The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan - Hardcover

Benfey, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375503277 ISBN 13: 9780375503276

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific.

In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.”

These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre.

Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Benfey teaches literature at Mount Holyoke College, where he is co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership. Benfey is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, and Degas in New Orleans. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

From the Back Cover

Advance praise for The Great Wave

“The close-up brilliance of Christopher Benfey’s depiction of the early stages of the encounter between sophisticated representatives of the American Gilded Age and those of nineteenth-century Japan required an assured grasp of both cultures, their assumptions and envies, their gifts and weaknesses, their humor and lack of it. He has portrayed this mutual loss of virginity with grace, wit, and a range of reference that re-echoes the original astonishments and is a pleasure to read.”
—W. S. Merwin

Praise for Christopher Benfey

Degas in New Orleans
“Yes, Degas in New Orleans involves a haunted house, ghosts, and titillating couplings, but all elements are solidly anchored in historical events and retold by Christopher Benfey in a deft synthesis of art criticism and historical speculation....An elegant introduction to a city that remains a secretive, seductive metropolis.”
—Grace Lichtenstein, The Washington Post Book World

The Double Life of Stephen Crane
“In this astute and subtle new reading of Stephen Crane, Christopher Benfey discovers the mysterious process of a life taking shape from its art. Mr. Benfey writes beautifully and is as sharp on the social and psychological dimensions of Crane’s experience as he is on language and literary craft.”
—Jean Strouse, author of Alice James

Reviews

The quests for spiritual fulfillment of the figures profiled here unfold in extraordinary ways. Disaffected by the mercenary state of American culture in the Gilded Age following the Civil War, many of New England's intellectual elite sought a new social order from the largely unfamiliar Japan, a nation whose own intellectuals were in turn looking to shake off years of isolation and forge a new identity as part the international community. Cultural historian Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke (Degas in New Orleans), seamlessly braids the far-flung adventures of cultural importers/exporters from both countries and offers an enjoyable collection of eclectic and surprising historical narratives about such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Adams. Benfey traces the importation of Japanese culture to the U.S. back to intrepid pilgrims like Herman Melville, who wrote of exploring Asia's "impenetrable Japans." This curiosity boomed in the cultural confusion after the Civil War, when many Americans felt that European philosophy could advance no further except through mysticism, which the exotic Japan was thought to offer. Benfey relates the lives of several Japanese eccentrics who likewise believed that a foreign culture might provide useful tools for a country similarly in the midst of dramatic change. The cultural exchanges that Benfey describes, at times comic, are tantalizing examples of how nations develop and in what ways they are able to learn from each other. Though Benfey sometimes meanders and indulges in digressions into the decadent lives of 19th-century Boston Brahmins, his account is consistently enjoyable and always informative.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For aesthetes dissatisfied with the upholstered world of late Victorian taste, Japan offered a cultural richness that mesmerized an unusual gallery of American characters. Their collecting and publicizing of all things Japanese animates this braided tour of cultural encounter. Of the people Benfey follows, none but Henry Adams is a household name today, and he was a latecomer to the Japanese fad, a languid, solace-seeking (after his wife's suicide) tourist among Benfey's group. More distinctive are those who initially sailed to Japan after the Meiji restoration of 1868. Benfey recounts Edward Sylvester Morse's seminal importance; he went to Japan as an anatomist of mollusks and returned as a popular writer and lecturer on Japanese style, particularly architecture. Others brought back immense quantities of artwork, or, like muralist John La Farge, sought a creative change in Japan's land- and seascapes. Conveying both rapture and disappointment with Japanese culture, Benfey draws a sophisticated portrait of the period's personalities. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

THE FLOATING WORLD



If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever

to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone

to whom the credit will be due;

for already she is on the threshold.

-herman melville, moby-dick (1851)

Imagine the following scenario. Two fatherless boys on opposite sides of the earth take to the sea within days of each other, in search of adventure and a livelihood. Their paths cross on an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where they encounter some of the same helpers, and hinderers. One arrives after years of wandering at the other's port of departure. The other falls just short but writes an extraordinary book that completes the journey. One deserts a whaling ship while the other is rescued by one. One discovers the joys of savage life while the other discovers the ambiguous joys of civilization. Each dreams of "opening" the other's country, and each is changed utterly in the process; their reward is gloom and isolation. Now, let us give these lost boys and Pacific drifters names and dates.

I. The May Basket

During the waning hours of a warm spring evening in 1843, in the coastal

village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, sixteen-year-old John Mung hung a May basket on the knocker of his classmate Catherine Terry's door. A note was hidden among the buttercups:

Tis in the chilly night

A basket you've got hung.

Get up, strike a light!

And see me run

But no take chase me.

Mung, according to age-old New England custom, ran off into the enveloping night-anonymous except for that telltale fifth line. Catherine Terry had reason to believe that the basket was "hung" by none other than John Mung, whom on occasion she had smiled at demurely during recess.

One Sunday morning, during that same spring of 1843, John Mung sat in Captain Whitfield's pew in the Fairhaven Congregational Church. After the service one of the elders of the church approached Captain Whitfield and quietly suggested that Mung should sit in the section reserved for escaped slaves. Mung was distracting the other worshipers, the elder explained, and would be more at home among the Negroes in the balcony.

Two years earlier John Mung had no idea that the town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, existed. He had never heard of the United States or of the English language. Rituals such as May baskets and the Christian Mass would have seemed to him impossibly foreign, and remote. In fact, no one by the name of John Mung existed in 1841. Call him Manjiro instead.

On January 5, 1841, in the Year of the Ox, the boy Manjiro, fourteen years old, boarded a boat with four other fishermen on the coast of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. Manjiro, who lived with his mother in the tiny village of Nakanohama, had wandered up the coast in search of work. Captain Fudenjo of the village of Usa, near Tosa, had found Manjiro asleep on the sand and asked him to join his crew: his two brothers, Jusuke and Goemon, and another fisherman called Toraemon. In the fixed feudal order of Old Japan, peasants like Manjiro had only one name, and one life to look forward to. Like his father, who died when Manjiro was nine, and his grandfather and great-grandfather back into the mists of time, Manjiro would be a fisherman. What knocked him loose from this order established across millennia was a storm-the "great wind" called the typhoon.

Fudenjo's twenty-four-foot boat with a square sail, like all boats made in Japan, was equipped to hug the shore-to go farther out was strictly against the national laws and punishable by death. The nets came up empty for two days. On the third the crew suddenly found themselves in a school of mackerel. In their excitement they barely noticed that the wind-whipped waves had risen. They tugged hurriedly at the heavily laden nets, but by the time they had retrieved them the storm was in full force. Their efforts to gain control of the boat led to disaster; the sails were torn and the rudder split in two. Tempest-tossed, they watched helplessly as they drifted farther and farther out to sea. The next morning the color of the sea, dark indigo, confirmed their worst fears. They were caught in the Kuroshio, or Black Current, a Pacific counterpart of the Gulf Stream. The best they could hope for was an island in their path. For these five superstitious and illiterate men, the sea was boundless-until somewhere, without warning, one dropped off the edge. Through eight days of terror, they drifted in the ice-cold water, living on raw fish and on icicles plucked from the ruined rigging.

Suddenly birds wheeled on the horizon-first just a few like children's kites entangled in the sky, and then a gathering din, swooping and feeding. Below the swarm of birds was a tiny speck of bleak land, Torishima, or Bird Island, its steep volcanic cliffs jutting above the waves. The battered fishing boat capsized in the crashing surf and was smashed to pieces on the rocks. The five men dragged themselves to shore and collapsed-Jusuke's leg was badly mauled in the landing. Barely two miles in circumference and all but barren of vegetation or animal life, as the men discovered, Torishima was little more of a refuge than the drifting fishing boat. Birds, nothing but birds kept the men company. Six months of a hand-to-mouth existence out of Robinson Crusoe ensued: eating great-winged albatross that came so close that Manjiro, the most agile of the men, could kill them with a stone; scavenging for birds' eggs in the lava crevices; drinking brackish water scooped from rocks with a scallop shell. Then, as spring edged into burning summer, the birds too began to depart.

One clear morning three wavering sticks rose above the horizon. On the lookout, Manjiro tied a ragged kimono to a fragment of driftwood and waved it wildly from the shore. The apparition of a ship-huge and ungainly and indescribably odd, as it seemed to the Japanese fishermen-came steadily closer, like something dreamed in their abject desperation. Then bizarre sailors, some with light skin and some very dark, rowed in a small boat toward the island. In sign language, friendly invitations were issued, and the starved castaways were conveyed to the mother ship.

Captain William H. Whitfield, a stern New Englander with a clipped beard and piercing eyes, had brought the John Howland from her home port of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1839, in search of whales in the waters east of Japan. Whaling captains had first discovered the fabled "Japan whaling grounds" twenty years earlier, as the overfished North Atlantic yielded fewer and fewer whales. Whitfield's crew had approached Torishima in hopes of finding giant sea turtles to relieve the monotony of their potatoes-and-hardtack diet. Instead they found five gaunt islanders-the Americans had no idea from whence they came and could make no sense of their language. They fed and clothed the shivering castaways, who looked at their rescuers with puzzled eyes.

Captain Whitfield then steered the John Howland on an eastward course toward the Sandwich Islands, hunting whales as he found them. Manjiro, quick-eyed and curious, was a favorite with the crew; they shortened his name to Mung, and added John in honor of their ship. Manjiro was astonished at the efficient violence practiced by these strangers. Four light whaling boats manned by six men each were lowered from the ship. With a sail or muffled oars, they approached the unwitting sperm whale and threw barbed harpoons into the domed head, holding on for dear life-the so-called Nantucket sleigh ride-as the whale tried desperately to free himself from the weapons lodged in his flesh. A boat could be dragged for miles, and at any moment the whale could dive downward or attack the boat, hurling the men into the sea. If all went well, the captured whale was butchered in the sea, and the flesh and blubber hacked into pieces and boiled down in vats on deck. These whalers, unlike the Japanese, did not eat the whale meat. The oil was what they were after, to light the houses of New England.

On November 20, 1841, the John Howland, with fourteen hundred barrels of sperm whale oil in its hold, dropped anchor in the port of Honolulu, on the southern coast of Oahu. The Sandwich Islands (later renamed Hawaii) were nominally an independent monarchy, with a king closely in league with American missionaries. With its dusty checkerboard streets lined with adobe walls, and a sprinkling of New England cottages incongruously mixed in among dingy native huts, Honolulu was part missionary town and part pleasure ground for sailors. Grogshops, brothels, and gambling dens had followed the onward march of civilization. With its strategic position along trade and whaling routes, Honolulu was the mid-ocean switching point for communications and travel in the Pacific, an obligatory stopping point for whalers, merchant ships, and naval vessels. Mail exchanged hands; newspapers were swapped; crew members could be hired and the sick or mutinous discharged.

Perched on the roof of his coral-pink church, Dr. Gerrit Parmele Judd was surprised to see his old friend Captain Whitfield, somber-clothed as always, leading five exotic strangers dressed in sailors' white duck along the main road. Dr. Judd, a Presbyterian missionary trained in medicine, was attaching the final shingles to his enormous new church, the Kaiwaiaho or "stone church." Hacked block by block by Hawaiian converts from coral reefs offshore, and built to house two thousand worshipers, the structure was the visual embodiment of Dr. Judd's far-reaching power and influence. From humble origins on the New England frontier, Dr. Judd had risen to high places. A tough-minded man with a jaw firmly clenched, he had won the confidence of King Kamehameha III and persuaded hundreds of native islanders, including the hard-drinking king, to sign a temperance pledge. Dr. Judd had also prevented Catholic priests from entering on British ships, keeping the islands...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375503277
• ISBN 13: 9780375503276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352