Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000
Tea with Okakura
By Christopher Benfey
Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 23, 1999-March 26, 2000.
an exhibition at Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan,, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Saeko Yamawaki, by Nobuko Sakamoto, by Makiko Yamada, by Hitomi Sato
Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 238 pp., $29.95 (paper)
The Book of Tea
by Kakuzo Okakura
Kodansha International, 160 pp., $10.00 (paper)
Commodore Matthew Perry's historic 'opening' of Japan in 1854 did not open up very much. Many American ships had run short of supplies or foundered near Japan's xenophobic shores, which had been closed to foreigners since the Shogun's declaration in 1639 that Christians were a menace to Japan. Perry's sailors put on a minstrel show, the Japanese countered with a sumo match, and a treaty was signed—at gunpoint, more or less. But hospitality was slow in coming to what Melville in Moby-Dick called 'that double-bolted land, Japan.'
Review, 5429 words
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