over his legacy, the study exposes the critical changes and continuities in the persistent crisis of national identity in modern Japan. Issuing from an era of overwhelming Western influence in Imperial Japan, Okakura\u27s principally philosophical notion of Asian spiritualism found an unexpected political home during a time of increasing antagonism vis-à-vis the West. Like the story of nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner\u27s appropriation by Nazi Germany, Okakura\u27s life and legacy expose the profound political and cultural crises of modern Japan