December 6, 2003
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
AMHERST, Mass.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Commodore Matthew
Perry's fabled "opening" of Japan. If you said, "Commodore
who?" you wouldn't be alone. Commodore Perry - Matthew
Calbraith Perry, to be exact - has faded from American
memory, even though every Japanese school child knows his
name.
In 1853, Perry brought a fleet of four heavily armed "Black
Ships" into Edo Bay, near present-day Tokyo, and demanded,
in the name of President Millard Fillmore, that Japan open
its ports to American ships. Japan, which had been closed
to foreigners for more than two centuries, complied, and
Perry steamed home expecting a hero's welcome.
He was disappointed, for Washington had more pressing
concerns than a tiny archipelago across the Pacific:
namely, the extension of slavery into the West and the
threatening noises about secession from Southern senators.
Perry decided he needed public relations help. He asked
Nathaniel Hawthorne, then United States consul in
Liverpool, England, if he might consider writing a book
about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero.
Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on Dec.
28, 1854, "It would be a very desirable labor for a young
literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world
can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than
Japan." But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and
suggested that Perry approach Herman Melville, who knew
something about the Pacific. Perry, stupidly, decided to
write the book himself, a wooden performance that did
nothing to enhance his reputation.
Today, Perry's image still needs burnishing in his own
country. He has what you might call a Columbus problem: he
is seen as more an invader than an explorer. This is
unfair. Perry came in search of treaties, not territory.
However imperious his manner, his aims - at least with
regard to Japan - were not imperialist. Backed by his guns,
he opened Japanese ports to foreign goods and ideas; but he
also opened the way for Western understanding of Japan.
It's worth remembering that the United States did not
occupy Japan. Instead, Japan took one look at Perry's
steamships and cannons and decided to modernize the country
- and quick. In the span of 50 years, Japan turned itself
into an industrial power, learning watch-making from the
Swiss and war-making from the Prussians, and won a place
among the world powers in the ghastly battles of the
Russo-Japanese War.
Yet some Japanese questioned whether this was progress. In
"The Book of Tea," published in 1906, Kakuzo Okakura
observed that the average Westerner was accustomed "to
regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle
arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to
commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields."
The truth is, though, that Perry didn't really open Japan.
He did the easy part: showing off American firepower to the
gaping samurai on shore, and forcing a trade agreement on
the emperor. But there was a second, slower, more
significant opening, which required actual understanding -
of Buddhism, for example, and the traditional arts of judo
and the tea ceremony.
This cultural opening was the result of patient effort by
dedicated men and women who saw more in Japan than good
harbors and coal for whaling ships. They were people like
Edward Sylvester Morse, who traveled to Japan in 1877 to
teach Darwin's theory of evolution to the Japanese and
ended up as the world's authority on Japanese ceramics, or
his younger contemporary, Ernest Fenollosa, who taught
Emerson and Hegel at Tokyo Imperial University before
falling in love with Buddhist painting and sculpture.
This sort of opening is as much an internal process as an
external one. People talk about the Japanese influence on
America; you might call this the "particle theory" of
cultural exchange. But what we see in the 150 years of
Japanese-American interaction is something more complicated
and harder to name. Maybe we need a "wave theory" of
cultural exchange, to explain the constant oscillation
between East and West.
That oscillation continues today, in movies like "Lost in
Translation" and "The Last Samurai." Both movies take as
their heroes broken-down Americans, hired by the Japanese,
who find unexpected regeneration in opening themselves to
Japan. In "The Last Samurai," Nathan Algren, the
hollowed-out Civil War veteran played by Tom Cruise, comes
to Japan to modernize its army. He is typical of those
oscillating 19th-century Americans who found that Old Japan
had more to teach them than they could offer in return.
Like his samurai sword, inscribed "I belong to the warrior
in whom the old ways have joined the new," Algren forges
himself into an alloy of East and West.
Not long ago we learned that Bob Dylan, in his album "Love
and Theft," had taken some lines from a Japanese book
called "Confessions of a Yakuza," by Junichi Saga. These
similarities gave rise to some understandable hand-wringing
about plagiarism and cultural appropriation. But Bob Dylan
is just another example of the great wave of
Japanese-American cultural oscillation. This is Bob Dylan,
for crying out loud, the guy who was born Robert Zimmerman
in Minnesota, adopted as his last name the first name of a
Welsh poet, and modeled himself on Woody Guthrie.
Could it be that his saga, not to mention the flurry of
movies about Japan and self-discovery, are signs that
finally, 150 years after Perry cracked open the door to
Japan and sailed away, the real opening has taken place?
Christopher Benfey, professor of English at Mount Holyoke
College, is author of "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits,
Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/06/opinion/06BENF.html?
ex=1071900730&ei=1&en=a895a8360bcdda0e