Japan in American Museums - but which Japan? - Bibliography

The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized a symposium, "Asia in Museums," as part of celebrations of the museum's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998. I was asked to talk about Japan in museums. When I was given my topic, "Japan in American Museums," I immediately responded with a question: "Which Japan?" The theme and my response gave me an opportunity to reflect on Japanese art collections in this country and their functions. My investigation took me down both familiar and unfamiliar paths of thinking about the reception and presentation of Japanese art in a foreign culture. This paper relays the gist of my presentation, and my continued theoretical musing about "Japanese art" as a notion rather than about the art objects themselves that make up this category.

The general theme of the symposium was the examination of how Asian cultures are perceived and presented in museums. Our intention was to review broadly how Western museums, through their collections and displays, have told stories about "other" cultures. To the extent that they narrate other societies by means of selected objects drawn from various "other" cultures, art museums today share their ancestry with nineteenth-century ethnographic museums. In a recent catalogue published for Images of Other Cultures, an exhibition of ethnology held in Osaka showcasing Japanese artifacts from the British Museum, various scholars observed how and what artifacts from Japan were displayed in the British Museum during the early decades of the twentieth century. (1) According to one report, Japan was shown in two different types of space in the museum. On the one hand, Japan was part of the ethnographic gallery devoted to artifacts from Africa and Oceania. Here Japanese objects were presented alongside those of the Ainu, an indigenous community in northern Japan of distinctly non-Japanese linguistic and ethnic identity. On the other hand, Japanese paintings were represented in the prints and drawing gallery, and other objects, such as "porcelain, metal work, lacquer ware, and netsuke," (2) were displayed as "works of art" in the "Oriental" or "Toyo [sic]" gallery. The report also notes that "a great deal was already known about the periods and styles of Japanese painting and a substantial number of paintings were exhibited according to these categories in the prints and drawings gallery." (3)

In the Osaka exhibition catalogue, John Mack of the British Museum addressed in his essay two major issues concerning ethnological collections and ethnographic exhibitions. One issue has to do with the question, "What are ethnographic collections and exhibitions about?" He examined the role museums play in their various displays by figuring them "as arenas for the exercise of power," an arena in which an organizer (curator) "appropriates to him or herself the right to represent cultures that are not their own." The voice in this arena is not so much one that "seeks to speak of or about other cultures" as one that "seeks to speak for them"--a "political" voice. The second issue is about the nature of ethnographic collections themselves. These collections, the argument goes, started as evidence for the understanding of other cultures, but recently have been seen "as an archive of the engagement of one culture with another." In other words, ethnographic collections are being interpreted more as "icons of sets of relationships; of the triumph of capitalism, of the colonial experience, or of the missionising enterprise." In this interpretation, ethnological objects are not simply evidence for the understanding of other cultures. In Mack's apt words, "ethnographic exhibitions are ... represented as problematical events staged in problematical places--and mounted by problematical people." (4)

It is well known that the ultimate origins of the collections and display of other cultures' artifacts probably lay in Wunderkammer and "cabinets of curiosities" of the European ruling families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The interest in representing other people of the world would in time inspire the series of world's fairs of the second half of the nineteenth century, in some of which Japan participated. The world's fairs in turn inspired the expos of more recent decades, in which art is a readily visible entity understood as representing a country. The fact that Edward Morse's collections of objects he amassed in Japan, (5) classified in natural history, ethnography, anthropology, and art, were divided between what is today's Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston tells us something of the shared boundaries between ethnography's and art history's evolving histories. That the style of display of some of the objects in the Japanese gallery at Peabody-Essex Museum comes close to that of an art museum probably echoes that intertwined history of the changing methodology in ethnography and art history. It comes as no surprise that in accounts of Charles L. Freer's collecting and selecting of Japanese works of art, he describes them frequently as "specimens." (6)

With this background in mind I would like to do three things. First, I will make some general remarks about the past fifty years of collecting and exhibiting Japanese art by American art museums. Second, I will analyze the impact of what can be seen as one of the pivotal exhibitions of Japanese art in America, the exhibition Japanese Painting and Sculpture of 1953 (Fig. 1), which was a benchmark event in the year that followed the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. As will be shown, the 1953 exhibition that traveled to five American cities embodied the cultural consensus of the art establishment in Japan as to which art was considered important: that is, it constituted a concrete statement of Japan's official canon of its cultural patrimony. Finally, I shall examine how that canon came into being, and what it might hold for us in the future.

Patterns of Exhibition from the 1950s to the 1990s

In 1981, on its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Japan Society of New York published a statistical report entitled Japanese Art Exhibitions with Catalogue in the United States of America, 1893-1981. (7) An informative publication, the report records a total of 173 entries, each item corresponding to an initial venue with its distinct title and the accompanying catalogue. The roster includes exhibitions consisting of works already in permanent collections in American museums, both public and private, libraries and archives. It chronicles loan and traveling shows negotiated among the various collections in the United States. Prominent also on the list are several important traveling exhibitions from Japan. This study of different venues and genres of exhibitions of Japanese art demonstrates that Japan as a concept is dynamic in a number of ways. On the one hand, disparate Japanese art objects and their many different stories have been marshaled together in order to construct a broad, generic history, and on the o ther hand, one or more portions of that generic history have been regrouped to be shaped into individual stories with special themes. And so, both lumping and chopping of the concept "Japan" have occurred in art museums in their presentation of Japanese art, in a typical as well as atypical manner. A follow-up roster of similar events of the past twenty years might provide a useful tool enabling us to observe, analyze, and interpret their range and significance.

The 1981 report reveals a variety of themes among the exhibitions listed. Some are generic and identifiable by their titles, such as Japanese Painting and Sculpture or One Thousand Years of Japanese Art. Among these is the 1953 show Japanese Painting and Sculpture, arguably the most important event of the 1950s and one that inaugurated a tradition of survey-type exhibitions, illuminating selected masterpieces of all periods or one particular period, or medium/format (sculpture or screens), or any permutation of those categories. Among these later surveys were Art Treasures from Japan, sent by the Japanese government in 1965, which toured four cities in North America and Canada, (8) Japanese Buddhist Sculpture at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, in 1982, and Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1988.

Other exhibitions are topical in focus. Among the most significant in this category were Japanese Arts of the Heian Period: 794-1185 at the Asia Society Galleries in New York in 1969, organized by John Rosenfield; Zen Painting and Calligraphy at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1970, organized by Jan Fontein and Money Hickman; Courtly Traditions in Japanese Art and Literature at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized by John Rosenfield and Fumiko Cranston in 1973; Momoyama: Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975, curated by Julia Meech; Shinto Arts at the Japan House Gallery, New York, in 1976, organized by Kageyama Haruki and Christine Guth; and Japanese Ink Paintings from American Collections: The Muromachi Period, at the Art Museum, Princeton University, in 1976. Some of these exhibitions, while selectively focused on specific subjects, demanded from viewers knowledge of premodern Japanese history, literature, and re ligion and, perhaps most crucial, background knowledge of the historical interface of China and Japan. Of the above group, the success of the Zen painting exhibition may have come from the perfect timing of the event. Zen and Zen-inspired concepts were ubiquitous expressions in the search for new cultural values in the fast-forming counterculture of the United States through the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly noteworthy in this context were two exhibitions, both dealing with the tea ceremony. They focused on the function of art and ritual in Japan, specifically in the tea ceremony, as a measure for building social consensus. Tea Taste in Japanese Art, mounted at Asia Society Galleries in 1963 and organized by Sherman E. Lee, emphasized an aesthetic dimension or realm inhabited by disparate objects brought into cohesion through their artistic or formal aspects. Chanoyu: Japanese Tea Ceremony was staged in 1979 at the Japan House Gallery. With a catalogue jointly written by American and Japanese authors, it cont extualized the artifacts of tea from Japanese collections in terms of how the tea ceremony as a ritualized event defined each item from an ensemble of disparate objects made of different materials (metal, clay, wood, bamboo, and paper) in terms of its function. In this contextualizing attempt, and owing to its anthropological method, Chanoyu came close to what an ethnographic and anthropological exhibition might successfully display by underscoring the fraternal relationships that exist among ethnography, anthropology, and art history.

Another category of exhibitions presented a single artist or school, such as Scholar Painters of Japan: The Nanga School, organized in 1972 by James Cahill, and Buson and His Followers at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 1974. The growing interest in Nanga (9) in the United States in the 1970s contrasted sharply with the extremely low status assigned the idiom in the earlier development of the Japanese painting collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Indeed, Ernest Fenollosa, (10) perhaps the most influential figure in the early connoisseurship and display of Japanese art, dismissed Nanga as "hardly more than a joke." (11) This emergent Nanga focus had much to do with the growth of art historical scholarship on post-Yuan styles and trends in Chinese painting. But it is also true that, more practically speaking, Nanga paintings were available at relatively low cost and in large quantity in Japan during the immediate post-World War II period. More recently, and reminiscent of the Nanga exhibit ions of the 1970s, the "eccentric" painter Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) has garnered much enthusiasm. In 1989 the Asia Society Galleries mounted a major display of the paintings of the artist, whose works would not have made the cut in the traditional, survey-type generic exhibitions of the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the success of this monographic exhibition derived from the familiarization of Americans with Jakuchu through the Shin'enkan Collection of his paintings, the largest single collection of this painter's work outside Japan. Also, stimulated in part by the Chinese field, the art of Japanese calligraphy, a category hitherto underviewed outside Japan, has been presented as a major genre in the artistic tradition of Japan, creating an additional genre of art historical research and teaching in museums and academia. The 1984 exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, Eighth-Nineteenth Century, organized jointly by the Japan House Gallery and the Asia Society Galleries and shown simultaneously at both New York institutions, was the first comprehensive exhibition of Japanese calligraphy of the survey type drawn from American collections mounted in this country. Underscoring the new interest in calligraphy as a major art form in Japanese art, some notable private collectors have significantly increased their holdings in the area of Japanese calligraphy from all historical periods. Among them two collections are significant: the Mary and Jackson Burke Collection in New York and the Barnet and Burto Collection in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

All museums in the United States suffer from lacunae in the vast field of Japanese archaeology and prehistory, from the Neolithic Jomon period, the longest period of Japanese material culture, to the seventh century C.E., the Kofun period and the beginning of Buddhist art in Japan. It was, therefore, enormously satisfying when the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., hosted the exhibition Ancient Japan in 1992, updating the archaeological knowledge of Japan's prehistory by the selected example of its material culture discerningly described, analyzed, and interpreted in the excellent accompanying catalogue.

In tandem with exhibition patterns from the 1950s into the 1990s was the emergence of new museum collections of Japanese art. Strong in painting, the major museums-- notably, the Seattle Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art--have increased their holdings despite regulatory practices in Japan discouraging the export of art objects. In this regard the Metropolitan Museum made an impressive acquisition of Japanese art to boost its holdings through the purchase of the Harry Packard Collection in 1975. The Cleveland Museum is preeminent in this respect for its stated commitment to strengthen its Asian holdings. Sherman E. Lee, the director of the Cleveland Museum, wrote in 1981, "... the Oriental [sic] collections needed a strong, reasoned and continuing development so that they might be more comparable with the already outstanding collections of ancient, medieval, and modern Western art." (12)

Paralleling this phenomenon has been the formation of notable private collections of Japanese art, especially in painting, each having its characteristic acquisition style. For example, the Mary and Jackson Burke and the John and Kimiko Powers Collections have been built through broad coverage of all historical periods of Japanese art history as defined by typical "masterpieces." The Shin'enkan Collection, by contrast, has targeted the stylistically expressive works of mid-to-late Edo-period painters such as Ito Jakuchu, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799), and Soga Shohaku (1730- 1781). And the Sanso Collection has been developed around the Edo idioms of Nanga, haiga ("haiku" painting), and zenga ("zen" painting), with some notable Muromachi ink paintings also acquired. The emergence of such private collections notwithstanding, acquisition of Japanese art in the 1950s and after by some American museums and private collectors, while quite remarkable, was not at all comparable to the opportunities available in the Ch inese field. Chinese paintings flowed into American collections during the period immediately following the Communist Revolution of 1949. Paintings and other works also arrived with migrations of collectors and scholars from China, boosting the capacity of art museums and universities as centers of Chinese art studies to advance art historical research. No comparable opportunities were granted the Japanese field during these same years, resulting in a considerable disadvantage for Japan specialists whose objects of analysis, from paintings to lacquer, never reached the overwhelming quantities of works introduced from China.

Masterpiece-oriented exhibitions have a contrast in more innovative and idiosyncratic shows concerning popular culture. These have included displays of Japanese folk arts and even toys. (13) One of the most unusual and effective of such exhibitions was Tsutsumu: The Art of the Japanese Package. It was organized in 1975 as a joint project of the American Federation of Arts and the Japan House Gallery and traveled to sixteen cities in the United States over four years. The exhibition, which fascinated viewers by strategically illuminating Japan's commercial arts and crafts of the plebeian world, presented the works as an expression of the artistic traditions that defined distinctly Japanese attitudes to form--specifically, the high standards of craftsmanship and of quality control that also describe "high art" such as painting or sculpture. When the exhibition arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1977, it was combined with objects from the host museum to become In the Nature of Materials: Japanese Decorati ve Arts, which emphasized materials and techniques used in the making of decorative arts.

Further expansion and experimentation beyond the normative "high art" framework occurred in a variety of displays of nontraditional art or of objects not always regarded as art. One of the most important efforts in this direction was the Japan House Gallery's Kanban in 1982, an exhibition of shop signs organized by the Japan Society, the American Federation of Arts, and the Peabody Museum of Salem. Another critically acclaimed exhibition along these lines was Tokyo: Form and Spirit, which took on the art and architecture of the commercial and technologically wired urban space that is Tokyo. This latter exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in collaboration with Japan House Gallery in 1986. Both the practice and theories of prominent Japanese architects were presented in the exhibition and articulated in the accompanying catalogue. In this production, traditional architecture--which is to say, teahouses, farmhouses, and those rarefied modular types of villa such as Katsura and Shugaku in--was underplayed. Instead, the exhibition emphasized a theme of contemporary urban chaos, with order imagined in the galleries through tactile spatial experience in what might be described as a theme park of virtual urban space.

These recent shifts in exhibition agendas and themes have not taken place in isolation. For Japanese art exhibitions are inescapably embedded in the larger context of a changing world of art exhibitions in general. (14) Their themes suggest a profound break with the traditional format and content of exhibitions organized around masterpieces. The emergent exhibitions of folk traditions of Japanese art are particularly salient in this regard. For they have as much to do with the gutsy aesthetics of agrarian and rustic strains in Japan's cultural history-that world of commoners so often neglected by scholars in their fascination with urbane courtly culture--as with the contemporary American interest in presenting to the public the artifacts of Native Americans or Africans that were formerly tucked in the corners of ethnographic museums.

From the 1970s, as the traditional art exhibitions gave way to innovation and experimentation, display of the art of Japan's more recent past began in earnest in this country. Imperial Japan: The Art of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), mounted at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University in 1980, was the first major exhibition of the art of the Meiji era since 1904. The introduction of Meiji art and architecture into the American lexicon of Japanese art history has fueled much debate and anxiety. Nihonga ("Japanese" painting), that is, the genre of neotraditional paintings of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is scoffed at by some American specialists as "saccharine sweet" anathema. By the same token Yoga ("European" painting), or oil paintings by Japanese artists, is denigrated for its putative derivativeness or is bypassed by Euro-American modernists who feel an uneasy geographic and cultural ambivalence about modern theory and practice that, rather than stopping at water's edge in California, has found its beachheads along the shores of East Asia. However, it is also true that Japanese art has been more or less accommodated to the Euro-American art historical enterprise, as seen in such exhibitions as The Great Wave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974 and in the various explanations of japonisme. But an account of Japan's total engagement with Euro-American art and theory is a territory few scholars dare to tread. Steps in this direction, and a focus on new art emerging in Japan, can be credited to exhibitions such as Japanese Art after 1945, organized by Alexandra Munroe at the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, in 1994 and the show of modern Japanese textiles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998. (15)

It seems clear that in the decades since 1950, the overall pattern of collecting and exhibiting Japanese art in museums shows an increasingly fragmented presentation of fields and interests. Viewers are presented with the complexity of Japanese culture, underscored by diversity in its art. The broadening range of genres and themes in Japanese art and culture represented in these museums and exhibitions after the 1950s to the present day may be seen as a reflection of the fast-growing bilateral relationship in many areas between the United States and Japan, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Diversity has also resulted, especially in very recent times, from the confrontation of Asianists with current debates and polemics in art history in general. There has been growing impatience with the notion of masterpiece and canon, so crucial to earlier standards of practice, and enhanced interest in the new interpretative art history based on any works of material or visual culture. One such trend is seen in the expl oration of patronage and the focus on art as a direct function of social, political, and economic power. How art exhibitions can be mounted with these new and often materialist themes is yet to be seen. The challenge to the established canon of art history and exhibition practice in Japanese art is just around the corner, and it is a serious one. Will it be necessary to retreat from the art history survey itself to accommodate the emergence of alternative art histories strongly informed by political and sociological interpretations of past art based on contemporary relevance? Art historical practices driven by developments in literary criticism, semiotics, studies of gender, and ethnicity, to name but a few areas of concern, are moves in this direction. While the art museum as an institution may not overtly declare its inclination to frame exhibitions in those newer and more discursive terms of engagement, the boundaries of the traditional paradigm have been transgressed for some time now, as evidenced by, in the area of Japan, Kanban and Tokyo: Form and Spirit. Certainly, the wide-open spaces in some museums invite the display of noncanonical art under the rubric of "multiculturalism," as has been the case in the educational curriculum of schools and universities across the country. It is against the backdrop of this current phenomenon of viewing art as charged with social and political agendas, and with exhibition trends of the past fifty years in mind, that I now would like to examine closely the 1953 exhibition Japanese Painting and Sculpture.

Japanese Painting and Sculpture was a result of cultural diplomacy between the United States and Japan during the politically uneasy period following the conclusion of World War II. A number of events added to the complexity of the relationship between those two countries: the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 and the retreat of the pro-United States Republic of China to Taiwan; the start of the Korean conflict in 1950; the Japanese signing of the peace treaty with the United States and forty-seven other countries (excluding the Soviet-block countries, India, Burma, and Yugoslavia) in 1951; and the Japan-United States Mutual Security Act in 1951. At the San Francisco Peace Conference in September 1951, when the peace treaty was signed to take effect in April 1952, there were hard-liners who insisted on punitive treaty clauses. They were opposed by many soft-liners against punishing Japan with exorbitant war reparations.

Foreseeing the role Japan could play in the politically precarious regions of the Pacific, they argued that allowing it to regain political stability and economic prosperity would serve to counter a perceived Communist threat in that part of the world. The soft-line argument, led by the United States, prevailed, leading to a close alliance between the United States and Japan. Cultural diplomacy between the two countries was an integral part of this development. The United States believed that through a potential partnership Japan could be reshaped--and redeployed--as a strong member of the free world. It was within this political atmosphere that an idea to bring a major exhibition of art from Japan was born. The exhibition of 1953 has special personal meaning to me because I saw this exhibition in Boston on its last day in mid-December. That was my first semester at an American secondary school, having lived in Japan as a youth, and my first encounter with major artworks from Japan.

Art, Treasure, Canon...and Politics

In 1954, one year after the exhibition Japanese Painting and Sculpture returned to Japan, the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, a special Japanese governmental agency that implemented the exhibition, published a lengthy and detailed report on the exhibition. (16) The report includes excerpts of correspondence from the Japanese curators of the exhibition as they traveled with the show to Washington, D.C., New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. It also outlines the events soon after the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty Conference that led to the exhibition of 1953.

According to the report, for a period of one month, from September 6 to October 5,1951, the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties held an exhibition of Japanese art, called Art Treasures from Japan, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, for the duration of the peace conference between the United States and Japan. (17) Those who saw the exhibition, among them Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and John D. Rockefeller III, urged the Japanese government to mount a similar exhibition on the East Coast of the United States. In November Rockefeller traveled to Japan with a request for an exhibition of Japanese traditional art to be shown in major cities of the United States. As a "civilian envoy," Rockefeller must have been effective. Long interested in Japanese art and culture, he was president of the Japan Society of America. More important, his family name was, as it were, carved in stone in the Japanese memory, for it had been the Rockefellers who had rebuilt the library of the U niversity of Tokyo at Hongo when it was destroyed in the great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

The following year, in 1952, David Finley, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to Takahashi Seiichiro, chairman of the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, informing him that Archibald G. Wenley, director of the Freer Gallery, Langdon Warner, formerly of the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Alan Priest, curator of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were on their way to Japan to initiate negotiations for an exhibition of Japanese art in United States venues. (18) The commission's response was neither forthcoming nor especially enthusiastic. No doubt the commission was reluctant to heed the request out of concern that the Japanese art objects, many in fragile condition, would suffer damage from climatic changes if moved out of Japan for a period of as long as one year, as the exhibition required. Another reason may have been that the exhibition followed too closely on the heels of Art Treasures from Japan.

The United States negotiators remained persistent. The fruit of such an exhibition, they argued, would be the rebuilding of Japan's image. (19) In his preface to Report on the Japanese Art Exhibition in 1954 Rockefeller, referring to some half million viewers who had attended the exhibition, emphasized not only that the exhibition enhanced the respectability of Japan but also that Americans were becoming increasingly familiar with Japan through other cultural endeavors. He was referring to such events as the Japanese teahouse, presented to the Museum of Modern Art by the America-Japan Society in Tokyo; the two Japanese films, Ugetsu monogatari and Jigokumon featured in the United States that year; the English translation of Osaragi Jiro's novel Homecoming; and a seventy-eight-page supplement to the Atlantic Monthly of January 1954 entitled Japan Today. Rockefeller also cites the Azuma Kabuki, which toured the country in the spring of 1954. (20)

Enormous optimism about a cultural interface between Japan and the United States was further voiced by David Finley, who claimed in his foreword to the 1954 report, "the success of the exhibition is proof of the widespread and increasing interest which the American people have in the history and culture of Japan.... For art transcends the barriers of language; and we find that by means of great artistic achievements, we are able to understand the inner meaning and significance of Japanese art and to realize the contribution which it has made to the culture of the civilized world." (21) The optimistic and congratulatory tone of these statements about the relationship between the United States and Japan, like the mutual image the two countries developed of each other, would go through various transformations during the next several decades. Certainly, the relationship has had its ups and downs. But the momentum to seek traveling exhibitions from Japan may be said to have been sparked by the success of the 1953 exhibition. Japanese Painting and Sculpture, as I will demonstrate, had an extraordinary group of masterpieces and would educate American specialists of Japanese art in what the Japanese sense of a canon and cultural patrimony has been.

Without doubt, Japanese Painting and Sculpture presented an astounding array of works across the spectrum of Japanese cultural history. There were 91 entries (118 individual items) consisting of paintings (77), sculptures (11), and applied arts (3). Paintings from earlier historical periods predominated. Buddhist paintings of the Heian and Kamakura periods totaled 17 entries. Non-Buddhist paintings from the same periods, further categorized as handscrolls, hanging scrolls, fans, and a screen, amounted to 15 entries. For the Muromachi period there were 17 entries (Fig. 2), including screens, and for the Momoyama period 6 entries, with screens predominating. The Edo period was represented largely by 6 entries of panels and screens identified with individual artists such as Kano Tan'yu (1602-1674), Tawaraya Sotatsu (fl. 1602-43; Fig. 3), and Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637), and the remainder of the Edo period was represented by 16 entries, including works by the Rinpa artists Ogata Korin (1658-1716) and Sakai Hoitsu (1761-1828); the Nanga artists Uragami Gyokudo (1745-1820), Ikeno Taiga (1723-1776), Aoki Mokubei (1767-1833), and Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841); the Maruyama school artist Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795); and several entries for genre painting and ukiyo-e. Of the 11 sculpture entries, most were Buddhist works in bronze dating from the sixth and seventh centuries; only one, a work by Koben (active early 13th century), dated from a later era.(22)

Who Compiled the List?

It was one thing to come to an agreement to hold an exhibition abroad. But it was quite another issue to decide on what, precisely, to exhibit. When David Finley, Langdon Warner, and Alan Priest arrived in Japan in July 1952, the Japanese Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties had formed a subcommittee specifically to make its own list of selections. However, it became clear on August 12, when the commission met with the three American representatives, that the United States side had already done its homework. The commission was presented with what became known as the "dream list" of desired objects. This list had as its behind-the-scenes protagonist Sherman E. Lee, one of the most informed persons in the United States about Japanese cultural assets. The "dream list" apparently took the Japanese by surprise. It is reported that the alternative list prepared by the commission subcommittee came nowhere near Lee's list in level of object excellence and importance. Warren I. Cohen puts the matter bluntl y. "Assuming the Americans would know no better," he writes, "they held back their finest pieces and put together a mediocre selection that would suffice to impress the gaijin, the ignorant foreigners. Alan Priest compared the Japanese offering to the beads with which the Dutch bought off the natives of Manhattan. But the Japanese had forgotten about Sherman Lee."(23)

The commission closely compared the two very different lists and exhibition concepts. After much haggling and with great care (skinchoni, in the words of the commission), a "compromise" list was drafted and presented on October 10, 1952, for final approval to a division of the Commission to Evaluate Cultural Properties (Bunkazai Senmon Shingikai). This final list consisted of a formidable roster of objects registered by the Japanese government as significant cultural assets. There was one work from the Imperial Household Collection; twelve works ranked as National Treasures (Kohuho); fifty-seven works designated Important Cultural Properties (Juyo bunkazai); and six works designated Important Art Objects (Juyo bijutsuhin). Only fifteen entries had not been designated or ranked as cultural assets. The American negotiators had outmaneuvered the commission. The success of the "dream list" for the 1953 exhibition was a measure of the American triumph in cultural diplomacy. It may be argued that Japan was in no po sition to refuse. However, the Japanese had underestimated the Americans' sound professional knowledge of the objects' whereabouts and a clear understanding of their artistic importance in Japan, which, in combination with their power of persuasion, made for a convincing case.

In mid-November 1952 the objects were packed and crated at the Tokyo National Museum and transported to Yokohama. There they were loaded onto the United States naval transport General M. M. Patrick on November 29 and dispatched on their ocean voyage to Seattle, and from there to Washington, D.C. On board were two young curatorial staff members of the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, Kurata Bunsaku and Suzuki Kei, specialists in sculpture and painting respectively. The Japanese team dispatched by the commission consisted of additional members drawn from three government art establishments: the Commission of Specialists, the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, and the Tokyo National Museum. The team chief was Ishizawa Masao. Other members included Fukui Rikichiro, Harada Jiro, Matsushita Taka'aki, Ogushi Sumio, and two administrators from the Tokyo National Museum. The use of a United States Navy vessel for transport of art objects(24) was negotiated on the American side by Charle s Wilson, secretary of defense and a member of the Honorary Committee of the Exhibition. No subsequent international art exhibitions would ever again be so supported by the Defense Department.

Production of an illustrated catalogue proceeded apace as the objects were transported. The English text--in translation from the Japanese--was carefully edited by Victor Hauge, a staff member of the United States Embassy in Tokyo. The catalogue was printed in Washington, D.C., and Phil Stern of the Freer Gallery and an employee of the National Gallery named Cott proofread the two hundred pages. Thirteen thousand copies were printed and sold at two dollars per copy. At each venue the catalogues sold out before the exhibition closed. According to the 1954 report the exhibition at its five venues attracted a total of nearly 423,000 viewers.(25)

The exhibition closed in Boston and the objects were packed, recrated, and shipped back to Japan on board the United States naval transport General J. McCray. They arrived back in Japan on March 5, 1954 (Fig. 4). The following day the crates were taken to the Tokyo National Museum and the objects put on display for Japanese viewers for ten days. Such "homecoming exhibitions" (satogacri ten), based on the 1954 precedent, were subsequently held for all exhibitions sent abroad under Japanese government sponsorship.

Without question, Japanese Painting and Sculpture was a remarkable event. It offered American viewers an opportunity to see many paintings and sculptures considered by the Japanese themselves to be their most valuable cultural properties from the Nara to the Edo periods. This could not have happened without a thorough understanding by the Americans of the Japanese system of valuation and registration of art objects. It taught American scholars a lesson: if you want a good exhibition of Japanese art, choose registered objects whenever possible. But what, precisely, is a registered object? The system was implemented over fifty years ago, under the Japanese national law called Law for Protection of Cultural Properties. Following this law, art objects were evaluated and assigned status as Kokuho (National Treasure, or NT), Juyo bunkazai (Important Cultural Property, or IGP), or Juyo bijutsuhin (Important Art Object, or LAO) in a hierarchical ranking of works of art according to degrees of importance. Arguably, th is is the most systematic control of national cultural assets ever devised by a government. The process of valuation and ranking obviously assumes the work, and implications, of a canon. It is this Japanese notion of a canon for its art, but also art as cultural patrimony, that I will now address.

The Canon and Its Effects

It is a ubiquitous format procedure in Japan to frame an exhibition using the standard periodization scheme of Nara to Edo (26) and to fill each period with masterpieces. The 1953 exhibition exemplified this practice, with which both lenders and borrowers were in agreement. It was a coup of sorts to bring to the United States so many registered items. The importance of this event requires further elaboration, for subsequent acquisition policy of American museums has been in one way or another influenced by this Japanese canon of cultural patrimony. A succession of exhibitions of Japanese art of the survey type based on periodization, regardless of medium, in American museums after 1953 proves the strength of this canon: Japanese Art of the Edo Period at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, in 1958, organized by Laurence Sickman; Art Treasures from Japan at the Los Angeles County Museum and three other museums in the United States and Canada in 1965; Momoyama: The Age of Grandeur at the Metr opolitan Museum in 1972; Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture at the National Gallery of Art in 1988; and Japan's Golden Age: Momoyama at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1996. Most recently the Metropolitan Museum mounted an exhibition from the Mary and Jackson Burke Collection that covered a comprehensive chronological span from Jomon pottery to Hiroshige's prints. These exhibitions embody exactly the same canon at work in the selection of objects for the 1953 event by both the Japanese and American sides. The Japanese official view regarding art objects not only has established itself as the canon, it also deeply affects our notion of Japanese art history. It subtends almost all general books or book chapters on Japanese art published in the 1950s and after. Indeed, the chapter headings in the ubiquitous Art and Architecture of Japan, by Robert Paine and Alexander Soper in 1955, revised in 1960--the standard for undergraduates in the 1950s and 1960s--reads like a gallery guide for a large generic exhibition of Japanese painting and sculpture. The same can be said, in terms of a chronology and subject matter based on hierarchy, for later textbooks such as Japanese Painting by Terukazu Akiyama (1961) and History of Japanese Art by Penelope Mason (1993) (27)

This canonical structure is official and remains in currency so long as the government art establishment exists in Japan. The NT, ICP, and LAO designations, translated into actual practice, have created a valuational hierarchy of cultural assets that, once shaped, became a standard against which all other works, related directly or indirectly, would be judged. However, this system, established through the Cultural Properties law of 1950 to preserve and register art objects, did not appear ex nihilo. It finds its origins in the history of Japan's modernization process of the 1880s and 1890s. Let me briefly trace what that history tells us about the ranking system. (28)

The 1950 legislation was passed with extreme urgency, prompted by the loss by fire of one of the major historical and artistic monuments in East Asia, the late seventh-century wall paintings in the main hall of the monastery Horyuji in Nara. This group of major Buddhist paintings linked the history of Japanese Buddhist art to China, Central Asia, and regions beyond. Workmen--who, ironically, were restoring the building housing the wall paintings, were unable to control the fire, which resulted in the destruction of the wall paintings on the night of January 26, 1949. The government formulated the cultural protection law to guard cultural assets precisely from hazards like this. The law provides that owners (whether temples, shrines, or private citizens) of registered cultural properties are entitled to government funding for preservation and repair of the objects. It also stipulates that when the private ownership of a cultural property changes hands in Japan through monetary transaction, the government Commi ssion for Protection of Cultural Properties (29) will have first right of purchase to make it part of the nation's cultural patrimony. In return for the government's guaranteed protection and coverage of the cost of preservation, owners are obliged to lend the designated objects to government museums on request. When foreign museums request loans, the owners must apply to the Bunkacho for permission to lend. And the duration of a loan is extremely short, merely four weeks for fragile objects. Under these circumstances, it is unthinkable that registered objects could come to be owned by someone outside Japan.

The modern official formation of the Japanese canon of cultural patrimony dates back to the first cultural protection law of 1871. The policies went through various transformations, mostly in response to foreign influences, such as French and Italian laws for cultural assets, or the sale of the Kibi scrolls to Boston in 1932. (30) By 1960, ten years after the first systematic law was passed by the post-World War II government, the number of designated objects had increased from 6,000 objects that had been initially known as "national treasures" in the old registrations to 9,037. Of these, the newly designated National Treasures numbered 931 items, which was a little over 10 percent of the total. Today the number of designated objects well exceeds ten thousand. Every year the Commission to Designate meets and votes, increasing the number of registered and designated items, which include Important Art Objects, a class of objects drawn from the old National Treasures that did not quite make the first two classes of the new post-1950 hierarchy (National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties) but are registered nonetheless.

The National Treasures and ICP classes currently apply to six categories of works: (1) painting; (2) sculpture; (3) applied arts; (4) calligraphy; (5) archaeological objects; and (6) architecture. The criteria established by the law and followed by the committee to designate remain somewhat loose. There are five criteria, for example, that define what ICP means in painting and sculpture:

(1) Those objects from various historical periods considered important in the cultural history of Japan showing excellence in their production.

(2) Those that are considered especially significant as historical materials in the history of painting and sculpture of Japan.

(3) Those objects that display outstanding features (prominent idiosyncrasy) in terms of subject matter, aesthetic quality, condition, and technique.

(4) Those that exhibit stylistic features that are attributable to a unique author or authors, schools, or geographic regions.

(5) Those objects of foreign production having significant bearing on Japanese cultural history (such as Chinese painting) (31)

It is from the objects designated ICP that the National Treasures are further selected. The same source describes the qualifications of National Treasures as: "[t]hose objects among the ICP that are even more exceptional in quality and of deep significance in Japan's cultural history." The selection of the 1953 exhibition of painting and sculpture sent to the United States by the Japanese government was guided by American familiarity with the ranking system, and it set a precedent for other similar exhibitions that came later.

The formulation of these five criteria and the definition of the factors leading to a work's designation were influenced as well by Japan's response at various moments to engagement with a changing world. Specifically, the modernization of Japan prompted it to size up the West. Learning how the Western nation-states were dealing with art was one agenda; how Japan might compare itself with the Middle Kingdom (China), which was facing its own crisis at the time, was another. Rejecting the option of waiting for the West to fasten its colonial grips over it, Japan employed its own long-tested bureaucracy to empower itself, arrogating the right to define itself as a modernizing nation-state of the world community, selectively appropriating certain Western values and institutional cultural models, like the museum. It was one path Japan could choose to take in order to sustain a concept of its national character; strengthening itself to face the reality of the changing world by modernizing its army was yet another.

These legal standards designating art objects, articulated as late as 1950, were implemented finally as national policy, subsuming the moments of national crisis Japan faced during the one hundred years since the Meiji era. "Objects deemed exceptionally important. . . or as witness to history" conveys some of the ways that Japan repositioned itself.

Prognosis

In a somewhat circuitous way, this paper has considered Japan and Japanesse art in American museums by historically tracing the evolving exhibition formats and patterns of the last fifty years. Our analysis of these exhibitions has led us to realize that the Japanese ant works collected and displayed in museums of the United states have been, directly or indirectly, conditioned by the Japanese national policy toward its cultural patrimony before they departed their place of origins. This implies that those works in collections outside Japan carry ready-made labels that convey official Japanese judgments: their own ranking and taxonomic identity (periodization, schools, stylistic affiliation) already provided by the same system that also transmits objective information (provenance, iconography, and possibly authorship) based on research (the staffs of the Agency for Cultural Affairs are trained art historians, contributors to the scholarly community). With some notable exceptions, art historical knowledge of i ndividual Japanese works in collections outside Japan comes substantially from the findings of Japanese scholars even long after the works have left Japan. For various reasons, some of these museums do not have full curatorial research files; in others, works are not even catalogued.

The systematic inventory of many of the Japanese works of art in collections, public and private, outside Japan have invariably been done by japanese scholars who have been sent by the various government art establishments, as well as by Japanese art book publishers. This activity was particularly prominent from the 1960s on. The result of their investigation of Japanese works of art can be found in the commercial, multivolume japanese publication Zaigai hiho (Japanese paintings in Western collections), which selected over three hundred paintings of various formats, schools, and mediums (3 volumes, 1969). Ten years later, the more elaborate Zaigai shiho Uapanese treasures in Western collections) appeared, this time covering all the chronological stylistic categories of painting, sculpture, ceramics, and other applied arts-more than one thousand items in all, with contributions from curators of the various museums in the United States as well as Europe (10 volumes, 1980). Recently, the series entitled Catalogu e of Japanese Art in Foreign Collections (Kaigai shozai Nihon bijulsuhim chdsa hokoku), sponsored since 1990 by the Japan Arts Fund, has been published by the Association of Scientific Research on Historic and Artistic Works of Japan, which is within the Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties (Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyfijo), an institute overseen by the Bunkacho. (32)

Museums outsideJapan that house Japanese works are, with the notable exceptions of the Freer Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ill-equipped in conservation facilities, placing them in a decisively disadvantageous position for repairing and conserving artworks, especially works on silk and paper. When repair is called for, the works are sent back to various conservation studios in Japan. Thus, through the material vulnerability of these works, museums outside Japan are taken hostage by Japanese artistic practices. No wonder then, faced with the task of choosing a theoretical method of dealing with Japanese art and then with the reality of maintaining it physically, museum curators of Japanese art acquiesce in following the formulas the Japanese have already devised.

But there is another aspect to the Japanese system. In being able to extend their canon of evaluation of art to the realms outside their national boundaries, the Japanese implicity claim ownership over artistic works abroad as part of their cultural patrimony. This sense of ownership or virtual ownership over art collected and displayed (in both the corporeal and the psychological senses) in a foreign land is translated into the consciousness of ethnicity. The ethnic divide between the cultural insider (Japanese and Asian) and the outsider (Americans and Europeans) has historically denied blissful parity of any kind. This ethnic factor or factor of distance here is seen in the following ways: it is perceived by the Japanese as manifestation of dismissiveness or neglect toward Asian/Japanese art shown by the presumed audience in the West, whose artistic and cultural orientation is dominantly Euro-American. The Japanese see this situation as calling for improvement, and they feel the artworks need salvaging. Th us, they come to the rescue, providing knowledge and skills to bring the Japanese works--their cultural property--under their care and protection. "Only the Japanese can look after them" is a ubiquitous utterance expressing the Japanese attitude toward what they see as cultural divide in a situation where the Euro-American viewers are seen disproportionately lacking in experience with and knowledge about Japanese art. Concerning research and conservation of Japanese works of art in foreign countries, the Japanese thus feel they are the ones who have to do these tasks for foreigners.

For foreigners? One might ask whether Japanese expertise in Japanese art in foreign collections as demonstrated in their various enterprises--publishing in popular art books as well as in scholarly journals--is benefiting the non-Japanese audience abroad. Only a small circle of Western experts on Japanese art benefits from studies published by their Japanese colleagues, as these are almost always published in Japanese. Nonspecialists in the West unable to read Japanese are totally barred from the realm of new knowledge available to specialists. The ethnic divide widens further. Western-language publications on Japanese art, whether they are descriptive research articles published in art historical journals or highly interpretative studies of art published in a number of interdisciplinary journals, remain sadly unread most of the time by Japanese scholars. There are clear signs of complacency among the Japanese scholars toward the Western-language publications on Japanese art, which, by being dismissed by the Japanese scholarly community, fail to bridge the gap between Japanese art and the Western world. The ethnicity issue here sought in an arena of the relationship between what is shown and by whom, between who knows and what, and between who speaks for what and whom is negotiated into a power relationship recalling that in the recent ethnographic discourse we noted at the beginning of this essay. The power relation here is of a different kind, however, than in typical (post-) colonial discourse. It is that of knowledge about art objects and how to handle them on the one hand, and, on the other, how to dispense them. The Japanese specialists of Japanese art are more empowered to deal with the specific requirements of individual works of art, whether they are in Japan or in museums outside Japan. And the information and knowledge about them are locked solidly in Japanese speaking domains. In other words, these objects come with dense texts provided by the "cultural insider."

If art talks back to Westerners, who unsuccessfully tried to speak for the Japanese, it also talks back to the Japanese, who hold tight rein on objects that are technically, but not conceptually, outside their concern and control. Perhaps our task as Western presenters of Japanese art is to see it on two fronts, the descriptive and interpretative: first, by mastering knowledge about the physicality and materiality of Japanese art, so that its idiosyncratic properties can be learned through our technical and discursive capabilities, such as our technical know-how in museum conservation and restoration studios and the conceptual apparatus we develop in art history classrooms, and second, by writing our own "texts" that interpret the art beyond what our Japanese colleagues have provided, while at the same time encouraging our Japanese colleagues to join in a truly global discourse on Japanese art. Japanese art history practiced today in museums and academia in the West encourages interpretation. To broaden under standing of Japanese art for viewers outside Japan, there are great opportunities to forge into new frontiers in the area of interpreting the already marshaled facts about different works of art in our museums. Further challenges exist in creating a field of knowledge that is yet to be explored. Comparative art history dealing with the Japan/ China interface offers one such challenge; examination of the artistic relationships between calligraphy and the materiality of the paper on which the calligraphy appears, as in the supreme Tale of Genji scrolls, another. As the recent study by the Japanese scholar Yasushi Egami has shown, it is more than promising to probe into the intricate visual effects created by the sumptuous paper of the Heian scrolls, which call for an anagogic interpretation through aural experience, such as Heian music and liturgical chanting. (33)

The canon of discriminating artworks in Japan mainly applies to the works from before the seventeenth century. Works of art that were perceived as being outside the area in which the canon was applied have been broadly investigated since the 1960s in Japan as well as in the United States, and as a result more Edo-period works, specifically, paintings of the middle to late Edo period, have joined the ranks of designated objects in recent years. We recognize, with some satisfaction, that the works of the "eccentrics," Jakuchu, Rosetsu, and Shohaku from the eighteenth century and the works of the late Rinpa school, Suzuki Ki'itsu (1796-1858), Nakamura Hochu (fl. 1802), and Sakai Do'itsu (1845-1913), for example, have been rediscovered by collectors in this country, creating opportunities for research and display, both in this country and in Japan. (34) A more recent sign is encouraging: doctoral dissertation topics pursued by graduate students are now extending into the very late Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and even Sho wa periods. Therefore, "Japan in American Museums" as a theme in the increasingly interconnected world prompts the question, "Which Japan?" and, perhaps more urgently, "Whose Japan?"

Notes

(1.) The Osaka exhibition was held at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, from September 25, 1997, to January 27, 1998. It moved to a venue in Tokyo and was held at the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, from February 11 to April 12, 1998. Scholarly essays are found in Kenji Yoshida and John Mack, eds., Ibunka e no manazashi (Images of Other Cultures: Re-viewing Ethnographic Collections of the British Museum and the Notional Museum of Ethnology, Osaka) (Tokyo: NHK Service Center, 1997).

(2.) A netsuke is a miniature sculpture, often finely lacquered, used as a toggle for a tiny but equally finely crafted medicine container called inro. They were both fashionable accessories in Japan from the 17th century on.

(3.) These objects, and their respective categories, are mentioned in A Guide to Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum, published in 1910, as reported by Kenji Yoshida in Kenji and Mack (as in n. 1), 41-42. See also Timothy Clark's notes on Japanese paintings in the British Museum, ibid., 116-17 (in Japanese), 314-15 (in English).

(4.) John Mack, "Over There Over Here: Ethnography in the British Museum," us Kenji and Mack (as in n. 1), 67-71, at 71.

(5.) Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) was an American zoologist and director of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass. He was an early collector of Japanese artifacts and wrote extensively on a variety of topics concerning Japan. In 1877 he traveled to Japan to study Pacific Ocean brachiopods and was invited to teach zoology at the then newly established University of Tokyo. He was instrumental in founding the Japanese Imperial Museum. Morse introduced to Japan many scientific methods in studying zoology and biology. New archaeological fields opened tip through his finds, near Yokohama in 1879, of a pottery culture called Jomon (the "chord pattern"), the oldest pottery culture of Japan, dating front 10,000 B.C.E.-ca. 300 B.C.E. See Money L. Hickman and Peter Fetchko, Japan Day by Day, an Exhibition Honoring Edward Sylvester Morse and Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of His Arrival in Japan in 1877, exh. cat., Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., 1977.

(6.) Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) was a self-made Detroit millionaire who amassed wealth through Isis business firm, Peninsular Car Works, which produced and sold railroad cargo cars. A self-taught connoisseur of Asian arts, he gave his collection to the nation before his death in 1919, which formed the core collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the earliest national museum, which opened its doors in 1923. For Freer, see Helen N. Tomlinson. "Charles Lang Freer: Pioneer Collector of Oriental Art," Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1979; idem, "Charles Lang Freer as Connoisseur," Apollo 18, no. 258 (August 1983); and Thomas Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art, exh. cat., Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1993. Freer's use of the word "specimens" is found ubiquitously in the day records he kept throughout his collecting days, known as "little black note books," in the Freer Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Wa shington, D.C.

(7.) Japanese Art Exhibitions with catalogue in the United States of America, 1893-1981 (New York: Japan Society, 1981).

(8.) The exhibition, consisting of 117 entries encompassing sculpture, painting, metalwork, lacquer, ceramics, and textiles, traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

(9.) Nanga, literally, "southern painting," was initially coined by the Chinese as nan-lsung-hua (nan-shu-ga its Japanese), or "southern school painting," to designate artists with lofty literary achievement and aspiration who painted without professional training--thus, self-defined amateurs. Nanga is an abbreviation of this term and artistic ideology adopted by the Japanese painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. This group of painters pursued, both in China and Japan, painted mostly landscape.

(10.) Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908) was an early American connoisseur of Japanese arts. A native of Salem, Mass., he studied philosophy and sociology at Harvard. He went to Japan in 1878 to teach philosophy and political economy at the University of Tokyo. He is best known for the role he played in the preservation of Japan's cultural assets at the time the nation was randomly abandoning its cultural patrimony while it seas being modernized following Western models. His own extensive collection of Japanese art became the core collection of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His views on Japanese art and culture, controversial today, are contained in his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, posthumously published in 1912. He was also interested in the Japanese Noh theater, on which he made notes that were posthumously published by his literary executor, Ezra Pound.

(11.) Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 2d ed. (London: Stokes, 1913). vol. 2, 165.

(12.) Sherman E. Lec, One Thousand Years of Japanese Art (New York: Japan Society, 1981), 11.

(13.) Folk Arts of Old Japan, Asia Society Galleries, 1965; Mingei Folk Arts of Japan, San Diego Museum of Art, 1977; Folk Traditions in Japanese Art, Cleveland Museum, 1978; Mingei: Japanese Folk Art from the Brooklyn Museum Collection, Brooklyn Museum, 1985; Japanese Folk Art: Triumph of Simplicity, Japan House Gallery, 1992.

(14.) The reader may refer to an instructive essay by Arthur C. Danto, "Masterpiece and the Museum," in Encounters and Reflections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 313-30.

(15.) Cara McCarty and Matilda McQuaid, Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles, exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998.

(16.) Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai (Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties), Amerika junkai Nihon kobijutsu tenrankai hokokusho, Showa niju-hachinen ichigatsu-junigatsu (Report on the Exhibition of Japanese Painting and Sculpture: January-December 1953 at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle) (Tokyo: Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai, 1954), in Japanese with partial English text.

(17.) The exhibition was organized and sent in a hurry to be mounted in San Francisco, where the peace conference proceedings were taking place. Though the exhibition was of extremely short duration, the objects selected for display in San Francisco came from all ranks of works, many of them registered National Treasures, Important Cultural Properties, and Important Art Objects, comprising a total of 178 entries in the exhibition catalogue. They included painting, ukiyo-e prints, calligraphy, sculpture, masks, metalwork, armor, sword mounts, sword furniture, lacquer art, ceramic art, textiles, and dolls, selected chronologically from the archaeological period to the 19th century. According to the catalogue's preface, dated August 1951 and written by Takahashi Seiichiro, the chairman of the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties of Japan, the Japanese government had "only a few weeks" between the time of the request for the exhibition and the packaging and shipping of rise show. See Art Treasures fro m Japan: A Special Loan Exhibition in Commemoration of the Signing of the Peace Treaty in Son Francisco, September 1951, exh. cat., M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1951 (unpaginated).

(18.) The content of Finley's letter is summarized in Morita Takashi, secretary of the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, "Events Leading to the Exhibition," in Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai (as in n. 16), 4 (in Japanese).

(19.) The exhibition of Japanese art of 1953, packaged and sent by the Japanese government, is effectively described as a visible instrument of cultural diplomacy. See Warren I. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 139-43.

(20.) Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai (as in n. 16), 5-6 (in English).

(21.) David Finley, in ibid., 3-4 (in English).

(22.) A comprehensive list of entries of the exhibition is in ibid., 79-82 (in Japanese), 9-12 (in English).

(23.) Cohen (as in n. 19), 140-41. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, Sherman E. Lee seas assigned to the Arts and Monuments department of the Supreme Commander Allied Forces in the Pacific (SCAP) in Tokyo. The position enabled Lee to get to know not only the location of great works, registered and unregistered, but also the intricate network of Japanese art dealers and collectors, as well as art historians. For Lee's role in the postwar Japanese art market, see ibid., 133-40; and Sherman E. Lee, "My Work in Japan: Arts and Monuments 1946-48," in The Confusion Era: Art and Culture of Japan during the Allied Occupation 1945-52, ed. Mark Sandler (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1997).

(24.) United States Navy transport seas also deployed for the return trip from New York through rise Panama Canal to Honolulu and to Yokohama. See below.

(25.) The National Gallery of Art, where the exhibition opened in late January 1953, had 189,094; the Metropolitan Museum, 79,790; Seattle, 73,756; Chicago, 68,722; and Boston, surprisingly, only 20,621. The report's account of the Boston venue, where the exhibition ran for a month, is interesting to note: "Compared with other venues, the number of visitors was extremely small. On the other hand, the quality of the viewers, befitting the region sass extremely high, underscoring the exhibition's success," observed the report. How the quality of the Boston viewers had been judged was not mentioned in the report. The same report also noted that in Boston, not a single exhibition poster or flyer seas posted beyond the museum's premises.

(26.) Comprehensive Japanese historical periods, beginning with the Nara period, are as follows: Early Nara (Hakuho), 643-710; Late Nara (Tempyo), 710-94; Early Heian, 794-897; Middle Heian, 897-1086; Late Heian, 1086-1185; Kamakura, 1185-1333; Muromachi, 1333-1573; Momoyama, 1573-1615; and Edo, 1615-1868.

(27.) Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of Japan, the Pelican History of Art (1955; reprint, Baltimore: Penguin, 1960); Terukazu Akiyama, Japanese Painting, Treasure of Asia series ([Geneva?]: Editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1961; reprint, New York: Rizzoli, 1977); and Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

(28.) Almost all Japanese books that list and illustrate designated art objects offer an introductory history of how the law to designate has been legislated in Japan. A succinct study of this designation system and its implications is offered discerningly in Christine M. E. Guth, "Kokuho: From Dynastic to Artistic Treasure," Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie (Kyoto) 9(1996-97): 313-22.

(29.) Since 1968 the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties has been within the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkacho), which is under the Ministry of Education at Toranomon, Tokyo.

(30.) During the 1870s and 1880s, the Japanese civil servants and ideologues, such as Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), Takahashi Kenzo (1855-1898), and Kuki Ryuichi (1852-1931), feared the eventual depletion and effacement of cultural assets without government intervention. Through their travel abroad they came to learn that in Europe, especially in France and Italy, cultural policies facilitated protection of artistic patrimony. They articulated their concern for the need to have a national policy on art in the inaugural issue of the journal of arts, Kokka, in 1889. Details tracing the history of legislation for national cultural assets are so far available in Japanese publications. See Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai (Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties), ed. Kokuho jiten (National Treasures encyclopedia) (Kyoto: Benrido, 1961), 15-21. Also see Guth (as in n. 28). Sale of the Kibi scrolls to Boston refers to the purchase made in 1932 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, of the late 12th-century handscroll Kibi Daijin Nitto Ekotoba (Illustrated scroll of Minister Kibi's adventures in China). Extremely rare examples of narrative scrolls dating from the late 12th century, the Kibi scrolls, in which the hero, a Japanese minister, outwits the Chinese, suddenly became available in Japan in 1932, but no Japanese museums or private collectors offered to buy them, whereupon Kojiro Tomita, curator of the Asiatic Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, seized this opportunity to purchase it for the Boston museum. The Japanese art establishment reacted immediately to the sale of the scroll to Boston as a major loss and assailed the transaction, giving rise to a protectionist atmosphere in general against the outflow of art objects from Japan. Within a year, in 1933, a law was legislated by the Japanese government discouraging export of art objects from Japan. The law required that any art objects deemed important must be approved personally by the minister of education for an export permit. The law is called Juyo bijutsuhin to no hozon ni kansuru horitsu (Law concerning protection and maintenance of important art objects). For this episode, see Jan Fontein, "Bosuton bijutsukan toyobu o kizuita hitotachi-korekushon no rekishi ni kansuru noto yori" (People who founded the Asiatic Department of the Boston Museum: From notes on the history of its collection), in Bosuton bijutsukan Nikon kaiga meihinten tokubetsu zuroku (Special illustrated catalogue of Japanese painting masterpieces in the Boston Museum) (Tokyo: Nippon Television Network Corporation, 1984), 15.

(31.) Bunkazai-hogo Iinkai (as inn. 30), 20.

(32.) Association of Scientific Research on Historic and Artistic Works of Japan (Kobunkazai kagaku kenkkyukai), Catalogue of Japanese Art in Foreign Collections (Tokyo: Kobunkazai kagaku Kenkkyukai), vol. 1, 1991, on the Metropolitan Museum Collection; vol. 2, 1992, on the Mary and Jackson Burke Collection and on the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation; vol. 3, 1993, on the Philadelphia Museum Collection; vol. 4, 1994, on the Joe and Etsuko Price Collection, Corona del Mar, Calif.; and vol. 5, 1995, on the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

(33.) Yasushi Egami, Ryoski soshoku, haku chiraski (Paper decoration and gold-leaf sprinkling), Nihon no bijutsu series, vol. 6, no. 397 (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1999).

(34.) These late Rinpa painters' works have been aggressively collected in the United States. Some representative collections with strong later Rinpa works include the Joe and Etsuko Price Collection; the Robert and Betsy Feinberg Collection in Bethesda, Md.; the Kurt Gitter Collection in New Orleans; and the Willard Clark Collection in Hanford, Calif.

Yoshiaki Shimizu is Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where he teaches Japanese art. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and was curator of Japanese art at the Freer Gallery of Art and guest curator at the National Gallery of Art in 1988 [Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

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