Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle. - book reviews

The subtext of Christine Guth's remarkable book Japan's role in the centuries-old traffic in misunderstanding and discord between traditional, non-Western societies and the aggressive, technologically advanced nations of the West. Japan began to experience these tensions in the 1540s, at the dawn of the Age of Exploration. Guth takes up the story in the 1860s, when Western warships forced Japan to reopen itself to trade and diplomatic relations. Its reaction, of course, was one of the most remarkable in modern history. In less than forty years Japan restructured its government and financial institutions, created a vast industrial base, and deployed a mighty army and navy. Defeating Russia in 1904-05, it became the first Asian nation since Ottoman Turkey to decisively humiliate a major European power in war. By the late 1930s, when the author's account ends, Japan was expanding its hegemony onto the mainland, beginning to expel European colonialists, and proclaiming a new East Asian economic and cultural sphere.

Concentrating on the art-historical aspects of this dialectical struggle, the author traces the career of Masuda Takashi (1848-1938), a leader of the giant Mitsui manufacturing and financial combine and one of the most accomplished art collectors of the modern era. Indeed, it is in the careers of magnates like Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) or J. P. Morgan (1837-1913) that suitable analogues of Masuda's achievements may be found.

The son of a low-ranking samurai official, Masuda was given a traditional Confucian and Buddhist education. While still in his teens, however, he studied English and even met America's first consul general in Japan, Townsend Harris (1804-78). In 1864 Masuda accompanied his father to Paris as part of a delegation seeking to close the port of Yokohama to foreign trade. In 1868 he enlisted in a cavalry troop in service to the crumbling Tokugawa military government. In the same year, however, that regime was overthrown by one headed by the emperor Meiji. The industrialization of Japall had begun.

Guth describes some of the transactions by which Masuda successfull mastered foreign business techniques and sought to redefine Japan's perception of' its national essence (kokutai), its cultural identity. At first the unemployed former samurai moved from job to job. For awhile he was an interpreter in foreign import-export firms, where he learned Western accounting methods and made life-long friends. His sister went to school in the United States, became a Christian, and renounced her native ways. Masuda worked for the mint in Osaka, became friends with the influential cabinet official Inoue Kaoru (1835-1915) and, in 1876 at Inoue's direction, took over a trading company that was soon absorbed by the Mitsui combine.

Astute in business and a shrewd judge of human character, Masuda quicklu climbed the ladder of corporate ranks. He expanded Mitsui coal mines and its control of resources in China. In 1901 he became a director of the central Mitsui organization. Though nominally retired in 1913, he remained an adviser and major influence in the company until his death a quarter century later. Though he was by no means the richest of the plutocrats of the new Japan, his fortune was great enough to enable him to plunge deeply into the art market.

According to the author, Masuda bought his first work of art in 1878, a lacquer box for writing implements. Collecting was in vogue among his friends in government and business, most notably Kido Takayoshi (1833-77), an early leader of the Meiji government and a passionate devotee of literati painting and calligraphy. Indeed, as Guth shows, political and cultural authority were as closely linked in the new Japan as they had been in the old, for the expectation that persons of high status should demonstrate virtue through mastery of arts and letters was deeply rooted in traditional Sino-Japanese statecraft. Even hereditary warriors had been expected to combine martial skills with cultural attainments, and Guth shows how Meiji leaders applied this ancient ethical principle to the new industrial-commercial ethos.

Masuda and his friends traveled abroad and were keenly aware of the glories of European art and architecture - its cathedrals, palaces, museums, office buildings, and department stores. In a competitive spirit, they wanted japan to create equally splendid monuments, but they also sought to affirm their nation's uniqueness and cultural identity. Art collecting, as the author shows, became an important part of the process of self definition, as Masuda and his circle established a new canon of masterworks and master artists from the past. In fact, much of today's image of premodern Japanese (and Chinese art) was created by Masuda and such like-minded collectors as Dan Takuma (1858-1932; mining engineer and administrator), Kawasaki Shozo (1837-1912; shipbuilder), Nezu Kaiichiro (1860-1940; railroads and manufacturing), and Okura Kihachiro (1837-1928; mercantile interests).

The author emphasizes that Masuda's own cultural life was centered on the tea ceremony. For a half-millennium this distinctively Japanese social custom had offered cultivated people the opportunity to gather in small groups in settings of natural beauty to engage in polite discourse and to examine works of art. Masuda held countless tea gatherings, and no aspiring executive of his company could ignore them. (In present-day japan no aspiring executive ignores golf.) Masuda used those occasions to show and compare objects in his own collection with those brought by his guests. Beginning in 1896 he held an annual gathering in honor of the Heian-period monk Kukai (or Kobo Daishi; 774-835). These gatherings gradually turned into ambitious exhibitions of the treasures of Mitsui executives and guests held in the houses on Masuda's estate in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

Particularly valuable is the author's account of the treatment of Buddhist paintings, sculptures, and ritual implements. Except for paintings and calligraphies by Zen monks, such materials had traditionally been kept only in a devotional context and not as objects of aesthetic appreciation. Masuda, a modern-minded person, was not at all pious, and his indifference to religion enabled him to collect Buddhist votive objects as works of art which he proudly displayed at his tea gatherings.

This book makes clear that Masuda was by no means alone in his collecting activities. A dozen or more japanese industrial leaders competed with him and with one another - at times fiercely - during the fifty years of Masuda's career as a collector. Appendix B contains a valuable list and biographical summaries of these persons. Some of them - Fujita, Hatakeyama, Nezu, Ohara, and Okura - founded private museums like the Frick Gallery in New York or the Freer in Washington. Hara Tomitaro (1868-1939) created an architectural park in Yokohama akin to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, Michigan, though much more elitist in taste.

Though Masuda's taste was strongly influenced by the sobriety of the tea ceremony, his collection of over four thousand objects was encyclopedic in character and included materials from China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. He did not found a museum, however, and after his death the collection was dispersed. Guth has identified and illustrated many former Masuda objects now in public and private collections, and she demonstrates how extraordinarily sharp was his sense of artistic quality and historical importance. His interests, however, were firmly rooted in the past; unlike some of his Japanese rivals, he had no interest in contemporary art. Japanese or Western.

This book makes clear the cultural differences between captains of Japanese industry and their Western counterparts, but it is also striking how similar in both spheres was the very modern process of collecting and museum-building - the same kinds of rivalries and vanities, the same use of collecting as a means of social legitimation or as an expression of nationalist feeling. A major difference is the absence of women among the Japanese - no parallels there to Beth Palmer (d. 1918) in Chicago, or to Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) in Boston.

This book helps dispel the misconception that it was "the keen eye and prophetic mind" of the Harvard-trained philosopher and historian Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) that induced Meiji-era Japanese to appreciate their own traditional arts and to stop their "orgy of foreignism." (The words are Mary Fenollosa's from her introduction to her husband's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art of 1912.) Guth shows conclusively that Masuda and others had begun to collect and preserve traditional arts long before Fenollosa.

She describes the founding of the Tokyo National Museum by Machida Hisanari (1838-97), who had studied at the South Kensington Museum (the present-day Victoria and Albert Museum) in London and imbided deeply the medievalism current in the Arts and Crafts movement in England. She also makes clear that the 319 works of sculpture, painting, and liturgical arts reputedly "presented" by Horyu-ji to Emperor Meiji were in fact purchased by the government for ten thousand yen (a vast sum in its day) to assist the financially distressed monastery. They are now housed in their own building in the national art museum compound in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

The author openly acknowledges that Masuda's career skirted serious ethical issues. These include the fascist tendencies of the pre-World War II giant industrial-financial combines (zaibatsu) and the role of the Mitsui interests in Japanese imperialism. Guth largely ignores such issues and concentrates on the genial, positive aspects of Masuda's collecting enterprise. Positive indeed were his achievements, and equable was his temperament; but the book mentions the controversies swirling around him without conveying their intensity or gravity, and herein lies its chief shortcoming.

Nativists proclaiming the doctrine of national purity confronted advocates of Western learning in the prewar years. Italian teachers in the government art college were discharged, the school's curriculum revised, and a law was issued forbidding the importation of oil paints and canvas. Western social theories-liberal democracy, fascism, syndicalism, anarchism, Marxism - interacted with values of samurai valor and loyalty, the cult of the emperor, and the tradition of concealed power. Painting groups formed and dissolved through the turbulent decades. japan may not have been as tempestuous as Iran of recent times, but three years after Masuda's death it attacked Pearl Harbor and Singapore and brought itself to the brink of apocalypse. Masuda may have been a gyroscope of stability; the world around him was far from stable.

In writing this book Guth devoted more than a decade of unremitting labor, including several trips to Japan. She explored numerous Japanese-language historical documents, diaries, and collection catalogues and traced the histories of important works of art whose movements have hitherto been unknown. The book contains copious illustrations in color and black-and-white, but they are small in scale and give little sense of the artistic power of the works that Masuda collected. That, however, is not the book's purpose. Its focal points are biography and the history of taste, and it is a major addition to the growing body of literature on the economics and social character of art collecting worldwide. This book contains valuable information and deep and subtle insights into the visual arts of the Meiji period that can be found in no other Western-language work.

COPYRIGHT 1994 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group